APT Gallery Deptford London
6 Creekside, London SE8 4SA

10th to 13th April 2014
http://www.cipango.co.uk/astrolab/index.html

Curators: Paul Malone and Nicola Rae

Artists: Alexandra Dimentieva, Luci Eldridge, Fabiola Faidiga, Liz Harrison, Francesca Horne, Richard Lawrence, Paul Malone, Chris Marshall, Marlena Novak, David Oates, Doron Polak, Joachim Raab, Nicola Rae, Steven Scott, Giorgio Tentolini, Alma Tischler-Wood, Albrecht Wild, Suzanne Wild, Jay Alan Yim

The very inaccessibility of Space lends itself to speculation, interpretation, and differing conceptual inhabitations. These often fictional narratives extend into how we view the world in all of its aspects; social, philosophical and metaphysical. Consisting often of the most flimsy of evidence; a few grains of photographic emulsion, a mathematical tower of cards or an ethical conviction, this arena lends itself towards wide horizons of enquiry. The charting of this world has only just begun, using heroic yet barely adequate tools as well as audacious attempts at understanding.
AstroLAB is an exhibition as laboratory that includes art works by twenty international artists. Each artist has been invited to freely interpret aspects of the astronomical and these works inform each other through juxtaposition, spatiality and sound. Some works have been generated experimentally in a few days specifically for this show, while others have been the result of research over a longer length of time.
One of the roles of an artist is to generate the conceptual freedoms necessary to enable an aesthetic apprehension of alternative ideas. Sometimes this requires approaching the subject obliquely, so as to catch it unawares. And so it is with the mapping of alternative directions in our understanding of the astronomical. This can take the form of inversions, metaphor and the questioning of collective cultural understandings and theories. Our Laboratory aspires to engage with all of these possibilities within a 'Planetarium of the Imagination'.