Moving beyond reality

What is it about anything space age? American artist Liliane Lijn concocts miraculous holograms out of a material that’s 99 per cent air, and yet all I can think about is a lava lamp. The combination of shifting colours and forms that aren’t quite solid can’t seem to escape association with a 1960s version of the future.

Lijn’s new exhibition brings a spot of Star Trek into the creaky wooden rooms of Soho’s Riflemaker, following a residency at the Space Sciences Lab in California three years ago. While her moving cone works from the 1960s fill the ground floor, upstairs offers a more ethereal experience. Three display cases contain lumps of extremely low-density aerogel, which were used on a Nasa-funded mission to collect interstellar particles.

With projections of scenes from India or China tickling their surfaces, the aerogel fragments appear to float, neither here nor there. When people approach the cases, it’s as if they’re analysing a magic trick, circling and craning their heads up and down.

A video near the stairwell offers background, though, and what could be the stuff of a fairground sideshow becomes scientific specimen. Describing the technological challenges of collecting stardust, it gives weight to Lijn’s matter-less pieces and moves them beyond bottled kitsch.

Until Jul 5, Mon to Fri 10am to 6pm (Sat from noon), free. Tel: 020 7439 0000, www.riflemaker.org

Liliane Lijn: Stardust
Riflemaker
Beak Street, W1F 9SU