"Thibault Mechler’s and Juliana Zepka’s sound and video installation The Overview Project (2022) is […] dedicated to a yearning: in a montage of footage from NASA and the Soviet Space Agency, we view almost 30 minutes of April 12th, 1961, when Yuri Gagarin (1934–68) became the first human to journey into space. Even if the film evokes a moment of nostalgia contemplating a failed utopia, not least because of the particular aesthetics of the 1960s film material, it also touches on elements of propaganda, glorification and myth-making.

The title refers to another event widely considered ‘historic’, seven years later: on the 24th of December, 1968, astronauts from Apollo 8 were able to take photos of planet Earth for the first time. This picture, which shows the stark, grey moon in the foreground and the blue-white earth in the far distance, would change the world: the view from above, as well as the media participation in such events, would have a drastic influence on the perception of time and space. The music composed especially for the film by Mechler and Zepka also ties in with this, as the melodies and tones of a broken pipe organ punctuate the film, which is divided into chapters. The spherical sound and image landscapes reinforce this supposed yearning for a time believed lost."

Theresa Roessler, curator (text from exhibition booklet).

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Exhibited artists : Anna Maria Balint, Mustafa Emin Büyükcoskun, Aida Kidane, David Moser, Anna Marcus & Alizé Rose May Monod, Thibault Mechler & Juliana Zepka, Thy Truong, Miriam Wieser.