Aleksandra Mir - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Life and work

She studied Communications at Schillerska/Gothenburg University

Gothenburg University

The University of Gothenburg is a university in Sweden's second largest city, Gothenburg.- Character :The University of Gothenburg is the third-oldest Swedish university, and with 24,900 full-time students it is also among the largest universities in the Nordic countries...

in Gothenburg (1986–87), Media Arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York (earning her BFA in 1992), and Cultural Anthropology at The Graduate Faculty, The New School for Social Research in New York (1994–96). She holds a dual Swedish - American citizenship.

In much of her work, Mir solicits the participation of friends, acquaintances, and strangers in playful upheavals of social norms. She has unleashed her wry and often pathetic critiques in works like Life is Sweet in Sweden (1995), advocated for more female bands among stoned festival goers in New Rock Feminism (1996), recorded and broadcast cat-calling whistles in Copenhagen's central square in Pick Up (Oh Baby) (1996). For Cinema for the Unemployed: Hollywood Disaster Movies 1970–1997 (1998), Mir screened disaster genre films during a normal workweek (9 a.m.– 5 p.m., Monday through Friday) to trigger and test the connections between leisure, drama, cultural production and unemployment.

One of Mir's best-known works, The First Woman on the Moon (1999), interlaced issues of space travel, feminism, and imperialism when she staged a moon landing on a Dutch beach, which she transformed into a moonscape for one day with the help of bulldozers. At sunset she climbed up on its highest peak, planted the American flag, opened a bottle of champagne and invited the audience to climb up and join her in the celebration.
A "sequel" to the moon landing took the form of a rocket in which the First Woman on the Moon would never have been able to go anywhere in. The monumental (22m tall) sculpture which was built out of industrial debris and stood in the London Roundhouse for 3 days only before it was scrapped, was aptly titled Gravity (2006).

The long linear display of found photographs that comprises HELLO (2000 - ongoing) connects Margaret Thatcher, Jim Morrison, Jesus, and Andy Warhol with her own friends and family in an unlimited daisy-chain of human relations that overrides divisions in time, location and class. For Daily News (2002), Mir solicited contributions from over a hundred friends to fabricate an alternative newspaper edition to reclaim her birthday, September 11. For the project Living and Loving, a serial print media collaborator with curator Polly Staple that came out in 2002, 2004 and 2006, Mir composed poignant biographical magazines about ordinary individuals, starting with Donald Cappy, an art school campus security guard Mir met by happenstance at the California College of Arts and Crafts in San Francisco.

In 2003 Mir proposed the creation of a life-size replica of Stonehenge, a yet unrealized project appropriately named Stonehenge II, which she wanted to construct near the original and give everyone free and unlimited access to. Through her drawings of maps, renamed enamel street signs, and other urban interventions, Mir meditates on public life in the cities. She rendered Tokyo more “tourist-friendly for westerners” in Naming Tokyo (2003–04). Her video Organized Movement (2004) chronicles Mir's experience in Mexico City as she played with the cliché of an typical artists in residence attending Latin dance classes to launch discussions about broader forms of public, organized movements.

She extended her interest in urban social interactions and isolation in The Big Umbrella (2004), for which she invited strangers to join her under a massive umbrella capable of sheltering sixteen people from the rain, but just as often remaining alone, carrying the burden of this burlesque heavy object herself. In 2007 Mir, along with curator Paolo Falcone, art collector Marion Franchetti, and artists Luca De Gennaro and Salvo Prestifilippo, embarked on an 800-kilometer journey from Palermo to Venice in a 1977 Silver Shadow Rolls Royce, which they dubbed the Sicilian Pavilion in order to crash the party and to promote Sicilian culture and art at the 52nd Venice Biennale.

For Newsroom 1986–2000 (2007), Mir with a group of assistants copied 240 NYC tabloid covers in felt-tip marker and mounted them in an ever revolving installation to simulate the daily workings of a Manhattan newsroom. Mir has been using the Sharpie household marker since 2001 to create her black and white signature drawings that simulate printed matter such as news, maps, vinyl records, jet plane designs or botanical prints. For The Church of Sharpie (2005), she gathered a room full of assistants and created 20 large USA maps in a workshop situation named in honor of her preferred marker and the cultish nature of her temporary collective.

For her solo show at Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt she collected 2529 Trophies from the general public and exhibited them all in one installation called Triumph (2009). For the 53rd Venice Biennale, Mir created Venezia (all places contain all others) (2009) and printed one million postcards of such diverse waterways as a spring in the Sahara Desert, the waterfront of Manhattan, the fountains of Paris and the lakes of Nordic villages, all overlaid with text declaring the images to be Venice.

