Anton Vidokle on the Cinema of the Stars – Ocula Magazine

Cosmism intersects philosophy, technology, and the cosmos, evolving in part from the theories of 19th-century Russian futurist Nikolai Fedorov (18291903). Cosmism's ideas are vast, spanning biopolitics, space exploration, and utopianism.

Artist and curator Anton Vidokle will explore Cosmism and the cosmos as chief curator of the 14th Shanghai Biennale (9 November 202331 March 2024) at the Power Station of Art. The biennial's title, Cosmos Cinema, is broader, accommodating all kinds of creation inspired by the night skies, but Vidokle cites a particular encounter for sparking his fascination with space and its power to broaden our thinking and our ambitions.

Power Station of Art (PSA) on the bank of Huangpu River, Shanghai. Photo: PSA.

Vidokle was introduced to Cosmism in 2012 through conversations with Ilya Kabakov and Boris Groys, who incidentally co-curated the 9th Shanghai Biennale that same year. This led to an enduring research project into post-Soviet cosmist legacies, and in 2019, Vidokle co-founded with Arseny Zhilyaev the Institute of the Cosmos, an online publication and open archive dedicated to Cosmism.

In his own artistic practice, Vidokle works in film and has to date produced seven short films emerging from his research into cosmist figures including Fedorov, Vasily Chekrygin, and Valerian Muraviov. He has presented in major international exhibitions including documenta 13 (2012), Gwangju Biennale (2016), and the Yokohama Triennale (2020).

Anton Vidokle, This is Cosmos (2014) (still) From the series 'Immortality For All: A Film Trilogy on Russian Cosmism' (20142017). HD video, colour, sound. 96 min. Courtesy the artist.

Born in Moscow in 1965, Vidokle emigrated to the United States in 1981, where he studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York. In 1999 he founded e-flux, a platform for arts listings, publishing, and curation. In 2015, Vidokle co-edited the e-flux publishing project SUPERCOMMUNITY for the 56th Venice Biennale. Vidokle is currently based in Berlin and New York, where he directs the programme at e-flux space.

For his curatorial team for the Shanghai Biennale, Vidokle has enlisted e-flux associate director Hallie Ayres, associate curator of film and video Lukas Brasiskis, colleagues who share his research interests and are involved with the Institute of the Cosmos. They are joined by researcher and educator Zairong Xiang, who was co-curator of the 2021 Guangzhou Image Triennial, and publications editor Ben Eastham, who is editor-in-chief of e-flux Criticism.

In this interview, Vidokle speaks to Sam Gaskin on the origins of his interest in Cosmism, its relation to cinema, and the importance of thinking beyond the planetary in the contemporary age.

MouSen+MSG, The Great Chain of Being - Planet Trilogy (2016). Experimental theatre space, videos, sound, objects, and bees. Exhibition view: Why Not Ask Again, Again?, 11th Shanghai Biennale, Power Station of Art (PSA), Shanghai (11 November 201612 March 2017). Courtesy PSA.

AVAbout a dozen years ago the philosopher and theorist Boris Groys told me a strange story about an unusual intellectual movement whose members tried to amend the constitution of the Soviet Union to include universal rights to rejuvenation, immortality, and interplanetary travel.

He also told me how, after the October Revolution in Russia, a special institute was set up to study the possibility of immortality, and artists at the time made models for orbiting cemeteries in which the bodies of the dead would be preserved in zero gravity until a technology to resurrect them could be developed. This sounded so much like the plot of a sci-fi film that I thought he had surely made it up. But a few months later, the artist Ilya Kabakov told me similar stories, which made me very curious.

Anton Vidokle, 'Immortality For All: A Film Trilogy on Russian Cosmism' (20142017) (still). HD video, colour, sound. 96 min. Courtesy the artist.

When I started looking, I came across the writings of Nikolai Fedorov, the founder of an intellectual tradition that later came to be known as Cosmism. His project centred around three tasks: technological immortality, the material resurrection of everyone who has ever lived, and travel through the cosmos.

Fedorov's thinking demanded a radical restructuring of society and its institutions to make such a project possible, as well as a total transformation or evolution of the human subject and our relations to each other. He insisted on a collaboration between science, philosophy, art, and social organisation as equal partners in what he called the "Common Task" of humanity. This common task was for Fedorov a true work of art, which he defined as the production and preservation of life. His thinking illustrates how reflections on humanity's place in the cosmos can prompt us to reconsider and reimagine the way that we live on earth.

Exhibition view: Group Exhibition, Art Without Death: Russian Cosmism, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin (1 September3 October 2017). Photo: Laura Fiorio/HKW.

