TO INFINITY & BEYOND
Visionary artist and outer space fanatic, Berlin-based Nahum is looking to the stars to challenge our perception of life on earth and to break down the borders between science and art.
Nahum is looking to the stars to challenge our perception of life on earth, and to break down the borders between science and art.
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious,” said Albert Einstein. But of all the unfathomable, mystifying elements of humanity, there is perhaps nothing that invokes such profound rapture as outer space.
That inky black veil with its speckles of dead stars becomes a canvas for the imagination – a fascination rooted in human potential and blind faith; the audacity to believe that what is impenetrable to us really exists, and to reach for it.
This liminal space between reality and the impossible is at the very core of Nahum’s artistic practice. Working from his studio in Kreuzberg, Berlin, Nahum offers reflections on the human experience – interrogating our limiting beliefs about such things as borders, gravity, time and the environment.
In 2018, Nahum became the first artist to launch an interactive artwork in outer space (while he downplays this label as being simply “PR speak”, it is indeed the first). On 29 June last year, his artwork ‘The Contour of Presence’ travelled aboard a SpaceX rocket to the International Space Station, where it now lives, floating 400km above the earth’s surface.
Like a Skype date with the cosmos, the piece is a kaleidoscopic sculpture uses an object called Pulse to stage an intimate one-to-one video performance between outer space and the earth.
“People are invited to walk into the exhibition, to see a mirror and by putting their hands up against it, their pulse and their heartbeat will sync up with this ethereal presence in outer space, as it circles around you, around the earth,” the artist explains.
The artwork is a meditation on the oneness of humanity – on how, despite the reductive silos we divide ourselves into, we are innately and irrepressibly connected.
“Right now, if I were to dig a hole directly through this point in the earth,” Nahum says, motioning his finger towards the pavement. “I might reach a man in Iraq, sitting on his windowsill, smoking a cigarette and reflecting on his everyday troubles. Existence is not an individual affair, we are closer to each other than we think – beyond distance and borders.”
While ‘The Contour of Presence’ may have been a career-topping move, you get the feeling that it is just the beginning of Nahum’s dalliance with the cosmos, propped up by a lifelong fascination with space, plus years of academic research in the fields of art and science.
Born in 1979 in Mexico City, Nahum was a sensitive, introspective child who showed an early interest in creativity – including music, drawing, and anything else that entertained his playful, wayward mind.
It wasn’t until his father showed him Carl Sagan’s TV series, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage that Nahum found himself gripped by the sheer mystery that is the universe. “That series really presented the universe in a fascinating, philosophical way. It was less about science and technology, and more an investigation of our identity,” he says.
Nahum has earned a Master in Arts from London’s Goldsmiths University and in 2016, he graduated from the International Space University (ISU), where he researched discoveries in Martian activity and the implications for Mars exploration. In 2011, Nahum founded KOSMICA – a Berlin-based, global institute that advocates for alternative and cultural uses of outer space – seeking to democratise and demystify an industry typically dominated by male scientists.
“I believe that all of us should have a stake in humanity’s actions in outer space – and in particular that artists, poets, anthropologists, musicians, philosophers and other cultural practitioners can bring unique perspectives to the debates and issues surrounding space activities,” Nahum explains.
Alongside ‘The Contour of Presence’, he’s produced a cache of star-gazing artworks, most notably 2015’s ‘Matters of Gravity’, a group exhibition inspired by a zero-gravity flight mission at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in Russia – involving nine artists reflecting on the concept of weightlessness.
“That is the essence of my work,” Nahum explains. “To break a paradigm, to reframe the way we think about the earth, and the meaning of existence. To open people’s eyes.”