Moving Through Images. Reflections on MIA Photo Fair 2026 BNP Paribas
- Noemi Cattaneo
- Mar 25
- 4 min read
At MIA Photo Fair BNP Paribas, the gaze builds connections: between memory and transformation, distant works come into contact, entering into dialogue.
Curated by Noemi Cattaneo
Visiting MIA Photo Fair 2026 BNP Paribas is like moving through Milan without a fixed direction. You proceed through encounters and sudden detours, drawn in by voices that emerge along the way, and moments of quiet pause.
In the corridors, images that seem distant from one another brush against each other, traversed by the gaze moving through the exhibition space. Suddenly, silent trajectories take shape, opening and breaking apart, revealing unexpected connections.
It is within this movement that the works of different artists, initially distant, seem to observe one another, almost drawing closer, beginning to enter into dialogue. And it is through the associations of the gaze that something emerges, something that concerns not only what is seen, but also the way in which it is experienced.
Photography is what remains of memory.
The eye navigates and gets caught, trying to move forward through memory to reconstruct an image, yet something comes between memory and vision.
In Catharsis and Returned, from the Beyond the Visible series, Kyungtaek Lee (AN INC., Seoul - South Korea) intervenes on pigment prints by rubbing them, erasing details and bringing others to the surface. This decisive gesture reveals a tension between the fading of memory, its constant state of transformation, and the human tendency to fix it in memory.
Photography, therefore, does not simply crystallize the memory of a moment or an encounter, but restores its intangible and ever-changing nature, which lives in the mind of those who experienced it. Rather than fixing a moment, it seems to return its ephemerality: the natural dissolving and sedimentation of the boundary between what has been and what one tries to hold onto.
If in Beyond the Visible the image is consumed from within, in Barber Shop, New York, Anastasia Samoylova (Galerie Peter Sillem, Frankfurt - Germany) brings its threshold onto the glass surface, between the interior of the barbershop and the rainy exterior.
The view becomes blurred, held back by a thin pane that is not only a physical barrier but also a point of contact. Raindrops run and settle on the surface, turning it into a vulnerable field where the gaze pauses and turns inward.
Here too, as in memory, the image is never fully accessible: it remains filtered, traversed by a distance that cannot be bridged.
Even what has passed continues to change.
History defines an imaginary, but just like memory, it is never stable. Images transform, shaped by the gaze and by time.
In the Costumes series, Thomas Gust (Buchkunst Berlin, Berlin - Germany) begins from portraits of geishas taken in photographic studios in the late 19th century: constructed images, intended to be exported to the West, which helped establish a fixed visual imaginary. Yet what appears as documentary evidence reveals its own artificial nature. The artist’s painterly intervention settles onto the surface, altering it and introducing a new emotional temperature.
The figures thus seem to escape the rigidity of the original image: no longer simple representations, but presences that transform, returned to a more personal dimension.
In the works of Chloé Jafé (Galerie Écho 119, Paris - France) as well, female figures move beyond their original context. In the I give you my life series, women from the Yakuza are carried into imaginary, chromatically vibrant spaces, where painterly marks engage in dialogue with tattoo imagery.
If the latter inscribes belonging onto the skin, the painterly gesture instead opens up a space of possibility, more intimate and individual. Manipulating images from both history and the present layers perception, rendering it unstable, emotional, and authentic.
As in the artwork Nell’attesa sorriderò di nascosto from the No Portraits series by Donatella Izzo (Tallulah Studio Art, Milan - Italy), where the female figure is placed in a suspended state, between being and appearing, between what has been and what is still taking shape.
The aesthetics of change: a way not to look away.
It is not only history and memory that alter the perception of an image: the gaze does as well, through its direction and the choice to look.
In the Unique Scenes series, Johnny Miller (Buchkunst Berlin, Berlin - Germany) chooses to elevate himself, to distance himself, in order to view the world from above, turning - thanks to a drone - his gaze downward. Distance makes visible and rationalizes the geometries of social inequality: commercial spaces are reduced to colored rectangles, each with its own density, history, and impact, unseen to the eye but evident to individual consciousness. Photography thus becomes an X-ray of the entire social and global organism.
Similarly, in Materiale Residuo, Nanni Licitra (Lo Magno artecontemporanea, Modica - Italy) screenprints photographs directly onto agricultural greenhouse plastic. The surface becomes essence itself: the smoke from burned fields seems to permeate the image, thickening as in the triptych where radiographic marks in farmers’ lungs are placed alongside plant X-rays.
If Miller elevates the gaze to prompt us to lower our heads in an act of awareness, Licitra instead clouds vision with smoke, not to confuse us, but to make a blink necessary, a shift in the direction of the gaze.
You leave MIA Photo Fair as you would return home after a walk through Milan on foot: a little tired, your eyes filled with images, and a desire for silence, so that the conversations with the works you encountered may be rekindled in memory.
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