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Jeronimo Voss, Inverted Night Sky, 2016. Photo by Gareth Jones.

Inverted Night Sky (2016)

We travel through the everyday activity of the observatory from teacups in the sink to workstations where researchers explore gravitational waves. Alongside this, a text rotates around the dome’s radius that muses on the relationship between time and power.

The project engages with the work of socialist astronomer Anton Pannekoek, exploring the convergence of art, astronomy, and politics, and how each strive for a certain form of universality. The work is also concerned with realism, both inside and outside the field of art, and how this can be understood as a radical expansion of one’s own observational framework or perspective.

The use of a dome appropriates the architecture of the observatory, as a space of both discovery and invention, utility and fantasy. A place to build constellations, to describe or gesture toward that which is elusive and ungraspable.

Courtesy of the artist. Supported by ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen). The film was produced at Anton Pannekoek Astronomy Institute, Amsterdam.

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