Subrosa Reading

To celebrate the opening of Na Mira’s exhibition Subrosa, MOCA presents a reading with the artist and authors Farid Matuk, Saretta Morgan, Saewon Oh, and Marty Windahl. 

Mira will read from her recent publication The Book of Na, which describes the divination practices that she used in creating some of the artworks on view in Subrosa. The artist worked with a Feng Shui reader who calculated the I Ching Hexagram 44: “Gou/Coming to meet” for her upcoming projects. Popularly interpreted as “The woman is strong. One should not marry the woman” Mira followed this feminist symbol for power upheavals as it echoed across the globe.

In The Book of Na, Mira used this Hexagram as a form of bibliomancy, quoting from page 44 of various books. This becomes a key technology of the text, providing synchronicities across times and narratives. 

Following Mira’s reading, the 4 invited authors will read aloud pg. 44 from 4 books of their choosing, continuing the story beyond a single author and becoming an ongoing divination and live entanglement.

 

About the authors:

Farid Matuk is the author of the poetry collections This Isa Nice Neighborhood and The Real Horse. His work has been supported by the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and by the Holloway Visiting Professorship in Poetry & Poetics at UC Berkley. Redolent, his book-arts collaboration with artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez, was published by Singing Saw Press in 2022.

Saretta Morgan’s work pursues relationships between geography and feeling, particularly as both locate bodies and thought along intersections of militarization, incarceration, and U.S. imperialism. Her books include Alt-Nature (Coffee House Press, 2024), and the chapbooks Feeling Upon Arrival (Ugly Duckling Press, 2018), and room for a counter interior (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2017). She lives on Akimel O’odham lands in Phoenix, AZ. 

Saewon Oh is an inter-disciplinary artist, educator and healing arts practitioner based in Joshua Tree, Ca. She weaves in and out of trance states with sound, hypnosis, plant consciousness and her ancestors for ritual, performative and healing purposes. These works have been witnessed at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Hammer Museum, Current:LA and ICA SF. She is also the founder of Sun Song, an embodied research lab for vibrational essence therapy. 

Marty Windahl (MW) is an astrologer and tarot reader. For many years she authored TAROTSCOPES, a weekly horoscope based on the tarot, incorporating her own stories as they pertained to the astrological omens. For both the 2021 and 2022 photo exhibition series at NO MOON gallery in Los Angeles she composed the artist biographies, using each photographer’s astrology chart to structure and inform the writing. Currently, her monthly horoscopes are published on the back of the dinner menu at DIMES restaurant in New York City.