MICHAEL NAJJAR
Ignition depicts a 300-tonne Soyuz launcher space rocket taking off from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana on 5 April 2019. Najjar used a sound-activated camera placed atop the launch tower—just 80 metres away from the 46-metre-tall rocket—to capture the exact moment it left the launch pad with all four boosters ignited to reach full thrust. The olive green rocket turned white due to the reaction between liquid oxygen and rocket propellant that covers the vehicle in ice. Najjar has also frozen the rocket in time—two minutes later it was travelling at over eight times the speed of sound.
About the Artist
Photographer Michael Najjar was born in Landau, Germany, in 1966. Since 1988, he has lived and worked in Berlin, where he attended the bildo Academy of Mediarts. His great preoccupations are technology and space travel. Najjar has himself signed up for a Virgin Galactic voyage into space.
In addition to photographing the Russian Soyuz launcher, Najjar has shot SpaceX´s Falcon Heavy rocket at Cape Canaveral in Florida, and Virgin’s VSS Unity at Spaceport America. He has also shot at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research; and at the German Aerospace Center, where Synlight—the world’s largest artificial sun—generates light intensity more than 10,000 times the solar radiation on the surface of Earth.
Najjar’s work has featured in international publications including New Scientist and in numerous exhibitions and biennials. It was included in The Beauty of Failure / The Failure of Beauty at the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona in 2004, the 2006 Venice Biennale’s 10th International Architecture Exhibition, the 9th Havana Biennial in 2006, and the Convergence Biennale Beijing 2007. In 2015 he was a selected artist at the ZKM GLOBALE, where work from his ‘Outer Space’ series was shown in the exhibition Exo-Evolution, curated by Peter Weibel.
Ocula | 2019
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