Dear Aliens, We Are Ready

Co-exhibitors:

 Mariel Miranda, David Cotterrell, Irma Sofía Poeter, Gro Sarauw , Alejandro Zacarias , Ryan Gardener, and Mónica Arreola.

The exhibition, Dear Aliens, We Are Ready, curated by Pastor Projects, included works by the artists: Mariel Miranda (MX), David Cotterrell (UK), Irma Sofía Poeter (MX), Gro Sarauw (DK), Alejandro Zacarias (MX), Ryan Gardener (UK), and Mónica Arreola(MX).

The adventurous multi-modality show is a laboratory, which offered a catalogue of possible practices to take us into deep space, far beyond our pandemic, isolated selves, while pointing towards new ways to engage with sites, non-sites, the digital and the global. The artists employed a mix of paradoxical investigation and sober surrealism in order to establish links of communication between living and inanimate beings and extra-terrestrials in the big void. In the current atmosphere of crisis, we suggest there is a living subjectivity, forms of life and nature that, due to a heightened distrust in human affairs, have mobilised or acquired a capacity to communicate and beam a rescue signal to outer space in the hope that aliens can come to Earth and fix things.

It is a playful subversion of the “self”, which in the 20th Century of the "Self" has been artificially manufactured to function within capitalist society as a machine, seeking to fill a perceived gap with objects, distinguishing lifestyles, or with identity through perceived contrasts between classes or different groups of people.

To coincide with the exhibition, the director of Pastor Projects and curator of the show, Thomas Vann-Altheimer, with the support of LOOKING FORWARD and Empathy & Risk, was in conversation with the artists for video interviews, which premiered during online live events in the second half of April 2021. The public programme offered insights into the practice of the seven artists involved in the show.