Mira Art Fair: Paris
For its first MIRA ART FAIR, Albuquerque Contemporânea is pleased to present a project that brings together artworks by Brazilian artists Tatiana Blass and Mabe Bethônico. The booth will give the visitor a chance to see a shared investigation into the material and symbolic consequences of extractive practices in Minas Gerais and other parts of the world. While Bethônico mobilizes historical, cultural, and spiritual narratives by interweaving Afro-Brazilian traditions with scientific discourse, Blass approaches the same terrain through processes of visual instability, staging environments marked by transformation, erosion, and ambiguity. Both artists engage mining not merely as a site of resource extraction, but as a complex field where memory, labor, and ecological impact converge.
Across distinct yet resonant strategies, the works reframe the scale and temporality of extraction by bringing it into proximity with embodied experience. Bethônico’s performative and textile-based gestures evoke collective ritual and continuity, while Blass’s mutable images and theatrical spaces foreground fragility and perceptual uncertainty. Together, they propose a critical reorientation from monumental landscapes shaped by industry to intimate, human-centered narratives that expose the tensions between visibility and erasure, permanence and decay, and the individual’s place within broader socio-political and environmental systems.
Uncertainty Principle – Tatiana Blass, 2026 “Uncertainty Principle” by Tatiana Blass presents interconnected works that explore the instability of images and the expansion of visual language through processes of transformation and decay. By staging ambiguous human figures within melting and shifting environments, the project reflects on vulnerability and the tension between individual experience and broader socio-political forces. The artist, who has lived for the past decade in Minas Gerais – Brazil’s largest mining state – has witnessed firsthand the profound impacts of mining. In response to the destruction caused by extractive mining processes, Blass transforms representations of open-pit craters into arena theater stages. The monumental scale of the excavations, their heavy machinery, and the immensity of the surrounding landscape are brought down to a human scale.
Walking the Dust – Mabe Bethônico, 2026 Mabe Bethônico’s practice explores the issues of geography, geology, history, and ethnography oftentimes in relation to extraction. Walking the Dust references Congado – a traditional Afro-Brazilian cultural and religious celebration, in which part of her family participates, prominent in the artist’s native Minas Gerais region where mining began in the 17th century – and is filtered through a reading of the mid-16th century treatise De Re Metallica by the German scholar Georgius Agricola, a fragment of which is devoted to the activity of ventilating the mines. It is a walk of celebration, reflection, and mourning that critically reflects on the effects of human actions. The banners and textiles employ symbols and patterns that blend the two histories together, united under a common sky that we all share regardless where we are. (Snippet of exhibition text, curator Krzysztof Kosciuczuk) This series of works consist in large-scale banners and textiles that will be shown for the first time during the artist’s participation in the 16 Manifesta, held from June until October in Germany.
