Issuu

CUE Art 137 West 25th Street New York, NY 10001 All artwork © Mari Nagem Photos by Leo Ng Graphic design by Jasmine Buckley Art 2 direction by Jinny Khanduja

THE TROPICS THE MOON AND MARS MARI NAGEM

July 11–September 26, 2026 CUE Art Catalogue Essayist Juntao Yang Catalogue Editor Jinny Khanduja

E 2xterior view of The Tropics, The Moon, and Mars

I4nstallation view of The Tropics, The Moon, and Mars

The Tropics, The Moon, and Mars is the first New York solo exhibition of Brooklyn-based Brazilian artist Mari Nagem, presented at CUE Art. 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. The exhibition opens with works that establish this conceptual framework. In space analog, a stainlesssteel surface shifts between the functions of bed, table, workstation, and platform over the course of the exhibition. Its form exemplifies embodied research conducted at the University of Arizona’s Biosphere 2, where researchers developed adaptable furnishings for simulated lunar and Martian habitation. tropics | moon | mars | ES, a data painting generated through Google Ngram Viewer maps the appearance of these three place-constructs across Spanishlanguage literature, producing a terrain in which linguistic frequency becomes geological landscape. Together, these works position scientific inquiry, language, and everyday life as overlapping systems through which worlds are imagined and constructed.

Deeper into the gallery, natural light gives way to a saturated world of red-orange. Distinct orbital environments are populated by forms adapted to an unfamiliar climate. In pássaros rodantes (whirlybirds), a yet untraced family artifact of birds carved from a tree trunk is transformed into a kinetic installation in which the figures move in reverse, evoking disrupted circadian rhythms, altered migration routes, and planetary cycles thrown out of alignment due to hyperheating. In another orbit, ruínas ninhos, ceramic sculptures embedded with mineral inclusions rest upon acrylic supports, suggesting futuristic ruins inspired by mining processes, mineral extraction, and the internal architecture of bird nests. New ecological assemblages blur distinctions between organism and artifact, natural history and technological intervention. In bouquet, sawtooth oak from near the artist’s Brooklyn home and driftwood sourced from Marajó Bay in the Brazilian Amazon live alongside human-defined “invasive” plant species and plastic. This orbit serves as an offering and a symbol of human intervention; the act of editing, cutting, and shaping is made visible through selection and arrangement. In à deriva (adrift), driftwood encrusted with stone and enamel is likewise an offering from the ocean, reminding us of the longevity and potency of geological time, and in this expanse, the relative brevity of human existence. Several works draw from long-term environmental research conducted in Brazilian ecosystems. flora futura (or the survival dance) references the ESECAFLOR (Estudo da Seca na Floresta) experiment developed by the Goeldi Museum and the Federal University of Pará in the Caxiuanã National Forest. Designed to simulate prolonged drought conditions, this longitudinal study investigates how the rainforest responds to sustained reductions in rainfall.

Within the exhibition, Nagem transforms decades of scientific observation into speculative futures; research findings become a sensitive projection of precarious survival, where future flora and unfamiliar species emerge through adaptation rather than permanence. 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 MapucheBrazilian 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.

pássaros rodantes (whirlybirds), 2026 Family heirloom wooden sculpture, enamel, vinyl, custom motor 12 × 12 × 12 inches

