Moon Gallery

Moon Gallery intends to launch 100 artifacts to the Moon within the compact format of a 10 x 10 x 1 cm plate on a lunar lander exterior panelling as early as 2025. As it costs 1 million euros/kg to send something to the Moon, these (smart) artists proposed to hence miniaturise the gallery. The idea is to develop culture for a future interplanetary society in this Petri dish-like gallery.

Bhedadīpikā was selected as part of the Moon Gallery in 2019 and is a visual dialogue based on the artist's own duality - as an artist as well as researcher.

Moon Gallery launched to the ISS in 2022 and stayed onboard for one year.

With over half the artists being women, the Moon Gallery has indeed been a game-changer in giving visibility to women artists.

For more information, please visit their website.

The Moon Gallery was successfully launched to the International Space Station (ISS) on February 19, 2022.

Consiting of 65 artworks in total on an 8x8 grid, the gallery orbited the Earth within the ISS, installed inside a Nanoracks Nanolab and served as moving targets for camera observations and performance tests.

The gallery offered a diverse range of materials and behaviours for the camera to detect, and in return, the artists have got a chance to learn about the performance of their artworks in microgravity.

Launch date: February 19, 2022
Spacecraft Mission: NG-17 Cygnus Cargo Resupply Mission
Launch Vehicle: NG Antares
Liftoff: 12:39 p.m. EST (17:39 GMT / 18:39 CET)
ISS Capture: February 21, 2022, 4:35am EST (0935 GMT / 1035 CET)
Mission duration: 12 months

Preparations for the lunar mission are under way. More details will be released in due time. Keep watching this space!

The concept of Duality has intrigued mankind since the beginning of civilization, and ancient Vedic texts propose several philosophies on the duality of nature in intriguing detail.

This artwork, part of the Moon Gallery, comprises of two objects constrained inside the 1cm³ box: a strip of paper with hand drawn phases of the Moon in phosphorescent ink, and a memory card that contains selected algorithmic simulations from the series Star Cities/Organised Worlds, one of the previous works of the artist [3D model].

Inspired by the artist's Indian roots, the work is named Bhedadipika – an illustration of Duality.

• P. Rajkakati. “A Space for Art in Space”. Journal of Space Philosophy vol. 11, no. 2 (Fall 2022)

• P. Rajkakati. “Bhedadipika – exploring the art-science duality through the medium of space”. 73rd International Astronautical Congres (IAC-2022), Paris (September 2022)

• A. Sitnikova, E. Glukhova, B. H. Foing, S. McCarthy, P. Rajkakati, M. Kuiper “Moon Gallery”. Global Space Exploration Conference (GLEX-2021), St Petersburg (June 2021)

• P. Rajkakati. "Bhedadipika: An illustation of Duality". European Planetary Science Congress 2019, Geneva, Switzerland (September 2021)

February 17, 2021 | Assam scientist-artist part of international lunar project | The Assam Tribune