A Space Museum

For this project the artists made a film and a series of artworks about the surreal yet entirely serious space adventure led by mathematics professor Manoug Manougian and supported by President Fouad Chehab. This “tribute to dreamers” critically explores the 1960s, politlcal utopias, modernism, failures, and the dreams of science fiction and what their reactivation would produce in the present. On visit to the fair site, the artists were surprised to discover, under a helipad, a hidden Space Museum, conceived and built by Oscar Niemeyer as part of the Rashid Karami fair. The museum would have been one of the first of its kind. These two projects – independent of each other yet inextricably linked – are brought together for the first time. The research and artworks question the relationship between two contemporaneous but suspended projects: the Lebanese Rocket Society and Niemeyer’s Space Museum.