Power Station of Art
No.678 Miaojiang Road, Huangpu District
200011 Shanghai
China
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biennale@powerstationofart.com
We are thrilled to present Cosmologies & Capitalism: Perfumed Nightmare, the twelfth online screening in the Cosmos Cinema Educational Film Program, as part of the 14th Shanghai Biennale. This week features Perfumed Nightmare (1977, 93 mins), a film by Kidlat Tahimik.
Kidlat Tahimik’s films, screenplays, and installations take for a starting point that colonizers subjugate Indigenous peoples by first destroying their mythologies. According to the artist, this process continued through the twentieth century and into the present, with Hollywood producing what the artist calls “Cinema Tonto flicks”—after “super-cowboy” Lone Ranger and his Indigenous sidekick Tonto (Spanish for “stupid”)—designed to convert people to hegemonic ways of being and thinking.
In conjunction with Tahimik’s installation at the Biennale, Cosmos Cinema website presents one of his best-known films, Perfumed Nightmare. A semi-autobiographical mockumentary/essay/travelogue, Tahimik’s film is a witty and thoughtful critique of globalization, colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, modernity, and technology. This uproariously confrontational comedy by the Filipino artist and film director became an audacious classic of independent filmmaking.
Perfumed Nightmare is available on the cosmoscinema.art website until February 10.
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.
