From the Guardian; What an urban spaceman tells us about the human condition

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What an urban spaceman tells us about the human condition

An unusual astronaut is at the centre of a new exhibition of art and scientific artefacts designed to make us think about everything from our personal lives to the fate of humanity itself

Laura Potier

Sun 1 Sep 2019 08.00 BST

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Yinka Shonibare’s Refugee Astronaut, the centrepiece of the Wellcome Foundation’s forthcoming Being Human exhibition. Photograph: Andy Hall/The Observer

“It’s hard to think of a greater challenge to our future health than environmental breakdown,” says Clare Barlow, project curator of Wellcome Collection’s newest gallery. Opening on Thursday 5 September, Being Human is a new permanent exhibit that explores trust, hope and fear, identity and health in the 21st century through four sections: genetics, minds and bodies, infection and environmental breakdown.
The space, which for 12 years housed Medicine Now, has been redesigned with reclaimed wood panelling and warm colours by the Turner prize-winning arts and architecture collective Assemble. The exhibition “explores our relationship with ourselves, with each other and with the world around us”, Barlow says. Each of the four sections asks a different question. “With minds and bodies the question is, why do we sometimes act like we value some lives more than others? With environmental breakdown, we ask why it’s so hard for us to act on climate change, when its effects are already here. And with that, the question of how we’re reacting to what’s being lost and how we see ourselves living in the future.”
Being Human displays imposing works of art alongside other artefacts, which include seeds withdrawn from the Svalbard global seed vault, a storage facility created by the Norwegian government in 2008 to protect vital crops such as wheat against global disasters, war or disease, and a commercially available gene-editing kit, items intended to ground the conceptual nature of the artworks in a scientific context. These are contrasted with pieces by established artists such as Deborah Kelly’s No Human Being Is Illegal (in All Our Glory), Kia LaBeija’s Eleven, a self-portrait of the black artist, who is living with HIV, and Superflex’s short film Flooded McDonald’s, which questions with whom responsibility for environmental breakdown lies: the customer or the corporation?
Visitors move from the genetics section, a “distillation of what makes us us” to an exploration of our relationships with our bodies and minds, then to our relationship with others and, finally, to our relationship with the planet and our grief for what has already been lost. They will be “progressing from things that feel deeply personal, and really allow them to scrutinise questions of identity, to reflecting on the global impact of environmental breakdown”.

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An image from Superflex’s short film Flooded McDonald’s.

At the centre of the exhibit is Refugee Astronaut, by British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare. The traveller, wearing a spacesuit of Dutch wax fabric and moon boots, carries a net of possessions on his back containing a telescope, an old camera and a star map, as well as evocatively titled books The Last Migration and The Quest for the Perfect Place. Barlow says these items are jumping-off points from which visitors can create their own idea of where the astronaut is heading.
Is the astronaut a refugee from Earth or is the artwork grounded in the current refugee crisis? “It can be read both ways,” says Barlow. “There’s a strong antithesis going on. Astronauts are cosmic explorers and then the word ‘refugee’ ties it to a very specific context. It pulls together so many different ideas, opening up questions around colonialism and the environment.”
Shonibare’s commission is the third in the Refugee Astronaut series, which began as criticism of colonialism and exploitation and its historical annexation, explains the artist. Each sculpture’s spacesuit has a different pattern, the latest of which is of green lines and clouds “to signify an ebbing relationship with nature, due to climate change”.
It is with good reason that this work serves as the exhibition’s keystone. “Refugee Astronaut is a metaphor for a post-apocalyptic figure, with his worldly possessions on his back, seeking conflict-free and environmentally clean, greener pastures,” says Shonibare. The work can be read either as “dystopian, or a note of caution” against “catastrophic climate events that will increasingly lead to migration and a scramble for scarce resources, leading to global conflict”.
The astronaut can be glimpsed from any point in the gallery, a constant reminder of the end point, the “ultimate progression”. “Maybe in this future, leaving Earth will be the only answer,” Barlow muses. “It’s a question mark on the end of the collection’s progression.”
Being Human opens on 5 September at the Wellcome Collection, London NW