The eac. – contemporary art centre of national interest, in partnership with the Observatoire de l’Espace, the cultural laboratory of CNES (the French space agency), presents the work of contemporary artists who have explored extraterrestrial art. This manifesto exhibition aims to lay the foundations for conceptualising 21st-century extraterrestrial art.
Through its creative residencies giving artists access to space resources, the Observatoire de l’Espace of CNES has built up, within its contemporary art collection, a group of works arising from direct interaction with the space environment. The International Space Station thus serves as a real or virtual place of creation for works that convey the new sensory perceptions generated by weightlessness on objects and bodies. Video works, drawings, sculptures and photographs produced aboard the Airbus ZERO-G explore how earthly media adapt to weightlessness, using creative devices specially designed for the context of parabolic flight. Finally, stratospheric balloon flights make it possible to rise gradually towards space, offering a new perspective on the extraterrestrial and transforming matter through direct contact with the space environment.
This exploration of extraterrestrial art builds on the first experiments by Space art artists in the 1980s and 1990s, and takes place at a time when announcements of an upcoming human presence on the Moon are multiplying, alongside wide-ranging activity in the space sector led by institutional players and NewSpace protagonists alike. In this current flourishing, contemporary creation seems to have an exceptional opportunity to open a new chapter in the history of art.
The exhibition L’art extra-terrestre au XXIe siècle shares with the public the results of the direct and original interaction with space undertaken by contemporary artists.