I8nstallation view of The Tropics, The Moon, and Mars

ruínas ninhos, 2026 Ceramic, minerals, acrylic 4 × 6 × 6 inches each

My practice reflects on a time shaped by the coexistence of technological acceleration and environmental uncertainty. I investigate tensions between the natural and the artificial through light works, sculpture, painting, digital experiments, and material explorations that coexist in immersive installations. Drawing upon speculative narratives and real-world data and information, I seek to create hybrid environments that facilitate ongoing conversation on the dynamic exchanges between nature and technology. I was raised in tropical Latin America as part of a generation embedded in a quickly unfolding transition from analog to digital technologies. Influenced by this situated positionality within broader global dynamics of geography and culture, I’m interested in social and existential questions about human existence while simultaneously rediscovering care, intuition, and sensitivity in relationships with our semi-synthetic world. In my work, I use solid, bold, and neon colors to create abstract forms and symbolize both natural and contrived landscapes. I play with geometric forms in ways that reference the realms of math, science, and technology, analyzing proportions, distances, measurements, angles, screens, pixels, and bodies to raise questions about more-than-human relationships. I often employ language as a medium of translation across systems and contexts. Over the past few years, I have organized my work into five realms: forest, water, sun, minerals, and machines—forces whose interdependence sustains life on Earth. These categories guide my formal and conceptual decisions while allowing freedom across media. I am interested in the dualities of rigor and irreverence, disciplinary thought and levity, and I often collaborate with transdisciplinary teams of scientists, technologists, and architects to create sensorial works that foster ecological awareness and new imaginaries for coexistence. —Mari Nagem

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 Brazilbased cultural television network Arte1, among others. She holds an MFA from the Haute École d'Art et Design de Genève, and currently lives and works between New York and Brazil.

à deriva (adrift), 2026 Driftwood, stone, enamel 16 × 13 × 13 inches

Installation view of The Tropics, The Moon, and Mars 14

ruínas ninhos, 2026 Ceramic, minerals, acrylic 4 16× 6 × 6 inches each

Alternative Intimacy Simulation; or, A Hybrid Social Dance Juntao Yang

A semicircle of red is overlaid on a glass door like a rising sun, its shade of red translucent, cool, and futuristic. Through the door is The Tropics, The Moon, and Mars, a solo exhibition at CUE Art by Mari Nagem, a Brazilian artist based in Brooklyn. Within this installation, where a science-fictional atmosphere converges with speculative aesthetics and ecological reflection, Nagem sketches a condition of post-natural survival in which the boundaries separating humans, natural objects, and fabricated items are erased and reimagined, while the material legacies of violence and trauma are remobilized as an expansive dance across bodies and senses. By staging negotiations among artifacts of colonial technics, minerals brought to light by the global extractive enterprise, and plants of uncertain provenance, Nagem seeks to reactivate the undercurrents of ordinary things within geological deep time and (anti-)utopian imagination, articulating a mode of intimacy made inescapable by its historical debts, yet strangely seductive in its orientation toward collective becoming. Past the narrow vestibule, the depths of CUE’s gallery have been remade. Five rings of red LED tubing, shaped like orbital tracks, immerse the white cube in a heady atmosphere. This conspicuously digital red refuses to enter the genealogy of sunlight or any other natural color; unmistakably artificial in texture, its neon-like saturation wavers between an underground dance floor and the interior of a spacecraft. At an almost preconscious register, the particular shade of red paradoxically offers the composure of cool design while summoning an imagined heat. It provides an apt perceptual context for the exhibition, echoing developmentalist technocracy’s fervent devotion to speed, scale, and frictionless futures. Such technological promises attempt to foreclose reflection and hesitation, claiming that they will lead us to “colonize the Moon” and even “conquer Mars,” although we have yet to reckon with all the damaged relations here on Earth. In the gallery, each band of light encloses a circle of sand, within which dark columns of varying heights rise and fall. Inside one of these orbits rests ruínas ninhos,

a group of three ceramic objects each roughly six inches to a side. Ivory and ochre toned, they are wrinkled like sheets of paper that have been crumpled and spread open again, each holding a dark mineral deposit and resting on an orange acrylic disc. Against the red light spilling everywhere without restraint, the forms and fabrication of ruínas ninhos demand patience and care, even a ceding of force to geological matter. Nagem treats clay as paper, first spreading it into a two-dimensional surface and then folding until the form closes. The process demands extreme proximity to the clay. The artist must anticipate where a fold will crack, how much water will prevent collapse, and how the material will slump once shaped. After the irreversibility of high-temperature firing, even the artist cannot know its interior structure. Within this almost meditative exercise in material tactility and vulnerability, an intimacy crossing the interface of subjecthood is awakened. Nagem’s investment in this process of form generation arises partly from the history of mineral extraction in her home country of Brazil and partly from ecological knowledge. Some birds construct basket-shaped nests with circuitous internal passages, placing their eggs in locations so difficult to reach that a predator entering the nest cannot determine where they are hidden. The artist’s negotiation with the material, and her act of burying mineral deposits, can therefore be understood as forms of protection: mountains destroyed by the global extractive industry are compressed into microscopic relics—their formation across geological deep time abruptly severed at the tempo of industry—while minerals once sheltered within the mountain, and now violently seized from it, are returned to an interior refuge. These forms, retaining the creases of softness while now fired and hardened, might also be ruins left by former mountains. The mountain was once vast; what remains is small, disordered, and residual. Yet protection and vigilance have not disappeared. Through understanding and negotiation, they acquire form once more, turning the ruin into a nest once again preparing itself for what has yet to hatch.

