At the centre of Starship Troopers, Mitchell Anderson’s two-piece exhibition marking the end of his residency at Binz39 in Zurich, lies a single object: a graphite rudder fragment salvaged from a Nazi V-2 rocket. It is the kind of object usually destined for a collector’s shelf, which Anderson found browsing the online catalogue of a space memorabilia auction. He playfully refers to the graphite piece as simply an ‘expensive pencil’. This strange, almost absurd material origin becomes the generative core of a visually minimal yet conceptually expansive exhibition – one that manages to speak, with equal parts restraint and urgency, to the tangled legacies of technology, pop cultural imagination, violence, and hypocrisy.
For this work, Anderson used the graphite to draw soft outlines of rockets, dozens of them (Fig. 1). In the process, he not only retools its historical function but queers it, destabilising its militaristic and masculine associations by subjecting it to delicate, repetitive mark-making. Each outline is traced by hand in barely-there graphite lines on translucent vellum sheets pinned to the gallery walls in rhythmic succession. The forms correspond to actual rockets launched between 1944 and 2025: those used for discovery and those used for death and diversion. Anderson’s description of his practice as probing ‘how close can you get without becoming literal’ echoes in every quiet line.
The V-2 rocket, a ‘vengeance weapon’ developed by Nazi Germany in the final stages of WWII and the first man-made object to cross into space, forms the starting point (1). Yet drawn across the wall of the main exhibition room, the rockets form a kind of parade: Apollo 13; Vostok 6 which carried Valentina Tereshkova into space; the GSLV MK3 developed in India; and, most recently, Blue Origin NS-31, which made headlines for flying Katy Perry into space in April 2025 (Fig. 2). These are weapons and vessels, nationalist trophies and capitalist amusements. By rendering them in such fragile and nearly invisible lines, Anderson exposes their interchangeability. They form a genealogy, but also a society or a troop. The exhibition title’s nod to Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers is more than a pop culture reference. It draws out the tension between militarism and spectacle, and the ease with which the two slide into each other.
Anderson’s conceptual method owes as much to the history of Pop Art and Sci-Fi literature as to astute contemporary observations. The exhibition recalls artists like Robert Rauschenberg’s NASA collaborations and Kiki Kogelnik’s playful, speculative space works. In an interview, the artist mentions that he keeps E.F. Bleiler’s Science Fiction: The Early Years in his studio (2). Still, in contrast with the loud and euphoric techno-futurism of postwar space-age aesthetics, Anderson’s graphite silhouettes provide a space for quiet reflection and insist that we look again. This reflection enters more explicitly through three quotes the artist includes in the exhibition leaflet: a line from Elton John’s 1972 song Rocket Man, a quote from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, ‘The two, boy and rocket, concurrently designed’, and Elon Musk’s characteristically flat proclamation, ‘rockets are cool’. The quotes indicate how the space race has shifted from being defined by Cold War nationalism to a theatre of private wealth. In 2025, the rocket is no longer merely a historical symbol of ambition; it is a deeply contemporary object, current, ongoing. With figures like Bezos and Musk expanding private space ventures while warfare intensifies across Ukraine and Gaza, the lines between exploration, domination, and entertainment are increasingly blurred.
In this exhibition, size and position matter. Each rocket is drawn to correspond to the average erect penis size in different parts of the world – a provocation Anderson does not hide. They are angled at a defiant 45 degrees, upward and ready. There is a quiet absurdity to this detail, but also a pointed homage to feminist science fiction writers, who, as Jane Donawerth has written, ‘frequently satirise men’s technology and masculinity itself when they portray rockets, robots, and prosthetics’ (3). Here, too, the rocket is as much a figure as a form: sexed, militarised, ridiculous.
The second piece in the show sits in a separate room. A fabric banner pinned to the wall, bearing the slogan ‘Rise Up Against Fascism’, flanked by two anti-fascist logos (Fig. 2). At first glance, it looks like a protest flag, but it is not. The banner is in fact a hand-painted prop used in the HBO series Succession, again purchased by Anderson in an online auction. This tension between the real and its imitation complicates the reading of the work. What does it mean for a protest object to be a fiction? Or, inversely, for fiction to so closely mimic protest? The encounter alters the viewing of the rockets in the previous room. If the rocket is an action-object, so is the flag. Both are performative and both hold a promise.
The tension between authenticity and representation is central to Anderson’s practice. In 2016, he published a short text titled A Provisional Theory of These Searched Out Objects (4). The notion of the ‘searched out’ as opposed to the ‘found object’ recurs across Anderson’s practice. Departing from the ready-made tradition of stumbling across materials on the street and in our everyday surroundings, Anderson actively seeks objects marked with contradiction: things both staged and real, potent and absurd. The graphite rudder was bought at auction, and the protest flag was a TV prop acquired online. Their acquisition is deliberate and specific, embedded in contemporary contexts of circulation and value. It is this intentional and purposeful engagement that makes his work so relevant. Anderson’s material choices reflect a logic of excavation as he pushes its conceptual potential. In this way, Starship Troopers is not a loud critique. Its urgency lies precisely in its quietness, in how it asks viewers to look twice – to come closer. And in its ability to collapse temporalities, bridging Nazi Germany and 2020s space tourism, Elon Musk and Elton John. With minimal intervention, Anderson intelligently weaves these tangled legacies of pop culture, spectacle, militarism, and violence in ways that expose their shared logics across time. Yet Anderson’s interest is not in condemnation, but in proximity. ‘How close can you get without becoming literal,’ he asked, and in this exhibition, he gets very close indeed.