In recent years we have become accustomed to exhibitions positioning human beings within the complex systems that shape our lives on earth. But there have been relatively few exhibitions that extend this understanding of humanity's implication in systems beyond the terrestrial sphereto consider how we are connected not only to life on this earth, but to the cosmos.

While there are not many contemporary artists who work with the ideas of Cosmism per se, there are many amazing artists making work about the cosmos and the close relationship between life on earth and outer space. There has not been a large-scale, international exhibition mapping such works historically or with respect to contemporary art, so it is exciting to have an opportunity to do this in Shanghai.

Han Zijian, Pointing at the Moon (2012). Installation. Exhibition view: Reactivation, 9th Shanghai Biennale, Power Station of Art (PSA), Shanghai (1 October 201231 March 2013). Courtesy PSA.

AVIt is worth reiterating that to reflect on the cosmos is not only to fixate on rockets or black holes or science fiction, but to engage with the myriad ways in which thinking about the cosmos continues to structure our terrestrial life: from medicine, where the human body can be construed as a kind of an inner cosmos as in certain traditional medicines, to economics, urban planning or agriculture, which are often organised according to complex cosmological designs. Take, for example, the biodynamic cultivation of plants, or the influence of Feng Shui on architecture and city planning.

We understand intuitively that our lives are connected to cosmic eventsjust think of the millions of people who every morning read horoscopes for advice on how to conduct the day ahead according to the movement of the planets.

Reproduction of Suzhou Star Chart (1193) by Huang Shang, etched in stone by Wang Zhiyuan (1247). Photo: Public Domain.

Esoteric and mystical thinking will be one facet of this exhibition, but the ecological dimension is also important. We might think of our relationship with the cosmos as being one way: the stars determine our fates; the debris from some distant explosion might one day arrive and extinguish much life on earth, as it has done before.

But in the past six decades of space exploration, we have released a multitude of living organisms and species into the solar system. We are changing the solar system, both intentionally and accidentally, and some works in the Biennale will draw parallels with the consequences of humanity's expansion on Earth.

One can say that cosmos is a kind of a proto-cinema, or that cinema has always existed in a sense: even before the technology of the moving image was invented.

The impact of the sun on life on Earth is the subject of several projects, as is the degree to which our perception of time is shaped by our planet's orbit around it. A number of works engage with the origin of religions, ancestor worship, and belief systems in contemplation of the cosmos. Another important subject is sky and star mapping, as an overlooked aspect of cartographies related to Indigenous cosmologies.

Death, resurrection, and the desire for eternal life are also an important part of this conversation, as well as the various futurismslike Afrofuturism, for instancethat reimagine life on earth by imagining new relations to the cosmos. We are interested in the presence and influence of cosmos on Earth.

The Comet Book (Comets and their General and Particular Meanings, According to Ptolome, Albumasar, Haly, Aliquind and other Astrologers) (1587). Northeastern France/Flanders. Photo: Kassel University Library, Public Domain.

As the exhibition title suggests, the show also relates to cinema, which serves as an analogue for our experience of the cosmos and one means of constructing our relationship to it. From very early in its history, cinema has attempted to represent travel in the cosmos and life on other planets.

At the same time, the medium of cinema itselfflickers of light in a dark space, out of which the mind constructs meaningis similar to how the cosmos appears to us when we look at the night sky. In this way one can say that cosmos is a kind of a proto-cinema, or that cinema has always existed in a sense: even before the technology of the moving image was invented.

Films direct the audience's attention, create room for imagination, and communicate new meanings to their viewers, who later project these ideas back onto the world.

Cinema also has an important historical role in Shanghai because it was a very early site for the production and presentation of film. The first film screening took place in Shanghai as early as 1896, only a year after the invention of this medium. By 1908 the first movie theatre opened, and soon there were more than 60 cinemas, film production studios, publicationsan entire film industry. The legacy of this can still be felt.

As a filmmaker myself, it makes sense to adapt certain filmmaking techniquessuch as montage, narrative, scenographyto structure and organise the logic and display of the show. The modern apparatus of cinema is designed to create new realities. Films direct the audience's attention, create room for imagination, and communicate new meanings to their viewers, who later project these ideas back onto the world. We hope that this will produce an intellectually immersive, psychological space and experience for the audience.

Anton Vidokle, 'Immortality For All: A Film Trilogy on Russian Cosmism' (20142017). HD video, colour, sound. 96 min. Exhibition view: Space Oddity, UCCA Dune, Beidaihe (7 March20 June 2021). Courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.

