The Tropics, The Moon, and Mars by Mari Nagem
July 11–September 26, 2026
Wed–Sat, 12–6 pm

Opening Reception (as part of West Side Fest): Saturday, July 11, 3–6 pm [RSVP]

The Tropics, The Moon, and Mars is the first New York solo exhibition of Brooklyn-based Brazilian artist Mari Nagem. In an immersive installation that unites light, sound, sculpture, painting, and digital experiments, Nagem constructs a post-natural tropical environment in which heat reorganizes relationships between bodies, technologies, geological formations, and living systems. The tropics appear as climate, home, and projection: a lived geography shaped by extraction, ecological transformation, and a long history of being imagined from elsewhere.

The exhibition originates from a simple yet unsettling proposition: humanity dreams of becoming an interplanetary species while remaining unable to live collaboratively with the terrestrial ecologies it already inhabits. Rather than presenting planetary expansion as technological triumph, Nagem considers how fantasies of the Moon and Mars extend the same logics that have long shaped extractive relationships on Earth. The three locales of the exhibition title become less distinct destinations than overlapping terrains through which to reconsider survival, adaptation, and coexistence.

Through the works, scientific knowledge is translated into material propositions. Data serves as landscape; research infrastructure is imagined as domestic architecture; geological formations resemble bodies; synthetic objects take on natural qualities of minerals, branches, and nests. In the work, Nagem approaches scientific research as transformative subtext, allowing empirical observation and speculative imagination to coexist within the same environment.

Heat permeates every aspect of this environment. Synthetic light burns rather than tanning. Color functions as both climate and atmosphere. Bodies—human, vegetal, geological, and technological—search for new modes of communication and persistence within an increasingly arid landscape. Accompanied by a commissioned sound work from Mapuche-Brazilian musician Brisa Flow, the installation is a temporal and evolving choreography in which survival is neither guaranteed nor singular.

The Tropics, The Moon, and Mars resists imagining the future as either dystopian inevitability or technological salvation. Instead, Nagem considers how various systems and forms of knowledge—scientific, traditional, artistic, and material—might generate new ways of inhabiting worlds that are already undergoing profound ecological change. The exhibition compels us to consider where we are going next, and how different forms of life might continue together within altered conditions of heat, time, and planetary belonging.

About the Artist
Mari Nagem (b. Belo Horizonte, Brazil) is a multidisciplinary artist conceptually driven by the relationship between nature and technology. She has been awarded numerous international fellowships, commissions, and residencies, including: S+T+Arts Buen-TEK Residency (Rome, IT and Fortaleza, BR, 2026); a public commission for COP30 by the Tomie Ohtake Institute for the Emílio Goeldi Zoobotanical Park and Museum (Belém, BR, 2025); commissions for Mostra 3M (São Paulo, BR, 2024) and SFER IK Museion (Tulum, MX, 2024); the Celia and Wally Gilbert Fellowship at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (US, 2024); the New York Foundation for the Arts Immigrant Artist Program (US, 2024); and the Ox-Bow Program Fellowship (US, 2022). She has been nominated for and received awards from Ars Electronica (S+T+Arts, 2026 and CIFO, 2024), the Pipa Prize (2024), and the Marcantonio Vilaça Prize (2021).

Nagem has participated in Latin American biennials, including Bienal Sur at the Macro Museum (Argentina) and the Digital Art Biennial (Brazil). She has had solo exhibitions at Cave Galeria (Fortaleza, 2026), Galeria Lume (São Paulo, 2024), and Paço das Artes (São Paulo, 2022), among others. Her work has been shown at Tomie Ohtake Institute, SESC, Oi Futuro, MAC Niteroí, the Museum of Image and Sound (BR); MESH Art Center, Selva, Berry Campbell Gallery, Flatiron Project Space, New York Live Arts (US); Savvy Contemporary (DE); Sea Foundation (NL); and festivals such as FILE, Die Digitale Düsseldorf, and Athens Digital Arts Festival.

Nagem’s projects and exhibitions have been featured in Art Dialogues Magazine, The Art Newspaper, Arte!Brasileiros, Estadão, Revista Select, and Brazil-based cultural television network Arte1, among others. She holds an MFA from the Haute École d'Art et Design de Genéve, and currently lives and works between New York and Brazil.

Press Inquiries
Click here to download a PDF version of the exhibition press release. For more info or press materials, email press@cueartfoundation.org.