Mir has created Plane Landing, a real size helium inflateable jet plane, meant not to fly, but to hover above the ground as "a sculpture of a jet plane in a permanent state of landing". So far, she has landed it on the country estate of Compton Verney in Warwickshire (2003), on the tarmac on the Zurich airport (2008) and at various locations around central Paris (2008). A recent proposal (2010) to inflate and deflate it on the stage of the Vienna Opera house to the music of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, making for what she calls "an industrial ballet", is yet to be realized.

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions of her work have been mounted at New Museum's Window on Broadway (1997), Casco Projects, Wiik aan Zee, 1999, Cubitt, London (2002), Swiss Institute, NYC (2003), Compton Verney House Trust, Warwickshire (2003), Kunsthalle St. Gallen, St Gallen (2003), Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2004), P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2004), The Power Plant, Toronto (2006), Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth (2005), Fundacion NMAC, Montenmedio (2005), Kunsthaus, Zurich (2006), Printed Matter, NYC (2007), Saatchi Gallery, London (2008), Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2009), The Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC (2011).

Solo exhibitions in galleries include Mary Boone Gallery, NYC (2007, 2008), greengrassi, London (2004, 2005), Gavlak, Palm Beach (2010), Laurent Godin, Paris (2006, 2009, 2011), Magazzino d'Arte Moderna, Rome (2010).

Her work has also been included in major group exhibitions such as the Sydney Biennale, Sydney (2002), GNS (Global Navigation System), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2003), The Whitney Biennial (2004), The Shapes of Space at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2007), 53rd Venice Biennale, Venice (2009)and Rosenblum Collection, Paris (2010-11).

Collections

SMAK Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Gent
FRAC - Collection Aquitaine, Bordeaux
Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin
MUDAM - Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg
The National Gallery / Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo
Ellipse Foundation, Alcoitão
CDAN - Centro de Arte y Naturaleza - Fundación Beulas, Huesca
Musac - Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Léon
Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (CAAC), Sevilla
Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich
The Saatchi Gallery, London
Tate Modern, London
Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York City, NY
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, NY
MoMA - Museum of Modern Art, New York City, NY
Fundación NMAC - Montenmedio Arte Contemporáneo, Centro de Arte y Naturaleza - Vejer de la Frontera, Cádiz
Rosenblum Collection, Paris, France

Publishing

Mir has created numerous small press artists books which were the subject of her retrospective exhibition at Printed Matter, NYC in 2007. Many of the titles below available as free for download PDF files from the artists web site. In 2009 She published the first edition of The How Not To Cookbook, a projects that solicited contributions from 1000 amateur cooks from around the world. The How Not To book series now includes 9 other titles: How Not To Romance, Parent, Sport, Nature, Art, Pet, Work, Travel, Live&Die, to which the general public is welcome to contribute.

The How Not To Cookbook, Rizzoli, NYC, 2010.
The How Not To Cookbook, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, 2009.
The Philadelphia Inquirer, Peregrine Arts, Philadelphia, 2008.
Gravity: The Eternal Countdown, The Arts Catalyst, London, 2007.
Newsroom 1986-2000, Mary Boone gallery, NYC, 2007.
LA: A Geography of Modern Art, Printed Matter, Inc, NYC, 2007.
The Big Umbrella, Laurent Godin, Paris, 2007.
The Concorde Collages, Galerie Laurent Godin, Paris, 2006.
105 Selected details from the Sharpie drawings 2003-2006, onestar press, Paris, 2006.
Switzerland and Other Islands, edition fink, Zürich, 2006.
The Meaning of Flowers, Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2006.
Living & Loving #3 The Biography of Mitchell Wright, White Columns, NYC, 2006.
The Church of Sharpie, Galeria Joan Prats, Barcelona/greengrassi, London, 2005.
Not Everything is Always White or Black, Project Art Space, Dublin, 2005.
Living & Loving #2 The Biography of Zoe Stillpass, Frieze Projcts, London, 2004.
A Voyage Towards South Pole and Round The World, NYC, 2004.
Corporate Mentality, Lukas & Sternberg, NYC, March 2003.
How to Be a Joshua Tree, NYC, May 2003.
Tank Talk, Institute of Contemporary Art, London, March 2003.
Daily News, Gavin Browns enterprise, NYC/Greengrassi, London, 11 Sept. 2002.
Living & Loving #1 The Biography of Donald Cappy, Cubitt, London/DCA, Dundee, 2002.
Man with Artificial Heart, NYC, 2002.
Disaster Guide, Cinema for The Unemployed, Momentum, Moss, 1998.
Bingo Blues, Transmission gallery, Glasgow, 1998.

External links

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