Corporations are already selling off mining rights to asteroids. These massive balls of rock and ore and minerals and ice up in space, far out of the reach of humanity, and mostly named after ancient Greek or Roman goddesses, are being traded like real estate by greedy suits with telescopes.
There are half a dozen asteroids in American sculptor Liz Larner’s exhibition at Camden Art Centre, her first institutional exhibition in the UK, plonked on the floor like they’ve just burned through the atmosphere on their way in from space. Each one is based on a Nasa scan of a real asteroid and then re-formed out of glittery, gritty ceramic. They’re gleaming symbols of corporate greed, ecological collapse and sexism – comets of misery, sent from the future to crash land on Finchley Road.
