The 14th Shanghai Biennale: Cosmos Cinema

Despite how strongly we now associate the concept of “cosmos” with science, thinking about the universe still evokes a sense of nostalgia. Recalling memories from adolescence—a field trip to the planetarium, looking through a telescope in the wilderness, a science lesson at school—our fascination with outer space seems inherently romantic. This sentimentality is reinforced by countless science-fiction films, from Georges Méliès’s early adventure-fantasy Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902) to recent space thrillers, such as Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016). Cinematic language has allowed the realization of human fantasy to venture into unknown territories, laying the foundation for “Cosmos Cinema,” the theme of the 14th edition of the Shanghai Biennale, which took place at the Power Station of Art and headed by chief curator Anton Vidokle, of e-flux, and a curatorial team which included Xiang Zairong, Hallie Ayres, Lukas Brasiskis, and Ben Eastham. 

The curatorial framework for “Cosmos Cinema” was inspired by Vidokle’s long-held interest in Russian cosmism, a philosophical and cultural movement centered around immortality, resurrection, and space travel during the Russian Revolution at the turn of the 20th century. Vidokle’s interest in Eastern European and Asian philosophy is by no means accidental, as these frameworks strongly contrast with contemporary Western cosmologies that seek to rationalize planetary colonization, resource extraction, and other survivalist efforts. Russian cosmism facilitates an alternative relationship between humans and the universe, including through philosophy, art, mythology, and spirituality. Accordingly, “Cosmos Cinema” is divided into nine sections, further referencing the ancient Chinese cosmology of Nine Heavens: “Freedom of Interplanetary Movement,” “Partial Eclipse,” “Ten Thousand Things,” “Solar Assembly Line,” “Cinema Cosmos,” “Futurisms,” “Reflexology at a Distance,” “Of Time and Space,” and finally “Brave Wind and Rain.”

Kicking off the cosmic experience, Trevor Paglen’s large-scale installation Prototype for a Nonfunctional Satellite (Design 4; Build 4) (2015–18) and his two Orbital Reflector series (both 2015–18) assert a clinical, metallic impression of a space mission, which was in fact the prototypes’ original purpose—to launch “purely artistic” objects into orbit and render human artistic expression within the extraterrestrial arena. While Paglen’s “artistic object” was lost in space due to the United States government shutting down communications with the rocket carrying the “satellite,” esoteric practices like astrology and the association between the cosmos and human sentiments have fulfilled our artistic imagination of the sky long before Paglen’s “artistic object” came into orbit. For thousands of years, societies have observed the night sky and tracked the movements of stars, seeking to determine individual and collective fate. 

In “Partial Eclipse,” Taiwan-based artist Yin-Ju Chen’s newly commissioned 16-minute video essay Somewhere Beyond Right and Wrong, There Is A Garden. I Will Meet You There (2023) laments her mother’s passing by examining the Chiron star, which signifies nurture and healing in Greek astrology. This astro-relationship could be heard from the Armenian-Lithuanian artist and composer Andrius Arutiunian’s sound sculpture You Do Not Remember Yourself (2022), a one-by-six-meter brass instrument that perpetually oscillates resonant sounds. The work represents Kepler’s concept of harmonia mundi, the “world’s harmony,” which sought to mathematically prove the Pythagorean theory of musica universalis. Both concepts attempted to establish that stars produce sounds that are audible to the human soul. 

One aspiration of “Cosmos Cinema” was the Biennale’s attempt to diversify global perspectives, as if seeing the world through a kaleidoscope. In the section “Ten Thousand Things,” Uzbekistani artist Furqat Palvan-Zade transformed his research on medieval and early-modern Islamic astronomy into a lightbox installation, The Moon (2023), displaying 12 lunar craters bearing the names of its corresponding, medieval polymaths and poets by the International Astronomical Union. Meanwhile, Filipino artist Kidlat Tahimik’s installation of tapestries and wood carvings Cinema tonto, cinema indio (2021–22) presents a reimagination of Indigenous movie theaters, where Aboriginal stories are conceived in a world without colonialism. Singapore-based artist Ho Rui An’s documentary Lining (2021) relays the history of Hong Kong’s textile industry through its traces of material networks, which connected the city to mainland China before the establishment of the People’s Republic. Through different interpretations of cultures and contexts, “Ten Thousand Things” revealed a decentralized worldview often dismissed by the epistemes of a neoliberal epoch.

