Apocryphally, in 1968, David Bowie conceived of Ziggy Stardust, his androgynous alien alter ego, after attending a screening of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In Kubrick’s film, science-fiction is an existential meditation on the limits of reason and experience, a journey to the outermost reaches of the universe in which we find ourselves confronted with the alien irrationality of our own orienting contradictions.  Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust gives these existential conflicts a throbbing pulse, marrying the cosmic ruminations in Kubrick’s film to the subversive power and alien strangeness of adolescent sexuality in Rock and Roll: as an uncanny figure of the future, an avatar of what’s to come.

An exhibition of new work made in Hanoi by the artist duo Andrea Orejarena (b. 1994, Colombia) and Caleb Stein (b.1994, UK), Long Time No See (2018-2020), is currently on view at Vincom Center for Contemporary Art in Hanoi until February 23rd, 2020.