Spaceship
Before there was the movie Gravity, there was Icarus XB-1. Not many people know about the celebrated tradition of science-fiction in Czech literature and film. In fact, while I was studying for a Masters in Czech, I found myself surprised by how much science fiction we were assigned. This week, however, Czech sci-fi hovered out of the shadows, and landed in New York.
A new exhibit, “Report on the Construction of a Spaceship Module,” has transformed the Fifth Floor gallery of the New Museum into a simulated interior of a spaceship. This otherworldly exhibit, inspired by the highly original Czech sci-fi film Icarus XB-1, was curated by tranzit, a network of interconnected organizations from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, and Romania. Details about this unusual spaceship concept are below…if you’re in New York, you might czech it out…
The vessel is inspired by the spacecraft in the iconic Czech science-fiction film Ikarie (Icarus) XB-1 (1963), which melded postwar utopianism with Soviet utilitarianism. In its structure and design, it recalls future fantasies from the socialist Eastern European side of the Iron Curtain and explores the ideological role that outer space played during this time. On view in and around the spacecraft will be 117 artworks, including video, sculpture, print, and installation, by artists hailing primarily from cities around Eastern Europe, notably Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Bucharest, and Bratislava, all of whom tranzit has worked with previously.
“Report on the Construction of a Spaceship Module” offers an allegory of “anthropological science fiction,” where the exhibition space becomes an estranged and exciting universe that dramatizes the cross-cultural translation involved in the presentation of art. The unique model evokes the challenges that contemporary artists experience in exhibiting works, or that curators come across in organizing exhibitions that stitch together diverse artworks, selected across generation, cultural context, personal narratives, and time.