A certain sentimentality permeated the exhibition, with the dim floor light guiding visitors through the Power Station as a reminder of the cinema experience. The movie-theater-like environment was only interrupted once you walked into the cavernous chimney-like space, where the second-largest installation of the Biennale stood. Titled Exo-Ecologies (2023), Dutch artist Jonas Staal’s work comprises a scaffolding presentation of billboards depicting different profiles on animals that were sent to space in recent human-astronomy history. The launch-site-looking installation commemorates the numerous nonhuman lifeforms that have paved the way to outer space. 

At the core of “Cosmos Cinema” is the section “Cinema Cosmos,” a reversal of the theme that revealed the true intent of the Biennale: while what we see in the sky has already passed (light travels for billions of years before it reaches us), we too are beams of light and waves of sound, dispersing our traces into the universe. This central section showcased Carsten Nicolai (Alva Noto)’s COSMOS (2023), a nearly-two-hour mix of 14 tracks composed for the exhibition, with several using samples of electromagnetic signals from outer space. If physical artworks occupy the spatial dimension, Nicolai’s COSMOS extends its occupation into the realm of time with sound dispersing like an echo of our cosmic signal. Nearby, the “Futurisms” section, including the Costakis Collection of early-modernist Russian paintings, reinforces the Biennale’s goal of re-establishing connections between Russian avant-garde and cosmism. But from the Russian Revolution to post-Covid socialism, the divergence of communism’s modern development in Asia poses a haunting juxtaposition in ideology.

At the same time, the apparent party-state capitalism that dominates contemporary China’s social structure has evolved into its own version of futurism. This worldview can be seen in the Guiyang-born artist He Zike’s video work Random Access (2023) within the same section, a Wong Kar-Wai-esque journey of a taxi driver and her customer (played by the artist’s parent) dreaming of the cloud memory stored at the largest data center and its transmission through the largest telescope in China, both located in artist’s hometown. Lucid yet depressing, her film reminds us that we have become dependent on capitalism’s control of data sets to store and recall our memories. 

Approaching the end of the Biennale, spirituality and human bonding returned to conclude the journey of “Cosmos Cinema.” In his What is your |x| series (2020) from the “Reflexology at a Distance” section, the Berlin-based Vietnamese artist Sung Tieu presents eight steel doors with imprints of horoscopic descriptions as well as a trompe-l’oeil steel sheet with an inscription of the artist’s birth chart. Sung questions whether descriptions of one’s character are inherent, or learned to form our psyche. And in “Brave Wind and Rain,” the Palestinian-English artist Rosalind Nashashibi’s I Ching-structured 67-minute film Denim Sky (2022) brings a fictional story that casts her friends and family as cosmonauts to seek a new form of spacetime travel through bonding. 

The cosmos is fascinating because the vastness of the universe triggers us to question life’s meaning. In the words of Nietzsche, “If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” The sheer emptiness of this void forces us to look inward, returning our spiritual and social connections. The aforementioned works return to an anthropocentric framework despite breaking away from solely being observers of the cosmos; they each attempt to establish an alternative relationship between us and what is “out there” that is too often obscured by our desire for material extraction and dominance. “Cosmos Cinema” was a timely exhibition on the discrepancy between people and power structures, particularly under our current geopolitical conditions. 

'Cosmism is not a unified idea, writes artist and e-flux founder Anton Vidokle in his accompanying catalogue essay that lays out the conceptual foundations for 'Cosmos Cinema', the 14th Shanghai Biennale, which he curated with Xiang Zairong, Hallie Ayres, Lukas Brasiskis and Ben Eastham. The term 'Russian Cosmism' sought to unify ideas from the late 19th century aroundimmortality, resurrection and space travel, yet Vidokle views this 'nationalist frame' as a misnomer in respect to 'ideas that are probably the most universal [he h a s ever come across' The Biennale thus attempts to untether cosmism from its temporal and geographical roots, with some 200 works by over 80 artists reflecting on what it means to live cosmically today.

