Drawing on ritual practices of Korean shamanism and on media histories rooted in structural filmmaking, Na Mira explores language, memory, and image-making systems. Mira’s sculptural and site-responsive installations are made with radio frequencies, infrared heat, and holography, which ground the artist’s reflections on the borders of body and state. “I work with what is hard to see,” the artist has noted. “My research reckons with military landscapes, diasporic time and thresholds of consciousness. Operating through negation—not film, not video, not performance, not text—tuning into the materiality of the signal and the animism of transmission.”
For Mira’s first solo museum exhibition in New York, the artist is developing a newly commissioned media installation. To produce this new work, Mira records footage at sites of personal and historical significance through a creative process that embraces chance and desire, resulting in phantasmagoric projections presented across the Kravis Studio. Mira’s approach aims to rupture the fidelity of the image on which soft power, propaganda, and other forms of statecraft often rely. NO SMOKING engages spaces at the edges of perception where optics shatter, multiply, and disappear in plain sight.
Organized by Sophie Cavoulacos, Curator, Department of Film, with Abby Hermosilla, Curatorial Associate, Department of Curatorial Affairs and Department of Media and Performance.
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)