Join us for Night Carries the Future, a free film programme expanding the group show The Crackling of the Sun:

Bringing together three films, Night Carries the Future explores how moving image can become a site of worldmaking, where myth, ritual, memory, and speculative imagination intertwine to envision alternative cosmologies and futures beyond the limits of the visible.

Garush Melkonyan: Cosmovisión (2023, 23')
In 1977, NASA launched two space probes transporting two phonograph records dubbed the “Golden Record”, containing, in coded form, documents destined for a potential extraterrestrial intelligence. Including around a hundred photographs as well as music, sounds, and speech from our planet, these documents were intended to describe as exhaustively as possible human life on Earth, and in particular, human civilization. Cosmovisión imagines a possible follow-up to this gesture of throwing a bottle into the interstellar ocean. The film portrays extraterrestrial life arriving on Earth, in order to meet its residents, exclusively guided by the Golden Record’s vision.

Riar Rizaldi: Mirage: Eigenstate (2024, 30')
Mirage: Eigenstate weaves together analogous investigations into the nature of reality, positioning Western science as just one methodology among many in a constellation of pluralistic worldviews. The film explores diverse interpretations of reality – from tropical Sufi mysticism and monorealism to theories of quantum mechanics. Edited in the style of American astronomer and planetary scientist Carl Sagan’s 1980s television series Cosmos, which sought to explain the origin of life and the fourth spatial dimension, Mirage: Eigenstate draws on the tradition of scientific mass communication, where complex concepts are made accessible through straightforward explanations, often accompanied by imagery. (Arsenal Berlin)

Larissa Sansour, Søren Lind: In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (2015, 29')
In a temporal twist, as suggested by its title, In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain tells the story of an intervention into the future perception of a territory’s political history.  A self-proclaimed narrative resistance group makes underground deposits of elaborate porcelain – suggested to belong to an entirely fictional civilization. Their aim is to influence history and support future claims to their vanishing lands. Once unearthed, the buried tableware will prove the existence of this counterfeit people. By implementing a myth of its own, their work becomes a historical intervention – de facto creating a nation. The film takes the form of a fictional video essay, combining live motion and CGI, and taking clues from archeology, politics, and science fiction. A voice-over based on an interview between a psychiatrist and the leader of the narrative resistance group about her thoughts on myth and fiction as constitutive for fact, history, and documentary reveals the philosophy and ideas behind the group’s actions. (Arsenal Berlin)

The exhibition The Crackling of the Sun builds on mythic memories and speculative storytelling. It unfolds across the gallery space and extends to two film programmes all offering inquiries into non-linear timescapes and speculative myths, while exploring future worldbuilding as a speculative, collective and feminist practice. 

Filmstill: Garush Melkonyan, Cosmovisión (2023) © the filmmaker and ADAGP, Paris.