KADIST, a non-profit contemporary art organization, presents its May–September 2026 programs around the world.
KADIST exhibitions
Threads of Kinship
Through June 30, 2026
In collaboration with and at the He Art Museum (Shunde, China)
Curated by Shona Mei Findlay, Yuan Fuca, and Marie Martraire in conversation with the HEM curatorial team. Supported by the Institut français.
Threads of Kinship explores histories of collectivity through practices of care, autonomy, and chosen kinship. Expanding on its presentation at KADIST Paris in 2025, this iteration deepens its engagement with the legacy of the Self-Comb Sisters and unfolds across four strands: female collectives, diasporic movement and economic systems, the entanglement of weaving and technology, and speculative visions of shared futures.
The Plantation Plot
Through July 11, 2026
KADIST (Paris)
Guest curated by Sheau Yun Lim.
The Plantation Plot brings together international artists and collectives across film, installation, photography, and sculpture. First presented at ILHAM Gallery (Kuala Lumpur), the exhibition examines the social, political, and economic legacies of global plantation systems, considered both as a historical structure and as a narrative framework that has shaped imaginaries, territories, and the circulation of bodies and resources.
Character Development
September 10–October 31, 2026
Minnesota Street Project Foundation (San Francisco, California)
Character Development brings together video installations, each featuring the artist as performer in different guises and roles. Calling upon cinematic history through citation, reinterpretation, and critique, each artwork addresses contemporary social issues ranging from consumer culture to post-colonialism, treating characters—in all their instability—as both structure and strategy.
KADIST Double Takes
Double Takes is KADIST’s film and video art program in collaboration with partner institutions. It presents works from the collection through screenings and discussions, with an extended online program on KADIST.tv.
Bodies in Contact
May 2, June 13 & August 16, 2026
Co-presented with and at BY ART MATTERS (Hangzhou, China)
Co-curated by Yuan Fuca, Ed Tianyi Sheng, and Huang Yuting
Bodies in Contact is the first screening and sharing session accompanying the exhibition Mei-yu Front. The program considers the body as a site of encounter across natural, urban, and social worlds. As part of an ongoing series, the screenings and discussions extend the exhibition’s narrative through dialogue with the KADIST Collection, offering expanded ways to experience and understand it.
Double Takes: Danses interdites
First iteration: May 29-31, 2026
Le Nouveau Printemps (Toulouse, France) / Co-presented with Le Nouveau Printemps and Loop Barcelona
Double Takes: Danses interdites brings together moving image, sound, and embodied histories through films from the KADIST collection. It is part of the 2026 edition of Nouveau Printemps conceived by Rossy de Palma, partly dedicated to “forbidden dances”—forms of dance censored or suppressed for religious, political, or social reasons, yet which persist through the gestures of artists engaged in resistance, remembrance, and celebration.
Fogo / Fuego
May 2026
Sala K (Santiago) and Museo de Historia Natural Río Seco (Punta Arenas, Chile) / In collaboration with Fundación Mar Adentro
Fogo / Fuego brings together moving-image artworks that reframe expedition as an inward, reflective journey shaped by environmental tensions. The program surveys artistic practices that involve travel across the Americas, informed by memory, migration, and ancestral ties to the land, involving both physical and imagined frontiers. Presented last summer on Fogo Island, the program now travels to Chile’s southernmost city, at the edge of Tierra del Fuego.
ARAVARA
June 2026
The National Gallery (Kingston, Jamaica) / In collaboration with LL Proyectos at Museo de la Identidad Nacional (Tegucigalpa)
Curated by Yina Jiménez Suriel
ARAVARA is an exhibition of moving image works that examines how ideas of “progress” have shaped the twentieth century and continue to inform contemporary imaginaries. Through repetition, archival reactivation, and speculative narration, the works challenge linear notions of time, revealing cycles of return and persistence, while using the audiovisual medium to reflect on how past promises continue to structure present realities and possible futures.