Stemming from over ten years of research into the subject. Vidokle's invitation to consider life on
earth through a cosmic lens, beyond the compromised concept of globalisation and its exhausted antidote, the planetary, feels increasingly urgent as the world careens from a decrepit unipolarity (defined by the aggressive hypocrisies of an old-world internationalism) into an uncertain, non-aligned multipolarity that has paradoxically emerged out of the internationalist order. Signalling this call to broaden, if not loosen, the frames by which the world is understood are three monumentally sized satellite prototypes by Trevor Paglen, which launch the show. Installed in a dark, hangar-like hall, Prototype for a Nonfunctional Satellite (Design 4; Build 4), 2013, is a giant silver orb suspended high up, while Orbital Reflector (Triangle Variation #4), 2015-18, is an origami-like silver tetrahedron hanging low to the ground. Draping from the ceiling between both is Orbital Reflector (Scale Model), 2015-2018, an uninflated mylar balloon prototype for a non-functional satellite that the artist launched into space on a SpaceX rocket in 2018. Embodying the Daedalus-like premise of its aspirational yet compromised existence, the satellite should have inflated into a reflective diamond once in orbit. Instead, it was lost in space when the then US president Donald Trump initiated a federal government shutdown amid disagreements with congress over funding the US/Mexico border wall (Artnotes AM427), leading organisations, including NASA, to temporarily close.

Dramatically lit, Paglen's glinting forms are each accompanied by a viewing platform, which amplifies the scale and theatricality oftheir staging. 'Cosmos Cinema' has been conceived as a film, after all, which comes through explicitly at the end, where a screen above the exit plays the show's credits, and more subtly at other junctionst h a t allude to cinema in an expanded sense. Reaching the first floor, for example, is a crescent-shaped, side-lit sectioned vitrine containing Michel Seuphor's geometric ink-on-paper interpretations of the I-Ching hexagrams, 64 Hexagrammes du Yi-King, 1986/2023. Echoing an analogue film roll in form and a movie's linearity in construct, the installation blocks access to the exhibition space behind it, directing visitors to ascend an escalator instead. From here, a balcony looks over the works in the gallery below, including Alice Wang's floor mosaic of 100,000 hand-painted glass tiles arranged to visualise the background radiation generated by the Big Bang, Untitled, 2016/23.

There's a sense of cinematic foreshadowing in Wang's picture of cosmic static, which invokes a reference 'Cosmos Cinema' makes to filmmaker Alexander Kluge, who described theuniverse as 'the original cinema, in which all past events are stored as visible "tracks of light". Appearing like an energetic pond, the mosaic anticipates a nexus located further along the exhibition's path, which is scattered with moving images, from Julieta Aranda's feverish video-essay on catastrophe in an age of hyper-production, Stealing one's own corpse, 2023, to He Zike's stirring road movie about cloud servers and their keepers, Random Access, 2023. Amid this dizzying 'cosmic cinema' is a black-box room dedicated to the many variations of Stanislaw Lem's 1961 science-fiction novel Solaris, in which a planet's oceanic surface repels the humans studying it by producing haunting reflections drawn from their memories. Copies of the book's translations and editions are placed on transparent tables, while film adaptations play out around and above them. One monitor runs Boris Nirenburg and Lidiya Ishimbayeva's two-part film from 1968, while two hanging screens show excerpts from Andrei Tarkosvky's 1972 film and Stephen Soderbergh's 2002 version. Projected on one wall is Deimantas Narkevicius's Revisiting Solaris, 2007, in which the ageing lead actor from Tarkovsky's film acts out a chapter from the book left out of the movie; another projection shows Solaris Mon Amour, 2023, composed by Kuba Mikurda, Laura Pawela and Marcin Lenarczyk, with footage produced in the 1960s by the Educational Film Studio in Łódz.

