Anton Vidokle: This is Cosmos

Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerpen (M HKA) is pleased to present an exhibition of Anton Vidokle entitled This is Cosmos, on view from January 22 through May 1, 2022.

Artist Anton Vidokle (1965, Moscow) currently lives in New York and Berlin. His film Immortality For All: A Film Trilogy on Russian Cosmism (2014–17) explores the phenomenon of Russian Cosmism. The first part of the trilogy (This is Cosmos, 2014) looks back at the foundations of Cosmist though. The second part (The Communist Revolution Was Caused By The Sun, 2015) explores the links between cosmology and politics, while the third (Immortality and Resurrection for All!, 2017) presents the museum as a place of resurrection—a central Cosmist idea.

Russian Cosmism was based on the speculative theories of the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov (1829–1903). This revolutionary movement brings together biopolitics, utopia, universalism, the Enlightenment’s radical humanism, Orthodox Christianity’s spirituality, and museology, and has a common mission. The latter is threefold: the universal bodily resurrection of the dead, attaining immortality, and finally the colonisation of space; all thanks to future advancement of science and technology. In his films, Vidokle analyses the influence of Russian Cosmism on the twentieth century and gauges its relevance for today. The development of Cosmist ideas were brought to an abrupt end by Stalin’s 1930s purges, in which many of the movement’s followers were imprisoned or executed.

Today, interest in the projects and ideas of Russian Cosmism is revived through philosophical tendencies that are intertwined with technological thought. And so artists and theorists like Anton Vidokle, Arseny Zhilyaev, Anastasia Gacheva and Boris Groys, among others, continue to explore the relevance and potential of the contemporary development of Cosmism.