Cao Shu traces a series of synchronisms and technological archives in the exhibition Lightning on the Upper Reaches of the Lethe.
Time folds and twists across history, acting as a subterranean river into which all things dissolve before returning as singular beings. The exhibition seizes fleeting instants when historical chaos is briefly illuminated and obscure constellations of relation momentarily conduct once more.
The works trace unsettling synchronisms throughout modern history. Nineteenth-century colonial surveys attempted to prove that two differently named rivers shared a single origin. A secondary emphasis examines the eerie correspondence connecting the detonation that vaporized bodies in Nagasaki with the camera flash used to capture an image on film.
Science-fiction film narratives propelled by absent protagonists share space with images drawn from the visual cortex of deceased mice. These images are drawn onward by invisible memories, converging on a single question regarding an irrational history of technology.
The chaotic ocean of daily existence is converted into a clear and orderly rational realm through methods such as colonial mapping, digital 3D polygonal wireframes, machine learning training sets, and detailed records of brain cortex function. Yet beneath this clear, rectilinear technological surface, the meandering river of Lethe continually returns, folding fear and memory back into the landscape.
Mark Hansen proposed the notion of a worldly sensibility, directing attention to the conditions under which experience takes shape before consciousness arrives. Operating prior to conscious awareness, physiological functions, external environmental pressures, and technological mechanisms drive forward to shape subsequent awareness and behavior.
Cao Shu’s practice remains attuned to these opaque moments of feed-forward. This zone exists prior to the Lethe, preceding the conscious division between anima and animus, and operating where the non-human mystical forces of geology and climate continue to function.
Lightning on the Upper Reaches is not merely a collection of stories woven from coincidence and omen. It proposes a more permeable mode of historical perception, capable of gently unsettling the linear narrative of progress constructed through invention, institutions, and media.
Each flash of lightning briefly illuminates the darkness before the world falls back into shadow. Yet the lightning returns, again and again, upstream of Lethe.