Apparently – at least according to his catalogue text – back in what was then the Soviet Union and the 1970s, the 14th Shanghai Biennale’s chief curator, artist, e-flux founder and by now-US-based Anton Vidokle grew up in a world of space-themed merchandise and next to something called ‘the Cosmos Kino’ (that last bit means cinema in Russian). But while there’s a sprinkling of barefaced nostalgia throughout this show (among it a tribute to the Russian-American conceptualist Ilya Kabakov, who died last year), it is generally rooted in more lofty, less sentimental thinking: the cosmos (rather than humanity) as the origin of all things, both material and immaterial; taking a cue from German philosopher and biennale-catalogue-contributor Alexander Kluge, the cosmos as a form of ur-cinema, an index of all events, recorded by the glittering light traces they leave behind; and the early-twentieth-century Russian philosophical movement cosmism, a precursor of transhumanism, which according to one of its founding thinkers (Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov) centered on a move ‘to regulate the forces of nature, to defeat death and bring ancestors back to life, so that they too would participate in the general resurrection’. This last is the subject of a number of Vidokle’s artworks.

As structuring concepts for an exhibition, there is of course a risk that all these flights of fancy will produce something akin to Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘Library of Babel’, which the celebrated Argentine author imagined would contain every possible book that could ever be written. Here we have works that deal with nearly all the pressing issues of our artistic moment: among them, Afrofuturism, indigenous traditions, gender and colonialism. Spiralling down the inside of the Power Station’s chimney (it used to be an actual power station) is a series of lightboxes by Jonas Staal (Exo-Ecologies, 2023, its title emblazoned on a giant red banner that fills up and lurks in the chimney shaft like a rocket in a silo) that index the nonhumans – among them guinea pigs, monkeys, mice, rats and fruit flies – that have been catapulted into outer space in the name of human expansionism. There is Nolan Oswald Dennis’s Black Liberation Zodiac: Khunuseti (2017–23), a roomsize installation featuring wallpapered astral-maps onto which Ancient Greek designations of the stars have been replaced with black liberation iconography. (The Pleiades, for example, become the Khunuseti, a designation given to the constellation by the Nama people of Southern Africa and referring to the daughters of the sky god Tsui // Goab.) That work, in turn, finds echoes (and this biennial is full of them) in Tavares Strachan’s series of ceramic sculptures and painted ‘self-portraits’ linking iconography from African culture to further astral charts and the iconography of space exploration.

Among the new works, there is He Zike’s video Random Access (2023), which centres, by way of a taxi journey in the aftermath of a data-cloud malfunction, on big data, our dependency on digital storage systems and the changing perception of time that results. There is Eastern philosophy influencing the West in the late Michel Seuphor’s interpretation of the 64 Hexagrammes du Yi-King (1986/2023), a series of black-and-white serigraphs depicting abstract geometric structures of the type that have long been a favourite of Western interior designers. There is Minjeong An’s Self-Portrait diagram (2007), a digital print that transposes personal details (moles, scars), general anatomy and auras onto what appears to be a blueprint for a robot; and Ivory Coast-born American Ouattara Watts’s more freestyle and expressionistic diagram-paintings from the Corruptions Impunity series (2011), which nod both to the artist’s African roots and his friendship with Jean-Michel Basquiat. Pretty soon you do get the impression that everything is cosmic. And, of course, it literally is. But it’s to the curators’ credit (Vidokle is joined by Xiang Zairong, Hallie Ayres, Ben Eastham and Lukas Brasiskis) that this well-structured (in nine chapters) and tightly wound (without ever totally becoming labyrinthine) show never collapses into a state of total Babel, despite its spiral galaxies of drawings and projections covering the walls, ceilings and corridors of this vast space.

