Book Launch: The Book of Na by Na Mira
Na Mira, The Book of Na (interior spread), 2022. Photo by Justin Lubliner.
About the event
Join us in celebrating the publication of The Book of Na by Na Mira, featuring readings and performances by Emmy Catedral, Jesse Chun, Shiv Kotecha, Grace Kredell, Lara Mimosa Montes, Na Mira, Litia Perta, and more!
This event is free and open to the public and will take place at Wendy's Subway. Wearing a mask is encouraged.
About the book
In The Book of Na, translation acts at the edge of perception. Tracing across projects in film, video, and performance, Na Mira reflects on the violent fragmentation of bodies while refusing the containment of geographic and corporeal borders. In 1977, a name is cut at an immigration office. This gap turns into an intergenerational score for becoming heat, hexagram, hologram. Using oracular and glitching technologies, Mira witnesses what escapes data: doppelgängers, dreams, endangered tigers, tesseracts, A. Turiyasangitananda Coltrane's stairs, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in a theater, Korean shamanism, frozen ligaments, wildfires, borderlands, subatomic particles, and pink. Syncing to a clock with neither face nor hands, Mira’s hauntological permutations in time, death, and relation travel outside the symbolic order and draw energy from the void.
About the readers
Emmy Catedral is a Butuan-born artist, writer, and educator based in New York City. A co-librarian of the Pilipinx American Library, Emmy also curates the bookstore and Public Programs at the newly opened Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA).
Jesse Chun is an artist based in New York. Chun's work has been exhibited internationally at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (Canada); the Nam June Paik Art Center (South Korea); SculptureCenter, New York and the Drawing Center, NY (United States), among others. Select public collections include the Museum of Modern Art Library (NY), and Kadist (FR).
Shiv Kotecha is the author of The Switch (Wonder, 2018) and EXTRIGUE (Make Now, 2015). His criticism appears in publications like 4Columns, BOMB, frieze, and The Nation. With the artist Pradeep Dalal, he edits a pamphlet series of long-format art writing called Cookie Jar.
Grace Kredell directs programming for the Golden Dome School, a community dedicated to mysticism and the arts. She is a psychic practitioner and has been a resident of The Future and Summer Forum for Inquiry + Exchange. Kredell has given public talks and performed public rituals at The Witch Institute at Queen’s University, XXI Space, New Gallery, Hunter College, The Picture Room, School for Poetic Computation, Art in Odd Places, Craft Contemporary, and Pomona College. Recently, she completed an MA in Womxn’s History at Sarah Lawrence College, where she wrote about nineteenth-century female fortune tellers, clairvoyants, and astrologers in the golden age of Spiritualism.
Lara Mimosa Montes is a writer, editor, and teaching artist whose practice spans the fields of alternative publishing and experimental writing. Her most recent book THRESHOLES is now available from Coffee House Press. To learn more about her work and see what she's currently reading visit laramimosa.info
Na Mira’s autobody rites have been presented at sites including Seoul Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art; Participant Inc., New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She earned an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. She grew up between the US and East Asia and teaches outside.
Litia Perta is a writer, a teacher, and a parent who works to unsettle the violent paradigms that sold us separation and called it truth. She uses intuitive critical practice and reconnecting to body (earth) to support other writers, artists, and caregivers in the rebellious practice of nourishing their creative joy. Most recently, she is the writer of Long Play, a book of poetic essays that is making its way into the world. She lives on settled land on an island in the Saalish Sea.