Aleksandra mir biography

Aleksandra Mir (born 1967) is a Swedish-American contemporary artist known for her large scale collaborative projects and for her anthropological methods, involving rigorous archival research, oral history and field work. Her work deals with travel, time, placehood, language, gender, identity, locality, nationality, globality, mobility, connectivity, performativity, representation, transition, translation and transgression.

She has exhibited at Kunsthaus Zurich (2006), Tate Modern, London (2014), Tate Liverpool (2017), Modern Art Oxford (2017), Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2009), M – Museum Leuven (2013), Whitney Museum of American Art (2014), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2007), MoMA, New York City (2012), YUZ Museum, Shanghai (2018), Whitney Biennial (2004), Biennale of Sydney (2002), Biennale di Venezia (2009), Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre (2015), Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2020), and Inhotim, Belo Horizonte (2021).

Aleksandra Mir was born in Lubin, Poland, and has lived and worked in Gothenburg, New York and Sicily. Her playful, diverse practice encompasses every imaginable medium: from drawing, sculpture and video to performance, installation and happening. She has published biographies of ‘ordinary’ people, established a “Church” based around Sharpie markers, set up a cinema showing disaster films to the unemployed, and in an elaborate and much-publicised perfomance on a Dutch beach, declared herself First Woman on the Moon. This year she features in the 53rd Venice Biennale, representing Russia as well as distributing 1,000,000 postcards, all depicting waterscapes from around the world and bearing the legend Venezia. Her most recent project saw her working with Edinburgh’s Collective gallery, who together published The How Not to Cook Book, an extensive compendium of culinary advice drawn from all over the world, for the Edinburgh Art Festival this summer. As the publication prepares to leave Collective’s gallery space, destined for bookshops across Edinburgh, I ask