Sacred & Profane

By Massimo di Forti

Paradise? It's a space center. Astronauts' helmets? They're saints' halos. And vice versa. Elective affinities or liaisons dangereuses? With iconoclastic candor and unsettling seismic effects, Aleksandra Mir celebrates the marriage of the Sacred and the Profane, of bold scientific progress and venerable religious traditions in the exhibition The Dream and The Promise (Magazzino, Via dei Prefetti 17, until April 15), curated by Valentina Bruschi. In twenty works on paper, the Polish artist uses collage to bring together delicate Madonnas and space shuttles, angelic flights and lunar landscapes, myths of modernity and millennial representations of faith, confirming the eclectic and paradoxical vocation that has characterized her work since the beginning.

Struck as a child by images of the moon landing, Mir has linked many stages of her artistic career to this obsession, from her 1999 performance First Woman on the Moon on the thirtieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission (with a female moon landing on a Dutch beach), to the 2004 project Garden of Rockets after a visit to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, to the 2006 Concorde collages and Gravity, also from 2006 (a giant rocket built from industrial scrap), to Plane Landing (an inflatable installation replicating an airliner anchored to the ground).

But The Dream and The Promise was born as the result of a journey from New York to Palermo, the cities where the artist has worked over the last two decades. It was the flea markets and old religious shops of Palermo that allowed her to find antique holy cards, rare prints, and souvenirs of religious ceremonies, which she then combined with images of space exploration to produce a visually striking and uniquely evocative short circuit. After her performance at the last Biennale, where she presented a million fake postcards of Venice dedicated to the waterways of the world and the highly topical theme of water (as an example of the contradictions of globalization) as a whole, Aleksandra Mir reconfirms with her exhibition in Rome (her first solo show in Italy) her surprising talent for the art of astonishing. This is also thanks to her wealth of irony, which allows her to fly high with incredible lightness.