bouquet, 2026 Ceramic, acrylic, plastic, mineral, driftwood from Marajó Bay, found sawtooth oak acorns, eucalyptus 12 18 × 8 × 8 inches

A recurring concern in Nagem’s practice is the possibility of alternative intervention at catastrophic sites where humans, technological objects, and natural environments meet. From this perspective, heat becomes a subtle medium of relation: the very thing that makes proximity unbearable and yet still possible. In another of the orbits sits à deriva, in which Nagem introduces—or, more precisely, orders online—a dramatically contorted piece of driftwood that has been shaped by water, embedding it with several polished spheres that gleam like eyes, as though inert matter still possessed vigilant nerves. Across from it, bouquet is likewise encircled by red light. At eight inches square, it assumes an almost domestic scale within the gallery. Its ceramic vessel, nearly organic in form, was assembled from remnants of the artist’s previous projects. Everything it contains was gathered rather than cultivated. The acorns come from a sawtooth oak—classified as invasive in the New York region and recovered from the tree nearest Nagem’s Brooklyn home. They are mounted onto brightly colored acrylic tubes that resemble fiber optics but have been bent into vegetal stems and roots. Beside them are a dried cutting of eucalyptus; a finger-shaped piece of driftwood gathered by the artist from Marajó Bay at the mouth of the Amazon, one of its smaller branches painted bright orange; and a small piece of chalcopyrite. These seemingly unrelated elements are assembled according to neither taxonomy nor shared habitat. What provisionally draws them together is a faint formal kinship among color, curvature, scale, and texture. Flower arrangement can itself be understood as a miniature curatorial act. Through it, Nagem constructs the hybrid scene we already inhabit: invasive, fallen, and untraceable things, things forcibly severed from their original contexts and relations, are reordered according to a logic of attentive care, producing an aesthetics of juxtaposition unabashed about its own heterogeneity. Traced back to the Greek aisthēsis, the etymological root of aesthetics points toward sensation and sensory perception. A hybrid aesthetics thus becomes an education of perception, requiring us to recognize and see those abjected things that have been fragmented and forcibly displaced, and to imagine a solidarity, or a reconstruction after the storm. Can the invasive be intimate? Are we permitted to enter into intimacy with things that are anything

but authentic, whose origins are uncertain, and which may bear the unmistakable traces of violence? If such an effort, practice, and act of imagination are indeed viable, can we, within this critical intimacy, rebuild and reorganize our relations with the things around us, opening a passage toward an alternative future? The answers are perhaps more complex than any exhibition could provide. Yet Nagem has found a formal language through which such intimacy can be felt and described. It lies dormant in her investment in hybrid bodies and fragile things, generated by the stratified pressures of complex causalities and embedded deep within the legacies of geological time and political violence. It acknowledges the violence of what has been, while awakening an impulse to repair that persists in full knowledge that redemption can never be complete. The orbit containing flora futura (or the survival dance) may best clarify this. Several bare branches are held in place by supports and set into slow motion by custom motors. The supports are microphone stands, fitted at their tops with 3D-printed components designed to grip the branches. What would have otherwise projected the sound of humans has instead become an invitation addressed to a leafless branch to speak. And sound is indeed present in the room. A sound work by Mapuche-Brazilian musician Brisa Flow, commissioned by CUE at Nagem’s invitation, encircles the space, flowing like a river and winding around the rings of light. The branches of flora futura point toward a longterm experiment conducted by the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi and the Federal University of Pará in Brazil’s Caxiuanã National Forest. In the study, panels installed beneath the forest canopy diverted a portion of the throughfall, making the rainforest perform a drought in real time so that scientists could observe how it responded to a sustained reduction in rainfall. Here, scientists were already speculating on the ecological future, and so the artist chose to speculate in turn. The movement of the branches and mechanisms resembles a dance, a clock, even a sundial. Nagem directs my attention to the shadows on the floor: you cannot tell whether they are dying or growing. Survival hangs suspended between withering and growth. pássaros rodantes (whirlybirds), installed inside another orbit, tightens this indeterminate dance step into a circular movement that repeats itself.

