Michael Najjar

Who Gave Us The Sponge To Wipe Away The Entire Horizon?
Video works from the “outer space” series

3 July – 30 August, 2015

Opening: 2 July 2015, 7 pm
Introduction to the exhibition by the artist

This summer the Es Baluard Museum of Contemporary Art presents a solo exhibition of works by Michael Najjar, the internationally renowned German artist whose work focuses on key elements of our modern society driven and controlled by computer and information technologies. The futuristic aesthetic of his works interrogates the social transformations wrought by science and technology, and pursues utopian and philosophical reflections through complex thematically linked work series.

Since 2011 Najjar has been engaged on his outer space series dedicated to cutting edge developments in space travel and space exploration. The exhibition presented at Es Baluard shows various chapters and situations from Najjar’s extensive astronaut training for his own space flight which will form a key part of this current series.

His three video works equilibrium (2013), spacewalk (2013) and skyfall (2015), now shown for the first time in Spain, range from a supersonic flight in a MiG-29 and a HALO (High Altitude Low Opening) jump from a height of 10,000 meters to the depths of a massive hydrolab in Russia’s Star City.

Taxing his physical strength to the limit, Najjar places himself in extreme hostile (and even life-threatening) situations to create videos of high aesthetic quality that astonish viewers and raise questions about the different poles of existence - life and death, time and space, the beautiful and the repulsive. In the supersonic flight, the high altitude jump and the diving routine, Najjar acts both as a conceptual artist who meticulously prepares his storyboard and as a protagonist deploying his own body in the performative action.