Star City: The Future Under Communism | Visual art review
Nottingham Contemporary
Star City is an unassuming new town a few miles from Moscow – but for many years its location was a closely guarded secret. That is because it was the hub of the Soviet space programme, where cosmonauts trained and lived with their families in splendid isolation.
These days, you are more likely to bump into artists in Star City than space pioneers. Among the first to undertake residencies there were Jane and Louise Wilson, whose film installation shows a surprisingly mundane-looking place. It is as if Letchworth secretly housed a collection of flight simulators and anti-gravity machines with the aspect of totalitarian fairground rides. Most threatening is a huge centrifuge that generates the crushing g-force cosmonauts experience on takeoff. Can it be entirely coincidental that this emblem of Soviet supremacy resembles a giant iron fist?
The Otolith Group artist collective took advantage of Star City's training facilities to experience a flight out of the earth's atmosphere. They intercut images of floating around in space with footage of a delegation of Indian women who travelled to Moscow in the early 1970s as representatives of India's own attempts to establish a space programme.
This well-presented show proves nothing looks quite so old-fashioned as recent visions of the future. A replica of a Sputnik satellite seems as enigmatically pointless as a constructivist sculpture. Cold war propaganda posters, meanwhile, promise a cosmic collectivism that seems more palatable than the earthbound variety – though Goshka Macuga's tube of genuine Soviet spacefood (cottage cheese with blackcurrant flavour) suggests that maybe it wasn't so palatable after all.