A cluster of wooden birds turns slowly atop a column, its surface coated in enamel and its eyes covered with white vinyl film. Its jarring synthetic sheen keeps the birds alert while dislodging the wood carving from its secure position as an innocent representation of nature. The object remained in Nagem’s family home for more than forty years. It was originally given to her mother by a relative who has since died. The child of two biologists, Nagem grew up among carved animals, charts of flora and fauna, and diagrams of human reproduction, and yet for years she overlooked this cluster of birds, regarding it as a slightly gaudy piece of domestic handicraft that required no closer attention. Only when her young niece casually called them “the rounding birds” did a name unconstrained by taxonomy compel Nagem to look again. Every bird had been carved from the same continuous section of tree trunk, without joints or later assembly, as though they had always lain together within the wood, differentiating themselves from a single material body. Now a custom motor turns this family heirloom in reverse. Birds ordinarily orient their migratory routes through changes in climate and season; here, the flock remains in constant motion but is no longer capable of arriving anywhere. More subtly, “reverse” does not exist within the circle itself. Only the direction of the birds’ beaks instructs the viewer as to what counts as forward and what is otherwise. The body provides time with its coordinates; when the body loses its orientation, time loses its direction as well. Rotation thus becomes orbit, clock, and a dance step from which there is no exit. It retains the form of the cycle while withdrawing the return and renewal that cyclicality promises. The intimacy encountered here offers no consolation of resynchronization with “natural rhythms.” The viewer is compelled to acknowledge that humans and birds, family heirlooms, synthetic materials, and planetary climate have long been locked inside the same temporal apparatus, disoriented yet still turning. The exhibition compresses light, bodies, experiments, and planetary warming into an environment of dysregulated heat. The living beings, minerals, and technologies within it carry mutually incompatible histories, yet must still rehearse how to occupy space and time together.

Returning to the front of the gallery, a painting titled tropics | moon | mars | ES converts Google Ngram data—the changing frequency of the terms naming the exhibition’s three locales, in this case, within a Spanish-language corpus—into a painted topography. Linguistic recurrence takes on geological relief, allowing tropical geography and interplanetary fantasy to rise and fall across the same terrain. A few steps away, in an inconspicuous corner parallel to the reception desk, space analog sits silently, although its uses remain in constant flux. This stainless-steel table, with its distinctly laboratory-like aesthetic, bears dotted lines in white vinyl marking the latitudes of the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn—or, more precisely, one moment in the Earth’s slowly shifting obliquity—alongside figures of temperature and scale. At its far end lies a less than inviting gray pillow, although viewers have begun asking whether they are permitted to lie down. Several faint scratches across the metal suggest that the object has performed a wider range of work. Its utility remains deliberately ambiguous, shifting at different moments among bed, table, workstation, and platform. Within the exhibition, this product of heavily encoded colonial engineering—its functional economy modeled on that of the space-habitat simulator at Biosphere 2—paradoxically reveals another ambition. At the opening reception, cratered rounds of pão de queijo were placed across its surface. People packed shoulder to shoulder maneuvered through the space as though performing a dance, enveloped by Brisa Flow’s composition of chants, bird and insect calls, electronic hums, drumbeats, and breathing. Is this a suggestion, or a synecdoche? We bake, eat, celebrate, and converse, and the cold metallic construction is repurposed as a platter for a shared moment. Within an ongoing mourning and blessing that acknowledges our own fragility, people attempt to bear and digest together the consequences left by extractivism. An opening reception cannot, of course, repay all these material debts. Alternative intimacy is not proclaimed as the future, but here, in this space, it can be rehearsed for one evening.

