Under the Skin, a Fruit: Short Film + Reading Program for The Book of Na with Na Mira + Elena Gomez
Na Mira, The Book of Na (interior spread) published by Wendy’s Subway, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Wendy's Subway, 2022. Photo by Justin Lubliner.
Under the Skin, a Fruit:
Short Film + Reading Program
for The Book of Na
with Na Mira + Elena Gomez
accompanied by Nguyễn Trinh Thi, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Tracey Moffatt, & Marie Menken
Co-organized by Rotations, Wendy’s Subway, and the Poetic Research Bureau
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November 17, 2022
7:30pm
$15
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In a conjunct effort to celebrate The Book of Na, a 240-page publication by LA-based artist Na Mira that engages border, obliteration, and dream, Rotations, Wendy’s Subway (Brooklyn), 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.
Special thanks to Nguyễn Trinh Thi, Electronic Arts Intermix, Estate of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, The Film-maker’s Cooperative, and Women Make Movies. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: courtesy Collection of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation. Copyright: Regents of the University of California. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.
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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)
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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.
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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.
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ABOUT THE CO-ORGANIZERS
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.
Wendy’s Subway is a reading room, writing space, and independent publisher in Bushwick, Brooklyn, dedicated to supporting emerging artists and writers in making experimental, urgent work, and creating alternative modes for learning and thinking in community. More at wendyssubway.com.