Launch of issue 142: “Cosmos Cinema”

Please join the editors of e-flux journal on Thursday, March 7 at 7pm for a special evening launching the journal’s current issue #142: “Cosmos Cinema”, guest edited by Ben Eastham and produced in conjunction with the 14th Shanghai Biennale.

Introduced by Anton Vidokle, Chief Curator of the 14th Shanghai Biennale, the evening begins with a performance by Kite, whose work is featured in the Biennale. Wičháȟpi Wóihaŋbleya is a solo performance by Oglala Lakȟóta artist Kite, utilizing a custom hair-braid computer interface that intertwines technology with Lakȟóta Visual Language to manipulate sound. In this version, Kite performs alone with computers, accompanied by recordings of the visual score for a small orchestral ensemble.

Scholar Christina Kiaer will speak on her text “Anna Andreeva: A ‘Cosmic-Minded Comrade’ in the Red Rose Collective,” co-authored with Ekaterina Kulinicheva. Kiaer’s essay about Soviet artist Anna Andreeva’s cosmic fabric designs from the 1960s contends with Western commentators who have characterized Andreeva’s abstract, geometric patterns as signs of her exceptional ability to circumvent the constraints of the Soviet art system, presumed always to prohibit abstraction and individual expression. Rather, as a result of new archival research, Kiaer suggests the opposite: that it was precisely the collective Soviet art system that allowed Andreeva to emerge as a leader among her comrades at the Red Rose silk factory, and as a unique artistic voice.

Author Xin Wang will discuss her text “The Cosmos Flickers for You,” which takes the warning contained in Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem trilogy as its starting point to consider the impulse behind the monumental inscriptions of Buddhist texts that adorn Chinese mountainsides. In doing so, Wang reflects on what it means to make a work of art that is to be received by nonhuman intelligences.

Lukas Brasiskis and Hallie Ayres, members of the Biennale’s curatorial team, will each discuss their respective texts, followed by a short screening of Yin-Ju Chen’s Beyond Right and Wrong, There is a Garden. I Will Meet You There (2023, 15 minutes), currently on view in the Biennale. In this film, 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.

The evening will conclude with light refreshments.

e-flux journal is a monthly art publication featuring writings by some of the most engaged artists and thinkers working today. Its issue #142: “Cosmos Cinema” (February 2024) is guest edited by Ben Eastham and features contributions by Anton Vidokle, Christina Kiaer, Ekaterina Kulinicheva, Hallie Ayres, Xin Wang, Elena Vogman, Zhen Zhang, Jonas Staal, Lukas Brasiskis, Zairong Xiang, and Arseny Zhilyaev. Read or download the issue here.

For more information, please contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.