Babette Semmer @ GAO Gallery

Laniakea (Hawaiian for ‘immeasurable heaven’), is a class XVI celestial painter, whose nefarious extra-dimensional practice spans both time and space. For this, her first exhibition on Earth, she will open up a storm-wrapped rift to a parallel universe in GAO’s carpark. Laniakea considers probing the deep-time history of our planet to be as much of an aesthetic endeavour as a cosmiconservational one, and as such, plans to show a series of contextually-purged, paradoxical, live-alternative- past-political-paint-portals in the main gallery. Because she is evil, Laniakea finds it funny that her work will be displayed to us via a medium whose technological advancement shall forever remain out of reach. After finishing a string of residencies throughout the slowly gentrifying Andromeda galaxy, and spending a few eons in marketing/ interplanetary relations, Laniakea felt she still lacked empathy. By moving in to our ‘rotten and needy solar system’ she thought she’d experience the ‘shocking penury of this plebeian civilisation first hand.’