Their work against the archive has led to a practice of counter surveillance that examines the politics of place, sight, and scarcity, in which found material, physical and otherwise, is used as a means of imagining abundance in the face of widespread dispossession. Through the pursuit of alternative modes of documentation and cultural preservation in collaboration marginalized and oppressed communities, 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. Their work is highly informed by the resilience of organizing movements for abolition, self-determination, and liberation in Chicago, SE Michigan, and the broader Midwest.
Mira is currently pursuing their Master of Art’s in Art Education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has a BA from the University of Michigan where they studied Ethnic Studies, Art History, and Ceramics.
They currently work with the following organizations: Groundcover News, the Patric McCoy Legacy Project, and Walls Turned Sideways.
Laser engraved acrylic
There is No Disappearing Act
November 3 - November 11, 2024 Sometimes Space
- It is unclear how many data centers there are in the city of Chicago. Some sources note 111, others note 136. Ubiquitous Archives is a contemplation on the rapidly accelerating accumulation of data and exploitation of resources that form the physical structures that sustain what Andy Clarno and others refer to as a “web of imperial policing. This web is fulfilled by the sharing of information, in the form of data, between different state, federal, and global agencies, from the Chicago Police Department to the FBI and the Israeli Defense Force, facilitated in part by data center and colocation providers. This piece draws on the loose formation of a data center, in which mass quantities of cloud data are housed in rows filling centers as large as 10.7 million square feet (Telecom, Inner Mongolia) and the most common data rack 42U houses 42 servers (the number of stacks before you), to evoke the innate physicality of data.
Enacting a practice of countersurveillance, Ubiquitous Archives focuses on two of the largest global data center and colocation providers with multiple locations in Chicago: Digital Realty and Equinix (who recently accepted a multi-million dollar contract from the Department of Homeland Security).
November 2024
- Eight pairs of glasses courtesy of the artist’s father, Victor Chao or Fu-Kuo Chao, who emigrated from Taiwan to the United States in 1985.
Soft book, made from scrap laser-engraved scrap fabric.
- This piece began in November 2023 and has transformed continually over the last 300 days, representative of a sustained experience of meaning-seeking amidst loss and violence. Through the mechanized process of burning text onto found fabric via a laser cutter, scholarly legibility becomes tenuous and material loss inevitable. Invoking the medium of the archive, and its fallibility, as we remember reflects on epistemicide and scholasticide and material violence and our responsibility to the stewardship of resistance and revolutionary thought as a collective generational inheritance.
October - December 2024 SITE Gallery
Curator and contributing artist
- School as a Function of Empire assembles student and alumni work to create space for institutional critique and speculation, document student activism, and reflect on SAIC and AIC’s complicities in violence both abroad and to its own community. This show was organized in solidarity with the struggle for Palestinian liberation by “Curators Under Censorship,” a community collective composed of current students, faculty, and alumni. As an anti-institutional outlet inside the very institution it critiques, this show has struggled with administrative suppression and censorship — within SAIC’s walls, you will not experience the originally proposed show. In this space, we collectively yearn for justice, we attempt to deconstruct, reimagine, rebuild, and perhaps abandon the institution itself.
This exhibition displays work that functions on several levels: engaging and reckoning with the ongoing genocide in Palestine and global state violence; addressing the continued scholasticide and epistemicide perpetrated by western academic institutions; diagnosing and demonstrating (S)AIC as implicated in imperial systems; processing such complicities via critique and reflection; and imagining futures where liberatory artistic creation overcomes institutional order.
This exhibition emerges from a shared understanding that SAIC and AIC actively benefit from and refuse to condemn or react to unimaginable violence actively being committed by the US-Israeli war machine. The Crown family and associated Crown Family Foundation contribute millions of dollars to (S)AIC and other artistic, cultural, and educational institutions throughout Chicago and beyond.
Through their 10% ownership of General Dynamics (GD), the fifth largest defense contractor in the world, the Crown family profits off the sale of weapons of mass destruction used by Israel and the Israeli Occupying Force (IOF) in their ongoing genocide and displacement of millions of Palestinians and violent escalations in Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria.
Our school is directly implicated in this violence and complicit in the artwashing of the Crown’s blood money. When Israel bombs, (S)AIC profits. The administration's intentional lack of financial transparency allows for the likely possibility of direct reinvestment of our tuition and endowment back into the US-Israel war machine, through the pockets of arms manufacturers like General Dynamics.
By curating this show, we do not aim to glorify the role of students in the movement for Palestine’s liberation; nor do we aim to argue that the exhibition, or the activism it portrays, enact any significant or efficacious form of justice. Rather, we organized the exhibition with a desire to transform the SITE Gallery into a space unlike any other we have found within SAIC — a space where our community can come together to learn, grieve, heal, and collectively process; a space where institutional critique and longings for better worlds can unfold beyond the puppeteering grips of (S)AIC’s blood-stained donors and, instead, stem from the students ourselves; a space where we find solidarity in the shared belief that art must disturb the equilibrium.
— Curators Under Censorship
Laser engraved scrap fabric
- 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.
- 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 …
my country kills people August 2-24, 2024 SPACE.01
Collaborative quilt project led by Stevie Emrich and Margaret Dugger
- “quilt church has been a project of symbiotic learning and growing. few members of our group (if any) had participated in a quilt project this big and yet we moved through it all together with ease and surprising pace... thank you to our first Quilt-Church-goers for such devotion, flexibility, and generosity to share time + knowledge. also a giant big huge thank you to everyone who purchased raffle tickets to benefit @orangetentproject [Orange Tent Project] - we raised a total of $1,060 !! The quilt will find its home with QC's very own absolute quilting wizard, Trish!”
Check out Quilt Church on Instagram!
Beeswax and cotton
- From Which We Become
May countless new forms take shape
Body to Body
Cylces of Liberatory Love
February 2024 CELLOPHANE