Upon descending the stairs of the International Centre for the Image, beneath Dublin’s Docklands, one can now experience the cosmos of “Rhi-Entry”, a new exhibition by Rhiannon Adam.
Over 781 people have been to space. 28 have travelled to the moon. 12 men have set foot on its surface.
Until November 2021, when Irish artist Rhiannon Adam was selected by Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa to board the first civilian circumlunar mission, making her the second woman selected to complete a lunar flyby.
Adam was selected as part of the dearMoon project. In collaboration with SpaceX, the project was the first of its kind to send a group of eight artists on a mission mirroring the 1968 Apollo 8 trajectory. Bill Anders, a member of the Apollo 8 crew remarked on return that “they should have sent poets”, reflecting how astronauts did not have the capacity to communicate the grandeur of what they saw. This quote became the genesis of dearMoon.
Originally from County Cork, Adam had an unconventional upbringing sailing around the world with her parents. She can see the connection to her fascination with space flight, “Travelling on a boat is about as close on earth as you can get to go into space…..And there is this sense of, that you’re very much at the whims of nature or you know, you’re not completely in control of your own destiny. There is something very powerful about relinquishing that.”
Photograph: Sorcha Murray
Living in her family’s own existence, on a boat in the middle of the ocean erased all senses of borders and superiority, “I have no sense of, you know, one country’s better than another or like one group of people’s better than another… So there’s something beautiful about the universality of it and interconnectedness….you look out at space and it’s the same sky that we were looking at, like millennia ago wondering what the hell it was.” We are reminded of the interconnectedness every time we look up, “the lights that we see in the sky and half of them are dead stars, you know, and like we’re looking at death and life all at once.”
dearMoon’s application process tracks back to March 2nd 2021, when benefactor Maezawa posted an open call on X for artists to join him. Over one million hopefuls clicked apply. Adam was the only woman chosen on the main crew. Representation on a platform as monumental as space travel proved to be a double-edged sword. “Because I was the only woman, that carried with it a certain, like, weight of responsibility, which I was carrying personally, which was like, I cannot mess this up, because if I mess it up, I’m messing up for my entire gender,” Adam remembers.
However, this was also the largest platform an artist could get “very few things capture the human imagination like spaceflight. So, if I could capture any sense of that and even translate five percent of that feeling and even one percent of the people that hear about the flight would have connected to it in any meaningful way. It would have probably had a much bigger reach than any of my work will ever have.”
Photograph: Sorcha Murray
In the coming years, Adam would eat sleep and breathe preparation for dearMoon “it took the air from every room that I was in”. Telling Dazed, “We were in it for the long haul. All of us had decided that this was going to be our life’s mission, so we planned our lives accordingly.”
On the run up to dearMoon, Adam was contacted by the Fotografiska museum in Stockholm. Global director, Johan Vikner and co-curator Sofia Lind wanted Adam to contribute to a show they were curating entitled “Space: A Visual Journey”.
Then, on June 1st 2024, after nearly three years since Adam was first selected, benefactor Yusaka Maezawa took to X to announce that after numerous delays with the Starship spacecraft, dearMoon was cancelled.
Now, there was a blank five metre stretch of wall for Adam at Fotografiska, “[it had to] encapsulate the experience in some way, like, the joy, the excitement, the sadness, like all of it, and, the sense of responsibility.”
From this, “Rhi-Entry” was born, a play on Adam’s forename and the most dangerous element to space travel, re-entry with the Earth’s atmosphere. Exploring broken dreams and the politics of space travel, we are taken on an immersive journey through the grief of the dearMoon cancellation through archive materials and Adam’s photography.
On its debut in Stockholm, Adam had found herself suddenly facing the reality of the dearMoon ending up in public, in front of a gallery of onlookers. “I hadn’t ever really talked about the cancellation, like in a really public way….I just burst into tears.”
“Rhi-Entry” has now been shown in Photo Vogue Milan, Fotografiska Tallinn and Copenhagen Photo Festival. On its journey, where does Rhiannon hope to find closure? “I don’t think there’ll ever be closure for me, you know, that’s the saddest part. For me, the reality of it is that it gets dark. And I go outside. And I look up. And the moon is right there. And I can never get away from it.”
Photograph: Sorcha Murray
Bill Anders, who died the week of the dearMoon cancellation in an eerie coincidence, is featured throughout the exhibition with newspaper cutouts from the day of his passing. Another stand-out from the exhibition features a lenticular image of Adam and Anders, which Adam remarks was “such a drama” to realise. New York Fashion Week 2024 saw Adam racing around the city desperately stitching on the exact right mission patches and sourcing the specific shade of blue hoodie necessary to restage the image.
Photograph: Sorcha Murray
While circling the exhibition, echoes of Rhiannon’s own voice, a news anchor’s and a scene from Interstellar (2014) orbit their way around my head. Nearing closer, these sounds are revealed as the Rhi-Entry film. The film is playing on loop, as if it is waiting for you to decipher the perfect re-entry point, to view from the beginning.
Entering the darkness of a soft padded enclosure, I am illuminated by footage of Adam sitting across from a zoom call, informing her that dearMoon has been cancelled. Adam stifles her disappointments and hastily ends the call. As the voice on the other end fades out, so too does Adam’s composure. Bending at the will of years of delays, I watch as Adam bursts into tears.
Adam intertwines the reality of the harrowing grief with fiction elements, using film footage exploring space travel including Interstellar (2014), Fly Me to the Moon (2024) and Contact (1997).
Blending fact and fiction is central to Adam’s work, two themes she does not find to be mutually exclusive “a documentary is aways like a little form of fiction right? As a photographer I’m making a selection of what I think is worth shooting. I’m still curating a version of existence. I’m leaving certain things out the frame.”
Adam charts the inescapable line of dialogue between fact and fiction a step further, referencing the design of the SpaceX astronaut suits. Hollywood costume designer, Jose Fernandez believed he was getting a brief to construct costumes for a film about space.
Fact and fiction found another thorough line in Adam’s life, outside of her own work. In the fallout of dearMoon, she worried: “there’s always this doubt, like, was [the dearMoon mission] real? Was it not? Like, was it a big publicity stunt and I will never know.”
The film also connects the ending of the dearMoon project with America’s far-right motivations with space travel. On the possibility of a future similar project, “I think that there was a brief moment when dearMoon could have existed, had real impact and I think that moment has passed, because Elon Musk, at the time when we were selected, was not involved in American politics. SpaceX was not a political plaything in the middle of this landscape.”
Founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk has become increasingly involved in politics since Maezawa first bought a trip on SpaceX’s Starship in 2018. Adam remarks “you know, it’s not just a race for the moon. It’s a race for which ideology gets to run things. That’s really the crux of it. It is like an ideological war.”
“Rhi-Entry” is now showing at the International Centre for the Image in Dublin until December 23rd.
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