Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, Massachusetts
05 February - 05 April 2026
Cosmos Falling includes works by Xin Liu, (The White Stone, 2021); Lawrence Lek (Geomancer, 2017); Yuyan Wang (The Moon Also Rises, 2023); and Angela Su (Cosmic Call, 2019), which employ pseudo-documentary and speculative fiction as filmic techniques to re-animate the afterlives of technical objects, while also questioning an aesthetics of failure that surrounds the cosmic, technological frontier. From missiles, rockets, comets, satellites, to artificial moons, each narrates what has been left in their wake and what emerges in the terrestrial ruin. Bordering on science fiction with Sinofuturist underpinnings that push beyond cyberpunk tropes, these works also enact a kind of embodied performativity between various bodies and subjectivities that reflect a reverse trajectory: falling from the heavens, cosmic frontier, lower orbit, sky, back to earth.
Lawrence Lek’s (b. 1982 in Frankfurt, based in Berlin) Geomancer is a computer-generated animation about the creative awakening of artificial intelligence. Set in Singapore on the eve of the island nation’s centennial in 2065, the film tells the story of a decommissioned environmental satellite that wishes to become an artist. Geomancer imagines the crisis that might happen when the world has become a techno-industrial complex run by a posthuman intelligence, and creative originality is no longer be considered novel.
Cosmos Falling is curated by Danni Shen, Senior Curatorial Assistant, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University. A gallery guide accompanying the exhibition features a commissioned essay by Yutong Shi, Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.