Art and Film?

e-flux is pleased to present Art and Film?—The Future of Moving Image Beyond Definition, curated by non-syntax on the occasion of Art Fair Tokyo 2026. Running from April 15–30, the program brings together twelve works that, placed in proximity, build up layers of the experimental impulse embedded within the ontology of the image itself, while speaking to contemporary modes of exhibition and spectatorship. View the full program here.

Featuring works by Rei Hayama, Hitoshi Nomura, Kenshu Shintsubo, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, Mayumi Hosokura, Mai Yamashita and Naoto Kobayashi, Youki Hirakawa, Shu Yonezawa, Tsuyoshi Ozawa, Ana Vaz, and Jonas Mekas.

These works belong to no single genre, style, or movement. What they share, rather, is a dissatisfaction with established paradigms—a mobilization of the tools and technologies of the image to produce difference and to challenge prevailing assumptions about how reality is documented, represented, and interpreted. The program attempts to extract and reactivate the critical agency that has always resided within the image.

Works are typically preserved as if they were finished, singular objects, assumed to hold a clear indexical relationship to history. Yet the image, in its ongoing processes of generation and transformation, remains elusive—and it forces a basic question to the surface: which moment should be preserved, which version retained, and who has the authority to decide?

The image is no longer simply inside the archive or outside it. It is becoming the archive—an entity in continuous revision. That is not just a technological development. It goes to the heart of what recording, preservation, and transmission mean as cultural acts.

To encounter images that resist being pinned down in language is not to encounter confusion. It is to encounter a record of an era in which the image keeps outgrowing its own definitions. And it is to be left with a question that may not be answerable, but is worth sitting with: how do we remember an image, and how do we pass it on? Somewhere in that difficulty—in the instability itself—might lie the opening for whatever comes next in image culture.