reverance, 2024 — COLDANDWETFROMTHEEARTH

Mira is an abolitionist artist, educator, researcher, and organizer based in Chicago. Their work explores global histories of resistance with a focus on the role state violence, censorship, and manufactured scarcity have had on our collective ability to imagine other realities and ways of life. Through the pursuit of alternative modes of documentation and cultural preservation, they seek forms and means of memory work that do not rely on imperial and colonial tools of capture and subjugation and instead rehearse collective liberation.

You can find more of their work on Instagram @coldandwetfromtheearth.

They are currently the General Manager at abolitionist gallery and community space Walls Turned Sideways based in East Garfield.

Mira holds a Master of Art’s in Art Education from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from the University of Michigan where they studied Ethnic Studies, Art History, and Ceramics.

They have worked with the following organizations: Walls Turned Sideways, The Digs, Patric McCoy Legacy Project/Diasporal Rhythms, Groundcover News, Michigan Student Power Alliance, and NON:Opera Arts & Humanities.

IMAGE ARCHIVE —

Reverence, August 2024
Laser engraved scrap fabric

my country kills people August 2-24, 2024 SPACE.01

Through reverence, through invocation … Is it possible for us to discover a balm in the knotting of past, present, and future? By honoring those violated by the knife of the archive, may we exceed the limits of the academy’s narrow conception of knowledge and create our own reservoirs of knowledge? May we produce our own body of knowledge, and may this body with your finger, my elbows, and your grandmother’s tongue transcend the false scarcity and limitation imposed by capitalism, neoliberalism, and the violent legacies of imperialism, colonialism, and state violence persistent within the institution?

Is there not enough meat on these bones to feed us all? Or must we reproduce the violence of the archive …

Bibliography:

Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. Dictee. Second edition. Berkeley, California ; University of California Press, 2001.

Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe : A Journal of Criticism, vol. 12, no. 2, 2008, pp. 1–14, https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1.

Lewallen, Constance., Rinder, Lawrence., & Trinh, T. M.-H. (Thi M.-H. (2001). The dream of the audience : Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982). University of California Berkeley Art Museum.

Trinh, T. Minh-Ha (Thi Minh-Ha), Thị Hiển Trần, Lai Khien, Kim Nhuy Ngo, Thi Bich Yen Tran, Lan Trinh, and Thu Vân. Mai. Surname Viêt, given Name Nam. United States: [Publisher not identified], 1989.

Trinh, T. Minh-Ha (Thi Minh-Ha). Framer Framed. New York: Routledge, 1992.