When: July 16 and 30, and August 13. 
Times: One screening at 18:00 and one at 19:00
Where: Planetariet, Vitensenteret i Trondheim
Tickets: Links to free tickets (Hoopla) will be available at Viral Viral on Facebook,
two weeks before each screening. 

Qianhui Qian’s Viral Viral is a two film-based confrontation of who we are as people in a global world in crisis screened at the planetarium in Vitensenteret. Set in early 2020 and one year later in 2021, the films track the effects of the pandemic as it spread across the world.

Viral Viral discuss whether people in the midst of the pandemic, no matter where they live, are gradually accepting the birth of a new order. How is the pandemic changing our lives, and do we humans still own our free will?

The pre-COVID era has become an extravagant hope, a utopia that everyone has had and lost in the end. The second part of the film will focus on the topic of how we engage with COVID in our daily lives and make it a part of the new order. 

The dome theatre as a stage will bring people a strong sense of substitution. This subversion of the traditional theatre format allows the public to see how the world became through the eyes of the artist, through the eyes of a Chinese citizen at the centre of the COVID-19 vortex.

Qianhui Qian: 

"My experience with the first stage of the pandemic was that average people were indifferent to it, just like watching a movie in a cinema. Because it was a disaster happening in China, which is very distanced. But gradually, the catastrophe climbed out of the screen, so close to us that every one of us could be infected right away. 

The charm of the planetarium is that it is so close to the audience that all the images happen right in front of them, and there is no escape anywhere. A strong sense of empathy allows the audience to feel my delicate emotions in this epidemic."

About the artist

Qianhui Qian was born in Shanghai, China, and lives and works in Trondheim. She graduated from Trondheim Academy of Fine Art (MFA) in 2020.

"From the perspective of a person who grew up in a megacity in East Asia, Shanghai is strikingly different from Norway. The main direction of my research is exploring this contrast and obsession with the unknown. Norway's spectacular natural landscape triggers my desire to be close to the earth we are living on. But different from artists who were born and raised in Norway, my contact with the natural environment has been brief but strong. I hope to show the love and fear, strangeness, and intimacy of an average urban person towards nature. My identity is first as a natural person, a human standing on the ground, and secondly as an artist. I try to find a way to visualize emotions and myths in a poetic way."