Life in the Future: Pumzi

We are happy to present Life in the Future: Pumzi, the seventh online screening in Cosmos Cinema Educational Film Program, as part of the 14th Shanghai Biennale. This week, the program features Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi (2009, 21 mins).

Presented in an installation designed collaboratively with Christian Nyampeta in the 14th Shanghai Biennale’s Futurisms section, this sci-fi short film explores the relationship between the environment and the people that inhabit it. Among the futuristic African community of the film, a museum worker risks everything to save a plant, prompting the film’s meditation on what sacrifices should be made for nature. It is a proposal for a future that goes far beyond individual lifetimes, or even the lifetimes of single tribes and nations.

Drawing inspiration from Afrofuturists, who envision the cosmos as both a wellspring of creativity and a haven for the oppressed, Pumzi explores the potential for hope amidst despair. 

The film is available globally at www.cosmoscinema.art until January 6, 2024.

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.