At a glance
Infrared heat, radio signals and ghostly projections turn perception itself into unstable territory — where memory, technology and state power collide.
Why go
You'll see
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Don't miss
Artlovers Tip
Don’t try to “fix” the image in your mind. When something becomes blurred, fragmented or difficult to identify, that instability is part of the work.
This is not one of MoMA’s blockbuster retrospectives, but it is a strong artist-to-know / new-media pick.
Come for the visual immersion, but stay for the bigger idea — seeing is never as neutral as it feels.
Artlovers relevance
Inside the exhibition
Meet the artist
Key Movements
Description
NO SMOKING is conceived specifically for MoMA’s Kravis Studio. To create it, Na Mira records footage at locations carrying both personal and historical significance, allowing chance, memory and desire to interfere with documentary certainty. Those images are then transformed into phantasmagoric projections that make the act of seeing itself feel unreliable.
Her work draws simultaneously on Korean shamanic ritual and experimental film history, especially structural filmmaking, while using contemporary technologies such as infrared heat, radio transmission and holography. The result resists easy categories: it can feel like film, sculpture, performance and installation at once, while belonging completely to none of them.
A central question is the relationship between body and state. Military landscapes, displaced histories and unstable signals become ways to ask who controls visibility, which images are trusted and what escapes official systems of representation. Mira’s interest is often precisely in what cannot be seen clearly.
Na Mira (b. 1982) is a Korean American interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans moving image, performance, installation and experimental technologies. Her work repeatedly explores diaspora, language, historical memory and the political implications of image-making.
Na Mira NO SMOKING
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