38 Artists & IllustratorsYou’ve worked across a variety of media, eschewing
traditional art practices. Do you think there is a unifying
theme to you work?
An exploratory approach and the fact that I am doing it all- although not at the same time, obviously. One thing has
organically led to another, ideas have looped back on
themselves over time, and experience and skill has
accumulated across media. A lot of the time I just adapt to
my resources and run with it. If I am on a beach in India, I
try to capture the energy of sleeping cows and wild dogs on
a small drawing pad. If I am offered a museum show with a
budget and massive wall space, I will want to fill that.
You were born in Poland, have American and Swedish
citizenship, and live in London. Does this feed into your
work? And how?
Some aspects I can trace to a particular location while
others just reflect a general sense of being in the world. I
have maintained a relationship with London since I was a
teenager in the 1980s, when we had to take a 24-hour
ferryboat from Gothenburg, where I grew up, to go to
Camden Market to buy shoes. I have travelled the world
extensively and lived for five years in Palermo, Sicily. My
schooling in Sweden in the early 1970s celebrated
socialism – as articulated in a productive group dynamic- above individual achievement. But my art education is
steeped in American art history and art’s complex
relationship to capital as I encountered it in New York at
the School of Visual Arts and in galleries in the 1990s.
Communist Poland itself barely features since I was only
five when my family was expelled following the 1969
political turmoil, but the experience of migration and the
cultural relativity that comes with it has probably formed
my brain more than anything else.
You studied communication, media art and cultural
anthropology. How do you feel they relate to your art?
And to art in general?
Art is often talked about as just making, yet a big, but
invisible, part of it is that of looking at the world and
drawing conclusions from it. My communications
background is a support structure for publishing and talks,
while, in the studio, we explore very basic mark-making
and, in that, we enter in dialogue with the Neanderthals. It
is essential for me to be aware of these often-anonymous
people and vernacular practices alongside celebrating the
great masters in art history.
Aleksandra Mir’s Space Tapestry is on display at Tate Liverpool
from 23 June to 15 October 2017. http://www.tate.org.uk;
http://www.aleksandramir.infoCan you tell us about the Space Tapestry project?
It is a 3x200m wall hanging that relates the history and
recent debates around space exploration and earth
observation. It is inspired by the 1,000-year-old Bayeux
Tapestry, which carries one of the first known depictions
of Halley’s Comet. The work has been three years in
production and involved 25 young artists in the process.
There is also a companion book that interviews 16 people
who work on space today – engineers, doctors, historians,
geologists, and biologists. Inside the book, a speech
bubble says, “Space seems to be everywhere.”What attracts you to the subject of space?
I saw Neil Armstrong land on the moon on TV when I was
two years old. My family lived behind the Iron Curtain, but
we shared the experience with everyone else in the world.
Few subjects are as unifying as space, which is actually all
about our lives on earth – for example, as rovers are
surveying Mars, its newly discovered geological features
are named after existing features on earth because we are
limited to what we already know or what we can perceive.
In 1999, I staged the art installation, called First Woman
on the Moon, on a beach in Holland. I sent Neil Armstrong
the video and he acknowledged it with good humour.Space Tapestry is a monochrome drawing. What draws
you to black and white? How do you use it as a medium?
I only use Sharpies, which were invented in 1964 so they’re
contemporary to my lifetime. In the 15 years that I have
explored this simple marker, I have yet to see the same
stroke repeated twice or get bored with it. I have even
achieved watercolour-like washes by violently destroying a
thick Sharpie and using the innards like a delicate brush.What are the challenges of working with a large team on
such a big scale? Is the choice practical, or is it intrinsic to
the work’s meaning?
I was a New York artist without a studio for more than a
decade when a friend lent me his large apartment and
empty floor space. I had all these big works in me, so I
simply needed extra hands to finish the projects before he
returned. In the process I discovered the diversity of the
strokes my friends helped me to produce was much more
interesting than the uniformity of my own hand. When I was
offered a solo show in a Manhattan blue-chip gallery, I
used it as studio for two months, recruited 17 assistants
(some off the street) and showed the work process live.
Space Tapestry is partially funded with grants that have a
strong diversity criteria and that widens my scope for the
work even more.10 MINUTES WITH...AS THE CONTEMPORARY ARTIST UNVEILS HER HUGE HAND-DRAWN WALL
HANGINGS EXPLORING SPACE TRAVEL AT TATE LIVERPOOL, SALLY HALES
ASKS WHAT INSPIRES HER BOLD AND GROUNDBREAKING WORK IN FELT PENALEKSANDRA MIR
ALEKSANDRA MIR, STUDIO, 2017 © ALEKSANDRA MIR38 10 Minutes with.indd 38 05/04/2017 17:16