Third Rock from the Sun at The Empty Quarter
Third Rock from the Sun - A Journey into Space is the latest exhibition at The Empty Quarter and it is splendid. It's on till 31st January and if you are in Dubai, make sure you don't miss it.
The exhibition features the following series and the whole thing just works together in one space:
- Space Project by Vincent Fournier
- Spomenik by Jan Kempenaers
- Fashioning Apollo by Nicholas de Monchaux
- Historic Moon Atlas by Maurice Loewy and Pierre Puiseux
- Lebanese Rocket Science courtesy of the Arab Image Foundation
Space: the Final Frontier. An infinite supply of knowledge and resources await us, just outside our atmosphere. Since the beginning of time, humans have looked up at the sky wondering what exactly was up there. Five hundred years ago, Christopher Columbus sailed west across the Atlantic, using the stars to guide him. Today, modern explorers are charting a course that may eventually take humanity out among the stars themselves. It's not so easy to instill in the public the same brand of wonder and nationalist pride that the Space Race evoked from 1958 to 1975.
Although many no longer agree, space exploration is one of the most important factors that will blast the human race into the future. The year 2011 marks the 42th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, the centennial of Futurism, and the quadricentennial of the Newtonian telescope. In the same year, it was announced that Virgin Galactic plans to build its first commercial space port in Abu Dhabi. What better time than now to look back on the past and toward the future of space travel, that ultimate flight of fancy of the human imagination?
I particularly like this series by Jan Kempenaers called Spomeniks which means monuments. He travelled around the balkans to photograph these monuments that were commissioned by the Yugoslavian Socialist Republic during the 1960/70s. Here's a very good write up about this series I found on Foto8.
