Science Fiction: A Journey into the Unknown
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Tickets
Full price: 5 € presale — 7 € on the door
Reduced price, Friends, Families 3+ members, Groups of 4 or more: 3 € presale / 4 € on the door
Unemployed, People with Disabilities - Companion, Second visit (on presentation of your previous ticket): 2 € (only from the Onassis Stegi box office)
Free: Children up to 5, Third or additional visits (on presentation of your previous tickets)
Group ticket reservations at groupsales@onassis.org
Introduction
Two years on from the “Digital Revolution” exhibition, the Onassis Stegi joins forces once again with London's Barbican Centre for a new show: “Science Fiction: Journey into the Unknown”, which explores science fiction's long-standing influence on the full range of contemporary culture. Get ready for a journey with science fiction as your guide: from the 19th century into the future and back to today and into the furthest reaches of the human mind.
Photo: Dan Tobin Smith
Design by Praline
“Science Fiction: Journey into the Unknown” is the Onassis Stegi’s second collaboration with London’s Barbican Centre. Science fiction, which once addressed a small and specialized audience, is now everywhere we look, thanks to its impact as a genre on art, design, film and literature. It explores unsolved mysteries along with our ability as a species to resolve them. It creates fantastic conditions that shed—an often critical—light on the realities of our here and now.
So embark on a journey through this selection of emblematic science-fiction-related books and comics, films and musical works which have left their mark on our world in an exhibition that makes the unknown seem somehow very familiar...
From the 19th century’s cabinets of curiosities to the vastness of space, and from the cities of the future to the inner landscapes of the human mind. Explore the mysterious lands of Jules Verne and Jonathan Swift, discover new galaxies through “Star Wars” and “Alien”, rub shoulders with aliens and stand beside legendary space suits from blockbusters like “Star Trek” and “Interstellar”. Then imagine dystopian worlds through the “Handmaid’s Tale”, “The Hunger Games”, “A Clockwork Orange”, “28 Days Later” and television’s “Black Mirror”. Finally, when there’s nothing left to explore except human consciousness, experience the metamorphosis and mutation of the human body through the eyes of the “Dreamcatcher”, “Donnie Darko”, and “eXistenZ”.
The show includes works by contemporary artists which were inspired by the possibilities offered by science fiction, while a series of parallel activities includes a concert series, discussions, educational programs, workshops and film screenings.
Video
“Science Fiction: Journey into the Unknown” is divided into four sections and includes over 800 exhibits.
In the first section, “Strange Journeys”, using the work of the pioneering visionaries of the genre as our map, we explore unknown and inaccessible corners of the Earth and other planets. We wander through lost cities, come face to face with dinosaurs, and conquer mysterious islands. We travel the globe, through the air and deep beneath the sea. From the original manuscripts and drawings of Jules Verne to props from the films “Godzilla” and “Jurassic Park”, and from Francis Bacon’s “New Atlantis” to Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe”, Rudyard Kipling’s “With the Night Mail”, Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels”, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Tarzan and the Lost Empire”.
In the exhibition’s second section, having now explored the planet Earth, we embark on a “Space Odyssey”, meeting creatures from other planets and spacecraft in far-flung locations along the way. We wander among artefacts from films including “Strange encounters of the third kind”, “Aliens”, “Stargate”, “Star Trek”, “Star Wars”, “Interstellar”, “Independence Day”, and works based on “Alien”, “District 9” and “First Men in the Moon”. We engage with the heart of the action through the new interactive commission from Territory Studio, which is based on Ridley Scott's The Martian.
Armed with a vision, improving our planet, in the third section, “Brave New Worlds”, we return to Earth and witness the collapse of society. We see the places and cultures Mankind created up-close. We wander through states of the future with towering skyscrapers and live in dystopian societies plagued by wars and pestilence. In the heart of this section, we discover emblematic texts including Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”, Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451”, Suzanne Collins’ “The Hunger Games”, Anthony Burgess’s “A Clockwork Orange”, and George Orwell’s “1984”. In addition to stills from movies and television series including “Metropolis”, “Dark City” and “The Prisoner”, this section is also home to architectural plans and drawings from Ben Wheatley’s recent hit movie “High Rise”.
Bringing our journey to an end, we explore the last thing left to explore, our selves, in the fourth section of the show, “Final Frontiers”. We delve deep into our bodies and our minds and call into question the very existence of humanity. As science and technology continue to extend ever outwards, we encounter cyborgs, clones and robots at first hand in landmark books including “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” by Robert Louis Stevenson and Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”, literary best-sellers by Mikhail Bulgakov, Philip K. Dick, Philip Pullman, William Gibson and films and series including “Back to the Future”, “Doctor Who”, “Donnie Darko”, “eXistenZ”, “The Terminator” and “Total Recall”. We meet the android Ava, protagonist of the film “Ex Machina”, TARS from “Interstellar”, Robot B-9 from the TV series “Lost in Space” and Sonny from “I-Robot”. We also watch Terence Broad’s autoencoded version of “Blade Runner”.
