Partial Eclipse: Following the Traces of Ancestors

We are thrilled to present Partial Eclipse: Following the Traces of Ancestors, the fifth online screening in Cosmos Cinema Educational Film Program, as part of the 14th Shanghai Biennale. This week features Two Horizons (2017, 24 mins) a two-channel film by Saodat Ismailova.

Drawing on the cultural identities and vernacular histories of Central Asia, Saodat Ismailova’s films meditate on memory, spirituality, immortality, and extinction. Frequently based around folk stories in which women are the lead protagonists, and exploring systems of knowledge suppressed by globalized modernity, these consciousness expanding works hover between visible and invisible worlds. Exhibited as part of the 14th Shanghai Biennale’s Partial Eclipse section–which is addressed to the cosmic phenomena that are hidden from sight, obscure to reason, and might even be unknowable–Two Horizons hints at infinite strategies through which humans access occluded forms of matter and energy.

Two Horizons combines a prophecy carried down in the ancient Turkic oral histories of Qorqut with the more recent history of a space launch facility. The tomb of Qorqut—the storyteller and seer who is the central hero of the epic—lies in the south of Kazakhstan, near the Baikonur Cosmodrome. In the local culture the belief persists that a person will one day come to defeat gravity and achieve eternal life. Interweaving myths, rituals, technologies, and dreams, Two Horizons proposes an expanded understanding of what it means to be human.

Don’t miss this extraordinary cinematic experience, available on cosmoscinema.art until December 23. 

The Cosmos Cinema website is 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.