Launch of e-flux journal issue #142: Cosmos Cinema

Launch of e-flux journal issue #142: Cosmos Cinema

Installation view of Space Is the Place at the 14th Shanghai Biennale: “Cosmos Cinema,” 2023–24. Photo courtesy of Power Station of Art.

Launch of e-flux journal issue #142: Cosmos Cinema
With Kite, Christina Kiaer, Xin Wang, Yin-Ju Chen, Hallie Ayres, Lukas Brasiskis, and Anton Vidokle

Free admission

Date
March 7, 2024, 7pm
e-flux
172 Classon Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11205
USA

Please join the editors of e-flux journal on Thursday, March 7 at 7pm for a special evening launching the journal’s current Issue #142: Cosmos Cinema, guest edited by Ben Eastham and produced in conjunction with the 14th Shanghai Biennale.

Introduced by Anton Vidokle, Chief Curator of the 14th Shanghai Biennale, the evening begins with a performance by Kite, whose work is featured in the Biennale. Wičháȟpi Wóihaŋbleya is a solo performance by Oglala Lakȟóta artist Kite, utilizing a custom hair-braid computer interface that intertwines technology with Lakȟóta Visual Language to manipulate sound. In this version, Kite performs alone with computers, accompanied by recordings of the visual score for a small orchestral ensemble.

Scholar Christina Kiaer will speak on her text “Anna Andreeva: A ‘Cosmic-Minded Comrade’ in the Red Rose Collective,” co-authored with Ekaterina Kulinicheva. Kiaer’s essay about Soviet artist Anna Andreeva’s cosmic fabric designs from the 1960s contends with Western commentators who have characterized Andreeva’s abstract, geometric patterns as signs of her exceptional ability to circumvent the constraints of the Soviet art system, presumed always to prohibit abstraction and individual expression. Rather, as a result of new archival research, Kiaer suggests the opposite: that it was precisely the collective Soviet art system that allowed Andreeva to emerge as a leader among her comrades at the Red Rose silk factory, and as a unique artistic voice.

Author Xin Wang will discuss her text “The Cosmos Flickers for You,” which takes the warning contained in Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem trilogy as its starting point to consider the impulse behind the monumental inscriptions of Buddhist texts that adorn Chinese mountainsides. In doing so, Wang reflects on what it means to make a work of art that is to be received by nonhuman intelligences.

Lukas Brasiskis and Hallie Ayres, members of the Biennale’s curatorial team, will each discuss their respective texts, followed by a short screening of Yin-Ju Chen’s Beyond Right and Wrong, There is a Garden. I Will Meet You There (2023, 15 minutes), currently on view in the Biennale. In this film, Chen explores the material effects of spiritual, shamanic, and Buddhist practices as well as the metaphysical properties of consciousness. Drawing on a poem by the thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi (from which the title is also taken), the film is the account of a healing process and a meditation on human suffering. Combining found footage, documentation from the artist’s own travels, and animations of the mythological centaur Chiron (renowned as a healer and prophet), Somewhere Beyond Right and Wrong… asks how spiritual practice can help us to move beyond individual subjectivity to perceive life and death from a cosmic perspective.

The evening will conclude with light refreshments.

e-flux journal is a monthly art publication featuring writings by some of the most engaged artists and thinkers working today. Its Issue #142: Cosmos Cinema (February 2024) is guest edited by Ben Eastham and features contributions by Anton Vidokle, Christina Kiaer, Ekaterina Kulinicheva, Hallie Ayres, Xin Wang, Elena Vogman, Zhen Zhang, Jonas Staal, Lukas Brasiskis, Zairong Xiang, and Arseny Zhilyaev. Read or download the issue here.

For more information, please contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility            
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue. 
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.          
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.

Category
Avant-Garde, Religion & Spirituality
Subject
Publications, Biennials, Cosmism, Soviet Union, China, Science Fiction, Outer Space

Suzanne Kite is an Oglála Lakȟóta artist, academic, and composer. She received a BFA in Fine Art and Composition from the California Institute of the Arts in 2013, an MFA in Fine Art and Music/Sound from the Milton Avery Graduate School of Fine Arts at Bard College in 2018, and is currently a PhD candidate in Fine Art at Concordia University. Fusing scholarship with creative practice, Kite explores Lakȟóta mythologies, ontologies, and philosophies, alongside computational systems, machine learning, and AI—investigating the complex dynamics between the individual and technology through sound, video, sculpture, performance, installation, writing, and countless other modes of expression.

Christina Kiaer is the Frances Hooper Professor in the Arts and Humanities and Chair of the Department of Art History at Northwestern University. She is the author of Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (MIT, 2005), coauthor with Robert Bird and Zachary Cahill of Revolution Every Day: A Calendar (Mousse, 2017), and coeditor with Eric Naiman of Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside (Indiana, 2005). She was co-curator, with Robert Bird and Zachary Cahill, of the exhibition Revolution Every Day at the Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, in 2017, and is currently curating the exhibition Collective Threads: Anna Andreeva at the Red Rose Silk Factory, opening at the Museum of Modern Art-Costakis Collection in Thessaloniki in December 2024.

Xin Wang is a curator and art historian based in New York. A PhD candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, she is finishing a dissertation titled “Soviet Hauntology.” She curated “To Your Eternity,” the fourth art-and-technology themed biennial at Beijing’s Today Art Museum. She is an appointed faculty at Yale School of Art’s MFA program in photography and since June 2024 has served as Curatorial Director at Pace Gallery.

Yin-Ju Chen interprets social power and history through cosmological systems. Utilizing astrology, sacred geometries, and alchemical symbols, she considers human behavior, nationalism, imperialism, state violence, totalitarianism, utopian formations, and collective thinking. Recently, she has been exploring the material effects of spiritual, shamanic, and Buddhism practices and the metaphysical potentialities of consciousness. She has participated in many international exhibitions and film festivals, inclduing at Shanghai Biennial (2023, 2014), Taipei Biennial (2023, 2020, 2012), Tate Modern Starr Cinema (2023), ICA at NYU Shanghai (2022), Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2021), Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (2021), Gwangju Biennale (2021), Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art (2019), International Film Festival Rotterdam (2018, 2011), Transmediale (2018), Liverpool Biennial (2016), Forum Expanded at the Berlinale (2016), Biennial of Sydney (2016), and the Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum Biennale (2014) among others. She lives and works in Taipei.

Hallie Ayres was on the curatorial team for the 14th Shanghai Biennale, Cosmos Cinema, and is associate director of e-flux.

Lukas Brasiskis is a Curator of Film and Video at e-flux. He is also a cocurator of the 14th Shanghai Biennale (2023–24). He received his PhD degree in Cinema Studies from New York University in 2022. His writings on moving image are widely published, and most recently he was the coeditor of Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe (Berghahn Press, 2024) and Jonas Mekas: The Camera Was Always Running (Yale University Press, 2022). From 2024, he is a co-editor of e-flux Film Notes.

Anton Vidokle is an editor of e-flux journal and chief curator of the 14th Shanghai Biennale: Cosmos Cinema.

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