I’m about halfway around Galerie Nordenhake Stockholm’s newest exhibition, Impact Structures by Elena Damiani, when I realise I’ve mistaken my German guide’s pronunciation of NASA as Gaza. My sombre comments whilst we looked at a row of crater pencil-drawings might, with hindsight, have been a little confusing.
I should have known, really. The first thing you see on entering the gallery is a spectacular piece of semitransparent silk chiffon printed with comets and dust tails. ‘Dust Tail’ hangs from the ceiling like a hammock in several layers, which, I read, is meant to describe the trajectory a comet follows.
In putting together the exhibition, multi-award winning, Peruvian-born artist Damiani found source material in NASA (not Gaza), the Lunar and Planetary Institute, and the U.S. Geological Survey repository. It’s part astronomy, part archaeology, and contains a fair bit of geology. It’s also, I learn, part fiction. This isn’t something I ever would’ve realised on my own; you’d need a fair amount of astronomy knowledge to notice that much of the scientific data Damiani used has been reconstituted with fictions she created herself. It’s not immediately clear what’s false, either. This, I suppose, is the point. Much of Damiani’s work in Impact Structures deconstructs the idea that scientific source material was ever 100% immutable in the first place. Just like art, it’s a cultural construct, as susceptible to interpretation as anything else in the world.
Case in point: ‘Samples 1-8’ is a photographic series of eight digital prints that document numerous small celestial bodies found on site. Damiani didn’t take the photos herself, but collected and arranged the found archival documentation and data. We’re told the elemental properties of each object and where it was found. But how much of this information can we trust? ‘World Map of Circular Depressions’, a map on the wall opposite, is something of a partner piece to ‘Samples 1-8’. Holes punched into the map’s surface locate where each meteoric discovery was made. They’re particularly concentrated in the more affluent parts of the world, whilst huge areas of land in South America, China, and the Middle East are empty. Here, the bias of scientific documentation is laid bare.
Other highlights include the final part of the exhibition, a video installation named ‘Brighter Than the Moon.’ I enter the dim room and find a small crowd staring at a shape-shifting projection on the wall. A soundscape of what sounds like a dust storm plays. I read that Damiani has taken found footage of near-earth objects collected from ESA and NASA and mixed it with microphotographs of meteorite samples. The macro and micro become indistinguishable after you watch it for long enough. The effects are hypnotic.
Impact Structures can be found at Galerie Nordenhake Stockholm and is open until September 24, 2016.
Opening hours: Tues – Fri 11:00 – 18:00, Sat 12:00 – 16:00
Words: Daisy Fernandez
