MIR - Art in Variable Gravity

MIR is a unique project that has facilitated artists' work in conditions of zero gravity (weightlessness) and in high G-forces, with the collaboration of the Russian space programme. In such extreme and unstable circumstances, risk and the unknown have large parts to play.

Such artistic experiments have become possible with the end of the Cold War and coincide with the search for a new rationale for space activities. As international political support for space programmes has weakened, so utopian cultural arguments for space exploration have begun to re-emerge, such as Russian cosmism, the artistic and philosophical idealism that Earth is the cradle for humankind and that sooner or later we will inevitably move into space. These utopian ideas dominated much earlier thinking about space, both in science-fiction literature and artistic expression, before the space age started and the Cold War context superseded these ideas with the 'Space Race' and 'Star Wars'. At the dawn of a new millennium, it is timely that artists and independent cultural activists are reclaiming these territories, in a contemporary and very direct sense.

The works in this exhibition emerge from recent MIR (Microgravity Interdisciplinary Research) campaigns which have enabled artists and scientists to undertake projects using the facilities – including 'zero gravity' flights and the giant centrifuge – at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in Star City, the heart of the Russian space programme and one of the former 'closed cities' of the Soviet Union. Pressetext

MIR - Art in Variable Gravity

mit Vadim Fishkin, Yuri Leiderman, Stefan Gec, Vadim Fishkin, Otolith Group ( Kodwo Eshun, Anjalika Sagar, Richard Couzins ), Andrew Kötting, Evgeni Nesterov