Artist Talk

Often combining analog video and experimental film transfers with sculptural elements and ambient radio sound, Na Mira’s work is attuned to the signals that arrive from the past into the present, and from the spiritual into the technological. What if what seems to have departed hasn’t fully disappeared? What if it remains still latent, waiting to be picked up like a radio frequency?

In her talk, Mira reflects on her work and artistic research through the lens of the theater lobby—a space that traditionally marks the passage from the everyday into the fictive. She considers how an artistic medium becomes a site that either absorbs or negates the foreign material she introduces—as if summoning energies from afar.

For staging grounds, Mira’s Autoasphyxiation is on view in EMPAC’s theater lobby.

With shots tracking the Dragon Hill military garrison in Seoul, Autoasphyxiation fixates on the border surrounding this zone, which has been controlled by various state forces since its construction by the Japanese Imperial Army in 1906. Mira stages this landscape as a live transmission, where this boundary wavers between presence and disappearance, signal and silence.