The English subtitle, “Is there anybody out there?” asks again the question posed by Pink Floyd on their 1979 rock opera The Wall: the protagonist, retreating into himself, sends out non-verbal distress signals in vain. The Chinese subtitle, “mixiu mixiu, did you get the signal?” is a line from the 2009 TV show Autumn’s Concerto, in which a young boy being raised by a single mother is told that his father is an alien living far away on a distant planet. When he tries to signal his father (also in vain), their codeword is mixiu mixiu: “Miss you, miss you.”
[…]
Taken in total, “Horizons” organizes a wildly diverse group of extraordinary and singular artists around an admittedly arbitrary vision of the antenna, the satellite, the probe, something sent from an era of projected science fantasy into the futures that have now become our pasts. This is not meant to be a serious analysis of science fiction; it is a romance, a story of love and loss, a natural history of grief, a meditation on the impossibility of connection across time and space.
Words by the curator Robin Peckham.
