We have always looked to the starry skies above and wondered what is out there. Space represents the aspiration to push beyond our limits, to take a step out into the unknown, and to dream about a future among the stars in the night sky. It encapsulates both the curiosity and excitement of discovering something new, and the timeless questions about who we are and where in this enormous vastness we belong.

The universe is a never-ending source of fascination, inspiration and big questions. The exhibition SPACE – A Visual Journey explores the celestial frontier where artistic expression and scientific inquiry meet and captures the grandeur of the cosmos through the eyes of astronomers and the interpretive visions of artists alike. In works by 13 different artists, we encounter questions like who we are in the face of eternity and when we leave our planet behind, what values we bring with us when we discover new worlds, and who has the right to dream about a future outside of Earth’s atmosphere. Through these works, and detailed space telescope images of distant galaxies and nebulae – that show us what we can’t actually see, we greet you to explore space, broaden your horizons and expand your own universe through art. 

On a night with clear skies, we can see thousands of stars by just going outside to a dark place and gazing upwards, but humans have always wanted to see more than the eye can perceive. We have invented telescopes, and over time improved them with bigger mirrors and cameras able to capture wavelengths of light that we can’t experience with the naked eye. With long exposure times they can make the invisible visible, show us the movements of the stars across the skies, and capture extremely detailed images of, for example, the surface of the Moon.

The Moon is our closest celestial body. It is so close to us that we can see some of its craters with the naked eye, and much more is revealed through a telescope. The Sun is our closest star, the center of our solar system, and central to many of humanity’s beliefs about the world.

The ability to see what is out there is also what tempts us to seek the unknown, travel out there, and try to understand our place in this vast cosmos. The astronaut Christer Fuglesang describes the transition from three G-forces to weightlessness during the journey into orbit, as a euphoric feeling of freedom. The transition is immediate – you’re flung forward and released from gravity, in free fall around the Earth.

Many space travellers describe the feeling of seeing Earth from space, the so-called ‘overview effect’, as a before and after. The astronaut Jessica Meir describes how the thin layer of atmosphere that protects us from the radiation of space, and makes life possible on the planet, seems to glow. From space you see Earth as a totality, without borders: a beautiful and vulnerable place where every part affects the whole.

In many ways, space represents the ultimate dream – an empty canvas where anything can happen, and unexpected discoveries can speed up human evolution. We have been picturing space travel since antiquity, but it was not until the 19th century, through the rise of the genre of science fiction, that they got a permanent place in our view of the world.

According to the science fiction scholar Jerry Määttä, there is now a greater struggle within the genre to depict a distant future than before, possibly because the future feels closer now, with such frequent technological and scientific achievements. Maybe it is this feeling of living in the future that makes many tech companies take their inspiration from science fiction – many inventions, like smartphones, the internet, and microwave ovens, existed in books before they became reality, and when SpaceX were developing their spacesuit, they turned to a design studio in Hollywood that had previously designed spacesuits for sci-fi movies.

The connections between science fiction and science are also strong. The genre helps to popularize science and show possibilities, and science opens new doors for what we can imagine. According to astrophysicist Katie Mack, the connections are even more evident. During the making of the movie Interstellar (2014), Hollywood’s super computers were used to generate such exact calculations of what a black hole could look like up close, that the movie’s scientific advisor, the Nobel Prize laureate Kip Thorne, could later use this data in his research.

Like stars we shine, but with infrared light that our eyes can’t perceive, so we can’t see it ourselves. What does it mean to be living, shining matter, on a planet of dead matter, orbiting a star, in constant motion through space? As far as we know, we are the only ones asking questions like that. We are not outside observers, we are, ourselves, parts of the universe we investigate: we are, like cosmologist Carl Sagan said, “a way for the cosmos to know itself”.

In our quest to understand how it all began, and our own place in the universe, we have created cosmologies – stories of the origin of the world and how it all fits together. Many creation stories, scientific as well as religious, start with a nothing, or a vast darkness. From this original source, just as in Mikael Owunna’s works, gods or natural forces step out and shape the world into what we see around us.

