In her second solo exhibition in Barcelona, Aleksandra Mir returns to a theme that interests her, the moon and space, this time in combination with angels, saints, virgins and little else.
The moon, rockets, aviation, newspapers and global communication have been recurring themes in Aleksandra Mir’s work. The dialectic between the public and private spheres and the local and global spheres are the main axes that articulate her discourse. Heir to the conceptual tradition of the 60s, and especially to its most performative aspects, Mir’s best works are precisely those that rely on irony as a strategy that allows her to point out, from intelligence and distance, those aspects on which she wants to influence.
“The Dream and the Promise” is the artist’s second solo exhibition in Barcelona. Four years ago, her exhibition “Airport” took us into the world of aviation, from a small scale and manual work that translated into the meticulous drawing of logos, brands and models of airplanes from all the companies in the world. In her current exhibition, Mir is still in the clouds, this time with a series of works that answer a question that the artist asks herself: “If astronauts and angels share the sky, isn’t it time for them to meet?” And the exhibition is literally that, the meeting, through collage, of images of angels, saints and virgins, together with rockets, ships and other space artifacts.
This is not the first time that Aleksandra Mir has visited the moon. Her video “First Woman on the Moon” (1999) (which can be seen on her website: www.aleksandramir.info) combined the grandiloquence of speeches about the great step for humanity that the arrival of man on the moon represented, with images filmed on a Dutch beach, in which excavators created a lunar landscape populated by children, workers, curious people and, of course, the first woman on the moon. In this way, with humor and intelligence, Mir pointed from a feminism as critical as it was funny to the ambition for the space race and the fascination with technology.
A few years later, in 2005, “Gravity” and “Garden of Rockets” emphasized the absurdity of this ambition, building rockets from piles of everyday items among which were Ajax, Pringles or Hellmans, to name just a few.
The series of collages “The Dream and the Promise” probably refers to a much more complex reflection on the similarities between religion and technology, their codes and strategies and the degree of faith and occultism that both spheres share. Unfortunately, there is an imbalance between this reflection and its formalization. Regrettably, the intelligent irony of some of his earlier works has also given way to a formalism that falls into repetition and redundancy.
