Between 6th and 7th Avenue
137 West 25th Street, Ground Floor
10001 New York NY
Hours: Wednesday–Saturday 12–6pm
CUE presents The Tropics, The Moon, and Mars is the first New York solo exhibition of Brooklyn-based Brazilian artist Mari Nagem. Nagem was selected for this opportunity through CUE’s open call. The show opens on Saturday, July 11 as part of West Side Fest, and will remain on view until September 26. The opening reception includes music by Fernanda Steinmann, bites by Brigadeiro Bakery, and a custom cocktail supported by Cappelletti.
In a new 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 begins 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. Rather than illustrating scientific research, Nagem approaches it as transformative material, 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 of resistance 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 scientific research, traditional knowledge, artistic speculation, and material transformation might generate new ways of inhabiting worlds already undergoing profound ecological change. The exhibition asks where we are going next, and how different forms of life might continue together within altered conditions of heat, time, and planetary belonging.
Opening reception: Saturday, July 11, 3–6pm, 137 W. 25th St.
Work Inquiries: For more information about the works in the show, see exhibition press release or inquire at info@cueartfoundation.org.
Public Programming: Related events and programming in CUE's gallery space are forthcoming; follow @cueart or sign up for emails to learn more.
Credits: The Tropics, The Moon, and Mars by Mari Nagem. Presented by CUE Art, 2025.
Sound Commission: Brisa Flow
Technical Consulting: Thiago Hersan
Technology Development: Mau Jabur, Philip Avetisov
Architectural Design Support: Beatriz Balduíno, Matthew Saacke
Graphic Design: Jasmine Buckley
Exhibition Text and Curatorial Guidance: Jinny Khanduja
CUE Team: Jinny Khanduja (Executive Director), Jasmine Buckley (Gallery Manager)
