A small step for a woman

By Sam Steverlynck

Forty years after it happened, the moon landing still captures the imagination, including that of artist Aleksandra Mir. At Museum M, she shows what NASA and Christian icons have in common.

A date that may not mean anything to you, but is nevertheless of historical importance: August 28, 1999. It is the day on which the first woman set foot on the moon. At least, in the video First Woman on the Moon by Aleksandra Mir, a Swedish-American artist with Polish roots.

In the video, you see a family, including a naked toddler, looking up in amazement at construction cranes dumping mountains of sand on the beach at Wijk aan Zee in the Netherlands: a fictional lunar landscape. In the background, you hear John F. Kennedy and commentators from 1969 describing Armstrong's moon landing while beachgoers stretch out and enjoy the sun. Once the cranes have finished, the artist plants the American flag in a mountain of sand – in the background, the legendary words echo: “That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Mir's video is a re-enactment of the moon landing, but with a playful, feminist twist. The video plays with the way that event was portrayed by the media – and, according to some, even staged.

First Woman on the Moon is one of Aleksandra Mir's best-known works, and therefore could not be left out of the small but coherent exhibition that M Leuven is now dedicating to her. All the works in the exhibition are about space travel.

“But I'm not a science fiction freak,” Mir says immediately, “I see space travel as a metaphor for life and our stubbornness in wanting to overcome the laws of gravity.”

Jesus on the Moon

This is particularly evident in The Seduction of Galileo Galilei. In this video, cranes are used to stack as many car tires as possible on top of each other. A mundane task that is given the air of a heroic deed by the bombastic soundtrack. The tires keep falling over, dooming the attempt to reach the heavens to failure. Or how the myths of Sisyphus and Icarus come together.

In addition to videos, Mir also displays an old print of the Saint Bernardus van Clairvaux praying to a rising rocket, a priest anointing another rocket, and Jesus on the Moon. The collages were not created with Photoshop, but rather using the old cut-and-paste technique that the Dadaists were so fond of. The works were covered with gold leaf, referring to icons.

”I found many old religious prints in Sicily,” says the artist. “I also visited the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.  And suddenly, I saw the strange similarity between the Christian iconography and those NASA images: Similar gazes toward the sky, gazes that express hope, fear, and admiration.” So, Mir brought both worlds together. “If Angels and astronauts share the same sky, isn’t it time they were introduced?”

The whole exhibition is interspersed with enlarged and manipulated front pages of newspapers, from the New York Times to Die Welt. They are characteristic of the way Mir exaggerates the contrast between reality and fiction. And, incidentally, pokes fun at the media.