MIR – Dreams of Space
Until June 6; Stills, Edinburgh

Zero gravity can be achieved in an ordinary jumbo jet, if you fly upwards very fast, and nose-dive back down again. On the way up, double gravity presses you against the floor, and at the top of the arc, you’re weightless for 30 seconds. You have to be careful where you float, however, because you’re twice your usual weight on the way back down.

Until twelve years ago it was only cosmonauts and astronauts that ever got the chance to experience the sensation of zero gravity, and it’s still not easy to arrange. But after a French dancer talked her way onto a parabolic flight in 1993, a sci-arts organisation saw the trip’s potential.

Over the last five years The Arts Catalyst has sent 50 artists, musicians, philosophers and dancers into weightless rapture, in a programme called MIR (Microgravity Interdisciplinary Research). Star City, the former secret cosmonaut training base near Moscow, has opened its doors to those lucky artists.

A crazy mixture of ideas has come out of the bumpy rides. Their layout at Stills is a little like life: there’s no introduction to explain what’s going on, and as you work your way through, you have to figure it out for yourself. Only once you’ve reached the end, if you can manage to sit at the poorly-situated video monitor, does an explanatory video make sense of it all.

So, for instance, I find myself wondering how on earth Stefan Gec negotiated access to the huge centrifuge equipment at Star City, and how Anjalika Sagar manages to float in thin air. Mind you, it’s probably best to see it this way round; each artwork has its own enigmatic integrity until you see the exhibition video. Then you see the realities of the project; all the artists crammed into a crowded plane like over-excited kids on a school trip.

Pushing artistic boundaries (and especially flight envelopes) comes with its drawbacks, and they’re hard to miss in this show. Much of the art is performance-based, the artists relying on the video footage acquired during the course of the flight. As it turned out on the day, most of the footage was to be compromised severely by the circumstances of the trip.

Bearing in mind that microgravity lasts only a few seconds at a time, overwrought cosmonauts are permanently grabbing the floating artists to avert bumps, bruises and broken bones. Every shot captures not only this, but also distracting views of other artists in the background. Few can keep the smiles from their faces, enjoying the sheer elation of weightlessness, along with its new-found awkwardness.

Biswas and Finer are a case in point. Dressed as colourful genies, in turbans and pointy slippers, they attempt to effect magical movements with flying carpets and an exotic pipe. Their video, bringing myth into reality, takes on a whole new slant by virtue of the Adidas-track-suited men who are twirling them around in space, and pulling them back down to earth.

While the pair are flying on their magic carpets, they leave their second project to look after itself. Strapped to the aeroplane’s floor, a camera records the movement of liquid in one box and of chime balls in another. The resulting video, in all its formal abstraction, isn’t plagued by the problems of the performance-based work.

The second video’s simplicity is a sign that artists are relatively new to the joys of microgravity, and still taking pleasure in basic experiments. There is a charming naivety to this, and to most of the other projects, proving that not all worlds have been conquered, or deconstructed, in this cynical age of postmodernism.

The one hint of jadedness in the show comes courtesy of Carey Young, whose series of photographs catches the heroic symbols of Russian space exploration in a state of decay, neglect and mundanity.

One exception is a glossy shot called The Columbiad. A metal contraption, packed full of shoes and protective clothing, was perhaps a piece of Yuri Gagarin’s equipment. It looks like a futurist version of Joseph Beuys’s primitive sled, and would effectively serve the same purpose: first survival, now hero-worship.

Downstairs there’s sheer lunacy in two projects by Yuri Leiderman and Vadim Fishkin. Space travel used to be an outrageous pipe dream for fantasists and closet rocket scientists, and that eccentricity is encapsulated in their works.

Leiderman’s Kefir Grains Are Going Onto The Flight documents the cultivation, selection and aviation of 100 tiny, puffy, white organisms. Leiderman grew the grains in Jerusalem and Moscow, systematically naming them with bizarre Jewish and Muslim names. Bahaval’s Cheerful Germination rubs shoulders with Ahmad’s Casual Benediction and Ibn Battuta’s Iambic Appropriation.

A video documents the painstaking process of selection, the artist applying nonsensical criteria to choose the most “worthy” grains. Each is put in a tiny bubble of a space-suit, and eventually the little grains are shown spinning wildly together in zero gravity, living out in miniature the frightening genetic fantasies of early Russian cosmists.

It gets even more madcap around the corner. Vadim Fishkin has orchestrated the amplified dripping of water in synchronisation with a blaring soundtrack of the Blue Danube. If you dare step between the splashing buckets you can view a Heath Robinson contraption in which the same process was carried out in zero gravity. The video shows the yellow droplets swinging, smearing and dancing around the glass sphere.

It’s truly nuts, but the best art usually is.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 03.04.05