From Interplanetary Movement to Ambivalent Future

We are excited to announce From Interplanetary Movement to Ambivalent Future, the fourth online screening in the Cosmos Cinema educational program as part of the 14th Shanghai Biennale.

In conjunction with the biennale’s focus on different kinds of futurisms–utopian, ambivalent, dystopian–this week’s online screening of Agnieszka Polska’s My Little Planet (2016, 7 min) presents a strange and yet not unfamiliar vision of the future. The work will be available through December 16 on the Cosmos Cinema website.

Exhibited as part of the Futurisms section at the 14th Shanghai Biennale, My Little Planet tells the story of a society in which time is measured by the orbit of everyday objects— a cigarette butt, a bottlecap, a sticking plaster— around the sun. Through its absurdist combination of registers and scales, this short video highlights the fundamentally arbitrary nature of the conventions that structure our experience of the world. For all its dry humor, this disarmingly witty work insists that the viewer reflect on what is taken for granted. In doing so, it advances a subtle critique of our failure to recognize—much less take personal responsibility for—the state of the world today.

The Cosmos Cinema website is the place where the histories of cinema excavated in weekly screenings at the Power Station of Art meet the moving-image works of artists represented in the 14th Shanghai Biennale. Each week, in alignment with one of the nine thematic sections that structure Cosmos Cinema, a selected moving-image work by one its artists is presented online with new contextualizing information. The 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.