Emine Mira Hunter (née Burke)

It can be argued that Mira Hunter has been whirling for most of her life. A visual artist and second-generation sufi mevlevi whirling dervish, she began her traditional training at the age of 16 with her father Raqib Burke and Sheikh Jelaladdin Loras. As a visual artist, she studied at NSCAD and Yale, graduating with a BFA in Interdisciplinary Art. 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, Celebrate Brooklyn, the London Forum and the Paleo Festival. She has toured all over the world, from New York, to London, to Istanbul, to Dubai, to Japan. She was 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, gently coaxing the 13th century practice into a contemporary context.

The traditional form of Turkish whirling, claims to transmit healing energy to human beings present. Whether this is a metaphorical or a physical claim is difficult to prove. Mira is recreating the Backster Effect (in an inspired accidental discovery in 1966, Cleve Backster used a galvanometer on his house plant and discovered it to be sentient) in order to see if the positive energy transmitted from whirling can be detected by plants. She recently started a collaborative project with her husband sculptor Derek Hunter, that looks to translate the restorative energy of the act of whirling through multi media installations using binaural sound recording and bullet time photography within custom built viewing environments. Mira is currently pursuing her MFA at Columbia University. She studies Sufism under Sherif Baba Catalkaya and lives and works in New York.

>>Click here to see video of Mira Hunter, including excerpts from her recent installation Time Machine
>>Click here to see pictures of Time Machine
>>A Short History of Whirling