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I find myself doing fieldwork physically, in the tradition of anthropology. I literally go to the opposite end of the world, to the most exotic faraway places I possibly can, only to find the closest things to me when I get there.

Aleksandra Mir

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Aleksandra Mir
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: January 1
Artist
Drawer
Installation Artist
Painter
Printmaker
Visual Artist
Lüben
Ends
Closest
Find
Physically
Things
Literally
World
Possibly
Opposite
Fieldwork
Opposites
Faraway
Tradition
Anthropology
Places
Exotic

More quotes by Aleksandra Mir

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The Stonehenge proposal got a lot of interesting criticism. One of the best - or worst - said something like, Go home to Las Vegas. I think this project could possibly be realized at a very late part of my career. Right now, I don't have the authority, the budget, the credibility.
Aleksandra Mir
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I've gotten all kinds of reactions and it's been used in so many different ways.
Aleksandra Mir
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Of course, I'd welcome protest. Good criticism is hard to find.
Aleksandra Mir
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The space program caused so much future-thinking in culture. People who couldn't go to the Moon were building space-fantasy chairs and corsets and hairdos and anything that they could put their hands on.
Aleksandra Mir
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Hello is always presented as a linear narrative, a singular chain, sometimes in a loop. But the reality of making it is that connections are naturally sprawling all over the place, so I am free to edit any way I want.
Aleksandra Mir
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You pick people, and they pick you sometimes. It's especially great to connect with people you think you have nothing in common with.
Aleksandra Mir
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I follow these intimate connections of strangers and, surprise!, end up finding even myself in the work at some point.
Aleksandra Mir
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The moment right now, it's a tragically regressive time we live in, you know. We just grounded the Concorde. Where's the future? We've lost the future.
Aleksandra Mir
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Hello is pseudoscience. The only smart way to read it is not to believe in it, not to trust it, or to put yourself in it and imagine what's out there that you haven't been told or seen.
Aleksandra Mir
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I wanted to contribute to the landscape tradition in art. By now I guess we are comfortable with the thought that man has been everywhere or affected everything in nature.
Aleksandra Mir
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National parks, zoos, protected areas, polluted seas - using the whole world as a readymade, I thought about it as a stage set. To activate a stage set you need a drama, an actor to offset it.
Aleksandra Mir
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In 1989 I came to New York to go to the School of Visual Arts. Then, after two years, I switched over to the New School for Social Research and did cultural anthropology in the graduate school there.
Aleksandra Mir
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People get upset when Baghdad, the Cradle of Civilization is burning, or when the Buddhas in Afghanistan are falling. These are real concerns.
Aleksandra Mir
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I'm neither shy nor impressed by media and press. It's just another industry to me. My response to the criticism was, I work with a steel factory. Why can't I work with the media?
Aleksandra Mir
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I wouldn't say the anthropologists were making art, but they were definitely justifying their practices with very personal reasoning, passion, and they were also experimenting with form. There was a sense of trying to be as sincere as possible, whether you were investigating something far away from you or very close.
Aleksandra Mir
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I think the wildest wildlife you can find these days is in Chernobyl, where wolves are running around breeding quite well in the nuclear disaster zones.
Aleksandra Mir
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Really the moment I decided I wanted to do art seriously, I left art school. I wanted to be with people who were interested in the same things I was: popular culture.
Aleksandra Mir
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Seeing your work go into storage in an art museum is obviously a tragedy of any cultural product - which doesn't mean I am anti-institutional.
Aleksandra Mir
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The plane as an object has been a huge effort to make. It is a sculpture, a technological invention, a piece of aviation culture. But really, it only exists to be inserted into a variety of landscapes, to be a catalyst, to offset them.
Aleksandra Mir
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Naming Tokyo kicked off at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in June, and it's going to travel to various art institutions for years to come. Every time it is shown, I'm developing the research and involving more and more people in it. The final conclusion of the work would eventually be to put up street signs in Tokyo with my names on them.
Aleksandra Mir