Re-entangling the Earthbound: Artistic Response to the Chinese Space Industry
07 February 2025, 7:00 pm–9:00 pm

This COSS panel discussion brings together two artists and one curator whose work engages with rocket debris searches and visits to rocket impact zones in Northwest and Southwest China.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Organiser
-
Institute of Advanced Studies
Location
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IAS Common GroundG11, ground floor, South WingUCL, Gower St, LondonWC1E 6BTUnited Kingdom
If sedimentary layers represent the silent chronicle of deep time—recording geological events and the history of species, a chronicle beneath our feet—then the sky above represents another kind of temporal structure, one defined by cycles, rotations, and orbital movements rather than linear deposition. This sky, referred to by Lisa Parks as a "vertical public space," symbolizes the openness of the human condition and demands analysis with environmental specificity. The sky is not a chaotic, homogeneous, or undifferentiated medium; rather, it is an environment constantly shaped and altered by specific perspectives and technologies.
The panel discussion brings together two artists and one curator whose work engages with rocket debris searches and visits to rocket impact zones in Northwest and Southwest China. The project will specifically explore how artistic research can provide alternative, critical, and creative interventions into the "specificity of the sky medium" and its geo/aero-politics. By focusing on falling rather than ascending, the investigation examines how the rocket, as a technical object, re-entangles the earthbound.
All welcome. Please register to attend: https://coss-earthbound.eventbrite.co.uk
The Centre for Outer Space Studies (COSS) was founded in 2019 to promote research and teaching related to the social study of Outer Space and our relationship to the cosmos and the planet. The Centre aims to act as a catalyst for serious debate, via talks, exhibitions, film screenings and other events that help us explore the socio-political impact of space science and the wider human relationship to outer space.
About the Speakers
Liu Xin
Xin Liu ( b. Xinjiang) is a multidisciplinary artist and engineer, who creates sculptures, digital experiences, and films that feature machinery, genetic material, petroleum, and rocket debris, to explore the verticality of space, extraterrestrial explorations, and cosmic metabolism.
Xin is an artist-in-residence at SETI Institute and the founding Arts Curator in the Space Exploration Initiative at MIT Media Lab, and a Visiting Fellow at Cornell Tech (2024-25). She is an advisor for LACMA Art+Tech Lab and a researcher at Antikythera, Berggruen Institute. Currently, she is a resident artist at Somerset House and Delfina Foundation. Her work has been shown at Shanghai Biennale, Thailand Biennale, M+ Museum, Yuz Museum, MoMA PS1, MAXXI Rome, Sundance Film Festival, Ars Electronica, and Onassis Foundation, Sapporo International Art Festival, among others.
More about Liu XinZhenZhen
Zhenzhen Zhong is an interdisciplinary artist, theater, and film worker. Her work merges installation, kinetic sculpture, and video art, blending diverse media including painting, photography, sound, data, and theater. In recent years, ZhenZhen has focused on creating "non-human performers" through handcrafted machines, exploring semi-fictional scenarios to address contemporary issues such as body, identity, labor, technology, and Pearl River Delta Region.
She had her double-person show Embodied Measurement at the Double Double Gallery this year. Her latest work Women at Work was shown at UTA Artist Space in Los Angeles. She has recently been a member of the Goethe Institute fellowship program AI to Amplify. She participated in the 2021 Huayu Youth Art Award (Sanya, China) as a member of the "44 Monthly” artist collective. Her project Built at Sea was selected and exhibited at Power Station of Arts in Shanghai.
Iris Long
Iris Long is an independent curator with a research focus on the megastructures of science and technology in China and the psychogeography of techno-science. She is also a 2022–2023 Berggruen Fellow and a Swissnex Fellow.
She has curated and co-curated exhibitions at the intersection of art and technology, including Lying Sophia and Mocking Alexa (Hyundai Blue Prize), the third Today Art Museum Future of Today Biennial, the art and technology sector of the inaugural Beijing Art Biennial, Earth Heat Flow: The Visitor Who Returns to Solar Time, the inaugural exhibition for Chinese National Astronomy, Cosmological Elements, Cosmos Archaeology (Shanghai Astronomy Museum) and so forth. She currently oversees the artist-in-residence program at the Department of Astronomy, Tsinghua University.
More about Iris LongMakar Terëshin
Makar Terëshin is a social anthropologist and documentary photographer. He is a PhD candidate and a member of the ETHNO-ISS project at University College London. His research interests concern material culture studies, environmental and visual anthropology, with an ethnographic focus on Russia and Kazakhstan. Currently, Makar is working on a project exploring politics and ecology of the Russian space industry in Central Kazakhstan. The project is supported by London Art and Humanities Partnership.