On the occasion of the 15th edition of MIA Photo Fair BNP Paribas 2026, Italy’s most important fair dedicated to contemporary photography, Tallulah Studio Art presents Tallulah Room – Napolian Issue, a monographic project dedicated to Keila Guilarte, included in the Progetti Focus Latino section curated by Rischa Paterlini.
The fair, scheduled from March 19 to 22, 2026, at Superstudio Più in Milan, thus becomes the stage for a powerful reflection on female identity, cultural memory, and the symbolic power of the image.
Tallulah Room complements and completes the broader curatorial concept proposed by the gallery at the fair, Becoming. Images in Transformation, a project that explores metamorphosis in contemporary photographic art as a permanent condition of existence, identity, and the very substance of the image.
Two distinct stands, one vision: to investigate photography as a space of transformation, threshold, and affirmation.
Napolian Issue: female identity and contemporary photography
With Napolian Issue, Keila Guilarte has created a photographic series that interprets female identity as a radical, conscious, and unmediated presence.
Through a rigorous aesthetic language—neutral backgrounds, minimal lighting, frontal gazes—the Cuban artist transforms the body into an archive of memory, belonging, and strength.
Naples is not a city to be described, but a symbolic condition: a collective root, a cultural and spiritual stratification embodied in the faces and bodies portrayed. Each subject occupies the space with authority, eschewing any folkloric or stereotypical narrative.
At the heart of the project is the dialogue between body and symbol, between spiritual tradition and contemporary representation of the feminine, free from judgment and rhetoric.
The result is a body of work with strong iconic power, capable of dialoguing both with the institutional context and with international collectors of fine art photography.
The works are presented in a limited edition of 5 + 2 AP, printed using high-quality museum processes.
Keila Guilarte
A Cuban visual artist and photographer, Keila Guilarte develops research focused on identity, body, and representation in contemporary photography.
Her formal language, essential and recognizable, uses frontal portraiture and controlled staging to transform the body into a symbolic territory traversed by memory, spirituality, and cultural belonging.
Her works have been presented in international exhibitions and are the subject of growing interest from collectors and institutions.
Rischa Paterlini
An independent curator and art consultant active in Europe and Latin America, Rischa Paterlini focuses her research on contemporary artistic practices related to identity, the body, and postcolonial narratives.
She collaborates with fairs, institutions, and independent spaces, developing projects that combine aesthetics, critical vision, and the art market, with a particular focus on emerging photography.
Tallulah Studio Art
Tallulah Studio Art is a curatorial platform dedicated to photography and contemporary imagery, active through exhibition projects, participation in international fairs, and collaborations with artists and curators.
With the Tallulah Room format, the platform reinforces its commitment to promoting projects with high conceptual density and museum quality, contributing to a vision of collecting as a conscious and lasting cultural investment.
And so, between threshold and affirmation, between dissolving identities and rewritten images, photography no longer limits itself to representing reality: it traverses it, challenges it, transforms it.
Tallulah Room and Becoming are not simply two stands in dialogue, but a single field of tension in which the image ceases to be surface and becomes process—an unstable, living place where every form is already, inevitably, in the making.
Superstudio Più
🗓 March 19–22, 2026
📌 Stand E008
Press conference: March 18, 2026, 12:00 p.m.
Press preview: March 18, 2026, 5:00–10:00 p.m. (by invitation only)
Fair hours: Thursday–Sunday, 11:00 a.m.–8:00 p.m.
