Mar 20 2024
Book Launch and Conversation | Citizens of the Cosmos with Anton Vidokle, Elizabeth Povinelli and Liam Gillick
Wed | 7PM
Please join us for the launch of Citizens of the Cosmos, a publication that examines the artist Anton Vidokle’s films and the Cosmist philosophy underpinning them. It features essays and conversations with Vidokle by seminal contemporary theorists, curators, and artists: Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Keti Chukhrov, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Daniel Muzyczuk, Miguel Amado and Georgia Perkins, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Raqs Media Collective. This is the first book to survey Vidokle’s Cosmism-related filmic output, begun in 2014, and includes full scripts from the films.
The book’s contributors speculate on Vidokle’s Cosmist conceptions of technological immortality, material resurrection, radical museology, ancestral cults and space travel, grappling with how these ideas embroil or crystallize contemporary theories, artistic and technological imaginaries: atmospheric manipulation, cryonics, biopolitics, extraplanetary prospecting, geo-engineering, genetics.
On the occasion of the launch, Vidokle will screen one of his films, Autotrofia (2020), and will be joined afterwards in conversation with Elizabeth Povinelli and Liam Gillick.
Citizens of the Cosmos
Edited by Miguel Amado
Associate edited by Ben Eastham and Hallie Ayres
Design by Atelier d’Alves
2024, English
17×24 cm, 312 pages, 42 color ill., softcover
ISBN 978-1-915609-15-1
Published by Sternberg Press and Sirius Arts Centre
Please RSVP to rsvp@swissinstitute.net.
Anton Vidokle is an artist, founding director of e-flux, and editor of e-flux journal. His artistic research focuses on the philosophy of cosmism and its traces left behind by cosmist scientists, thinkers, and artists. Vidokle’s work has been presented in international exhibitions, festivals, and institutions including documenta, Venice Biennale, Shanghai Biennale, Berlinale, Locarno Film Festival, Gwangju Biennale, Taipei Biennale, Yokohama Triennale, Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, Tretyakov Gallery, MuHKA, Reina Sofia, MMCA Seoul, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, The National Gallery in Washington, DC, and many others. He was Chief Curator of the 14th Shanghai Biennale, Cosmos Cinema.
Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University. Her books include Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism(2016), Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (2011), and The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (2002). She is also a founding member of the Karrabing Film Collective.
Liam Gillick is an artist based in New York. His work exposes the dysfunctional aspects of a modernist legacy in terms of abstraction and architecture when framed within a globalized, neo-liberal consensus, and extends into structural rethinking of the exhibition as a form. He has produced a number of short films since the late 2000s which address the construction of the creative persona in light of the enduring mutability of the contemporary artist as a cultural figure. Over the last twenty five years Gillick has also been a prolific writer and critic of contemporary art, contributing to Artforum, October, Frieze, and e-flux Journal. His book Industry and Intelligence: Contemporary Art Since 1820 was published by Columbia University Press in March 2016.
Image: Anton Vidokle, still from Autotrofia, 2020-2023. HD video, color, sound. 32:03 min. Italian with English subtitles. Courtesy of the artist.
