Emine Mira Hunter (née Burke) is a nomadic visual artist, originally from Vancouver Canada, currently in Istanbul, and on her way to New York. She is a second-generation whirling dervish, an environmentalist, a painter, a runner, a natural redhead and she loves music, knitting and her disaster stray calico, Burak. For the past 10 years she has collaborated with Turkish born, Canadian producer/musician/DJ Mercan Dede, performing at such acclaimed international events as the Montreal Jazz Festival, the Vancouver Folk Festival, the Montreux Jazz Festival and the Paleo Festival. She is one of the original members of his performance ensemble Secret Tribe. She has toured all over the world, from New York, to London, to Japan. She was recently featured in David Michalek’s Slow Dance project that was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2008. Mira continues to challenge the fundamental forms of whirling by incorporating innovative movements and concepts, coaxing the 13th century practice into a contemporary context. She is currently preparing for an upcoming tour in Switzerland with the avant-garde performance group Stimmhorn. She is now on tour with Mercan Dede Secret Tribe, with shows in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Emirates and Australia. She will also be performing as part of the CanAsian Dance Festival in Toronto, May 2009, with her father Raqib Brian Burke and sound artist Eric Powell. She graduated from the NSCAD University in Halifax, where she fell in love with her magnificent husband, fellow visual artist Derek Hunter. She was awarded the Ellen Battell Stoeckel fellowship to study at Yale University, where she met Mary Mattingly. She is preparing to relocate to New York in December to work on Mattingly's Waterpod™ project.
Mira Hunter will be performing as part of the CanAsian Dance Festival
in Toronto Thursday May 7 and Saturday May 9, 2009 at 8:00 p.m., with her father Raqib Brian Burke and Canadian sound artist Eric Powell aka Ian Oldham.
"An intimate and haunting glimpse into an emotive reinterpretation of an ancient mystical practice performed by traditionally trained Mevlevi whirling dervishes Mira Hunter and her teacher and father Raqib Brian Burke of the Open Secret School of Whirling, accompanied by Canadian soundscape artist Eric Powell."
Mira Hunter’s most recent piece Time Machine, which is the result of a collaboration with her husband Derek Hunter, features 65 disposable cameras fixed to a 360 degree rail made from reclaimed lumber, activated by electromechanical solenoids. The photographs, which feature Mira, are animated in a sequence, giving the audience the visual experience of revolving around a whirling dervish, caught in a single moment. The images, often displaying unusual exposure anomalies, were scanned and made into two films, which played simultaneously within a wooden yurt.