tropics | moon | mars | ES, 2026 Acrylic, latex, enamel on canvas 15 × 20 inches

Detail of space analog, 2026 Steel table, vinyl, pillow, fabric Dimensions vary with installation

flora futura (or the survival dance), 2026 Found branches, wood sealant, motors, custom hardware Dimensions vary with installation

This text was commissioned as part of the Art Critic Mentorship Program, a partnership between CUE and the AICA-USA (US section of the International Association of Art Critics). The program pairs emerging writers with mentors and editors to produce original essays about exhibitions at CUE’s gallery. For more information, visit www.cueartfoundation.org. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior written consent from the author. Juntao Yang is a scholar, critic, and artist working across media theory, environmental humanities, and queer theory, with contemporary cinema, visual art, and popular culture as primary objects. Yang is concerned with how power operates through material and mediatic processes—often invisibly, at the micro-level. Yang is a PhD student in Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley, and holds an MA in Film and Media Studies from Columbia University. Yang is a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA), and is based in Berkeley and Nanjing. Jinny Khanduja is a cultural facilitator whose work spans writing, editing, design, administration, and curatorial care of artists’ work and ideas. She has worked in nonprofit arts organizations for more than 15 years, holding a wide range of roles that bridge programs, communications, development, strategy, and leadership. Her practice is grounded in a commitment to new forms of organizational stewardship that challenge conventional models and bring programmatic and operational work into closer alignment. As Executive Director of CUE, she leads the organization’s strategic vision and artist-centered programs. She is invested in building responsive structures that make this work possible, and in creating space for artists’ practices to remain fluid, ambitious, relational, and deeply engaged.

Detail of à deriva (adrift), 2026 Driftwood, stone, enamel 16 24× 13 × 13 inches

Installation view of The Tropics, The Moon, and Mars 26

CUE Art is a nonprofit organization that works with and for emerging and underrecognized artists and art workers to create new opportunities and present varied perspectives in the arts. Through our gallery space and public programs, we foster the development of thought-provoking exhibitions and events, create avenues for mentorship, cultivate relationships amongst peers and the public, and facilitate the exchange of ideas. Founded in 2003, CUE was established with the purpose of presenting a wide range of artists’ work from many different contexts. Since its inception, the organization has supported artists who experiment and take risks that challenge public perceptions, as well as those whose work has been less visible in commercial and institutional venues. Exhibiting artists are selected through two methods: nomination by an established artist or selection via our annual open call. In line with CUE’s commitment to providing substantive professional development opportunities, each artist is paired with a mentor—an established curator or artist who provides support throughout the process of developing their exhibition. To learn more about CUE, visit us online or sign up for our newsletter at www.cueartfoundation.org.

STAFF Jinny Khanduja Executive Director Jasmine Buckley Gallery Manager Kayleigh Alvarez, Trinity Lopez, Safia Raffo-Wells Summer Interns Jackie Arias Villegas, Cal Perera Fall Interns

EXHIBITION CREDITS Commissioned Sound Brisa Flow Technical Consulting Thiago Hersan Technology Development Mau Jabur, Philip Avetisov Architectural Design Support Beatriz Balduíno, Matthew Saacke Art Handling Josue Guarionex, Lane Twitchell Graphic Design Jasmine Buckley Art Direction, Exhibition Text, Curatorial Development Jinny Khanduja

BOARD OF DIRECTORS Lilly Wei, President Amanda Adams-Louis Steffani Jemison

SUPPORT Programmatic support for CUE Art’s exhibitions and public initiatives is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation; the Arison Arts Foundation; Evercore, Inc.; and members of CUE. Programs are also supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Detail of flora futura (or the survival dance), 2026 Found branches, wood sealant, motors, custom hardware Dimensions vary with installation

CUE Art 137 West 25th Street New York, NY 10001