What if an image could refuse to behave like an image?
What if a landscape could carry political information without telling a conventional story?
And what if the things we cannot see—signals, frequencies, heat, memory, transmission—could become the real subject of an artwork?
These questions sit at the center of Na Mira’s NO SMOKING, a newly commissioned media installation opening at The Museum of Modern Art on November 14, 2026. Presented in the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio, the exhibition runs through February 15, 2027, marking Mira’s first solo museum exhibition in New York and her largest presentation to date.
Rather than presenting moving image as a transparent window onto reality, Mira treats technology itself as unstable territory. Radio frequencies, infrared video, holography, sound, architecture, and projection become ways of questioning how images are produced—and how perception can be controlled.
The result promises to be less a conventional film exhibition than an environment in which the act of seeing becomes uncertain.
Working at the Edge of Visibility
Mira’s practice begins with what conventional images often leave out.
MoMA describes the artist’s work as engaging with language, memory, image-making systems, and the borders between body and state. Her installations have incorporated radio frequencies, infrared heat, and holography, technologies that allow her to work with phenomena that are partially or completely invisible to ordinary vision.
That interest gives NO SMOKING its particular tension.
The exhibition is not simply about making hidden things visible. Instead, Mira appears interested in the unstable territory between visibility and disappearance—where an image can break apart, multiply, distort, or become difficult to locate.
Her own description of the practice is telling: she has said that she works with “what is hard to see,” connecting her research to military landscapes, diasporic time, and thresholds of consciousness.
For an institution built around the history of modern and contemporary image-making, that becomes a particularly resonant proposition.
The Military Landscape as Image
For NO SMOKING, Mira turns toward two locations connected to American military infrastructure: Fort Bliss and the adjacent White Sands Missile Range along the U.S.–Mexico border.
According to MoMA, the artist recorded footage during the summer of 2025 inside an empty cinema on the Fort Bliss army base and at White Sands Missile Range. Together, the sites form part of the largest military installation in the United States.
But Mira does not approach these locations through conventional documentary strategies.
Instead, the landscapes become sites where technology, power, memory, and perception intersect.
The empty cinema is particularly suggestive. A cinema is already a machine for producing images and shaping attention. An abandoned one, situated within a military environment, becomes something else: a space where the technologies of viewing remain after their expected audience has disappeared.
The military landscape consequently becomes both subject and medium.
From Documentary to Fûkeiron
One of the intellectual foundations for the project is fûkeiron, a late-1960s Japanese film theory that argued landscapes could communicate political conditions more effectively than conventional narrative or documentary forms.
MoMA notes that Mira was drawn to geographies marked by rupture while developing NO SMOKING.
That connection is central to understanding the installation.
A military base does not need to show soldiers, weapons, or conflict in order to communicate militarization. Architecture, emptiness, distance, restricted access, surveillance systems, fences, frequencies, and infrastructure can all become political evidence.
The landscape itself carries the structure.
Mira’s approach pushes this idea further by making the image unstable. Instead of treating the landscape as a reliable record, she introduces technological and perceptual disruptions that challenge the viewer’s confidence in what is being seen.
Infrared and the Unseen
Among the key materials in NO SMOKING are infrared videos.
Infrared imaging changes the logic of ordinary vision. It does not simply reproduce what the human eye sees; it registers information beyond the limits of normal perception.
That makes infrared particularly appropriate for Mira’s larger investigation.
The artist’s newly developed works include BLISS BLISS (2026), a two-channel infrared high-definition video work incorporating black-and-white imagery, glass, plexiglass, and sunlight, as well as MANHATTAN MANHATTAN (2026), an infrared high-definition video work incorporating frequency.
These titles themselves suggest a doubling.
Something appears, then appears again differently.
A place becomes an image. The image becomes a signal. The signal becomes an atmosphere.
Ritual, Animism, and Transmission
Technology in Mira’s work is never presented as purely neutral.
MoMA connects NO SMOKING to ritual practices of Korean shamanism and to the artist’s interest in animism and transmission.
This creates an unusual meeting point between ancient and contemporary systems.
Radio waves and ritual transmission may seem to belong to entirely different worlds. One is associated with modern technological infrastructure; the other with spiritual communication and embodied ceremony.
Mira’s work complicates that distinction.
Both involve transmission across an unseen space.
Both depend on signals.
Both raise questions about what can be perceived and what must be believed.
Within the Kravis Studio, these ideas can become spatial rather than merely theoretical. Spectral projections and a site-responsive sonic environment will respond directly to the architecture of the space, making the gallery itself part of the work.
Breaking the Authority of the Image
At the heart of NO SMOKING is a political question: who controls the image?
Images are frequently treated as evidence. A photograph can document an event. A video can appear to provide proof. A landscape image can seem objective.
But Mira’s work questions that presumed fidelity.
MoMA describes her new commission as an attempt to rupture the fidelity of the image on which soft power, propaganda, and other forms of statecraft often rely.
That makes the exhibition particularly relevant in an era saturated with cameras, satellite imagery, surveillance systems, algorithmic vision, synthetic images, and constant digital transmission.
The more images surround us, the more urgent the question becomes: what makes an image trustworthy?
Mira does not answer by producing a competing authoritative image.
She destabilizes the authority itself.
The Kravis Studio as an Instrument
The location of NO SMOKING matters.
The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio occupies the center of MoMA’s fourth-floor collection galleries and is dedicated to experimental performance, sound, moving image, and live art. MoMA describes it as a platform for artists developing new forms and approaches.
For Mira’s installation, the Studio becomes more than a container.
Its architecture is actively engaged.
The projections, sound, frequencies, and spatial relationships are intended to create an environment in which visitors encounter images rather than simply watch them.
That distinction changes the role of the audience.
A viewer entering NO SMOKING is not necessarily looking at a sequence of information. They are entering a system.
Diasporic Time and the Body
Mira’s interest in perception is also connected to questions of diaspora and historical rupture.
Her practice draws on Korean shamanic traditions while engaging landscapes shaped by contemporary military power. Her earlier work has included sites such as Seoul’s Dragon Hill Garrison and the Korean Demilitarized Zone, making military geography a recurring part of her artistic research.
This gives NO SMOKING another layer.
The body is never completely separate from geography.
Borders are not merely lines on maps. They are experienced through movement, memory, restriction, displacement, surveillance, and inherited histories.
By working through frequencies and altered images, Mira gives those conditions an unconventional visual language.
An Exhibition About What Refuses to Appear
NO SMOKING arrives at MoMA as an exhibition about images, but its deepest subject may be everything images cannot fully capture.
A frequency cannot always be seen.
Memory cannot always be verified.
A political condition cannot always be photographed.
A border can be physically visible while its consequences remain psychological and historical.
A military landscape can look empty while carrying enormous institutional power.
Mira’s achievement lies in refusing to resolve these contradictions.
Instead, she makes uncertainty productive.
Her installation asks visitors to slow down their assumptions about what seeing means—to consider the possibility that perception is not passive, that technology is not neutral, and that an image can reveal as much through its failure as through its clarity.
At MoMA’s Kravis Studio, NO SMOKING promises to turn the museum into a threshold between the visible and invisible.
And in that threshold, the signal itself becomes the artwork.
