Dualities Interwoven

We are excited to announce Dualities Interwoven, the ninth online screening in the Cosmos Cinema educational program as part of the 14th Shanghai Biennale. This week we present A Demon that Slips into Your Telescope While You’re Dead Tired and Blocks the Light (2020, 54 mins), a film by Itziar Barrio that will be available through January 20 on the Cosmos Cinema website.

Exhibited as part of the Ten Thousand Things section at the 14th Shanghai Biennale, A Demon that Slips into Your Telescope While You’re Dead Tired and Blocks the Light is one part in a trilogy of multimedia projects (collectively titled Material, 2016–23). Reflecting on how scientists and technologists impact our understanding of the world, it reveals the social constructs and systems of power that shape fields of “objective” knowledge through the contemplation of phenomena at the edge of human perception. The film comprises interviews with experts in astro-biology, astrophysics, and sociocultural anthropology alongside aerial images from NASA’s archives and original scenes dramatizing a speculative fiction by Janani Balasubramanian. Actors perform conversations between astronomical phenomena, and between a scientist and her data, in which the elusive brown dwarf—an indeterminate celestial entity not visible to the human eye—is a recurring motif. Exceeding any singular classification, brown dwarfs teach us about the fissures in the construction of scientific knowledge and the importance of the indeterminate and non-visible.

Don’t miss this work, available on the cosmoscinema.art website until January 20.

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 features works 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.