Futurisms: Death and Resurrection

We are happy to present Futurisms: Death and Resurrection, the sixth online screening in Cosmos Cinema Educational Film Program, as part of the 14th Shanghai Biennale. This week features Jakub Štourač and Anna Luňáková​’s film Foundations of the Work of the Sun (2023, 14 mins)

Installed in the 14th Shanghai Biennale’s Futurisms section, this experimental film delves into the profound question of how celestial bodies act upon human and non-human lifecycles. Foundations of the Work of the Sun is a film-poem, composed of interlinked micro-essays that together form a fictional documentary about the sun's impact on earth.

Influenced by G.W. Leibniz's theory of pre-established harmony and his contributions to optics, the film explores how cameras convert sunlight into comprehensible images, and the role of photographs as visual documents of embodied perspectives. With a poetic sound composition as its backbone, each segment of the film delves into themes of labor, exhaustion, and utopianism. One part reflects on Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit, completed in 1930, while another traces the life of a worker through photograms, snapshots, and prints. Taken together, this collection of "micro-essays" raises the question: How to think collectively through the individual?

Foundations of the Work of the Sun is available at cosmoscinema.art until December 30.

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 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 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.