Solaris

THIS EVENT IS NOW FULLY BOOKED.

The first in a series of Reading Room sessions at Nottingham Contemporary's Study Centre as part of the group exhibition 'Star City: The future under Communism'. Short stories and utopic writings by artists and Sci Fi writers will make up this series of informal talks, which will be informed by the inclusion of special guest readers. The exhibition will include A beautiful futuristic glass cinema will show Deimantas Narkevicius’s alternative ending to Tarkovsky’s film of Solaris, a classic of sci-fi cinema.

Solaris , by Stanisław Lem, is a science fiction novel about the ultimate inadequacy of communication between human and non-human species. In probing and examining the oceanic surface of the planet Solaris, from a hovering research station, the unaware human scientists are, in turn, being studied by the planet, which is a sentient being. In due course, Solaris probes for and examines the secret, guilty thoughts of the human beings scientifically examining it. Responding to such examination, Solaris realises their secret, guilty concerns — in human form, for each scientist to confront, while Solaris studies their responses to its psychological probing.

The story of Solaris is thematically pervaded by a powerful, poetic sense of the physical remoteness of outer space and the loneliness it engenders are Lem’s philosophic explorations of man’s anthropomorphic limitations. Solaris was originally published in Warsaw in 1961; it is the best-known of the English-translated (1970) works of the writer Stanisław Lem (1921–2006).