Yin-Ju Chen: Trauma of Time and Space

We are pleased to launch Trauma of Time and Space, the eleventh online edition of the Cosmos Cinema educational film program, as part of the 14th Shanghai Biennale. This edition features Yin-Ju Chen’s Beyond Right and Wrong, There is a Garden. I Will Meet You There (2023, 15 mins).

Somewhere Beyond Right and Wrong, there is a Garden. I Will Meet You There is 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. In this film Yin-Ju Chen explores the material effects of spiritual, shamanic, and Buddhist practices as well as the metaphysical properties of consciousness.

Drawing on a poem by the thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi (from which the title is also taken), the film is the account of a healing process and a meditation on human suffering. Combining found footage, documentation from the artist’s own travels, and animations of the mythological centaur Chiron (renowned as a healer and prophet), Somewhere Beyond Right and Wrong… asks how spiritual practice can help us to move beyond individual subjectivity to perceive life and death from a cosmic perspective.

Don’t miss this cinematic experience, available on the cosmoscinema.art website from January 27 through February 3.

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 Film 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.