It all begins however, with two gigantic lumps of interstellar fancy designed by American Trevor Paglen that dominate the cavernous main hall of the Power Station of Art: Prototype for a Nonfunctional Satellite (Design 4; Build 4), and Orbital Reflector (Triangle Variation #4) Scale Model (both works 2015–18). In 2019 an orbital deployment of a version of the latter failed as a result of a US government shutdown. Paglen’s idea was that if space is being exploited by commerce, science and the military, then why not add a purely aesthetic, or sweetly innocent, aspect to it also? A big artistic signature in the sky (‘they are shiny and look much bigger than they actually are’, Paglen said of the objects in an interview), designed to last a couple of months before burning up harmlessly in the Earth’s atmosphere. Here, the objects are full of fantastic promise but empty of function, which comes across like a lecture about purposelessness in Kantian aesthetics and the very definition of space junk. (In this respect the work has an intriguing relationship with Brazilian Clarissa Tossin’s Future Geography series (2021–), in which strips of amazon.com packaging are interlaced with NASA imagery of deep space using geographic Amazon-inspired weaving techniques). Despite the presence of two workbenches full of notes, drawings and mood boards, it’s the sculptures’ shiny seductive qualities that come to the fore. You’re transported, via shiny materiality and retro space-age form, from the space of a redundant power station into what might be the deck of the Death Star in Star Wars.

It would be easy to label the above superficial. But given that there’s a large room dedicated to film adaptations of Stanisław Lem’s sci-fi novel Solaris (1961) towards the end of the show, perhaps this is simply part of this exhibition-cum-movie’s script. (Musician Sun Ra is the subject of another ‘tribute’ room.) Alongside movie clips and various editions of Lem’s book, the former includes Deimantas Narkevičius’s video Revisiting Solaris (2007), in which he works with actor Donatas Banionis to reprise the lead role from Andrei Tarkovsky’s celebrated 1972 version but with an ending closer to Lem’s original story. All of which largely glosses over the fact that Lem, by his own admission, wasn’t writing science fiction because he wanted to, but because the restrictions and ideological pressure under which he wrote (in Communist Poland) meant that he had to locate his discourse in the relative safety of outer space. Given the current international popularity of Chinese science fiction and authors such as Cixin Liu, you leave the room wondering whether something similar is going on in China now. But you’re not encouraged to do that, and Liu and Chinese sci-fi are largely, and oddly, absent here. Nevertheless you can’t escape the fact that Asian countries (China prominent among them) are increasingly active in space exploration today, at the same time as various new kinds of Cold War (and actual war) dominate terrestrial space. What you’re left with by the end of this show is a sense that it’s the mess of conflicting and overlapping ideologies down here that really map its territory, more than any kind of cosmic wonder. And the rather forlorn hope that we don’t export all that junk with us to outer space.

According to its curatorial mission statement, ‘Cosmos Cinema’ – the 14th edition of the Shanghai Biennale – seeks to position film not only as a storytelling medium, but as a ‘cosmic phenomenon with the potential to change our understanding of the universe and our place within it’. It’s an ambitious aim, yet chief curator Anton Vidokle delivers a sharp show with abundant references to Soviet cosmology, which can be read as an extension of his own film trilogy Immortality for All (2014–17), at a time when a non-occidental perspective feels all-the-more pertinent given that we are living, once again, in a Cold War.

At the entrance to the exhibition is a series of sculptures by Trevor Paglen, including Prototype for a Nonfunctional Satellite, (Design 4 Build 4) (2015–18) – a suspended reflective sphere nearly five metres in diameter, the scale and sheen of which dominate the visitor’s field of vision in the dimly lit space. This brilliant spectacle can be read in conjunction with his Orbital Reflector (Triangle Variation #4) Scale Model (2015–18) a nearby sketch for an unrealized 1990s plan by a Russian-European space consortium to launch orbital satellites that, capable of reflecting moonlight at 100 times its natural brightness, could provide illumination for resource exploitation in remote areas. Following the collapse of the USSR in 1989, post-Soviet nations faced economic challenges that made them less keen to pursue spaceflight and more interested in the financial potential of extraction processes.

Projected in a corner, David Lamelas’s 24-minute film, A Study of the Relationships between Inner and Outer Space (1969), includes interviews with pedestrians about the impending moon landing. Their general indifference and, specifically, the unrelatability of space to their daily lives – ‘Maybe focus on the issues on the Earth first,’ quips one interviewee – is undergirded by a strong sense of alienation.

