In Death by Sun, multidisciplinary artist Tianzhuo Chen places the sun at the centre of a journey through mythology, technology, and the contested futures of solar energy. Moving between ancient solar imaginaries, the climate crisis, authoritarian symbolism, energy colonialism, and the geopolitics of renewable energy, the performance asks how our relationship with the sun continues to shape ideas of power, progress, and the future. Reimagined as a plural and unstable protagonist, the sun becomes both narrator and force: sacred and technological, life-giving and destructive.

Drawing on Georges Bataille’s writings on the sun, the work approaches it as a force of excess and expenditure that gives without return, bringing ideas of abundance, waste, and consumption into tension with contemporary systems of extraction. Together with collaborators Ndoho Ange, Siko Setyanto, and Dis Fig, Chen transforms these ideas through choreography, sound, video, intense light, and immersive installation, opening a space for imagining alternative forms of solarity.

This event is not included in the transmediale and CTM passes, nor in the Connect pass. Ticket pre-sale will start on 1 December.