Aleksandra Mir

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The pink painted Mandela Way T-34 Tank at this point covered with graffiti, March 2005.

Aleksandra Mir (b.1967, Lubin, Poland) is an artist based in New York City and Palermo, Sicily. She has Swedish citizenship.

Mir studied Communication and Media Studies at Schillerska/Gothenburg University (1986-1987) and attained her BFA in Media Arts (1992) from the School of Visual Arts in New York before completing her post graduate work in Cultural Anthropology from the New School for Social Research in New York in 1996.^[1]

Aleksandra Mir’s work is all about potential: minor acts of kindness, faith in possibility, and those coincidences that make an expanding world a little smaller. Challenging the boundaries of traditional art, Mir’s practice is often removed from the studio and integrated into society at large. From transforming a Dutch beach into a lunar surface and declaring herself the ‘first woman on the moon’, publishing biographies of ‘average’ people, staging a nine-to-five cinema (showing disaster films) for the unemployed, and recreating Stonehenge as a football pitch, Mir confronts ‘what if?’ with grassroots enthusiasm, authoring her own brand of magic within the everyday. In the gallery, Mir’s drawings and photographs exude this same ‘feel good’ ethic: using found and plebeian materials, her work engages history, politics and social ideologies to highlight aspects of personal negotiation with an increasingly globalised existence.

With her background in mass media and communications, media arts and social anthropology, Mir proposes art as a tool of social improvement. Developing complex collaborative relationships and encouraging public interaction, Mir approaches her practice as visionary experimentation to advocate new ideas of community. Through her thought-provoking humour, Mir offers both critical analysis of, and positive alternatives to, authoritative superstructures.