Freedom of Interplanetary Movement: Rocket Societies

We are pleased to announce Freedom of Interplanetary Movement: Rocket Societies—the second online screening in the Cosmos Cinema educational program, a part of the 14th Shanghai Biennial.

This week’s online screening showcases two artists’ films: Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige's Lebanese Rocket Society (2015, 92 mins) and Nuotama Bodomo's Afronauts (2014, 14 mins). The films are streaming through December 2 here.

Lebanese Rocket Society uncovers a forgotten chapter of Lebanese history, chronicling a group of scientists' ambitious space research in the early 1960s. This film investigates why this significant achievement has faded from public memory, becoming a lost dream of scientific advancement and space exploration in Lebanon. In dialogue with the Lebanese Rocket Society, Nuotama Frances Bodomo's Afronauts presents another alternative narrative for space exploration set on July 16, 1969, paralleling NASA's Apollo 11 mission. Drawing inspiration from the true story from 1964, initiative of an eccentric Zambian schoolteacher, Edward Makuka Nkoloso, who aspired to launch the first African to the moon, challenges the dominant discourse of the space race between the USSR and the United States.

Both films, which have also been screened at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai, are featured online to introduce Freedom of Interplanetary Movement, one of the Biennale’s thematic sections. It embodies the vision that space should be an arena for nurturing the deepest material and spiritual capacities of all beings, rather than a domain for exploitation or colonization.

Complementing the weekly screening series in Shanghai, the Cosmos Cinema website is the place where the histories of cinema excavated in the screenings at the Power Station of Art meet the moving-image works of contemporary artists represented in the exhibition of the 14th Shanghai Biennale. Each week, in alignment with one of the nine thematic sections/palaces that define this year’s biennale, a selected moving-image work by one of the artists featured in Cosmos Cinema is screened online together with contextualizing information. 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. 

The 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.