Nanna Debois Buhl showed the video work Helios, which is based on recordings of the surface of the sun taken through a spectroscope. Spectroscopy has been used since the 19th century to visualise and analyse the chemical composition of celestial bodies. Via using a prism to split the rays of the sun into the colour spectrum, dark lines or bars appear in the colour field which represent different chemical elements.

The video was accompanied by a generative algorithm, also titled Helios, which interweaves descriptions of sunspots, the technologies used to visualise them, and ghosts that may haunt the machine. In this way, our knowledge of the sun and the chemical composition of the heavens is problematised through a focus on the how we know what we know, reminding us that the way we experience the cycles of the physical systems is also a question of how our particular sensory apparatus allows us to experience them.

This is further underlined in Debois Buhl’s series of ‘celestographs’, or photograms inspired by the Swedish author and artist August Strindberg, who exposed photographic plates to the night sky in an attempt to capture an image of it. Although his images undoubtedly resemble the heavens, they most likely depict dew, particles, or chemical impurities. While Debois Buhl’s 10 images, intervals and forms of stones of stars, are quite convincing as images of distant stars and other celestial phenomena, they are in fact made by allowing sand to drift over the paper on several evenings in a windy coastal location.

Helena Fernández-Cavada’s work Different temporal expressions of the now was made specifically for this project and relates to some of the discussions that were held on the island of Ven about circadian cycles and our existence in the universe. On Ven Tycho Brahe discovered a new star in the sky, showing that we and the universe are in continuous transformation, and so these works take inspiration from the knowledge of impermanence. Thirty pinhole cameras were placed on the island for a month to record the sun’s arc in the sky, a drawing repeated with a slightly different line each time. The photographs on display are thus also a form of photogram, which record the movements of the universe over time and in a sense also as a spatial visualisation, as the sun’s arc has redrawn itself in different positions.

Accompanying these are the watercolour drawings Every time I close my eyes, I see the landscapes of the sky, which on the other hand articulate the light inside of the artist herself, that she can contact and which has no end and no beginning; space and time do not operate there. Nevertheless, she senses it under many conditions and through many changes. Attempting to manifest it results in failure, and there is an absurdity in trying to capture it, but the drawings on display offer a record of the endeavour.

Just as Fernández-Cavada offers both a meditation on the cycle of the sun and its light, by which so much human activity is measured, and on the internal energy of the human being, the work of Anu Ramdas also mediates between the cosmic and the self. Weird Cosmic Object, a light-absorbing black spinning top, refers to black holes and their movements. At the centre of every galaxy is a black hole that through its enormous gravity ‘swallows’ matter and at the same time ‘spits’ the same information out into the universe again.

What is Looking Back at You brings this principle down from the macrocosmic to the microcosmic scale, being a medallion with a mirror just big enough for viewers to look themselves in the eye, yet too small to see themselves in full figure. The pupil of the viewer’s eye may be said to become a black hole, the matter of the world being sucked into and streaming out of it. The title refers to the ancient Vedic idea of Atman (the Self) which is unchanging.