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Visual Artists’ News Sheet | November – December 2021
Exhibition Profile
Anton Vidokle, The Communist Revolution Was Caused By The Sun, 2015, image still, HD video, color, sound, 33:36 min.; courtesy of the artist and SIRIUS.
ANTON VIDOKLE HAS been making a series of films that explore Russian
Citizens of the Cosmos MIGUEL AMADO REFLECTS ON ANTON VIDOKLE’S RECENT EXHIBITION IN RAMPA, WHICH WAS COPRODUCED BY SIRIUS. If we compare an archive to a grave, then reading, or more precisely research, will be the path toward exhumation, and an exhibition, as it were, the resurrection. – Nikolai Fedorov
Cosmism through cinematic devices and an engagement with biopolitics, universalism, revolution, and museology. His latest exhibition, ‘Citizens of the Cosmos’ (9 September – 16 October), was curated by myself with Alexandra Balona for Rampa in Porto, Portugal, in co-production with SIRIUS. Russian Cosmism is a constellation of theories and projects – philosophical, artistic, scientific – informed by the writings of the Russian philosopher, Nikolai Fedorov (1829-1903), which two of his adherents organised into a publishable form, resulting in the posthumous book, Philosophy of the Common Task (1906/13). It brings together discourses of Marxism, Russian Orthodox Christianity, Enlightenment, and Eastern philosophies through the lenses of mysticism and utopia, and involves conceptions of technological immortality, resurrection, and space travel, speculating on how these might be materialised through artistic, social, and scientific means. Russian Cosmism emerged in the late-nineteenth century and developed through the 1920s and 1930s, when a new generation pursued Fedorov’s vision. As a movement, it rejected the contemplative for the transformative, aiming to create a new world, and thus appealed to those in pursuit of a classless society after the October Revolution of 1917. It entered a period of relative obscurity in the Soviet territories following the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, and reemerged in Russia and elsewhere following the publication in 1979 of Nikolai F. Fedorov, an Introduction by the historian George M. Young. It has permeated Western intellectual circles in recent years, and has impacted the art scene thanks to the efforts of philosopher, Boris Groys. Vidokle’s films form tableaux vivants, situated between fact and fiction, reality and otherness, poetics and ideology. He shot them in Moscow, Siberia, Almaty and Karagandy in Kazakhstan, Tokyo, and beyond. They
