Off to Space: Countenarrating the Cosmos is a group exhibition bringing together works by 6 international artists and collectives dealing with contested narratives, public history and turbulent contemporary political contexts by analyzing and revisiting space exploration strategies that started in the XX century as attempts to widen geopolitical influence, accumulate power and make utopia futures possible.
Today’s environmental, political and economic crisis alongside global colonial ambitions that stretch to other planets instigate a new spiral turn of the space race, which is joined by new large players on the political arena. In this context revisiting the space programs of the Cold War era and the politics behind them allows for deeper understanding of the past, amplifying its untold stories and voices and thinking of alternative futures. Aimed to expand the possibilities and powers of humanity the space programs have been and remain a form of political and ideological battles both between and within societies producing them since they are closely connected to the issues of power, race, ethnicity, identity, and gender struggles, territory division and inequality.
Addressing various forms of cosmisms and counterfuturisms, the presented works - videos, prints, collages and installations - balance between facts and fiction, sci-fi and mockumentary and often juxtaposу an individual story to collective history. Using events or phenomena set in the past, the exhibited works, however, have a definite connection with the contemporary moment and global political processes including migration and refugee crisis, growing antisemitism and new strategies of exile, feminist movement, postcolonial discourse of reclaiming the past and the future. By creating counterhistories they deal with the issues of displaced identities and articulate cases of voice dispossession thus bringing historical justice to silenced communities and individuals. Presenting space exploration from positions of ethnic minorities, women, animals, small communities, dependent economies and displaying how affected space representations have always been by current dominant ideologies and political visions, the exhibition becomes a platform for discovering a variety of counterfuturisms and temporalities and offers artistic ways of reclaiming displaced stories and representations of the past and future.
Maria Veits
Maria Veits is an independent curator and researcher. She is a co-founder and curator of TOK, an art organization and the first officially registered curatorial collective in Russia. Throughout their practice TOK curators challenge the borders of the territory of art and seek ways of how it can foster social change. Most projects of the collective are multilayered and long-term initiatives aimed at generating new knowledge about the causes and consequences of changing political and social realities and often lie between historical analysis and the political imaginary. Maria’s curatorial practice spans across working in different geographies, both in public spaces and in collaboration with a variety of art and non-art institutions.
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