In 2019, New Horizons sent back a photo of the boundaries of the solar system, the image of a blackhole was revealed for the very first time, a rocket by Space X carried Taiwan’s satellite, FORMOSAT-7, into outer space, and plans to return to the Moon were announced. As the inevitable results of scientific and technological progress, these milestones of space exploration seem to unite people all over the world in a shared sense of progress.
Yet in history, four fatal spaceflights, two by the Soviet Union and two by the U.S., resulted in the deaths of 18 astronauts. The missions were triggered politically, socially, and technologically and they were doomed because of similar reasons - the political pressure within Soyuz 1, the technical accident of Soyuz 11, the bureaucracies that exacerbated the disasters of STS-51-L and STS-107.
Nevertheless, to fade away en route to the universe might be the purist way to return to it. Perhaps the stars are not a new frontier, but an ancestral home, a place of origin.
The exhibition “Perpetuity’s Itinerants” is composed of an installation, Perpetuity’s Itinerants, an image-based work, STS-51-L & STS-107, and mixed media, Soyuz 1 & Soyuz 11. Perpetuity’s Itinerants presents 18 portraits of the deceased astronauts and 18 steel sculptures of paper planes; STS-51-L & STS-107 collages launching images of NASA’s space shuttle program. Two fatal missions – STS-51-L and STS-107 – are on top while the other successful missions are presented below, creating two surreal launches; Soyuz 1 & Soyuz 11 displays newspapers reporting the spaceflights from 1967 and 1971. Multiple meteor fragments compose Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Stars on the Soviet Union newspaper, Pravda.
