Under the Skin, a Fruit: Short Film and Reading Program for The Book of Na
Co-organized with Rotations and Poetic Research Bureau, Los Angeles
Image credit: Na Mira, The Book of Na (interior spread), published by Wendy's Subway, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Wendy's Subway. Photo by Justin Lubliner.
About the event
Where:
2220 Arts + Archives
2220 Beverly Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90057
Time: 7:30pm PST
Cost: $15 ticket
Register here.
In a conjunct effort to celebrate The Book of Na, a book by LA-based artist Na Mira that engages border, obliteration, and dream, Rotations, Wendy’s Subway, and Poetic Research Bureau co-present a program of short films—selected together with Mira and visiting Melbourne poet Elena Gomez—by film artists whose work is informed by translation and dislocation, both materially and in real time. “Under the Skin, a Fruit” takes a line from Mira’s book to convey the shared dual-textures and ineffable doubles, stone fruits, in otherwise diverging lines of straining “plot”: Aboriginal histories take place in theatrical reencounter, Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva is read aloud and fragmented, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s earthwork shifts its container. Shorts will screen in two parts, accompanying readings from Mira and Gomez of their own work. Books will be for sale.
Short Film Program
Nguyen Trinh Thi, Landscape Series #1 (2013, 5 mins)
Na Mira, Untitled (Água Viva) (2013, 12 mins)
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Re Dis Appearing (1977, 2.5 mins)
Tracey Moffatt, Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1989, 17 mins)
Na Mira, Tesseract(test) (2020, 6 mins)
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Secret Spill (1974, 27 mins)
Marie Menken, Eye Music in Red Major (1961, 5.5 mins)
Full program notes here.
About the readers
Elena Gomez lives in Melbourne. She is the author of Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt (Puncher & Wattmann, 2020), Body of Work (Cordite Books, 2018), and several pamphlets and chapbooks.
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. Mira earned an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. She grew up between the US and East Asia and teaches outside.
About the co-organizers
The Poetic Research Bureau is a valise fiction and portable literary service in the public domain. It is a founding and resident member of 2220 Arts + Archives on Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles. The Bureau office hosts an extended community of autodidacts and guessworkers caught up in language inquiry and the unguarded arts. Just as it is: an archive and study by day, and by night, a non-professional public forum for presentations, readings, screenings and sundry intellectual exchanges.
Rotations is an occasional film series built in homage to the collaborative work of Veggie Cloud, an LA-based film and lecture series programmed by Courtney Stephens and Kate Wolf that brought documentary, animation, experimental, narrative, nonfiction and repertory film-work into feminist company. Based at 2220 Arts + Archives in Los Angeles, Rotations is focused on experimental nonfiction filmmaking by contemporary women practitioners and their collaborators. Programmed and hosted by Corina Copp, unless stated otherwise.
Special thanks
Special thanks to Nguyễn Trinh Thi, Electronic Arts Intermix, Estate of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, The Film-maker’s Cooperative, and Women Make Movies.