Sacro & Profano, viaggio virtuale New York - Palermo
by Massimo di Forti

Il Messaggero, Rome, March 29, 2010.
 
English translation:

Heaven? It's a space station. Astronaut's helmets? They are the halos of saints. And visa versa. Chosen affinity or liasions dangereuses? With iconoclastic candor and effectively sismic frankness, Aleksandra Mir celebrates the marriage of Sacred - Profane, of progressive scientific discovery and venerable religious tradition in the exhibition Il Sogno e la Promessa (Magazzino d'arte moderna, via dei Prefetti 17, until 15 April, hours: Tues-Fri 11.00-15.00 - 16.00-20.00, Sat. 11.00 -13.00 - 16.00-20.00) curated by Valentina Bruschi. In twenty works on paper, the Polish artist brings together through the technique of collage delicate madonnas and Shuttle rockets, the flights of angels and journies to the moon, myths of modernity and millenial representations of the faith to rexamine the eclectic and paradoxical vocation that has connoted her research since the beginning.

Struck, even as a child, by images of the moon landing, Mir has dedicated many steps in her career to this obsession, from the 1999 performance First Woman on the Moon on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the flight of Apollo 11 (with the feminine moon landing on a Dutch beach), to the project Garden of Rockets, 2004, after a visit to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, to the Concorde Collages of 2006, to Gravity of 2006 (a gigantic missle realized in industrial detritus), to Plane Landing (an inflatable installation that replicated an airplane anchored to the ground by a line).

But Il Sogno e la Promessa is born as the result of a virtual journey from New York to Palermo, the cities where the artist has worked for the last two decades. There are small street markets of second-hand goods and old stores selling religious articles of Palermo that allow one to find antique icons, rare prints, souvenirs of religious ceremonies and to combine them, later, with images of the space empire producing a visual short-circuit of singular suggestion. After the performance at the last Biennale, in which she presented tens of thousands of postcards of Venice dedicated to the 'vie d'acqua' to all the world and to the literal theme of the water (as an example of the contradictions of globalization) in a whole, Aleksandra Mir confirms with her show in Rome (her first solo show in Italy) a remarkable talent in the art of surprising. Thanks also to her irony that allows it to fly high with incredible lightness.