Sophia Al Maria, Sonya Dyer, Ursula Mayer, Victoria Sin

Rewriting The Future is both a warning and a vision of hope. In an age where wealth controls our systems of power – and the world is ruled by patriarchal societies and systems – feminist perspectives can offer new angles on gender, power, ecology and community.

Speculative and science fiction are spaces where potential futures are explored, questioned and proposed. As with many disciplines, they are also spaces where creative, talented female, trans, non-binary and intersectional queer perspectives have been overlooked. Mainstream science fiction has long-perpetuated and replicated unequal structures of power, projecting them into a depressingly-similar future.

The four artists in the exhibition envisage new possibilities, extrapolating from our current, tumultuous condition. The visceral, luscious near-future speculations of Ursula Mayer’s large-scale film installation ATOM SPIRIT create a place where race, gender, postcolonialism and technology intersect. Victoria Sin’s And at the pinnacle the foot of a mountain, imagines a world that is non human-centric – one in which humans are merely vessels to enable reproduction, subsumed by giant orchids and locked into a cycle of parasitic behaviour.

Sophia Al Maria’s iridescent, hyper-colour moving image work The Magical State explores the extraction of fossil fuels from the desecrated land as a kind of ritualistic, violent exorcism imposed on the abject ‘female’ body. Sonya Dyer’s Hailing Frequencies Open reimagines the history and potentiality of Space travel, creating a world where an aptly-named vessel carries the descendants of the first human materials sent into Space towards the Andromeda Galaxy.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a digital publication compiling new speculative fiction writing from some brilliant feminist minds. Curated by Angelica Sule.

With support from the Elephant Trust.

Sonya Dyer, Hailing Frequencies Open, 2019, Installation.

Hailing Frequencies Open intersects actor Nichelle Nicols’ pioneering astronaut recruitment activism work, the dubious genesis of HeLa cells and the Greek myth of Andromeda – combining social justice with speculation, fantasy with the political.

In the 1970s, Nicols developed a pioneering astronaut recruitment programme, enabling the first American woman and the first Black man to visit Space. HeLa cells – taken from the body of a young African American woman, Henrietta Lacks – are ‘immortal’ and can reproduce under practically any circumstances. These cells were the first human materials sent into Space, by the Soviets in 1960.

Hailing Frequencies Open builds a world wherein the cells are still in Space, travelling towards the Andromeda Galaxy on the Anarcha II space vessel. The vessel’s name monumentalises the memory of an enslaved women experimented on by the scientist regarded as the father of modern gynaecology. Alice Coltrane’s composition, Andromeda’s Suffering, adds a poignant layer of multigenerational connection, recalling the Greek myth about the Aethiopian princess.

Videos featuring prominent Black women scientists accompany the vessel. The journey to Andromeda becomes a metaphor for the reclamation of the neglected stories of Black women of mythology and of the future.

Sonya Dyer’s work explores how the future is constructed within the popular imagination. Dyer is particularly interested in reimagining Black women’s subjectivities within speculative futures.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/33584