Group exhibition featuring Bonnie Camplin, Annie Goh, Jackie Karuti, Janina Kraupe-Świderska, Alexandra Paperno. Curated by Daria Khan.

Bonnie Camplin, 15 drawings, felt-tip on paper and 28 print-out materials

Bonnie Camplin's work questions ideological forces, established knowledge systems, and mechanisms of manipulation such as propaganda – all of which must be resisted, she contends, to allow for the continued expansion of the mind. In opposition to the accumulation of skills and learned techniques, Camplin turns to deep, inner knowing, where knowing the universe can be achieved through knowing oneself.

Attempting to reconcile witchcraft and science, magic and quantum physics, Camplin questions how desire, intention and the unconscious can predict and produce the future. She approaches her work as a survey, where art and subjective experience becomes a strategy for accessing knowledge.

The series of drawings and print-out materials on display at Mimosa House synthesise the concept of vortex geometry by Viktor Schauberger (1885-1958), derived from his observations of Nature; Walter Russell’s (1871-1963) description of electricity and time; and the artist’s knowledge, acquired "from Source".

An American painter and author, Russell published the thesis A New Concept of the Universe (1952), in which he proposed electricity as the force which God used to create the universe. Specifically, Russell wrote of ‘electric spiral vortices’, wielded in pairs by God. His vision of a cosmos based on opposing electromagnetic vortexes anticipated the ‘space-time vortexes' theorised by Albert Einstein, and which NASA found evidence for in 2011.

Camplin’s drawings are accompanied by recent UFO reports and extracts from the US Department of Defence's study, ‘Warp Drive, Dark Energy, and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions’ (2010). This paper describes advanced aerospace technologies, such as the ‘warp drive’, which would crack the mysteries of ‘dark energy’ and other unseen dimensions. The ‘warp drive' is a speculative spacecraft propulsion-system, which appears in various works of science fiction, notably Star Trek, and the writing of the popular American sci-fi author Isaac Asimov (1920–1992).

• Camplin, Bonnie. 2018. SPIRSEQ Drawings. [Art Object]
• Kahn, Daria; Camplin, Bonnie; Brebenel, Mihaela; Goh, Annie and Shin, Sarah. 2022. 'Cosmic Mothers Panel Discussion at Mimosa House 2022 with Bonnie Camplin and others'. In: Panel Discussion: Cosmic Mothers. Mimosa House, London, United Kingdom 19 January 2022. [Conference or Workshop Item]

The title of this exhibition is inspired by the enigmatic painting ‘Cosmic Mother’ (1970) by the Soviet artist Galina Konopatskaya (1911–1989). In the painting, the Cosmic Mother appears as an ethnically ambiguous, androgynous person holding a baby in their arms. Both mother and child wear astronaut suits and are floating in outer space. The composition echoes Christian Orthodox icons of the Madonna and Child found in churches, but instead of the traditional golden halo surrounding the Madonna’s head, the Cosmic Mother floats in front of planet Earth.

This 1970 masterpiece belongs to the tradition of Socialist Realism, a style of state-sponsored art used to spread communist propaganda and atheist values in Soviet Russia. Konopatskaya’s painting suggests the holy Madonna should be replaced with an atheist image of a woman-astronaut. Her figure alludes to the first woman in space – the Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova in 1963 – and the supremacy of science and technology over religion. But women’s emancipation under communism was deceptive. The state needed women to enter the labour market, as well as to become mothers, in its quest to become the world’s leading power, during the Cold War. It demanded both kinds of labour, to conform to the state’s production and reproduction growth plans.

Yet, what would happen if we set aside this context? If, instead, we chose to view the image through the prisms of cyberfeminism and queer science-fiction, and in doing so, build an alternative system of knowledge around it? Dispensing with its historical context might leave us with another, liberated image – a futuristic portrait of an almighty science fiction icon, a gender-fluid Goddess, a cosmic carer.

This image acts as an invitation to re-imagine the history of art and feminism to our advantage. It asks us to reflect on the relationship between science, ideology, and the imagination. Could we view the Cosmic Mother as an optimistic premonition that speaks to a queer universe, a place independent of biological parenthood, where participation in the realms of science, technology and religion are no longer gendered and racialised – but equalised? Artists’ works in the show draw on cosmologies, science-fiction, esoteric practices and ancestral mythologies that deconstruct officially approved scientific discourse. Featuring video, sound, painting and drawing, the exhibition examines the way alternative knowledges and radical imaginations overlap across cultures and geographies, and act as a tool to resist a dominant world order of utility, convenience and standardisation.

The exhibition was made possible thanks to Taus Makhacheva, Dominik Pajewscy, Grażyna Świderska, Mateusz Swiderski and Paulina Olowska.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/39520