Who winds up the great clockwork that we glimpse in the night sky? The limitless space becomes a symbol for the divine – the eternal and infinite. The secretive dance of the stars and planets reflects a cosmic order that is so much greater than us, but that we are still a part of, and puts us face to face with the all-encompassing mystery that both religion, art, and science, are trying to explore, describe, and understand, from their different perspectives.

A journey out into the universe is also a voyage into ourselves, into our image of who we are, where we come from, and what we are capable of achieving. There are not just technical dilemmas we encounter in our aim to reach farther outside the Earth’s atmosphere. Many questions rise to the surface. It becomes relevant to ask who has the mandate to act for humanity in space, because who is it that actually decides on the rules of what is and is not acceptable beyond international air space?

The artist Rhiannon Adam, who was part of the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa’s dear Moon crew, until the project was unexpectedly canceled in June 2024, describes how space has long only been available to the super rich or the superhuman – astronauts cast in the mold that was created during the last space race, and by innumerable Hollywood movies since. dearMoon would have been the first time a group of civilians – among them artists and musicians – got to travel around the Moon and back, with the goal of contemplating and creating, and letting new perspectives and insights grow.

Adam describes that everyone in the crew felt a great responsibility to live up to the expectations, and to be worthy of the task. She also describes the difficult balance in wanting to represent the groups she identifies with – including artists, women, queer people, and Irish nationals – and, at the same time, not having to be a superhuman, but just an ordinary person with flaws and weaknesses. She has also thought a lot about the importance of letting other perspectives in, before all the available space is claimed and privatized: “Change starts with ideas, everything we do now creates a time capsule of what people in our time were thinking and feeling, and how we choose to act.”

Many now turn their gaze towards space again. NASA and ESA plan manned missions to the Moon in the coming years, and Japan is working on a rover that future astronauts will be able to use for both transport and habitation during field missions of up to 30 days. Several participants – among them China, the U.S., and India – are planning permanent space stations on the Moon. Another cooperation between the U.S., Europe, Canada, Japan, and the United Arab Emirates is also meant to lead to a space station in orbit around the Moon: ‘Lunar Gateway’. It’s intended as Earth’s new outpost for continued exploration of the solar system, now that both private and governmental agents are honing in on Mars. The first person to set foot on this alien planet has most likely already been born, and with new innovations, the 6–7 month long journey can likely be shortened. Like the astronomer Phil Plait puts it: “There will be life on Mars, and it will be us.”

We are now in the middle of a shift, where more and more private agents are engaging in space travel. Everything from giant initiatives, like SpaceX that sells transport of astronauts to ISS, to small businesses that experiment with crop cultivation in Mars-like environments, to workshops in space medicine – something we encounter in Matjaž Tančič’s images.

This development opens new doors. In a not-so-distant future, we could build factories in space. There, we could 3D-print human organs in weightless-ness and create new types of materials, mine asteroids for metals, or harvest energy from the sun and export it to Earth. But not all voices are joined in praise of this commercialization of space. What values, truths, and social constructions do we bring with us and which ones do we leave behind, when we approach space during this second space race? The impact of the first images of Earth from space, from the Apollo 8-mission, kick-started the global movement for the environment. One question that the artist Mónica Alcázar-Duarte asks herself in the project Space Nomads, is what the possibility of moving to another planet, would do to our attitude towards Earth?

For thousands of years, we saw the planets as wandering lights among the fixed stars. When telescopes were invented, they became alien worlds, and when spaceships were created they became places possible to visit. But for the foreseeable future, Earth is our home in the universe. From here, we gaze towards infinity and try to figure out how it all fits together.

In this quest we are helped by both art and science. They meet in mutual awe of the unknown, and the same desire to understand the world around us and our place in it. With artistic visions and scientific measurements, we build the puzzle that is the ever-expanding universe. Science widens our understanding, and shows us that reality often exceeds what we have imagined, while art gives science shape, makes it possible to visualize, and picks up where science still ponders.

From our vantage point in the cosmos, we observe the visible and the invisible, the measurable and the imaginable. With a capacity for innovation and destruction, reverence and exploitation, we turn our gaze inwards with as much fascination as outwards. Here we stand, looking out into eternity, experiencing our insignificance and our greatness, and choose to explore the universe we are part of.