There's a moon for us all at lunar art show

The man and the moon: one of the Private Moon series of pictures (Image: Leonid Tishkov/The Arts Catalyst)

As the space race reheats, Republic of the Moon looks at our attitudes to the moon and raises the bigger issues of ownership and colonialism

Republic of the Moon, Bargehouse, London, 9 January to 2 February; plus accompanying book Manifesto for a Republic of the Moon

IT COULD hardly be more timely. Less than a month after China's Chang'e-3 mission placed a rover on the lunar surface, an art show, Republic of the Moon, sets out its own exploration of our natural satellite. Put together by the Arts Catalyst, an organisation whose remit is "provocative, playful, risk-taking" art-science projects, the aim is to encourage public engagement with a field usually dominated by politics, science, business and space enthusiasts.

There is a publication, too: Manifesto for a Republic of the Moon, which works with the show to provide an alternative take on the moon's significance, focusing on wit, imagination, small-scale science and the unresolved issue of ownership .

Take the "Moon Treaty", which came into force 30 years ago. It was framed to put the moon under international control, but as the moon race reheats, only 15 states have signed up to it. Aside from China's rover Yutu (which means "Jade Rabbit", a mythical pet of moon goddess Chang'e), India, Japan and South Korea also have projects. And companies are lining up, spurred by mining potential, interest in space tourism and Google's Lunar X prize of $20 million to create a privately funded lunar rover.

These competing agendas are cleverly captured by artists Hagen Betzweiser and Sue Corke, who work together under the name WE COLONISED THE MOON. They are artists in residence at the exhibition. Entering their area, you are faced with a blackboard bearing the words: "Theme Park or Quarry".

Elsewhere in the show, whimsy and imagination feature strongly. In Moon Goose Analogue: Lunar Migration Bird Facility, a film and elaborate control room by artist Agnes Meyer-Brandis, we see how she raised 11 geese, making them think she was their mother, and taking them on walks in a lunar-like landscape.

Similarly imaginative is Joanna Griffin's work, Moon Vehicle, created with P. Shreekumar, an astrophysicist at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in Bangalore. This documents a project set up at a top art school in the city. Students used "imagination" experiments, art, and visits to ISRO to explore the technologies used in India's first lunar probe, Chandrayaan-1.

Underlining the importance of other kinds of thinking, Griffin writes in the Manifesto: "Moon missions risk becoming a transport system whereby [only] certain ideologies and habits of thinking from Earth are projected onto the Moon." In other words, we are in danger of repeating the mistakes of the colonial era, but on an interplanetary scale.

This problem is crystallised in Liliane Lijn's art. Her ongoing Moonmeme work consists of a proposed projection of the word "SHE" across the face of the moon. Such an approach sees the moon as a blank canvas on which, she says, to "transform the meaning of an essential word".

Translation and transformation are also key to Katie Paterson's Earth-Moon-Earth. She turned Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata into Morse code, reflected it off the moon and deciphered it back on Earth for a self-playing baby grand piano. The result is recognisable but glitch-ridden because the moon absorbs some information in its shadows. The "moon-altered" score turns the gaps into enigmatic intervals and rests.

In Paterson's work, the moon is an agent of change. But in Leonid Tishkov's Private Moon, it is a fixed point. This set of photos, each coupled with a verse, tells of a relationship between a man who met the moon and stayed with "her" for the rest of his life. It is touching, but the images see the moon as alien, empty, passive; the man is the only active force.

Overall, the show is admirable for its attempts to engage the public and for suggesting that when it comes to the moon's ownership, narratives of colonialism and gender are never far away. But it remains open to charges of anthropocentrism: as if the moon only matters in how it relates to humanity. The exhibition repeats the logic that gave us anthropogenic climate change, and, for all its emphasis on imagination and wit, fails to offer us an escape route.

Tom Jeffreys is an art critic, and edits online magazine The Learned Pig