Aleksandra Mir (born 1967) is a Swedish-American

contemporary art Contemporary art is the art of today, produced in the second half of the 20th century or in the 21st century. Contemporary artists work in a globally influenced, culturally diverse, and technologically advancing world. Their art is a dynamic co ...

ist known for her collaborative installations and projects. Her work deals with travel, time, placehood, language, gender, identity, locality, nationality, globality, mobility, connectivity, performativity, representation, transition, translation and transgression. She is known for her large scale collaborative projects and for her anthropological methods, involving rigorous archival research, oral history and field work. She has exhibited at Kunsthaus Zurich (2006), Tate Modern, London (2014), Tate Liverpool (2017), Modern Art Oxford (2017), Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2009), M – Museum Leuven (2013), Whitney Museum of American Art (2014), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2007), MoMA, New York City (2012), YUZ Museum, Shanghai (2018), Whitney Biennial (2004), Biennale of Sydney (2002), Biennale di Venezia (2009), and Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre (2015), Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2020).

Personal life

Mir was born in

Lubin Lubin (; german: Lüben, szl, Lubin) is a city in Lower Silesian Voivodeship in south-western Poland. It is the administrative seat of Lubin County, and also of the rural district called Gmina Lubin, although it is not part of the territory o ...

, Poland in 1967. Her Polish citizenship was revoked during the

1968 Polish political crisis The Polish 1968 political crisis, also known in Poland as March 1968, Students' March, or March events ( pl, Marzec 1968; studencki Marzec; wydarzenia marcowe), was a series of major student, intellectual and other protests against the ruling Pol ...

. She holds dual Swedish-American citizenship. She grew up in Sweden, where she studied at the

University of Gothenburg The University of Gothenburg ( sv, Göteborgs universitet) is a university in Sweden's second largest city, Gothenburg. Founded in 1891, the university is the third-oldest of the current Swedish universities and with 37,000 students and 6000 st ...

. She moved to the United States in 1989 to attend the

School of Visual Arts The School of Visual Arts New York City (SVA NYC) is a private for-profit art school in New York City. It was founded in 1947 and is a member of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design. History This school was started by ...

in New York and studied cultural anthropology at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. Mir lived in Palermo, Sicily from 2005 to 2010. She lives in London.

Work

''The How Not to Cookbook'', (Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, 2009 and Rizzoli, NYC 2010) collected advice from 1,000 home cooks from around the world who explained what ''not'' to do in the kitchen. In ''First Woman on the Moon'' (1999), Mir converted a Dutch beach into a moonscape for one day with the help of bulldozers. The video of this event has been presented at multiple venues, at the

International Space University The International Space University (ISU) is dedicated to the discovery, research, and development of outer space and its applications for peaceful purposes, through international and multidisciplinary education and research programs. ISU was f ...

, Strasbourg and at the UK Space Conference, Liverpool, 2015. In 2002, Mir painted the

Mandela Way T-34 Tank The Mandela Way T-34 Tank, nicknamed Stompie, is a decommissioned Soviet-built T-34-85 medium tank, which used to be located on the corner of Mandela Way and Page's Walk in Bermondsey, London, England. The tank was regularly repainted in a wide ...

pink with Cubitt Artists. 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 created a series of large scale murals using only Sharpie marker pens. In ''Triumph'' she collected 2529 trophies from the general public of Sicily and exhibited them all in one installation at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2009). It traveled to the

South London Gallery The South London Gallery, founded 1891, is a public-funded gallery of contemporary art in Camberwell, London. Until 1992, it was known as the South London Art Gallery, and nowadays the acronym SLG is often used. Margot Heller became its direc ...

for the London Olympics in 2012. Mir has created ''Plane Landing'', a real size helium inflatable 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". The work further challenges the notion of time and space; with regard to the planes permanent state of landing - is its location a hangar or a permanent museum.

References

External links

Sculpture Unlimited, Institute for the Fine Arts and Cultural Studies, Linz, Austria

Tara Expeditions, Antarctica

Aleksandra Mir at Drawing Room, London

Aleksandra Mir at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Aleksandra Mir at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Aleksandra Mir at South London Gallery
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mir, Aleksandra 1967 births Living people 20th-century American women artists 21st-century American women artists 20th-century Swedish women artists 20th-century Swedish artists 21st-century Swedish women artists 21st-century Swedish artists American contemporary artists Swedish contemporary artists The New School alumni Swedish people of Polish descent Polish women artists Bâloise Prize winners