Artists Film International 2026

Artists Film International 2026: A Kind of Power

Since the advent of cinema, moving image practice has been tied to questions of perception and power. Early filmmakers imagined the camera as a form of mechanical vision capable of revealing the world objectively, yet cinema quickly exposed how vision remains shaped by the social and political structures that organise the gaze. Throughout the twentieth century, colonial image-making, propaganda, ethnographic film, and patriarchal modes of spectatorship produced and reinforced regimes that shaped how people, cultures, and histories were seen and understood. Far from disappearing, today these systems of visibility have been reconfigured within contemporary digital image cultures defined by circulation, algorithmic mediation, surveillance infrastructures, and the relentless production of visual information.

A Kind of Power brings together a selection of international artists whose films renegotiate the fraught legacies of representation and respond to the conditions under which people, histories, and territories are made visible. Curated by Antonia Shaw, Head of Programmes at Forma, in collaboration with a network of cultural institutions, the 19th edition of Artists Film International (AFI’26) is structured as a decentralised curatorial platform in which each partner nominates an artist from its local context. Presented through exhibitions, festivals, and screenings across four continents, the programme creates connections between artists and audiences across distinct social, political, and geographic contexts, foregrounding moving image as a space through which relations, perspectives, and collective forms of attention are continually reshaped.

Across A Kind of Power, many of the artists move beyond critique alone, exploring how moving-image might create new forms of relation, attention, and collective presence. While some works confront contemporary systems of visibility directly, others propose alternative ways of inhabiting and understanding the world through ritual, memory, reciprocity, and acts of witnessing.

Mila Turajlić's Non-Aligned Newsreels: Voices from the Debris [Algiers Sessions] reactivates forgotten archives of decolonisation and liberation movements, whilst Video News'ONGOING PROJECT. VIDEO NEWS traces how images circulate between people and become sites of collective attention and memory. In Sight Unseen, Alessandra Ferrini traces the politics of visibility surrounding Italy's colonial past through archival materials that have been manipulated, obscured, or withheld from view, while Amaal Said's Open Country considers how race, belonging, and movement shape the experience of being seen within the contemporary British landscape. Drawing on ritual, ecology, and borderlands thinking, Kiyo Gutiérrez'snepantlera shifts the terms through which bodies, landscapes, and histories are perceived, imagining forms of relation beyond inherited structures of looking. Together, these works form part of a wider constellation of new and recent films by twelve artists selected by AFI partners across Europe, Asia, and North America.

A Kind of Power premieres on 11 June 2026 at Sapieha Palace, a branch of the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), before opening at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) on 27 June. In Vilnius, the programme will take shape at Sapieha Palace as a rotating three-screen installation in which changing constellations of works are presented across the summer months. In Los Angeles, LACE will showcase the programme through a one-day off-site screening event at Heavy Manners Library on 27 June 2026, foregrounding the different ways moving image can be encountered collectively across the AFI network. Further dates and partner presentations will be announced throughout the year.