Anne Haaning’s solo exhibition TRACER OBJECT is based on the American space agency NASA’s archive of stardust collected from the Stardust mission between 1999 and 2006. Haaning is interested in what significance images can hold as containers and who they communicate to. HEIRLOOM has invited her to exhibit her ongoing artistic research project in NASA’s stardust archive and show her exploration of what traces are deposited in the spaces, materials, and stories that surround us.

The exhibition’s title, TRACER OBJECT, is the name of a tool in the digital 3D rendering program that the artist uses in her attempt to challenge the abstract scientific narratives about the universe. The exhibition presents a series of large prints on silk with motifs from NASA’s stardust archive, as well as the vacuum frame and exposure machine the artist has created to produce the silk works. Here, Haaning has used the old photographic technique of cyanotype, where the image is a trace of the light exposure the motif undergoes.

Additionally, the new video work SPECKS is installed in sand dunes in HEIRLOOM’s cinema. In the video installation, Haaning explores and speculates on the digital reality we live in, and the quantum leap that occurs between her own body lying at the water’s edge on the island of Møn and NASA’s mission in outer space. The artistic process is exposed in the work itself, including the artist’s prompt to the AI chatbot which has been tasked with composing the work’s soundtrack Stardust Echoes.

The stardust, whose microscopic size makes it invisible to the human eye, has been made visible at NASA’s laboratory in Houston, USA, through advanced technological methods and equipment that have condensed the dust to a sign—a trace of its original existence out in space. The traces of the cosmic dust, and the technological inventions surrounding their discovery and reproduction, shape Haaning’s project of deconstructing NASA’s archive of stardust. Visitors will have the opportunity to follow her exploration of the intangible scientific material and experience the striking dialogue between the science laboratory and the artist’s workspace.

In an accelerated reality where artificial intelligence is gaining ground day by day, where social media has changed the media landscape in just a few years and where sci-fi future scenarios suddenly collide with the present, the artistic endeavour to evoke technological constructions creates an important anchor point. Haaning’s attempt to navigate this maze of signs, data, translation and meaning-making simultaneously becomes an image of how many invisible and unconscious filters and prisms we experience the world through.

Biography

Anne Haaning is a visual artist, researcher and teacher, and she is currently working on her practice-based Marie Curie postdoc We Are Supernova at Goldsmiths College in London. Haaning’s primary medium is video installation, and in her practice, she is focused on exploring the possibilities and challenges of technology. She often uses computer graphics and animation combined with archival research to unfold these themes.

The exhibition is supported by the Obel Family Foundation, the Augustinus Foundation, the Danish Art Council, Beckett Foundation, Horizon Europe, Knud Højgaard's Foundation Grosserer L.F. Foghts Fond, Aage & Johanne Louis Hansens Foundation, and the Danish Art Workshops.