You Have Four Weeks Left to Stand Underneath the Sun at Saatchi Gallery

There’s a six-metre sphere hanging in the middle of Saatchi Gallery in London, and it’s made of 400,000 NASA photographs stitched together into something that looks unsettlingly like the sun. It’s called Helios, built by British artist Luke Jerram, and it sits at the halfway point of The Sun and The Moon: Art Inspired by the Celestial, the gallery’s biggest summer show in years.

There’s nine rooms, two floors and over 170 artists, structured around a full 24-hour day, dawn to midnight with no detours. Curator Katherine Benson created it in order to track every conceivable way humans have responded to two objects in the sky, and the results are stranger than you’d expect from a show with such a straightforward premise. A Celtic bust of the sun god Sol Invictus dug up from the 1st century BC sits a few rooms from a replica Nebra Sky Disc, Europe’s oldest known map of the cosmos. In the same eclectic fashion, Royal Opera costumes hang near a section on tarot. 

The Sun takes the first four rooms as dawn opens on early mythology. The Sun Rising moves into ritual and the turning of seasons. Bryony Ella’s My Body is a Sundial asks you to consider your own body as both a clock and the thing being timed. Setting Sun turns toward transformation, closing on a screening of Nancy Holt’s 1978 film Sun Tunnels. 

The Moon takes over where the evening introduces Saad Qureshi’s split moon, suspended overhead as if caught mid-fracture. Walking on the Moon skips the astronauts and goes for the overlooked story of craftswomen and textile designers who helped build the Apollo missions, centered on Moon Landing, in a collaboration between weaver Margo Selby and composer Helen Caddick that treats colour, rhythm and mathematics as the same language. Midnight goes full witching hour, folklore and superstition. And it all ends with Massless Suns and Dark Suns, an immersive teamLab light installation that really believes you have to be there to experience it properly, as it deliberately photographs terribly.

Gallery director Paul Foster has called the exhibit an exercise in wonder and  a reminder not to take for granted the two things that make life on Earth possible in the first place.