We are pleased to announce Globalization, History, and Mundane Cosmos, the sixteenth online installment of the Cosmos Cinema educational program, as part of the 14th Shanghai Biennale.
Featured this week is The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time Cone (2023, 25 minutes), a film by Raqs Media Collective that presents a cosmic interplay of colonization and globalization. Installed in the Partial Eclipse section of the Biennale, the work oscillates between fact and fiction while hovering over the year 1980, a crepuscular time of threshold and transience. Shot in New Delhi’s hinterland—in places of wilderness in-between and at the edge of other places—it sees Raqs experiment with new visual textures achieved through images that hover between past and present, found archival footage, and digitally and hand-drawn figures and topologies. The main protagonist is a bicyclist whose circular and repetitive journey invokes the un-chronology of a “non-year” bracketed by tumult on either side. Raqs excavates memory and anti-memory, and the mis-registrations that invariably occur when looking back from the present towards the not-so-distant past. By acknowledging the parallax that occurs when one looks at one time from another place, 1980 is recovered as a calendar seeded with possibilities. “There is,” the collective proposes, “a 1980 hidden in every year.”
The work is available for viewing through March 9 on www.cosmoscinema.art.
