In Shifting Grounds a video installation revisits NASA’s 1997 educational film Destination: Mars, which imagined a fictional Mars mission taking place from 2018 to 2020. Told through the astronauts’ personal logs, the narrative reflects hopes of transforming the red planet into a future home.

Now that 2020 is behind us, that speculative vision feels eerily close to reality. Mars has become more than a dream: global investment, sharper satellite imagery, and renewed space programs bring the idea of colonization into sharper focus. But alongside utopian ambition comes a deeper unease. What does our desire to leave Earth say about our failures here? And who will be left behind?

Shifting Grounds turns these questions into a haunting, quirky karaoke video taking place in a zoo's everyday life, set to Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You”. It stages an imaginary goodbye to our planet—equal parts love song and warning—as it reflects on the physical, emotional, and ethical consequences of parallel lives across planets. The zoo stands for the impossibility of a space that seems so integrated in our perception of other species and outerworldly at the same time —reflecting on society at large.

As we edge closer to interplanetary futures, the work asks: Who gets to start anew on Mars? Who stays Earthbound? And what memories of our planet will remain?