MIRA Art Fair opened this week in Paris, marking the first time an art fair in the city has been completely dedicated to contemporary Latin American artwork.
Taking place at the Maison d’Amerique Latine through September 22nd, the fair is stimulating a dialogue between the Latin American region and the European art scene.
A rich public program of panel discussions accompanies the fair and examines critical issues, such as the problematic plurality of the term “Latin America” and the role of art residences in the development of diasporic artistic practice. In its first edition, the fair packs a punch with one booth after another exhibiting conceptually rigorous work addressing themes of migration, identity, and propaganda.
Some stand-out works below:
Jose Carlos Martinat at Mayoral Galeria
In his “wall extractions”, artist José Carlos Martinat painstakingly removes layers of South American walls, often used for political propaganda. In using these weathered walls as the base layer and origin point of his paintings, Martinat highlights the erosion of memory and the transience of political symbols.
Camila Rodriguez Triana at Galerie BAO
As a Mestiza descendant of the Mhuysqas, the indigenous people of Colombia’s Altiplano Cundiboyacense, Camila Rodríguez Triana draws on themes of cultural reclamation in her work. Ukha Pacha explores her family tree through interventions with books on American colonization. Book pages are first smeared with soil from the artist’s homeland to obscure the original text, then embroidered in golden thread with the names of her ancestors.
Cristina Escobar at Galerie Waltman
In a gesture of symbolic minimalism, together these panels form the shape of the Mediterranean Sea – a passage now known as a deadly migration route. The seven stone slabs are an interpretation of the words of writer Virgilio Piñera: ‘…los cuerpos, en las aguas, como carbones apagados derivan hacia el mar…’ (‘the bodies in the waters, like extinguished coals drift toward the sea’) and act as a funerary monument.
Alex Hernandez at EL APARTAMENTO
Alex Hernandez studied the Apis honey bee alongside beekeepers in the countryside of Havana while conceptualizing and creating this work (first shown at the Cuban Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2019). These panels are an investigation into how bee colonies react to an artistic intervention using man-made geometric constraints. Creating patterns based on archival images and placing the bees within artificial honeycombs, the result is a political commentary on the parallels between human society and the natural world.
Miler Lagos at Galeria Max Estrella
In his series, Anillos del tiempo (Rings of time), Miler Lagos collages 400 copies of the same newspaper page. Echoing the rings of a tree trunk which reveal age and environmental conditions, the arrangement of the newspaper pages serves as a “witness of memory” and a reminder of the human tendency to exploit our natural environment.
MIRA Art Fair, 18th -22nd September 2024,
mira-artfair.com
