2025 Commissions & Performances
Each day of AIR 2026 unfolds through newly commissioned and adapted works that engage with the architecture of Aspen’s institutions and its alpine landscape as both set and score. Spanning sound, movement, film, and performance, artists explore how acts of staging—from the cinematic to the theatrical—shape perception, attunement, and collective experience within shared space.
Matthew Barney
Within a riding arena repurposed from the former drill hall of the 10th Mountain Division infantry, Matthew Barney presents the new live performance TACTICAL parallax. Conceived specifically for the Mountain-West setting, the work collides—for the first time—characters, stories, movement, and visual vocabularies from the artist’s most recent major bodies of work concerned with the mythology of violence that lives in the American landscape. Barney interweaves the hunt iconography from his film Redoubt (2018), which follows protagonist Diana’s ritualistic pursuit of a wolf, with the pageantry and violence-as-entertainment depicted in SECONDARY (2023), a video installation inspired by a historic NFL hit that left one player paralyzed for life. Athletes, referees, zone defenses, hunters, and hunted come together to forge a link between the joint spectacles of American football and Western expansionism.
Caroline Polachek
Known for her genre-defying sound and captivating live performances, Caroline Polachek brings a singular energy to AIR’s lineup of artists, musicians, and thinkers.
Paul Chan
Since 2018, artist Paul Chan has been developing and working in the machine learning space. He wanted to understand what this new kind of computation could and could not do for artists and writers. He also wanted to know if there were other ways machine intelligence could play a role in an artist’s life beyond empowering them to generate “content” at scale, ad nauseam, in perpetuity. In this presentation, Chan will demonstrate the latest version of Paul′ (the ′ symbol, or “prime,” is a mathematical notation for denoting a value as derivative of some original). Chan calls Paul′ a “synthetic self-portrait,” or “synth” for short. Chan will talk about the philosophical, psychoanalytic, and thanatological influences that have shaped Paul’, and give an account of his evolving understanding of what a “machine” is, what “intelligence” means, and how life (biological or synthetic) becomes enlivened or deadened by the quality of that understanding.
Jota Mombaça
The Muted Saints is a site-responsive opera in three acts that dwells in the liminal space between lake and land. It departs from Mombaça’s 2023 short story Stuck in Movement (in the Tide), in which the protagonist experiences a transition from a human existence towards a geological one. Performed at the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies’ Hallam Lake Nature Preserve, The Muted Saints explores the resonances between body and planet, provoking a profound reconsideration of the limits of human subjectivity in the apprehension of the current climate catastrophe.
Cannupa Hanska Luger
Cannupa Hanska Luger’s sonic and sculptural installation Volume (2023) consists of a chorus of double-chambered globular whistles made of clay and fired using either a pit, a wood-fired kiln, or an electric kiln. The exteriors of the whistles are modeled after the skulls of foxes, ocelots, vultures, armadillos, and turtles, while their internal structures are loosely inspired by the design of pre-Columbian Aztec wind instruments, such as ocarinas and tlapitzallis. Through the haunting qualities of both their sound, material, and form, each instrument is designed to perform a form of communion with ancestral presences. Originally commissioned for a concert hall, the ensemble of whistles has been re-tuned specifically for Aspen’s mountain landscape, which lies at the same altitude as Luger’s New Mexico studio. Now sited outdoors and open to the elements, the work performs using a mechanical system powered by compressed air, producing vibratory, sustained waves of sound that resonate across the valley.
Mimi Park
Spiraling from within the library of the Aspen Center for Physics is a new installation by Mimi Park with a unique lifespan. Principles of dissolution and return characterize Park’s art, which often takes the form of sprawling sculptural installations that integrate small readymades with natural substances like seeds, plants and soil. Over the course of the exhibition, mechanized elements within the installation release energy powered by the sun, electricity, or batteries, resulting in unchoreographed movement. When the energy is depleted, the installation comes to rest in a temporary form. All elements of Park’s installation for AIR can be borrowed by visitors with the understanding that they will be returned when Park requests them for a future presentation. Park considers the ways in which matter circulates through the world in random patterns of proximity, with endless permutations. These fragile unions of objects illuminate new understandings of caretaking, value, and responsibility.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul & Rafiq Bhatia with the Aspen Music Festival and School
On Blue (2022) is a collaborative project between filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul and composer Rafiq Bhatia. The film serves as a companion piece to Weerasethakul’s earlier film Blue (2018), in which actress Jenjira Pongpas Widner lies between states of sleep and wakefulness at night, surrounded by shifting backdrops from Thai folk theater. Originally commissioned for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial by Liquid Music, On Blue features a new instrumental arrangement for the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble conducted by Tim Weiss. Inspired by “moments of awakening, of sunrise,” ambient sounds and orchestral textures complement the film’s serene pacing, evoking a sense of intimacy and transience between the physical and spiritual realms.
Sophia Al-Maria
Sophia Al-Maria joins forces with musician Davia Spain to summon an otherworldly transmission—part séance, part song-cycle, part science-fictional lament. The performance spirals outward from Sara Imari Walker’s Life as No One Knows It—a theoretical livewire that reimagines what life is—and catches the ricochet of Álvaro Enrigue’s Sudden Death, where time loops and bodies become battlegrounds for meaning.
André 3000
André 3000 will no longer be performing at the inaugural AIR Festival due to unforeseen personal circumstances. Aspen Art Museum and The Wheeler Opera House wish him all the best at this time and we look forward to sharing updates with you all about future AIR programming.