ASAKUSA is delighted to announce the screening exhibition "Russian Cosmism: Trilogy" by Anton Vidokle, New York and Berlin based artist and founder of e-flux. Vidokle focuses on video and creates works in collaboration with artists including Liam Gillick and fiction writer Hu Fang. His collaborative practice extends to cross-disciplinary projects that penetrate the existing infrastructure: unitednationsplaza (2006-7), for instance, is the unrealised Manifesta 6 experimental art-school-as-exhibition which invited Boris Groys, Martha Rosler and others; Time/Bank (2010-, e-flux), an ongoing platform that enables people to trade artistic skills using time as a unit of exchange; and e-flux journal (2008-, e-flux), a monthly art periodical featuring critical essays and contributions by some of the most engaged artists and thinkers of our time. Through his strategic interventions, Vidokle consistently aims to support the autonomy of art and art community at large.

The exhibition screens Vidokle's film trilogy centered on the ideas formed by philosopher Nikolai Fyodorov, known as Russian cosmicism. Fyodorov believed that death is a "mistake" that has to be corrected, and that all human endeavours advancing science, technology, and the control of nature, should eventually overcome death and resurrection of life. Fyodorov addressed topics traditionally confined to esoteric literature, exploring the influence of cosmic rays, energy particles and humans as cosmic beings, while his writings draw diverse philosophical streams into one, including Enlightenment, Russian Orthodox, Eastern philosophy, Cosmology, and Marx's historical materialism. In the early 20th century at the time of Italian futurism, Cosmism permeated into the psyche of Russian intellectuals endeavoured towards political and cultural advancement.