In 1999 on a Dutch beach, Aleksandra Mir constructed a lunar landscape out of sand, erected an American flag on the highest peak, and declared herself “The First Woman on the Moon.” The year before, in Norway, Mir teamed up with a local unemployment agency and showed a series of Hollywood disaster films, running them only during work hours, for the city’s unemployed. In Denmark in 1996, she set up twenty-six speakers in a town square and broadcast the sound of men whistling as women walked by. Earlier this year, she proposed the building of an exact-scale replica of Stonehenge, only a few miles from the original site. Unlike the first, “Stonehenge II” would offer full access to visitors—down to a “Stonehenge” soccer team that would use the rocks as goalposts.

Certainly the aforementioned productions are not spun from the mind of an artist particularly comfortable working within the safe confines of traditional art practices. In fact, Aleksandra Mir could be accused of not practicing safe art at all. While much of the New York art community is still hermetically limited to the boundaries of white gallery walls, this thirty-six-year old Polish-born Swedish citizen (who currently lives in Manhattan) seems to go out of her way to destroy the convention that good art is made by an artist in one space and delivered to a quiet viewing public in another. Mir’s work is disruptive and ever-evolving; audience reactions are often just as crucial as the initial piece itself. And, best of all, her work refuses to stick to national borders, observe the codes, follow the peace, comb its hair, and keep to itself.

Mir operates in the school of anthropology. She researches like a social scientist and travels the planet doing fieldwork for a single production. Probably her most famous series of works, “Hello,” has thus far been made seven times, and each of them could be considered ongoing. “Hello” is a photographic daisy chain that links people of all walks of life and times and circumstances together, shot-by-shot. In one photo we get Elizabeth Taylor and John Warner. In the next, John Warner and George W. Bush. Then George W. Bush–Bush Senior, Bush Senior–Björn Borg, until eventually a snowman is linked to the Duke of Windsor to Ursula Andress to an anonymous child vacationing in Switzerland to possibly you yourself. (Look out for Mir’s “Hello” at this spring’s Whitney Biennial where she will link founder Gloria Vanderbult Whitney to pop star Whitney Houston.)

In another work, Mir has made it her role to give names to all the streets in Tokyo, collecting lists from friends and colleagues, and applying them to a Tokyo map. The project will only be...