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.

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) which opens 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.