ART CITIES:Amsterdam-Jeronimo Voss

Jeronimo Voss’ exhibition “Inverted Night Sky” is inspired by charcoal drawings of the Milky Way found in the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy in Amsterdam. From 1927 onwards, these images were transferred into all Zeiss Planetarium projection systems around the world in order to simulate the Milky Way as it is visible in the night sky.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam Archive

Initiated and finalized by astronomer and socialist thinker Anton Pannekoek, the drawings, based on naked-eye observations, adopted a “bottom-up” approach, paralleling his view that society ought to be structured by self-organized workers’ councils, instead of being governed by state bureaucracy. The exhibition “Inverted Night Sky” points to the transience of sensorial perceptions, working conditions, and social relations that may appear natural to us today. The exhibition is the result of conversations with astronomers, historians, students, and friends about the image of the Milky Way. Over the past three years, Voss has collected visual and sonic materials such as photographs, sound files, and text fragments, which he then edited by means of digital and analogue techniques into the three interrelated works in the exhibition. Each piece is testament to the artist’s fascination in techniques that immerse the beholder. “Inverted Night Sky” is a full dome video projection in which the artist blends the view of the stars with a reflection on the historical and economic realities of time – more precisely, Newtonian absolute time – which still dictates the routine structure of the “working day”. “Aspects of the Milky Way” is a three-dimensional slide show, consisting of moveable frames that hold translucent images and fragments drawn from Voss’ research. “Relativistic Working Time” is based on electromagnetic radiation emitted by pulsating neutron stars (pulsars) from different regions of the Milky Way, translated into audible beats, made in collaboration with artists Jessica Sehrt and Martin Stiehl. The piece stands as an abstraction of the current gravitational wave research at the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy. Transcending the political particularities of Pannekoek’s time, in Jeronimo Voss’ installation, the inverted appearance of the night sky drawings further translates as an inversion of seemingly unchangeable, absolute natural laws, leading to the statement “True wealth is silence of time”.

Info: Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, Rozenstraat 59, Amsterdam, Duration: 15/5-26/6/16, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 11:00-17:00, www.smba.nl