MIRA Latino Art Fair 2025

The Maison de l'Amérique latine, a historic mansion in the heart of Paris, will host the second edition of MIRA, a contemporary art fair with the mission of showcasing the vitality and contemporaneity of the Latin American art scene.

Overview

With a different model of fair, intimate and exclusive, which prioritizes quality, MIRA aims to emphasize the high calibre of artistic proposals and exchanges among collectors, institutions, and galleries. MIRA comes to Paris to focus attention on never before seen works, placing the Latin American region at the center of the European art scene. It offers an opportunity to discover the cultural and artistic richness of Latin America. Managed by a passionate team, it aims to highlight the vitality, diversity, and contemporaneity of Latin American art.

Following the Caribbean and Andean theoretical constellations in which lo maravilloso and lo mágico name historically situated regimes of knowledge, the programme assumes the opacity, discontinuity, and fabulation as conditions of thinking rather than as deficits. To activate the maravilloso is to recognise the excess of lived complexity over what dominant languages can name; to activate the magical is to re-centre local, cosmopolitical and sensorial rationalities disqualified by colonial modernity and its ongoing structures. Within this framework, the programme foregrounds performance, conversations and collective dynamics as modes of thinking-through-doing that displace object-based spectatorship and reinstate embodied, relational and procedural epistemologies. The interventions engage questions of intimacy, identity and vulnerability across sensorial and poetic registers, but also confront dystopian, extractive and overtly political horizons: they stage the body both as a place of exposure and of refusal.

Rather than “represent” Latin America, the programme treats the region as a moving epistemic territory; a field of methods, not a geography — and articulates a curatorial de-celeration as central approach suspending the accelerated temporality of the art-fair apparatus to open intervals for situated dialogue that resonate with and critically refract the fair’s thematic axes. To slow down here is not to withdraw, but to re-time perception in order to allow attention, encounter and contradiction to operate as primary analytic instruments. In doing so, the programme sketches a counter-framing in which the public moment becomes not illustrative but generative, a laboratory for thinking otherwise through embodied, collective and diasporic practice.

Among the artists working with the photographic medium, Shinji Nagabe is a Brazilian artist of Japanese heritage whose work explores the intersections of cultural identity and personal discovery. Since relocating to Europe in 2014, Nagabe has focused on developing a deeply personal series of textile-based artworks, drawing from his experiences of cultural adaptation and his recent exploration of his homosexuality. The soft sculptures he creates challenge conventional perceptions of how traditions and lived experiences shape both individual and collective identities, inviting viewers to reflect on the complexities of belonging and the fluid exchanges catalyzed by globalization.

Nagabe’s hybrid technique, influenced by his background as a professional photographer, merges photographic images printed on textiles with industrial materials such as plastic beads, flowers, and curtain rods. These meticulously hand-crafted compositions reimagine the traditional diorama, transforming it into a surreal medium for personal storytelling. Through his dioramas, Nagabe critiques globalization with both playful and incisive commentary, highlighting the chaotic layering of cultural and visual references that define contemporary life. His work engages with stereotypes while celebrating the intricate interplay of overlapping cultural narratives.

Drawing the Territory presents photographic works by ten renowned contemporary  artists from the collections of Société Générale and Jean-Michel Attal. This project initiates a dialogue between visual representation and spatial identity, offering a variety of perspectives on how places are imagined, shaped, and questioned through contemporary artistic practices.

Staged within the second edition of MIRA Art Fair —a platform dedicated to showcasing and affirming Latin American creative expression— this curatorial proposal invites reflection on the very concept of “place”. Is there a single, unified Latin American landscape, or a constellation of imagined geographies? To what extent are these spaces cultural constructs, shaped by shared symbols and collective narratives? The featured works challenge rigid classifications and open  up a conversation about the fluid and often contested meanings of land and belonging.

Drawing on Foucauldian thought, which frames space as a site of symbolic appropriation, the presentation explores how images contribute to —or subvert— the production of meaning tied to location. In what ways can photography assert, activate, destabilize, or transform our perception of the spaces we inhabit or imagine? And what connections can be drawn between visual invention and the redefinition of spatial narratives?

The selected artists —many of whom have direct links to Latin America or the Spanishspeaking world— engage with themes such as historical reinterpretation, manipulation of imagery, social critique, documentary approaches, globalization, environmental degradation, ethnic and religious tensions, and the visibility of racialized minorities. Their diverse practices offer multifaceted insights into the politics of space, memory, and identity. Thus, Drawing the Territory encourages viewers to reconsider spatial identity as a shifting, constructed concept negotiated through visual culture, history, and imagination.

MIRA Art Fair recognizes and prioritizes the need to be key players in the ecological transition, and therefore maintains sustainability as the essence of its proposal. A cultural journey that transports you to a world where the authenticity and vitality of Latin America come to life. From contemporary art exhibitions to a station featuring Latin American music, and gastronomic spaces exploring the authentic flavors of the region, everything is designed to immerse you in the essence of Latin America.

All performances and conversations will take place at the auditorium of the Maison de l’Amérique Latine with their kind support.