Eduardo Kac

ESA’s Proxima mission, in which the French astronaut Thomas Pesquet took part in 2016, was the starting point for an extraordinary artistic collaboration. Eduardo Kac, whose transgressive approach has always consisted in pushing back the boundaries between art, science and life, conceived with Pesquet a work made under the radical conditions of weightlessness, using only the materials available on board.

Presented in Tel Aviv as part of Galerie Charlot’s programme, the exhibition Télescope intérieur takes on a new dimension in this Mediterranean and Middle Eastern context, where questions of borders — geographical, political, cultural — resonate with particular intensity. Kac, a Brazilian artist who has worked on several continents, is attuned to these issues: his work has always questioned what separates and what connects — species, cultures, worlds. The inner telescope is an instrument of this crossing: it allows us to look beyond appearances, beyond visible borders, to reach something essential about what it means to be human in a universe infinitely vaster than our representations of it.

Galerie Charlot presents a solo exhibition by the artist Eduardo Kac, “Télescope Intérieur” (Inner Telescope). The exhibition grew out of a work conceived by Eduardo Kac and realised in space in collaboration with the French astronaut Thomas Pesquet during the European Space Agency (ESA) “Proxima” mission, launched in November 2016.

Made from materials already available on the space station, the work “Télescope Intérieur”, which also gives the exhibition its title, is an instrument of observation and poetic reflection that leads us to rethink our relationship to the world and our place in the universe.

It consists of a form that has neither top nor bottom, neither front nor back. Seen from one angle, it reveals the word “MOI” (“ME”), evoking Humanity, a collective self; from another viewpoint, one sees a human figure with its umbilical cord cut, a symbol of emancipation from our gravitational limits.

Since the 1980s, Eduardo Kac has been theorising and producing works of art and poetry that challenge the limits of gravity. In 2007, he published his manifesto “Space Poetry”. In 2017, the artist’s dream finally came true: creating a work directly in space, in a state of weightlessness aboard the International Space Station.

A selection of drawings, embroideries, photographs, videos and artist’s books will illustrate this adventure at Galerie Charlot until 27 July.

This visionary project by Eduardo Kac was made possible by the Observatoire de l’Espace, the arts-science laboratory of CNES (the French space agency), with the assistance of ESA and the support of the Fondation Daniel et Nina Carasso.