Sacred Fictions

By Jesús Martínez Clàra

The Dream and the Promise is the title of Aleksandra Mir's exhibition at Joan Prats. During her previous stint at the gallery, she offered us various indications of travel with her installation Aeropuerto (2005), a work that culminated in her sculpture Plane Landing (2008), a twenty-meter inflatable airplane that she landed and photographed deflated and limp in various European cities. There is no doubt that Aleksandra likes to travel: born in Poland, she has been a Swedish and American citizen and currently lives in Palermo. Her creative hyperactivity has led her to work on more than a hundred very diverse and complex projects over the last fifteen years. In all of them, there is a strong concern for social and gender issues, but what she likes most is living on the border between reality and fiction, between dreams and promises.

In her celebrated Gravity (2006), she began to prepare her journey into the universe with a new fiction, honoring the classical idea that what we cannot possess is given to us by art. She spent five months building a twenty-meter rocket out of industrial waste, a contraption that he has never stopped cultivating through a wide variety of media: performances, videos, texts, interviews, photography, books, black-and-white drawings, and, as in the current exhibition, collage.

This concern for space exploration has led her to create the series she is exhibiting today under the title Dreams and Promise. She began this series in 2008, when she pointed the bow of her desire toward the starry sky and outer space with Aim at the Stars, Declaration for Space, and Made in Heaven, collages of various dimensions mounted with gold leaf frames. Her fiction in these series is to mix the promises made to believers about life in the hereafter with all kinds of artifacts from Earth created by humans in the here and now. Let's say she wants to demonstrate, in a Heideggerian way, the beneficial encounter between metaphysics and physics. To do this, he uses images of space travel as if it were a search for cosmological proof of God's existence. She attempts to reconcile humans' dreams of conquering outer space with the religious promises of the Christian faith, bringing together the achievements of scientific progress on earth with the celestial and authentic inhabitants of outer space: angels, virgins, and even the Sacred Heart of Jesus himself.

Viewers are likely to be left with a sense of doubt about the degree of conviction or irony conveyed by Aleksandra's fictions. But it is worth noting that irony is nothing more than a strategy of human knowledge that protects us from everything that frightens us. Aleksandra's fictions, her dreams and promises, address these fascinating mysteries.