Cosmonauts: Birth of an Exhibition

The Science Museum has a rich tradition of exhibitions and galleries devoted to space exploration. Over several decades they have featured and highlighted examples of space hardware – rockets, satellites and spacecraft. The displays have dwelt on the technological and, sometimes, the scientific, with little consideration of the social, let alone of any cultural contexts in which the technology might be located. The Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age exhibition (2015) challenged this trend with an exposition that, while including uniquely historic space artefacts, situated them firmly and visibly within a far broader treatment of a nation’s interest in space. Recent scholarship had emphasised the role of the cultural in the emergence of Russia’s fascination with space and this was self-evident during a series of curatorial visits to Russia to research the exhibition. Would such a holistic representation of Russian space flight and its origins deliver the exhibition’s ambitious objective of attracting ‘large numbers of visitors’ and drawing ‘superlative comment’?[1] This paper presents the thinking behind and ambition for Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age. It relates this both to the Science Museum’s own history of space exhibitions and crucially to an evolving body of scholarship that is seeking new perspectives, principally of the social, the artistic and the cultural, from which to view and interpret Russia’s launching of the Space Age in the late 1950s. It refers to specific examples of this broader, inter-disciplinary approach in the exhibition and how this in turn was on occasion an emergent exercise where the final forms of the messages conveyed were contingent also on an established dialogue between the curatorial and design teams.

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