Three more recent films shown in the exhibition – Saodat Ismailova’s Two Horizons (2017), Liu Yujia’s The Market (2023) and He Zike’s Random Access (2023) – are marked by a yearning to escape reality. Two Horizons, for instance, overlaps the story of Korkut, the first shaman of the Great Eurasian Steppe, who evaded death by levitating, with the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from which the Soviets launched their spacecrafts, similarly defying gravity in search of eternal life via colonization of Mars. In The Market, on the other hand, Liu explores the borders of Northeast Asia, where shamanism is commonly practised by the local people. Here, instead of looking to space, Liu focuses on the Earth, documenting the trade of ginseng, a root herb with mythic properties that symbolizes immortality and is believed to promote longevity.

Fear of the unknown is encapsulated perfectly in ‘Solaristics’, a section of the exhibition on the gallery’s second floor that takes its cue from Stanisław Lem’s sci-fi classic Solaris (1961), which follows a crew of scientists searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence. The novel’s eerie tranquillity inspired director Andrei Tarkovsky to make a film version in 1972 as a Soviet counterpart to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). This led, in turn, to an unofficial sequel by Deimantas Narkevičius, Revisiting Solaris (2007), as well as to the found-footage documentary Solaris Mon Amour (2023) by Marcin Lenarczyk, Kuba Mikurda and Laura Pawela – both of which are screened here.

The Soviet references and aesthetics of ‘Cosmos Cinema’ find particular resonance in China where figures such as Yuri Gagarin – the first man successfully to fly in space – were household names and inspired many, myself included, to dream of becoming an astronaut. This fascinating exhibition explores not only the continued impact of last century’s space race but the sense of earthly alienation left in its wake.

In the early 1980s, when I was a girl intrigued by science and space, I raptly watched the 13-episode documentary Cosmos on American TV. Hosted by the charismatic astronomer Carl Sagan, it connected science and civilization, explored the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and deepened cosmic curiosity in a public still in the throes of humankind’s then-recent journeys to the moon and beyond. In the soaring entrance of the 14th Shanghai Biennale, titled Cosmos Cinema and on view in the city’s vast Power Station of Art contemporary art center, I experienced a flash of nostalgia for that time, perhaps an escape from today’s dire earthly conditions. Within that first darkened space, Trevor Paglen’s silver “Prototype for a Nonfunctional Satellite (Design 4; Build 4)”(2013) hangs as an illuminated, mirrored globe — shiny and pure. 

Cosmos Cinema emerged from Russia-born chief curator (and e-flux cofounder) Anton Vidokle’s similar intrigue on the other side of the Cold War’s space race, and his later research of Russian Cosmism, an obscure intellectual movement that proposed, among other things, amending the Soviet Union’s constitution to include “universal rights to rejuvenation, immortality, and interplanetary travel.” Cosmism’s utopian ideals — coupled with German filmmaker/thinker Alexander Kluge’s assertions that cinema is analogous to early dreams of leaving Earth — were the starting points that inspired Vidokle and his team (Zairong Xiang, Hallie Ayres, Lukas Brasiskis, and Ben Eastham) to assemble this sprawling exhibition that dives into ancient cosmologies, current issues, and futurist dreams, both terrestrial and extraterrestrial, through a cinematic lens.

The show unfolds in nine conceptual chapters called “palaces” (the first is “freedom of interplanetary travel”; others include “ten thousand things,” “futurisms,” and “of time and space”). Video work is predictably abundant, but even apart from the many black boxes, the biennale’s spaces are mostly dark and hushed, like a movie theater or night sky. Spot- or backlights illuminate objects and vitrines; other works — like Liam Gillick’s “A Voyage in Search of Rational Senses” (2023), a mini-model of a museum bathed in a multicolored light show — use light as material.

