Astronomical Art in Santiago

From 28 November 2014 until 18 January 2015, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago in Chile will display the exhibition “Bajo Presión” — Under Pressure. Eight international artists will present works that reflect the condition of contemporary society. One of these artist is the Austrian astronomer and visual artist Ulrike Kuchner.

In her art, Kuchner combines the languages of two worlds, art and science. The images of her collection “Measuring Mistakes” are part of her astronomical work and were taken with the VIsible Multi-Object Spectrograph (VIMOS), an integral field spectrograph mounted on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). The pieces chosen for this exhibition consist of 15 individually treated enlargements of calibration data which are taken apart and rearranged. The collection has been exhibited before at the European Space Policy Institute (ESPI) and at the Kunsthalle in Vienna.

Scientifically she used these data to answer questions about active nuclei of interacting or colliding galaxies. For her artwork she has modified the data visually, through printing, painting and installation art. In her art Kuchner hopes to pique the viewer’s curiosity and encourage a creative process in an audience not usually connected to science.

The exhibition also includes work by the artists David Kahang (Canada), Ana Teixeira and Iara Freiberg (Brazil), Katarina Veldhues and Gottfried Schumacher (Germany), Claudia Vásquez (Chile) and Javier Soria (Argentina). It is curated by Claudia Gómez Vásquez and Mauricio Lizama.