Author: ofiradmin

“On September 24th, 2024, the University of Zurich Space Hub (UZH Space Hub) was inaugurated at Switzerland Innovation Park Zurich (IPZ). To mark this significant milestone, a special exhibition was curated to lead visitors from the park’s entrance to Hangar 4, the new home of UZH Space Hub.”

Curators: Ralph Rosenbauer (Switzerland Innovation Park Zurich), Ravit Helled (University of Zurich), Jochem Braakhekke (University of Zurich), Claudia Röösli (University of Zurich), Jelena Rakin (University of Zurich)

Images from Earth observation and astronomy captivate with overwhelming aesthetics. They often evoke a sense of beauty in observers, even though the foundations for such an effect are not always obvious in the context of scientific images. However, upon closer look, the constitutive elements of these pictures can be interpreted in terms of fundamental categories used in art and media history to describe and understand images—such as harmony, line, color, or materiality. This exhibition sheds light on the historical, cultural, and aesthetic mechanisms that allow for a comparison of these scientific images with abstract works of art.

In “Mother / Father” I visually intertwine the remnants of my father’s sculptures with the remnants of my mother’s ornamental embroidery. My father, who was an academically trained sculptor, died before the Serbo-Croatian war. In the post-war period, his work remained inaccessible to my family, for years on the “wrong” side of the Danube. After we were allowed to transport the work, much of it was damaged or completely lost in the fire that destroyed our house – for example, the white marble bust, which broke in two. While I always thought of my father as the one who was artistically expressive (since he was formally educated as a sculptor) and therefore his work inherently entitled to preservation, I have only recently begun to acknowledge the tacit and unrecognized beauty of the ornamental, floral embroidery in my mother’s work. In many ways, women’s floral embroidery was clearly the “other” to the dominant institutionalized artistic expression. The peasant floral embroidery in my matrilineal tradition, which she was obliged to do as a female child, and which she recently recovered from Bosnia, lives on the margins of aesthetic recognition.

Exhibited in Paris (France) from October 5 – 11, 2024 at the gallery Libre Est L‘Art

Exhibited in Osijek (Croatia) from April 4 – 11, 2024 at the gallery Waldinger

The project approximates the aesthetics of botany to the astrophotography, using similar visual methods. Image compositions in contemporary astrophotography exhibit a sophisticated use of harmony, color, and superimposition. They often evoke geometric principles of universal nature phenomena: galaxy spirals resemble botanical spirals (for instance, Karl Blossfeldt’s 1920s fern photography). “False colors” and superimpositions furthermore enhance the mystical, sublime, or even divine mood of macrocosm. By asking “Is Botany Aesthetics Extrasolar?”, the project points out to the sense of aesthetic pleasure that is central to human perception yet obliterated in the methods of the natural sciences.