the other: A Vik Muniz–Curated Group Show at Nara Roesler, New York

Nara Roesler's New York gallery opens "the other" on November 5, 2026, running through January 9, 2027. Curated by the Brazilian artist Vik Muniz, the show closes the gallery's year-long celebration of Nara Roesler's fifty years as a dealer.

The roster spans generations and media: Antonio Dias, Julio Le Parc, Tomie Ohtake, Daniel Buren, Richard Long, Sheila Hicks, Heinz Mack, Isaac Julien, JR, Cao Guimarães, Jonathas de Andrade, Amelia Toledo, Carlito Carvalhosa, Marco Maggi, Alexandre Arrechea, Xavier Veilhan, Angelo Venosa, Not Vital, Maria Klabin, Marco A. Castillo and Jose Dávila, along with Muniz himself.

The starting point is Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of an "excess of seeing": each person perceives things about others that remain out of their own reach. Muniz links this to artistic practice, which requires stepping outside one's own position, and to the way a work acquires meanings beyond its maker's intention through the viewer. His own pictures, built from sugar, chocolate and refuse and then photographed, probe how we recognize images. He has curated at the gallery before: "Buzz" (2012), on optical art, and "Screenspace" (2018), co-curated with Lucas Blalock and Barney Kulok, on photography in a post-digital setting.

Among the works, Dias's "Black Mirror" (1968) is a black formica-covered wooden object whose surface reflects only diffusely. Maggi's "Global Myopia (Parking Mirror)" (2010) incises a convex mirror, altering the reflected image. Toledo's "Mundo de espelho" (1966) uses six cut and perforated stainless-steel pieces to fragment and multiply reflections. De Andrade's "Senhorio, por Reginaldo," from the series "Eu, mestiço" (2017), pairs portrait and text to examine how social and racial conventions shape perception. Guimarães's "Retroatos #01" (1998/2016) gathers twenty photographs. Also shown are Muniz's magazine-image series, Julien's photograph from the Lina Bo Bardi project, JR's "Hands, composition #7" (2022) and Klabin's oil painting "Costela de Adão" (2022).

The gallery's own position adds another layer. Muniz notes that Nara Roesler is a Brazilian institution operating in New York, a foreign presence in a different cultural context. Drawing on Julia Kristeva's view of otherness as part of the formation of the self, the show treats the other not only as someone different from us but as something we have yet to recognize in ourselves.