Rhi-Entry

PhotoIreland presents the premiere of Rhi-Entry by Irish artist Rhiannon Adam at the International Centre for the Image.

Throughout history, 117 billion humans have gazed at the same moon, yet only 24 people — all American men — have seen its surface up close.

During the pandemic, Irish photographic artist Rhiannon Adam discovered an application for the ultimate art residency: dearMoon. In 2018, Japanese billionaire and art collector Yusaku Maezawa announced a global search for eight artists to join him on a week-long lunar mission aboard SpaceX’s Starship: the first civilian mission to deep space.

The mission’s flight path would echo Apollo 8’s 1968 journey, which famously led astronaut Bill Anders to suggest NASA “should have sent poets” to capture the sense of wonder he experienced. dearMoon sought to fulfil this vision by inviting creatives to reflect on humanity from space, aiming to inspire world peace.

In 2021, Adam was chosen as the only female crew member from a million applicants, with the chance to achieve the seemingly impossible, to become the first out queer woman to venture beyond the Karman line. For three years, she immersed herself in the space industry, grappling with her mortality and the responsibility of representing marginalised voices.

However, in June 2024, Maezawa abruptly canceled the mission, leaving the crew to pick up the pieces of their disrupted lives.

The work presented here blurs fact and fiction through moving images, photographs, and ephemera, reflecting on Adam’s psychological recalibration and her struggle to return to a “normal” life. It is often cited that reentry (or Rhi-entry) is the most dangerous part of spaceflight, and for Adam, this rings true, despite never having left our planet.

This presentation stands as a shrine to lost dreams and an urgent call for alternative voices in the space industry.

Rhiannon Adam is a photographic artist. She was born in Co. Cork, Ireland and is currently based between London and the United States. Adam’s work is heavily influenced by her nomadic childhood spent at sea, sailing around the world with her parents. Little photographic evidence of this period in her life exists, igniting an interest in the influence of photography on recall, the notion of the photograph as a physical object, and the image as an intersection between fact and fiction – themes that continue throughout her work.

Her long-term projects straddle art photography and social documentary, while subject matter is often focused on complex narratives relating to climate change, social injustice, outsider communities, and abuse of power. Within that, she is drawn to stories relating to the power of myth, and the often-close proximity between utopia and dystopia.

As a part of her varied practice, Adam is also an occasional publisher and curator. Her imprint ‘Lost Cat’ was founded in 2013.