“Posición aparente” (Apparent Position), Paloma Polo’s first institutional solo show in Spain, comprised an approximately twenty-minute 16-mm film transferred to HD video, a series of fourteen photographs, and a book, which together reflected the artist’s interest in twentieth-century scientific expeditions. The topic is not a new concern for Polo, who was born in Madrid in 1983, and now lives and works in Amsterdam. Last year she presented another film, The Path of Totality—Concepts of Simultaneity, 2011, a bustling stream of images, collected from various sources, depicting members of astronomical expeditions engaged in everyday tasks. While the earlier piece was a heterogeneous accumulation of shots that remained in the realm of the fragmentary, the work presented at the Reina Sofía, Action at a Distance, 2012, has a more linear approach to narrative.

However, Polo’s interest in scientific expeditions is only part of a broader fascination with the drive for knowledge in the modern era. And this quest is echoed in her own research-based methodologies. For her new work, Polo immersed herself in the study of Arthur Stanley Eddington’s 1919 journey to the island of Príncipe, in Africa’s Gulf of Guinea, where the British astronomer sought to verify Albert Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity by exploring the development of solar eclipses. Eddington’s expedition took place, ironically, in the midst of World War I, one of the greatest setbacks to the ideas of progress and modernity.

Polo sought out the exact place where Eddington and his crew photographed eclipses. A commemorative slab had been laid on a spot where this was supposed to have taken place, but Polo’s research showed that the photographs had been taken elsewhere, albeit close by. Her film footage focuses on the slab being moved to the new site. That’s about it. But what is the point of all this? Polo sees a profound difference between a scientific expedition like Eddington’s and exploratory expeditions undertaken in the name of colonialism. While the purpose of the latter was conquest and exploitation, an astronomical expedition is concerned only with the conditions for looking up at the skies. For this reason, Polo needed to attach her narrative to a place—the island of Príncipe, a place that has been systematically muted in all narratives about Eddington’s endeavor. The film starts with an interior scene of a Portuguese colonial house with its distinctive tiles, but then it immediately plunges into an outdoor setting. Men young and old struggle to carry the big slab in a sequence of images that depict the transportation of the memorial as a quotidian and playful activity. Life actually happens in Príncipe, a fact that contradicts the reductive silence of history. Polo has created a visual narrative of a place and time from which few images reach us. The effort of moving the slab seems preposterous in contrast to the indifference of historians to the exact location of the site. For them, it is a simply irrelevant fact.

How important is such accuracy anyway? Polo has used old photographic techniques to plausibly restage Eddington’s 1919 observation camp for her photographs. Looking at them, we might ask ourselves what makes these meticulously researched new images less credible than ones really taken at the time would have been. After all, the quest for truth may be chimerical no matter how efficient the tools at hand. Much of Polo’s work evolves, in the long run, around the delicate relationship between science, art, and history—and the distance between each of them and that complex and slippery ground that we call reality. One reason for this gap is, of course, our inevitable tendency to construct meaning for specific purposes, most of them political.

—Javier Hontoria