Anish Kapoor, a Turner Prize–winning artist who has never been afraid of controversy, has plotted his next project: sending a sculpture to space.
What, exactly, the work might be remains a mystery, but he told the Times of London this week that it will ponder such questions as: “What is adequate? What can stand up against vast, eternal, cosmic space? It’s ambitious to put something in space which is visible from Earth.” According to Kapoor, the sculpture “might” involve mirrors.
It is ambitious, yes, but Kapoor is not the first to have attempted such a feat (or stunt, depending on how you look at it). As my colleague Emily Watlington highlighted in Art in America in 2023, artists ranging from Jeff Koons to Tavares Strachan have performed similar acts. She wrote that sending art to space “underscores the idea of the private space sector as a plaything for the ultra-rich.”
Who is funding Kapoor’s latest project? He would not tell the Times of London, saying only that the work would cost nine figures and that his backers were “not necessarily American.” Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX bankrolled Koons’s project, is not among Kapoor’s funders, the artist confirmed.
Kapoor then put a finer point on it, denouncing Musk’s efforts to provide money to figures such as Tommy Robinson, a far-right activist whose Islamophobic posts have gained him a following in the UK. “I cannot stand Musk’s approach to space, which is deeply entrenched in money and gross capitalism,” Kapoor said. “I also object to his political reach in the UK.”
Moreover, Kapoor said, “Space politics is currently rather disgusting. We are instead hoping to launch a work of art which is useless, which is something rather magical. The people backing me agree with this.” It’s confusing how Koons’s 125 sculptures aboard a SpaceX rocket could be perceived as being any more utile to society, but so it goes.
The Times piece was published the same week that the Palazzo Manfrin released word of a Kapoor show headed to Venice during this year’s Biennale. Kapoor is also preparing a show in New York this month at Lisson Gallery, which represents him.
The works at both of those exhibitions are likely to be smaller than what Kapoor plans to launch into space, which the artist said has never witnessed a sculpture so large as the one is crafting. Failing to beat the allegations that sending art into space is complicit in what some scholars have called “astrocolonialism,” Kapoor said, “The aim is to poetically occupy the unoccupiable.”
