Sultan Saif AlNeyadi
was an open-heart environment for families and students from overseas. The bond that we built with other students from multinational groups was amazing.
I picked up engineering and technology as a discipline for my career and going to space was something that always kind of haunted me throughout my academic life … it was just like a call to fulfil a childhood dream.
And when they told me that I was among the first two astronauts from the UAE to go for training for a mission (NASA-SpaceX Crew 6), it was in a way, a responsibility.
First of all, I called the family. I shared the good news and they couldn’t believe it; I could not believe it myself. I normally try to exercise to release any stress so I went for a long run.
There were 4000 applicants and I remember in the first days we were meeting with some of the applicants and most of them were really accomplished people, most of them were pilots. I’m an engineer by profession, so I really thought I might have little chance in this.
They looked at the candidates as a whole and, on top of the physical shape and the medical status, and the academic background, I was lucky enough to be selected in the first election.
The call for the first mission was in 2018. We’d spent almost two years in Russia and more than two and a half years in the US at NASA. So it’s a long, long ride.
It requires a lot of travelling and a long time away from family. It requires a lot of learning new skills and information and physical readiness, and you cannot imagine how sophisticated some of the training is.
Coming from an engineering background I had no aviation background so I had to learn how to fly jets.
I had to learn how to do scuba diving and spend six hours underwater in the neutral buoyancy lab.
Some people consider flying a T-38 as challenging and they’re right, but to me, I think the hardest part of training is being away from family and home.
On arriving at the International Space Station (March, 2023) we had to adapt to microgravity and although it might sound fun floating going from one place to another and playing with floating objects, it is hard at the same time.
On this mission I conducted a space walk, which was a first for our region. I had taken some personal items with me on the mission including family photos, my wedding ring, Lego characters from my kids and I’d taken their favourite book that I’d read to them on board the station.
Although it might sound fun floating … it is hard
This thoughtful and quietly provocative exhibition is something of a trojan horse. It lures you in with some well-made chairs, then uses ideas and methods to begin a conversation that goes elsewhere.
It’s not dishonest, but there is some sleight of hand, and I found that impressive; I don’t expect a show about handmade furniture to get me thinking about global capitalism, but here we are. A Thread That Binds shares the craft and ideas of Ben Grieve-Johnson and Jon Grant.
They hand make furniture, and they do it somewhat slowly, using quite old (it seems to me) techniques that rely on knowledge of wood and how tools work.
They make interesting decisions when they make their furniture. One detail that struck me was that they don’t use sandpaper; they smooth and polish the wood but the grooves and slight ridges of the tools are allowed to remain; they are not rendered out of sight; they are left for all to see.
It’s an interesting decision, because this makes every piece of furniture here on display different to furniture you might be used to. I could say they look unfinished, but that’s not the case: you can see the person making a chair here understands exactly when the object has reached completion, and has stained it, finished it with milk paint or beeswax, and it’s done. I think it’s unfinished because my knowledge of chairs requires them to look a certain way to be finished, but you sit on chairs. You use them.
You can sit on these chairs, as it happens. There are clear directions for you to do this if you wish, permission to sit, pick up the chair, feel the materials, engage with it.
The chairs, unsurprisingly, succeed as chairs, and my notion of what a finished chair is – is out the window.
Why did I think that, I wonder? There are a lot of reasons, but since mass production began well over century ago, we have been bombarded with marketing that suggests to us that mass production is fabulous, but also that material made by hand at a different pace is something called artisanal, and not for us; it’s for an imagined elite that can afford the object in question.
The chairs are not cheap here, but you know what? They are not expensive either. They’re priced at what I’d say they were worth, and seem intensely solid, and stable, and I’m willing to bet that these items will outlast you. Here is perhaps the last chair you will ever buy, made in a traditional style that looks nothing like contemporary design, that just looks solid and well crafted.
It’s such a strange moment when it strikes me that such a thing seems a little radical; that how something is made can be a comment on how everything else is made, and that when you are told the story of a chair, you’re being told a story about history and its tides.
This is a quietly fantastic show, and Grieve-Johnson and Grant’s thoughtful work is a very necessary conversation.
This is a beautiful duo of works about sound and how it connects us to that which is gone or inaccessible. Claudine Arendt has used a complex process to create ceramic works that are realisations of zooplankton acoustics. The tiny sounds are represented visually by beautiful abstracted ceramic works: we see the shape of their strange micro-song, presented as if these were aquatic living things. There’s tangible weird wonder in Arendt’s work, and it’s slightly ghostly and unreal.
Maria Blackwell’s remarkable work is an intimate, devastating hymn to love, loss and connection: Blackwell found recordings of her deceased father singing traditional Irish songs; these songs arise from a long tradition of sharing and connection taking place through song. Blackwell sings with her father in the presented works, harmonising and joining with him as he sings, despite his absence. A small slide of a fragment of Ireland glows on the shelf as you listen.
It’s pure emotion offered as something shared, and it’s devastatingly beautiful; the sense of striving for connection despite personal loss is very strong. This is one of those simple works which will knock the listener over.
Both works suggest a notion of absence and dramatic change, coupling the ungraspable nature of biodiversity destruction with the shattering loss of a parent. A precise, powerful show.