Experimental/artist film, CGI | 00:11:13 | 2025

Venera-13 reimagines space exploration beyond narratives of human dominance. Set against the backdrop of the Soviet mission to Venus in 1982, the film explores the unconscious motivations behind space technology, granting voice and agency to the machinery itself. At its center is the lander Venera-13, equipped with a pioneering pre-digital camera invented by the artist’s grandmother, scientist Margarita Naraeva. The spacecraft operated for two hours, capturing the first color images of Venus before perishing in its hostile atmosphere. Through a dialogue co-written with Naraeva, the film unfolds the story of this “suicide camera”—a sentient, rebellious machine awakening to its complicity in the Cold War space race. By merging historical record and speculative fiction, Venera-13 reflects on visual colonialism, technological desire, and the politics of seeing in an era of industrialized vision.

Andrey Shental is a Berlin-based artisrt, curator, and writer. His artistic practice moves across film, photography, landscape performance, environmental interventions, and text, informed by a background in philosophy and a fascination with sublime natural forces. Addressing mastery over nature, human–nonhuman communication, and techno-scientific bias, my video works merge documentary, 3D animation, and found footage, granting agency to fungi, plants, machines, and landscapes as political subjects. Since 2020, I have developed a research-based project on Soviet missions to Venus, exploring how outer-space exploration intertwined with colonial ambition and the fantasy of mastering the cosmos.