Alien Nation. Courtesy the ICA.
The ICA's new exhibition Alien Nation explores the intersection between race, science fiction and contemporary art. Juan Toledo has mixed views about the results.
Very recently the BBC World Service published the results of a world-wide survey they conducted with over 3,000 young people from around 25 countries. One of the most revealing things of this survey was that a large majority of our young contemporaries see their right to migrate, and to live wherever they choose, as one of their essential human rights.
The survey also demonstrated that many will even risk their lives to move to another country with better opportunities. But if young people see their right to migrate and settle in another country as an indispensable one, for governments and political classes in industrialised countries it is a highly contentious issue. It's one that has ignited the flame of the ultra-right and nationalistic parties across Europe in the last 10-15 years.
Courtesy the ICA.
In this sense Alien Nation, the current exhibition at the ICA until mid January, is a very timely attempt to look at one of the most topical issues of our day. Described as an exploration of "the complex relationship between science fiction, race and contemporary art" Alien Nation includes the work of twelve UK and international artists working around the subject of 'otherness' and 'difference'.
The exhibition also makes it didactically clear that the science-fiction film genre that came out of Hollywood in the 1950s and 60s was really a subliminal manifestation of the Cold War, and of America's paranoia with communism and its subsequent McCarthyism. However, what this exhibition also reminds us of is how uneven - and sometimes plainly bad - art connected with the idea of aliens has been.
Courtesy the ICA
In the lower galley television sets show excerpts of four different Hollywood films - The Thing, It Came from Outer Space, Quatermass and the Pit and the seminal Invasion of Body Snatchers - plus some sculptures by Yinka Shonibare, Eric Wesley and Marepe.
What is surprising about these sculptures is their child-like quality, a quality also very much present in the coloured drawings of Laylah Ali and her prosaic caricatures of outworldly figures. Shonibare's Dysfuctional Family does not look dysfunctional at all, just different and indeed even lovable - like cartoon characters from children's films.
The piece that deserves most attention is Mario Ybarra Jr's mural Brown and Proud. It's a poutpurri of images and themes related to the idea of what it means to be Mexican nowadays. Flying Mayan pyramids with multi-eyed zapatista revolutionaries sit alongside a Chicano rapper with a sombrero and a furry animal copied from that other ode to infantilism: Star Wars. What Ybarra manages to show us is the multifaceted idea of identity, its juxtapositions and possible permutations. This specially commissioned mural has panache, irreverence and a grown up sense of humour.
Courtesy the ICA.
In the Upper Galleries the British artist Hew Locke takes us back to the Star Wars theme with his Golden Horde, an over-elaborate fleet of space ships assembled with a modern day detritus of toys, particularly guns. It's difficult to discern what it is about, apart from some juvenile but equally ancient idea of what an invading and threatening fleet from outer space might look like.
The other work that deserves some attention is Ellen Gallagher and Edgar Cleijne's five part 16mm film installation. Apart from Superboo which pushes the idea race and alienation a bit too literally, their piece is imaginative and atmospheric, demonstrating the kind of unconscious fears we feel about the unknown, whether phantoms or deep sea creatures.
Although very timely and occupied with a topical theme, what Alien Nation seems to be saying is, ironically, that contemporary art has very little to say, or indeed show, when it comes to the explore notion of otherness, alienation, difference and integration.
Perhaps this is the result of a positive - maybe the reason that this exhibition fails to move or resonate is down to the fact that we have learned so much about assimilating the 'other' and appreciating difference.
