Back to Earth: Contested Histories of Outer Space Travel

Lower Level

Nuotama Bodomo

Alice dos Reis

Zahy Tentehar

Subash Thebe LimbuB

Back to Earth: Contested Histories of Outer Space Travel is an exhibition and discursive program that seeks to critically engage mainstream narratives of space exploration.

Addressing the ways in which imaginaries of outer space travel, space tourism, and cosmic mining continue to naturalize colonization and dispossession of people on Earth, Back to Earth takes an intersectional approach to new planetary imaginaries. We invited artists and filmmakers who from Black, Indigenous, Asian, and feminist perspectives are reflecting on the implications of space travel for racialized communities, as these exploratory endeavors continue to assert technocratic ideas of progress that erase, negate, and disavow the capacity of diverse forms of life to exist and thrive on our planet. This program contributes to today’s most pressing planetary thinking, as it follows philosopher Kelly Oliver’s provocative question: “how do we share the Earth with those with whom we don’t share the world?” With this in mind, we invited conceptions of the world that do not begin from a totalizing view of the globe, but ones that depart from a broader imagining of worlds-within-the-world.

Alongside this group of artists, the exhibition includes talks and discursive engagements with writers and scholars like Kelly Oliver, Ella Diaz, Daniella Brito, and Himali Singh Soin who is providing critical new perspectives on the urgency of repositioning the narratives of outer space exploration. These intersectional imaginaries highlight some of the most interesting visual experiments that today are helping us rethink our role in building worlds that are grounded on earth, that are rooted in interdependence, and that foreground mutual accountability.

For the exhibition, Canal Projects commissioned a new film by the Indigenous filmmaker Zahy Tentehar. The film Máquina Ancestral: Ureipy (2023) is a performance and science-fiction short film where a differently-abled character called "robotic entity" travels to a mysterious space in search of his identity, which was lost in time. Evermore aware of the failures and perhaps even ruination of the human condition, the robotic entity refuses to succumb to this loss. Instead, the robot seeks to redeem the human species by rescuing its inherited ancestral knowledge.

Nuotama Frances Bodomo is a filmmaker based between Tamale, Accra, and New York City. She grew up in Norway and Hong Kong before moving to New York to study film at Columbia University (BA) and NYU's Tisch School of the Arts (MFA). Her short films Boneshaker (2013) and Afronauts (2014) both premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Everybody Dies! (2016) premiered at SXSW as part of the omnibus feature film Collective: Unconscious. Afronauts has participated in several group exhibitions, including the Whitney Museum’s Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905-2016, the 2018 Venice Biennale’s Dimensions of Citizenship, & the 4th Edition of the Lubumbashi Biennale in 2015. Nuotama also served as staff writer & director on the Peabody Award-winning television show Random Acts of Flyness (HBO) and she co-founded the New Negress Film Society. She was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2014 and is a 2019 United States Artists Fellow in Film. Her work is currently streaming on Netflix and the Criterion Channel.

Subash Thebe Limbu is a Yakthung (Limbu) artist and comes from the people of Dharan, Nepal. He works with sound, film, music, performance, and painting. Subash has a MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins (2016), BA in Fine Art from Middlesex University (2011), and Intermediate in Fine Art from Lalit Kala Campus, Kathmandu. His works are inspired by socio-political issues, resistance, and science/speculative fiction. Indigeneity, climate change, and Adivasi Futurism are recurring themes in his works. He is based in Newa Nation (Kathmandu) and London.

Zahy Tentehar lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. Tentehar is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, actor, and activist from the Tentehar-Guajajara people. Tentehar’s video works examine contemporary indigenous identities and experiences amidst ongoing struggles for land rights and against ecological exploitation in the aftermath of colonial invasion. Her works have previously been shown in exhibitions including Dja Guata Porã: Indigenous Rio de Janeiro at Museu de Arte (MAR), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2017); Nakoada: Strategies for Modern Art at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM-Rio), Rio de Janeiro (2022), and a recent solo presentation at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), São Paulo (2021).

Alice dos Reis is a visual artist. They have exhibited, solo and in group, at the Serralves Museum for Contemporary Art (Porto), Kunsthalle Lissabon (Lisbon), Gallerie D’Italia (Torino), 5th Istanbul Design Biennale (Istanbul), Radius CCA (Delft), Porto Municipal Gallery (Porto), PuntWG (Amsterdam), Galerie InSitu (Paris), Display (Prague), Gallery and Lehmann + Silva, among others. Their films have been shown at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Eye Film Museum (Amsterdam), Platform Vdrome, and Museum of the Moving Image (NYC), as well as in various international film festivals. They co-run Pântano Books, an independent poetry press.