2026
HD video, sound, color
24 minutes

The Sky Is Not Real unfolds as a meditation on darkness—cosmic, psychological, and historical. Part of Wang’s ongoing Pyramids and Parabolas film series (2019-present), the latest iteration turns inward to examine the unconscious while simultaneously reaching outward toward the mysteries of the universe. The film is composed primarily of long takes of the southern hemisphere night sky filmed in the Australian Outback at The Jump-Up Dark Sky Sanctuary and Ilfracombe, Queensland. Dense constellations, nebulae, and distant stellar systems form a field of immersion, recalling the durational monochrome structure of Derek Jarman’s Blue.

The film responds to Solaris—Andrei Tarkovsky’s adaptation of Stanisław Lem’s novel—in which psychologist and cosmonaut Kris Kelvin is sent to a space station orbiting the oceanic planet Solaris after its crew begins reporting inexplicable visions. The night sky in Wang’s film is bookended by found footage from Solaris. As the darkness outside the spacecraft window fills the frame, it cuts to Wang’s own footage of the southern sky. This transition opens a structural aperture through which her voiceover enters Tarkovsky’s narrative world. Moving between first and third person, the narration inhabits the psychic terrain of Solaris, at times observing Kelvin from within the diegesis, at times dissolving into the planet’s consciousness.

Drawn from Wang’s psychoanalysis sessions, the narration accumulates memories of lived experience: an anechoic chamber, a hospital delivery room, a school bus, a carjacking, a nightclub, a meditation retreat, the Australian Outback. These spaces fold into one another beneath the same sky while Wang’s voice circles rather than resolves. The cinematic soundtrack deepens the atmosphere—beneath the constellations, interior psychic events begin to mirror cosmic phenomena. If Solaris externalized memory as planetary encounter, Wang’s film internalizes the cosmos as psychic condition, suggesting that the unknown within the human mind and the unknown beyond our planet may be structurally intertwined.

Commissioned by the New Museum and supported by Capsule, Acting Method Production, London, and Pioneer Works. Presented in New Humans: Memories of the Future, opening on March 21, 2026.