Cosmic Beings presents contemporary perspectives on our place within the cosmos. Featuring new commissions by Hannah Brontë and Kalanjay Dhir and a new digital commission by Studio A’s Mathew Calandra on IG @cementfondu, the exhibition highlights these Australian practitioners alongside notable international artists. Drawing on broad influences, from ancient wisdoms to Afrofuturism, sci-fi comics to quantum physics, the artists look beyond our Earthling limitations to expand the scope and scale of human consciousness.

The exhibition takes its starting point from an archetypal sci-fi storyline that imagines alien invasion as the only hope for unifying the human race. The threat and need to act would force humans to rise above their differences and join together to fight a common enemy. At the outset of the pandemic, it was speculated this might prove true. The initially unidentified and aggressive virus attacked worldwide populations at unparalleled scale, offering a stand-in for extraterrestrials. In the West, rhetoric on terrorism and the invasion of ‘illegal aliens’ temporarily subsided and in its place talk of global collaboration on medical innovations and vaccine-sharing came to the fore. However, as the real impacts of COVID19 took hold, they instead highlighted already entrenched divides along socioeconomic, geopolitical and racial lines and created new personal ones between those vaxxed and unvaxxed.

Against this calamitous backdrop, space tourism took off for the ultra-wealthy, NASA acknowledged the existence of Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UFOs), and the James Webb Space Telescope launched, helping us see further into space and back in time than ever before. Ironically, while life on Earth seemed evermore incomprehensible, we found ourselves on the cusp of profound new levels of cosmic understanding.

The artists in Cosmic Beings help us reflect on these unprecedented and tumultuous times with a critical eye to the past and vision for more peaceful and just futures. Enlisting the social criticism, philosophy and storytelling of science fiction and its otherworldly aesthetics, including puppetry, costume, comic book imagery and scientific illustration, the artists rewrite the story that humanity’s salvation is dependent on planetary invasion and dispel the problematic notion of aliens as threatening ‘Others’. Instead, their works offer alternative and speculative narratives, as well as new ways of being now, anticipating how artificially imposed divisions – between humans, the natural world and other species – might evaporate when viewed from an outer space perspective.

Might we envision unity, empathy and equity on Earth by contemplating ourselves as cosmic beings?