Star City: The Future Under Communism

Star City is an unassuming new town a few miles from Moscow – but for many years its location was a closely guarded secret. That is because it was the hub of the Soviet space programme, where ­cosmonauts trained and lived with their families in splendid isolation. These days, you are more likely to bump into artists in Star City than space pioneers. Among the first to ­undertake residencies there were Jane and ­Louise ­Wilson, whose film installation shows a surprisingly mundane-looking place. It is as if Letchworth secretly housed a ­collection of flight ­simulators and anti-gravity machines with the aspect of totalitarian fairground rides. Most threatening is a huge ­centrifuge that ­generates the crushing g-force ­cosmonauts experience on takeoff. Can it be entirely coincidental that this emblem of Soviet supremacy resembles a giant iron fist? The Otolith Group artist collective took advantage of Star City's training facilities to experience a flight out of the earth's atmosphere. They intercut images of floating around in space with ­footage of a delegation of Indian women who travelled to Moscow in the early 1970s as ­representatives of India's own attempts to establish a space programme. This well-presented show proves ­nothing looks quite so ­old-fashioned as recent visions of the future. A replica of a Sputnik ­satellite seems as enigmatically pointless as a ­constructivist sculpture. Cold war propaganda ­posters, ­meanwhile, promise a cosmic collectivism that seems more palatable than the earthbound variety – though Goshka ­Macuga's tube of ­genuine Soviet spacefood (­cottage cheese with blackcurrant flavour) ­suggests that maybe it wasn't so ­palatable after all.