Whitney Biennial 2022: 
Quiet as It’s Kept

Floor 6

Born 1982 in Lawrence, KS, on Kickapoo, Osage, Kansa, and Sioux lands
Lives in Los Angeles, CA, on Tongva, Gabrielino, Kizh, and Chumash lands

Na Mira’s time-based work uses autobiography and chance to address larger political histories. In a series she began making in 2018, Mira reflects on how mythology intersects with contemporary lived experiences of violence, colonialism and desire. Mira’s installation includes footage of her performing as a tiger in the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea, a ritual at the site of late artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s 1982 murder, as well as a radio broadcast that has been transmitting in her studio from an unknown source. Informed by spiritual practices and shamanism—Mira’s great-grandmother lived as a shaman during the period of the Japanese occupation of Korea when it was outlawed—the works are radically open-ended, guided by circumstance and direct embodied experience. Mira shoots with an infrared night camera to find evidence of what the eye normally cannot see. But the camera’s frequent glitches also suggest how much of what is present—histories, memories, spirits, the past—keeps its own time and place.