Recurring themes meander through the “palaces”: beyond space travel (Jonas Staal’s monumental piece in the Power Station’s chimney, titled “Exo-Ecologies,” 2023, is an interspecies “launch pad”) are works addressing early human myths and systems — Saodat Ismailova’s two-channel video “Two Horizons” (2022) dreamily sets a young boy in a haunting Central Asian landscape and melds the story of the famous Soviet spaceport in what is now Kazakhstan with an old prophecy of a person who can defy gravity and achieve immortality. Michel Seuphor’s 64 line drawings representing hexagrams from the I Ching — arranged in a huge half-circular vitrine — are each labelled with heady slogans like “solidarity” or “the strength of the lonely man.” There are dashes of esotericism, too: Emma Kunz’s colorful geometric “energy field” drawings from the 1930s are powerfully vibrating mandalas (the healer claimed her art was not for her time, but rather for the 21st century), and Nolan Oswald Dennis’s wall drawings meld African belief systems and astrology. 

Other works address current issues like climate: in Wanuri Kahiu and Christian Nyampeta’s “Pumzi”(2009), a 20-minute post-apocalyptic sci-fi film, the protagonist sacrifices her life to allow a plant to live, while Clarissa Tossin’s wall pieces (including “Future Geography: Hyades Star Cluster,” 2021) weave shredded Amazon delivery boxes with strips of printed images of deep space: “maps” illustrating the sky’s geography with the products of terrestrial extraction. And He Zike’s film “Random Access” (2023) explores urban fragility: A retired cab driver tries to navigate the city of Guiyang, today’s Chinese data capital, after a power outage, evoking shared memories of the past with her passenger. (Such fragility is an interesting idea in Shanghai, whose recent strict pandemic lockdown measures resulted in social unrest.)

Several intriguing shows-within-shows mainly highlight how 20th-century thinkers and artists imagined a cosmic future — in one dark room is part of the collection of George Costakis, who in the 1920s amassed a number of avant-garde works by Russian Constructivists such as Malevich and Rodchenko; these and other artists’ wonderful abstract-figurative drawings and paintings on view here include telescopes and robots. Another space is dedicated to interpretations of Solaris, the 1972 Soviet sci-fi film based on Stanisław Lem’s 1961 novel. (The show’s one performative piece, Arseny Zhilyaev’s “Shanghai Operations Room,” 2023, also riffs on a sci-fi classic: the empty yellow rooms refer to the “god room” in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

With more than 80 artists, 200 works, and so much time-based art, seeing all of Cosmos Cinema is a commitment, but one of the show’s core questions is how time and space stretch, fold, wrinkle, and collapse into each other; one line in Raqs Media Collective’s video “The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time Cone” (2023) states that “things might vanish from history, but they do not vanish from time,” while Suzanne Treister, in a fascinating series of comic-like drawings called The Escapist BHST Black Hole Spacetime (2018–19), asserts that “time is a drug.”

The show’s choreography — upstairs and back down, with detours and mysterious passages through glass doors — is as convoluted as the plots and subplots in an art-house film; hot topics like gender, Indigenous ritual, and Afrofuturism crop up (too) briefly. At times Cosmos Cinema packs in too many storylines, and viewers risk losing touch with the when, where, and how.

At the show’s exit, production and curatorial credits roll across a screen on a heavy black curtain — a cleverly cinematic outro. And as in the moments after any good sci-fi film, we ask questions: Are we doomed? Can we escape the mess we’ve made of our earth, here or somewhere else? Cosmos Cinema lays out a melancholy utopia; it feels as if we’re being asked to choose hope or despair. I, for one, choose hope. Returning to my initial nostalgia, back in the exhibition’s first space near Paglen’s silver orb is a round couch on which a dozen or so viewers can sit and watch Eva Szasz’s animated “Cosmic Zoom”(1968) on one wall, or, fully reclined, see Charles and Ray Eames’s “Powers of Ten” (1977) on the ceiling. Both films take a simple western-world scene (a boy and a dog boating in a Canadian river; a New York couple picnicking on a blanket), zoom out to deep space, and zoom back in to the atoms comprising our cells. Both were made in an era in which the “whole earth” was a new concept, and globalism seemed like a good idea. Decades on, the naive promise of one happy planet has been utterly dashed — and trashed, as extractive tech billionaires have even co-opted space travel — but these works are a reminder that the universe and our world are still miracles, if we’d only look. Since time immemorial, humanity has gazed at the stars and at itself, and dreamed of the eternities in both.