Visual documentation of the 14th Shanghai Biennale with newly commissioned essays reflecting on its themes.

Visual documentation of the 14th Shanghai Biennale with newly commissioned essays reflecting on its themes.

Published to complement the 14th Shanghai Biennale, entitled Cosmos Cinema and curated by Anton Vidokle, this illustrated catalogue extends the exhibition's proposal that the methodologies of filmmaking might offer one way of representing and reimagining our entanglement in time and space.

The book presents the work of artists from the early twentieth century to the present alongside a series of specially commissioned essays on subjects ranging from the history of Shanghai cinema to the possibility of communicating with nonhuman intelligence. Arranged according to the Nine Palaces of traditional Chinese cosmology, and reproduced here in a design that recreates the consciously cinematic experience of the exhibition, these works of art and their accompanying texts encourage us to reflect on our place within the systems that shape our lives at every scale.