Anton Vidokle, This is Cosmos (2014) (still) From the series 'Immortality For All: A Film Trilogy on Russian Cosmism' (20142017). HD video, colour, sound. 96 min. Courtesy the artist.

AVCosmism itself is very far removed from transhumanism or the billionaire follies that aim to exploit the natural resources of space for profit or establish colonies for a wealthy minority. It was a utopian movement predicated on the absolute equality of all human beings, including those who have died. It was from this commitment that all its proposals sprang.

Besides that, to attend to the cosmos is not to ignore the plight of the planet. We have learned in recent years that ignoring distant parts of the system is no way to protect those parts of it that we inhabit. For instance, to dismiss the destruction of a rainforest on another continent as irrelevant to the circumstance in which I live is both irresponsible and counterproductive. This might be one of the key proposals of the exhibitionthat we widen our perspectives if we are to better address the challenges facing our species, not narrow them.

To consider our place in the cosmos is not an alternative to thinking about issues such as climate change, income inequality, and so onit is a way of framing them.

This is not an either/or situation. As the works in the show will demonstrate, to consider our place in the cosmos is not an alternative to thinking about issues such as climate change, income inequality, and so onit is a way of framing them. From a cosmic, planetary perspective, these are challenges that we share, that extend across borders, and that must be addressed collectively.

In saying that, concerning significant topics for art and artistsand this is also a place from which I myself speakwe are not social workers tasked with fixing the world's problems, or journalists obliged to cover current events. That would be a very narrow, instrumental understanding of art and artists. But artists can provide new ways of seeing the world around us.

Pablo Vargas Lugo, Eclipses for Shanghai (2018). HD video of performance with sound. 15 min. Exhibition view: Proregress, 12th Shanghai Biennale, Power Station of Art (PSA), Shanghai (10 November 201810 March 2019). Courtesy PSA.

AVIt would be a tragedy if we could not conceive of the cosmos as anything other than the arena for government space programs or an opportunity for capitalist entrepreneurship. One might as well reduce the earth's oceans to shipping routes or its forests to the provision of timber. It is an astonishingly rich and varied physical and imaginative space, and human history has in large part been defined by the way that individuals in different cultures have looked to the shared space of the sky and imagined themselves into it, not apart from it.

We must be careful not to "estrange" ourselves from the cosmosto treat Earth and our species as somehow exceptional to the wider space that we inhabit.

This exhibition is by no means about the conquest of space or private and government space programmes. We are looking at works by artists who reflect on the myriad connections between life on Earth and the cosmos. These connections are sometimes direct; at other times they are more subtle, showing how different understandings of humanity's position in the cosmos have shaped different cultures and the everyday lives of individuals, throughout history. Artists have been doing this in one way or another since the beginning of societies, and continue to work with this subject today in all parts of the world.

Marjolijn Dijkman, Lunar Station (2015). Steel pendulum, sand, table, video, and found objects. Exhibition view: Why Not Ask Again, Again?, 11th Shanghai Biennale, Power Station of Art (PSA), Shanghai (11 November 201612 March 2017). Courtesy PSA.

AVThe obstruction of the night sky by pollution is not a phenomenon limited to China, as the inhabitant of any large metropolis will know. The question might illustrate some of the concerns that underpin the exhibition. To identify the issue with China risks downplaying the infinitely wider systems that create itthe shift by Western Europe and the U.S. of its industrial production; the changing weather patterns that pay no attention to national borders, as residents of New York recently kept inside by the smoke from wildfires in Canada can attest.

Leandro Katz, The Sky Fell Twice (2018). Photographic installation, 128 panels. 28.5 18.5 cm each. Exhibition view: Proregress, 12th Shanghai Biennale, Power Station of Art (PSA), Shanghai (10 November 201810 March 2019). Courtesy PSA.

But perhaps terms like astral-poverty or astral-estrangement do offer a useful way of reflecting on these broader issues. It has become very familiar in the art world to hear of the nature-culture divide and the hugely damaging consequences of separating ourselves, as human beings, from the natural world of which we are a part.

In a similar vein, we must be careful not to "estrange" ourselves from the cosmosto treat Earth and our species as somehow exceptional to the wider space that we inhabit. This exhibition encourages every individual, irrespective of local circumstances, to think of themselves as a part of that cosmos, not separate from it.

Of course, we hope that this exhibition will not stand alonethat it might encourage others to engage with these themes and to develop them in their own way, that it might offer a way of thinking about our present and future situation that can be applied in different contexts. Cosmism is an incredibly rich subject, and this exhibition hopes to open a door into it. [O]

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Anton Vidokle on the Cinema of the Stars - Ocula Magazine