Hotel is the latest work in a series (Dust, 2022–ongoing) inspired by Na Mira’s long-standing interest in the artist and writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982), in which she pays tribute to and communicates with her. Hotel stages an encounter for the viewer in a space that includes transistor radios—playing a recording of a Korean radio station that began broadcasting into Mira’s Los Angeles studio in 2020—mirrors, and two black-and-white films projected on perpendicular walls, a section of which is painted red.
Drawing on Mira’s lineage in Korean Shamanic traditions, portions of the films are reflected in two mirrors, creating an extension and fragmentation of space and time. This approach expands traditional one-point perspective, used to create the illusion of three-dimensional space on a flat picture plane, into multiple vanishing points, as is used in traditional East Asian landscape painting, and four-dimensional space (three-dimensional space plus time). The 16mm films include words that Mira exchanged in trance states with Cha, projected in quick succession, as well as a scene in which a performer runs around the circumference of the inscrutable Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, tracing its winding interior curves. These fragments work with the radio transmissions to imbue technology with a sense of otherworldliness. In an environment intended to heighten the viewer’s physical awareness, Mira channels inversions, loops, refractions, and glitches to draw out what she terms “the animism of technology” and activate a portal to speak with and through the past.
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About Contemporary Film, Video, and Sound
From August 2024 to September 2025, the Lane West Gallery will be dedicated to a rotating selection of contemporary film, video, and sound works. Each of the featured artists grapples with the body’s relationship to technology.
Contemporary Film, Video, and Sound is curated by Katja Rivera, Curator of Contemporary Art. Support is generously provided by the Catharine and Bart Holaday Endowment for Interactive Art.
Top image: Installation view of Hotel at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2023. Courtesy the artist and Paul Soto, Los Angeles.