Aleksandra Mir (b. 1967), still from The Seduction of Galileo Galilei, 2011. Video, color, sound; 16:33 min.
Commissioned by Mercer Union, Toronto. Collection of the artist, Mary Boone Gallery, New York, and Galeria Joan Prats, Barcelona
Aleksandra Mir’s ‘Seduction of Galileo’ at the Whitney The Whitney Museum of American Art presents ‘The Seduction of Galileo Galilei’ (2011), Aleksandra Mir’s new video work that documents a Galileo-inspired gravitational experiment.
October 20, 2011 through February 19, 2012
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Source: Whitney Museum / theartwolf.com
“The Seduction of Galileo Galilei” (2011) is conceived as a dialogue between the artist and the seventeenth-century Italian scientist, mathematician, and philosopher Galileo Galilei (1564–1642). Galileo was a devout Catholic, but his investigations into astronomy and cosmology set him at odds with the Church and its doctrines, and he was tried by the Inquisition.
Aleksandra Mir performs a gravitational experiment inspired by Galileo’s apocryphal experiment of the law of falling bodies, in which two balls of the same material, but different masses, are dropped from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. According to the press note, “rather than dropping objects from the top of the Leaning Tower (…) Mir and her team attempted to build their own tower. In the gravel pit of a go-kart track in Stouffville, Ontario [Canada], Mir worked with crane operators and volunteers to stack tires as high as possible in a precarious, lilting spire“.
The exhibition also shows collages from Mir’s 2008–09 series “The Dream and the Promise”, a group of works related to the artist’s question, “If angels and astronauts share the same sky, isn’t it time they were introduced?”.
About the artist
Born in Lubin, Poland, in 1967, Aleksandra Mir studied in New York and currently lives and works in London, England. Solo exhibitions of her work include those at the New Museum’s Window on Broadway (1997), Swiss Institute, NYC (2003), Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2004), P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2004), Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth (2005), Kunsthaus, Zurich (2006), Saatchi Gallery, London (2008), and Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2009).
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