Four artist groups will gather at Daishoin, a 1,200-year-old Buddhist temple on the island of Miyajima, for the second edition of MAFIN, the Miyajima Art Festival in the Narrative. Running November 20 to December 13 and curated by Emi Totsuka, the project asks what peace and prayer can mean in contemporary art, staged inside a temple whose eternal flame has reportedly burned since the era of the monk Kukai.

The 2026 theme is framed as "the eye of time," described by the organisers as a universal, ongoing process toward peace. The premise is deliberately slow: in a society where AI delivers instant answers, the festival treats the act of pausing before unanswerable questions as itself a form of prayer. The participants are Chim↑Pom from Smappa!Group, Sumi Kanazawa, Hiroshima-born sculptor Hiroko Kubo, and Belarus-born artist Ilya Yerashevich.

Each brings work tuned to the temple's history. Chim↑Pom presents a piece built around three kinds of fire: the undying flame kept at Daishoin, the "flame of peace" carried from the Hiroshima bombing, and an ordinary flame with no such lineage — asking how context changes what a flame means. Kanazawa shows around 100 of her graphite-covered newspaper drawings alongside drawings she has made each August 6 to 10, the days around the bombing anniversary, since 2019. Kubo exhibits her multi-eyed sculpture "Eye of the Forest" (2024), made with industrial materials such as blue tarpaulin, while Yerashevich contributes gold-leaf figures drawing on Christian icons and Buddhist sculpture to evoke absence and memory.

MAFIN launched in 2025, the 80th anniversary year of the atomic bombing, as a project to re-read Miyajima's history and memory through contemporary art. A special concert by musician Meitei is scheduled at the temple's Kannon Hall on November 22. Set inside one of Japan's most visited sacred sites, the festival is betting that art can still open a space for reflection that politics and technology cannot.