The Sky is not the Limit

By Jozefien Van Beek

Madonna and child flanked by ascending rockets, Jesus on the moon next to the American flag. These are collages by Aleksandra Mir. She humorously resolves the contradiction between science and religion.

The Swedish-American artist Aleksandra Mir has been fascinated by space travel since the beginning of her career. Museum M brings together a number of works in the small but fascinating exhibition The Space Age.

In her collage series The Dream and the Promise, she mixes Catholic iconography with images from NASA. For both angels and astronauts, the sky is the limit. Mir effortlessly blends the two, backed by a quote from Galileo Galilei, who stated that he had learned more from divine grace than from telescopes in his discoveries.

A collage shows three shepherd children. In a meadow with sheep, they sit devoutly on their knees, hands in prayer, as if a divine apparition had descended. But their idol is a rocket taking off with a lot of smoke. These beautiful and funny collages raise serious questions: Do we now worship science instead of God? Do we blindly follow researchers as we did religion in the past?

The same mix of humour and seriousness is presented in the 1999 video First Woman on the Moon, as a feminist response to Neil Armstrong. Following President Kennedy's call to send a man to the moon before the end of the 1960s, Mir begins her mission to get a woman on the moon before the end of the millennium. She stages a moon landing on a beach in the Netherlands. With the help of a team of volunteers, she recreates a lunar landscape, complete with craters and mountains of sand. This allows her to be the first woman to set foot on the moon and plant an American flag, with the legendary words “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” recorded on the tape. After the performance, we see children playing in the lunar landscape. It is this playful shield that gives Mir's work its great appeal.

This is also the case in the video Gravity, in which the artist builds a 22-meter-high rocket out of waste material. The film starts with the unmistakable words: “In the 20th century, men dreamed about spaceflight. Today, some women still do.”

Phallus, right?

But she does not deny that she needs the help of men to do this: To the tune of What a Feeling from the film Flashdance, she puts male technicians and engineers to work. Theatrical lighting, smoke machines, slow-motion images, and the eighties soundtrack create a heroic atmosphere. A man pulls on metal chains with his shirt off. Other men work with heavy machinery. Slightly slowed-down images show three men walking side by side through a gigantic warehouse, like astronauts on a mission. The men are reluctant to flex their super-masculine muscles. And Mir plays that male-female opposition to the full. I'm sure I'm not the only one who sees a phallic symbol in the slowly growing rocket.

The film's corny aesthetic and eighties soundtrack testify to a healthy dose of irony. The impressive rocket, constructed from steel, fiberglass, large tractor tires, and industrial fans, testifies – just like another film, in which she stacks large tires on top of each other until the tower collapses – to a thorough form of playfulness. In case you haven't understood yet: Aleksandra Mir is a woman after our own hearts.