Patricia L. Boyd and Na Mira

Patricia L. Boyd and Na Mira’s two-person show “Perpetual Language” builds a vocabulary around rupture, loss, and incompleteness. Organized by Quinn Latimer as part of the annual Curated by festival, it takes its title from Roland Barthes’s 1977–78 lecture course “The Neutral,” which also serves as this year’s festival theme.

Four pieces from Boyd’s sculptural series “Contents in the Storage Problem” (all works cited 2023) are scattered on the floor in the gallery’s first room. Cardboard moving boxes paired with glass-topped, back-lit display cases of the same size, the works are presented either open or closed and contain personal possessions—bedsheets, single pieces of cutlery, liquor bottles, etc.—alongside copies of erotic drawings, inventory documents, and analogue photographs of a dismantled bed and New York City. The installation, continuing in the last room, preserves fragments of a shared life.

Mira’s Marquee commands the main gallery space: a wide-shot, single-channel film projected onto a wall in the corner of the room. A rectangular segment of the wall is painted red, tinting the projection, which is reflected in mirrors mounted to wall and on the gallery’s ornamental nineteenth-century parquet floor. The piece takes Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s White Dust from Mongolia (1982)—Cha’s final, unfinished film before her tragic murder in 1982—as a point of departure. Here, Mira’s split-screen shows surreal scenes that reference Cha’s archive as well as her own automatic writings, conjuring a discordant visual and sonic atmosphere.

At once gently devastating and quietly calming, this lyrical exhibition implements absence as both a burden and a push, one that drives us to act it out (agieren, says Freud); to reenact, to return, and to reconsider.