Two exhibitions
dal 26/11/2013 al 22/3/2014
Segnalato da
26/11/2013
Two exhibitions
M - Museum, Leuven
'The Space Age' is an exhibition by Aleksandra Mir concentrating on the work about space exploration the artist has developed over the past 15 years. She considers global events in popular culture such as the moon landing. Gerard Herman's everyday life and environment form the point of departure of his graphic work, installations, performances, audio compositions, animated films and radio broadcasts.
Aleksandra Mir
The Space Age
November 28, 2013 - February 16, 2014
'The Space Age' is an exhibition by Aleksandra Mir in M - Museum Leuven concentrating on the work about space exploration the artist has developed over the past 15 years. Based on a number of historical events, such as the discovery of the laws of physics, the early experimental spaceship launches, and the first successful moon landing.
Space Travel
Space travel has been a recurring theme in Mir’s work since the very beginning of her career. She considers global events in popular culture such as the moon landing, the development of a mass aviation culture and the progress of various space programmes to have a great influence on how we live and perceive ourselves in the world. Mir’s fictional narratives are both a celebration of these events and a questioning of their historical and social trajectories.
Religion and Science
Mir’s films are autonomous epilogues to her public performances where each refers to an ambitious historical narrative. In her later film The Seduction of Galileo Galilei (2011) and in the series of collages The Dream and The Promise (2008-9), she underscores particular similarities between religion and science. Inspired by a quote by 16th century Italian scientist and philosopher Galileo Galilei, who conducted unprecedented scientific discoveries in physics, mathematics and astronomy, but who also declared ‘to have learned more through divine grace than through telescopes’ (Galileo Galilei, Letters).
This exhibition in M – Museum Leuven brings together for the very first time Mir’s early films First Woman on the Moon (1999), Gravity (2006) and The Seduction of Galileo Galilei (2011) with the series of collages The Dream and the Promise (2008-09) and the more recent work Satellite Crashes down in Porto Alegre, Brazil (2013).
- One of Aleksandra Mir’s best-known works is First Woman on the Moon (1999). The film documents a staged event recreating a moon landscape and featuring a ‘landing’ ceremony on the beach in the Netherlands. Following President Kennedy’s call to put a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s, Mir started her mission to get a woman to the moon before the end of the millennium. Despite her limited means, she succesfully declared herself the first woman on the moon thirty years after the first moon landing. Assisted in this feat by the local population, dozens of volunteers and obliging sponsors, she was thus able to infiltrate the male-dominated history of space travel.
http://www.aleksandramir.info/videos/first-woman-on-the-moon
- In 2006, Mir launched the sequel to her 1999 moon landing and started a new ambitious space travel project, the construction of a 22-metre-high rocket. With the help of technicians and engineers the rocket was built from waste materials such as steel, fibreglass, tractor tyres, industrial fans, etc. To complete the whole composition, Mir adopted theatrical lighting and smoke machines evoking the NASA hangar at the Kennedy Space Centre. Mir documented the proceedings in her film Gravity.
http://www.aleksandramir.info/videos/gravity
- For The Seduction of Galileo Galilei (2011), Mir was inspired by the story of Galileo throwing weights with different mass from the Tower of Pisa in order to provide evidence for ‘the law of falling bodies’. The video documents Mir’s own battle with gravity as together with her crew and several professional crane operators they stack car tyres as high as possible until the tower eventually tips over to a fall and they start over again. These repeated attempts were undertaken over the course of one day.
http://www.aleksandramir.info/videos/the-seduction-of-galileo-galilei
- The Dream and the Promise (2008-2009): Mir presents a series of collages that connect religious iconography with images of space travel. Science and religion are often juxtaposed as two contradictory extremes. However, Galileo Galilei, the father of modern science, was also a devout Catholic and thus his life work is evidence of the convergence between the two. In order to illustrate the relationship between science and faith, Mir reverts to images she found in two very different locations: the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida and the Baroque churches of Sicily. She discovered that the iconography used by NASA and the Catholic Church has a lot in common.
The exhibition in M - Museum Leuven is accompanied by a fully illustrated poster book The Space Age.
The Swedish-American artist Aleksandra Mir was born in 1967 in Lubin, Poland. She currently lives in London but travels continuously with her work.
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Gerard Herman
Anger Ram Herd
From November 28 until March 23, 2014 M presents the first solo museum exhibition of Belgian artist Gerard Herman.
The work of Gerard Herman (1989, Ghent) is difficult to pigeonhole in a single genre or medium. Generally speaking, his everyday life and environment form the point of departure of his graphic work, installations, performances, audio compositions, animated films and radio broadcasts. By using his mother tongue and an indispensable measure of humour, his works appear to offer bite-sized responses to human experiences like failure and success. And yet, they are not definitive: each work is merely an impulse that may generate further meanings.
The title ‘Anger Ram Herd’ is an anagram of Gerard Herman’s name and in that sense accords with his fascination for language and wordplay. Besides texts, the artist also associates music with his own visual language, giving his work a poetic and multi-layered quality. For ‘Anger Ram Herd’, Gerard Herman created almost exclusively new work, tailored to the exhibition rooms at M. The exhibition thus opens a new chapter in an artistic practice that constantly reinvents itself.
Gerard Herman lives and works in Antwerp. In early November 2013, he took part in the three-day Playground Festival in Leuven where he presented his performance Winterreise. His work has also been shown in the solo exhibitions Nioue Ouerquen in Rossicontemporary gallery – Brussels (2013) and Het is weer tijd voor de polonaise in Maes & Matthys Gallery – Antwerp (2011).
He has also taken part in group exhibitions, such as I Fail Good in Beursschouwburg – Brussels (2012) and Unscene II in Wiels – Brussels (2012).
Image: Aleksandra Mir, First Woman on the Moon, Wijk aan Zee (NL), 1999
Press contact:
Annik Altruy + 32 16272938 annik.altruy@leuven.be
Opening: Wednesday November 27, 8pm
M – Museum Leuven
L. Vanderkelenstraat 28 3000 Leuven Belgium
Open
Monday, Tuesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday: 11:00 > 18:00
Thursday: 11:00 > 22:00
Wednesday: open during the school holidays (with the exception of July, August and December)
Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday: open from 9:00 for educational groups with a reservation
Admission
Individuals € 9
Consessions (1) € 7
-26 years € 5
13-18 years € 3
13 years and ICOM, IKT, art schools (2), art college (3) free