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 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 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 currently work 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.
MISC WORK —
chronologically arranged
to the best of my ability
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