- Venue
- Transreal Fiction
- Starts
- Monday, August 3, 2009
- Ends
- Monday, August 31, 2009
- Address
- 7 Cowgatehead The Grassmarket Edinburgh EH1 1JY
- Location
- Scotland
Did Scotland ever have its own top-secret space programme? Did the project succeed in sending a man into space, even if it couldn’t bring him back? And if not, then why not? Alba ad Astra is a celebration of what might have been our greatest technological achievement. Using photography, text and small sculptures to create a mixed-media show, Madeleine Shepherd has worked with spoken-word performance group Writers’ Bloc to explore the forgotten history of Scots in space. “I decided that a portfolio of my photographs, suitably annotated, would fit into the new tradition of space-travel-inspired works by artists like Aleksandra Mir and John Timberlake” Madeleine says. “A lot of my previous work was based on taking objects out of their normal context and giving them new roles. These captioned photographs do exactly that and ask the viewer to question the reality they appear to represent.” In his foreword to the catalogue, leading science-fiction writer Ken MacLeod praises Alba ad Astra’s “haunting photographs that will reopen many questions we had thought were closed”.