Nine Elephants Festival
July 16, 2026 at Swimming Pool (Sofia) / July 18, 2026 at the Botanical Garden of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (Sofia)
In collaboration with the Nine Elephants Festival
Curated by Viktoria Draganova
Presented across two sites in Sofia, the screenings respond to the festival theme, Everything We Do, which considers the city as shaped through everyday actions, labor, care, and more-than-human interactions. The first screening reflects art's role in shaping public environments. The second, Opera Ecologica, turns to outdoor screenings that foreground land, plants, rivers, and wind as carriers of stories that outlast empires and their extractive logics.
FEATURING
July–November 2026
Tinworks at Rialto (Bozeman, Montana, United States)
Curated by Vic Brooks
FEATURING is a film series presented within the theatrical context of independent and community-based cinemas across the United States. Short-form works from the KADIST collection screen alongside feature-length films by the same artists, tracing the evolution of their moving-image practices from gallery-based formats to a sustained engagement with cinematic conventions. This film series debuts at Tinworks at Rialto, inaugurating the first chapter of this multi-venue program. Located in the historic Rialto Theater in downtown Bozeman, the venue reopened in 2025 under Tinworks Art and now operates as a year-round hub for art, film, performance, and music.
KADIST collaborations and residencies
PAC x KADIST Seed Fund
February–November 2026
Mexico City
KADIST and PAC launch a Seed Fund initiative to mark PAC’s 25th anniversary. The program supports two artists through a year-long process of development and dialogue, each paired with a curator. Focused on works-in-progress with strong potential for future presentation, it serves as a strategic intervention in an artist’s practice, emphasizing long-term engagement and critical exchange. For the 2026 edition, the participating curators and selected artists are Magalí Arriola with Paloma Contreras Lomas and Jovanna P. Venegas with Alan Hernández.
FERTILE RESISTANCE
June 5–August 16, 2026
Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, United States)
As part of the new “Collection in Residence” collaboration with the ICA VCU, a selection of KADIST video works previously presented at major international events will launch the initiative. The daily screening program addresses urgent social, political, and environmental concerns, from militarization and climate crisis to forms of resistance. Reflecting ICA and KADIST’s shared commitment to critical and poetic practices, the program will continue this fall in the classroom, with KADIST.tv serving as a pedagogical resource for VCU faculty, students, and the broader Richmond community.
Daniel Barcay
June 2026
Résidence Tallard, a program by KADIST (Paris)
US technologist and researcher Daniel Barcay explores how artificial intelligence is reshaping our inner lives, relationships, and shared sense of reality. The residency unfolds through a series of intimate, industry-oriented gatherings as well as one public event in Paris, bringing together technologists and cultural thinkers for a more nuanced conversation about how we live with these systems.
KADIST online programs
Cinema Antena: Al alcance de la mano / As Long As My Hands Can Reach
April 1–July 31
Online: KADIST.tv
To celebrate the first anniversary of Cinema Antena, a microcinema in San Agustín Etla founded by Carolina Fusilier and Miko Revereza, KADIST commissioned a KADIST.tv channel curated by the duo. Reflecting the cinema’s intuitive, dialogue-driven programming the selection of works engage resonant themes in Oaxaca—extraction, ephemerality, and an economy of gesture—while foregrounding play as a form of resistance and a point of entry for youth to experiment with filmmaking.
We, Earthbound
April 2–ongoing
Online: Media Art 21 (MA21) and KADIST.tv
Curated by Mariana Fernández with Joseph del Pesco.
We, Earthbound is an online exhibition featuring works across video, sound, performance, and research-based practices that foreground listening, vibration, and movement as modalities for engaging nonhuman lifeforms and planetary systems. The exhibition is a collaboration with Media Art 21 (MA21), a bilingual online platform co-organized by the Institute of Sci-Tech Arts at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) and ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, and is accompanied by a film and video channel on KADIST.tv.
Press inquiries
Caroline Arce Ross, Communications Director, KADIST: caroline.arceross@kadist.org
