Asteroid To Be Exploded In Upper Atmosphere

Alicja Kwade’s Asteroid to be Exploded in Upper Atmosphere, unites her main artistic concerns: the passage of time, the Duchampian object and the language of cinema are brought together in an intriguing semiotic mind-game. The work painstakingly recreates a newspaper headline from the 1957 cult sci-fi movie Kronos, in which an invading alien being threatens to drain the world of all its energy. Evoking the disjunctive textuality of Ed Ruscha, the words make a subtle and seamless intrusion upon the everyday and ordinary. The association of newsprint with a real time and place, heavy with historicity, is disrupted: fictional, filmic time invades. What if an asteroid really were to be exploded in our upper atmosphere? The message would look the same. The movie, in order to imitate reality, imitates real headlines; Kwade thus simulates a simulacrum, reflecting a doubled interpretation back at the viewer. Cinema is able to blur the boundaries between reality and fantasy, and Kwade imbues her ‘found’ object with this same dreamlike aura. Kronos is also an alternate spelling of Chronos, the Greek god of time, wryly underscoring the preoccupations of time, space and objecthood in Kwade’s work. ‘I’m fascinated with the borders between science and suspicion. All the in-betweens,’ she has said (A. Kwade, quoted in K. Bradley, ‘Alicja Kwade,’ in ArtReview December 2013). Probing these permeable margins of reality, simulation and imagination, Kwade exposes the ways in which we situate ourselves in the world and how we reproduce it: the results are both playful and subtly disquieting.