Futurisms: Mindscapes of the Unknown

We are pleased to announce Futurisms: Mindscapes of the Unknown, the third online screening in the Cosmos Cinema educational program as part of the 14th Shanghai Biennial.

In conjunction with a screening of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris scheduled to take place in the Cosmos Cinema Theater at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai on December 2 with an introduction by Bogna Konior, this week’s online screening showcases Deimantas Narkevičius’s Revisiting Solaris (2007, 18 mins). The film will be streaming through December 9 on the Cosmos Cinema website.

Exhibited as part of the Solaristics room at the 14th Shanghai Biennale, Narkevičius’s Revisiting Solaris poses the key question of whether our understanding can move beyond the terrestrial circumstances that shaped our bodies and minds. Four decades after Donatas Banionis played the lead in Tarkovsky’s 1972 film adaptation of Stanisław Lem’s novel, Narkevičius invited the famous actor to reprise the role in order to realize a scenario in which Chris Kelvin never returned to earth as it was desired by Lem. Combining new footage with photographs taken in 1905 by the Lithuanian painter and composer Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, Narkevičius makes a new contribution to the landscape of Solaris and its complex representations of the specters of the past that are traced in an immersive, multimedia installation at the Biennale’s exhibition.

Complementing the weekly screening series in Shanghai, the Cosmos Cinema website is the place where the histories of cinema excavated in the screenings at the Power Station of Art meet the moving-image works of contemporary artists represented in the exhibition of the 14th Shanghai Biennale. Each week, in alignment with one of the nine thematic sections that define this year’s biennale, a selected moving-image work by one of the artists featured in Cosmos Cinema is screened online together with contextualizing information. Cosmos Cinema website will feature work by artists including Itziar Barrio, Yin-Ju Chen, Saodat Ismailova, Deimantas Narkevičius, Liu Xin, Maha Maamoun, Agnieszka Polska, Raqs Media Collective, Ho Rui An, Liu Yujia, He Zike, Julieta Aranda, Jakub Štourač and Anna Lunakova, and Zhou Xiaohu, among many others. 

Cosmos Cinema Educational Program and online platform are made possible by .ART Registry.

It is also co-sponsored by Aesop and Humanities Research Center, Division of Arts and Humanities, and DKUNST Art on Campus of Duke Kunshan University.