Durational Public Whirling (Grand Central)

Mira Hunter is a finalist in ArtCycle Discovers: The MFA Prize, the search for the best and brightest MFA students in NYC. The Columbia MFA student's work will be shown from February 2--February 23, 2013 at Gallery Brooklyn. Mira Hunter was born and raised in Vancouver, Canada, and currently lives and works in New York City. She is a visual artist and a second-generation whirling dervish, traditionally an all-male 13th century mystic practice. As a visual artist, she studied at Yale and the Novia Scotia College of Art and Design, graduating with a BFA. In 2009, she was one of the primary artists involved in the creation of Waterpod, an eco-habitat that navigated the waterways of New York’s five boroughs. Hunter’s sculptural installations often involve imagery captured using a bullet-time camera ring created with her husband, sculptor Derek Junck Hunter, which they presented at dorkbot-nyc at Location one in 2011. She has also performed at such acclaimed international events as the Montreux Jazz Festival, the London Forum, Istanbul’s Arena, Celebrate Brooklyn, and the Dubai International Film Festival. She has collaborated with Mercan Dede and the Modern Dance Company of Turkey; was featured in David Michalek’s Slow Dance project at the 2008 Venice Biennale; and appeared in Fatih Akin's award-winning documentary Crossing The Bridge: The Sounds of Istanbul.

From the artist: "When I whirl, I experience the world as still. My vision is abstracted; I observe my environment from the eye of a hurricane. In my video, performance, and installation work, I seek to capture the fleeting nature of transformation by arresting and reanimating time. This preoccupation with time manifests in a variety of methods and media. Sometimes it is through installation videos, which I create using a custom ring of 65 cameras to simultaneously photograph my subject, whether it is a gas explosion or a dervish in the round. The resulting images are compiled to create a stop-motion animation that strives to apprehend the fullness of change in each still moment. Other time-based pieces include durational performances, such as two hours of whirling in the main hall of Grand Central Station or three hours during Open Studios at Columbia University. I am interested in what transpires when the body and mind are engaged in physically intense extremes: what happens to one when the other gives out?"