SOFIA.- The National Gallery in Sofia is presenting Irradiation, a solo exhibition by Anton Vidokle, curated by Martina Yordanova and Vasil Vladimirov. Installed in the historic Royal Palace, the exhibition brings together six of Vidokle’s films made over the past decade in dialogue with a special installation of twenty-four Himalayan landscapes by Nicholas Roerich, created between the early and mid-20th century.
Vidokle’s films revisit the suppressed philosophy of Cosmism, which imagined immortality, resurrection, space travel, and cosmic unity as humanity’s common task. Originating with the 19th-century librarian and thinker Nikolai Fedorov, Cosmism profoundly influenced the Soviet avant-garde in the wake of the October Revolution. Filmed across Kazakhstan, Siberia, Japan, Italy, and Mesopotamia, Vidokle’s works weave together documentary, performance, and essay, inviting reflection on death and immortality, ecology and spirituality, and the possibility of art as a vehicle for collective transformation.
The exhibition includes Immortality for All! (2012–2017), a trilogy that introduces the central themes of Cosmism through a polyphonic montage of voices and images. Citizens of the Cosmos (2018), filmed in Tokyo, enacts a manifesto by the anarchist-cosmist poet Alexander Svyatogor. Autotrofia (2019), filmed in southern Italy, interlaces a prose poem by artist Vassily Chekrygin with a scientific treatise by Vladimir Vernadsky. Gilgamesh: She Who Saw the Deep (2021), co-directed with Pelin Tan in Kurdish in southeastern Turkey, revisits humanity’s earliest tale of the quest for eternal life. Scored with fragments of music by John Cale, Alva Noto (Carsten Nicolai), Laurie Spiegel, Éliane Radigue, Else Marie Pade, and Vidokle’s own voice and field recordings, the films resonate with hypnotic sonic intensity.
Presented alongside Roerich’s radiant Himalayan landscapes—long revered for their spiritual and healing qualities—the exhibition proposes an encounter between moving image, sound, historic collection, and the museum itself as a site of memory, preservation, and potential resurrection. Installed as a therapeutic array, Roerich’s paintings are conceived as more than images to be viewed: their vibrational color fields are believed to irradiate the body, fostering psychological and physical healing simply through presence and exposure. The dialogue between Roerich’s luminous visions and Vidokle’s cinematic meditations opens a speculative space where earthly and cosmic time converge.
Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947) was a painter, philosopher, mystic, and tireless traveler whose life and work radiated an aura of spiritual quest. Trained in St. Petersburg yet drawn to ancient legends and esoteric traditions, he created thousands of paintings of saints, sacred mountains, and cosmic visions. Beyond his canvases, Roerich led expeditions across the Himalayas and Central Asia, co-authored the mystical Agni Yoga teachings with his wife Helena, and championed the “Banner of Peace” to safeguard culture as a spiritual force. Often linked with occult diplomacy, secret missions, and prophetic visions, Roerich remains an enigmatic figure—part artist, part sage—whose legacy continues to inspire seekers of transcendence.
Anton Vidokle is an artist, curator, and publisher. Born in Moscow in 1965 and raised in New York, he founded e-flux in 1998 as a platform for art and theory. Since 2012 he has made films to bridge his text-based and visual practices, presenting them in Documenta, Berlinale and Locarno Film Festivals, the Venice Biennale, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Museo Reina Sofía, Stedelijk Museum, MoMA, Tretyakov Gallery, and Muzeum Sztuki, among others. Most recently, Vidokle co-curated Cosmos Cinema at the 14th Shanghai Biennale and Séance: Technology of the Spirit at the 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale.
