Haus der Kulturen der Welt takes Berliners on a mind-boggling trip through Cosmism in the conference and exhibition Art Without Death, Aug 31-Oct 3.
Anton Vidokle, “Immortality and Resurrection for All”, 2017Haus der Kulturen der Welt takes Berliners on a mind-boggling trip through Cosmism in the conference and exhibition Art Without Death.
Kicking off with a two-day conference (Sep 1-2) organised by theoretical heavy-hitter Boris Groys, Art Without Death examines the philosophical and cultural influence of Cosmism on art, science and politics in both pre-revolutionary and Soviet Russia. The father of the movement was Nikolai Fedorov (1829-1903), a librarian hermit whose visionary thoughts somehow reconciled Christian mysticism and scientific progress in an engrossing theoretical hodgepodge that demanded that the goal of technology be to overcome death.
Little known in the European West, his thought influenced a flurry of artists and thinkers, from Tolstoy and Kazimir Malevich to Ilya Kabakov’s famous 1984 installation “The Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment” and, according to Groys, the Soviet space programme (for Fedorov, the colonisation of other planets would be the inevitable consequence of the lack of space following the great “resuscitation of the dead”).
The conference focuses on key concepts from Fedorov’s philosophy of the “Common Task” and ends with a panel on contemporary art with Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Anton Vidokle and Arseny Zhilyaev. Meanwhile, the exhibition presents a selection of “cosmic” works by the Russian avant-garde from Thessaloniki’s George Costakis collection (as handpicked by Groys) alongside installations by two contemporary artists. Anton Vidokle’s Cosmism film trilogy (the third episode premiered on the Aug 31 opening) screens inside a site-specific structure inspired by Muslim cemeteries in Kazakhstan (where parts of the films were shot).
In the foyer, Zhilyaev’s installation-cum-library will let visitors read about Cosmism while enjoying the therapeutic effect of ionizer lamps as devised by last century’s cosmic scientist Alexander Chizhevsky. Art Without Death introduces Berlin audiences to a peculiar utopia that for all its (very Russian) outlandishness, should find its relevance in today’s age, which seeks to reconcile fast-paced scientific progress with a godless quest for spirituality.
Art Without Death: Russian Cosmism, Aug 31-Oct 3 | Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Tiergarten