Michael Najjar
"outer space"

Exhibition: 5 June - 5 August 2015

Galería Juan Silió is proud to presend the second solo exhibition of berlin based artist Michael Najjar.

The focus of his work is on key elements of our modern society driven and controlled by computer and information technologies. Najjar, widely seen as a visual futurist, transmutes science, history and philosophy into visions and utopias of future social structures emerging under the impact of cutting-edge technologies.

Michael Najjar's current outer space" work series deals with the latest developments in space flight and the way they will shape our future life on earth, in earth’s near orbit and on other planets. The cultural dimension represented by emergent cutting edge space technologies – in terms of the deeper knowledge they will reveal about the universe, their impact on space travel and the way they will influence and shape our society – are very much at the center of Najjars's work.

The artist started the series by photographing the final launch of the American Space Shuttle Atlantis in June 2011 at Cape Canaveral and it has now become a work in progress. Drawing on pioneering research around the globe, the artist detects new cutting edge space technologies and creates photographic and video artworks which evoke a feeling for the impact these developments will have on our future society. His collaboration with leading scientists and space agencies has given him privileged access to locations which are usually unknown and unseen by the public. The series blends documentary and fictive scenarios in a virtual anticipation of future experiences.

One hallmark of Najjar’s creative output is the way it is deeply informed by an experiential hands-on approach. The intimate experience of “living through” situations which provide the leitmotifs of his art is essential to the artist. For his "outer space" series Najjar conducted an intensive astronaut training program at Star City, Russia. Defying physical limits, the artist put his body through a grueling series of stratospheric and zero gravity flights,centrifugal spins, and space walk training in a heavy astronaut suit– situations of extremities which he captures on camera to investigate his own physical and mental responses and exemplify them in his works.

"Michael Najjar is acting, on the one hand, as a concept artist and, on the other as his own protagonist using his own body for the performative action. Through the use of his own body, Najjar‘s works are related to the Body Art movement, in which artists in the 1960s discovered use of their own bodies as material, and at the same time to Performance art which emerged from the marriage of performing arts and visual arts." (Dr. Andreas Beitin, head of ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe)

This performative aspect is a fundamental part of Najjar's work process which will culminate in the artist's own spaceflight. As one of the pioneer astronauts of Virgin Galactic, Michael Najjar will be soon embarking on SpaceShipTwo where he will be the first artist to travel in space. The spaceship crashed during a testflight in October last year. The latest work "serious anomaly" reflects on this accident and the relationship between man and machine.