Commissions & Performances
July 27–July 31, 2026
Each day of AIR 2026 came alive through newly commissioned and reimagined works that activated Aspen’s cultural spaces and surrounding landscape as both set and score. Spanning sound, movement, film, and performance, artists turned acts of staging—from the cinematic to the theatrical—into immersive encounters that reshaped perception, heightened attunement, and drew audiences into collective experience within shared space.
Camille Henrot
Camille Henrot brought her interdisciplinary practice to the stage for the first time with Commedia dell’arte. Co-commissioned by Performa, Aspen Art Museum / Wheeler Opera House, and LYRA Art Foundation, Henrot’s performance incorporates the stock characters of the Italian Renaissance theatrical tradition within a modern-day New York City apartment building. The delivery of a package triggers a cascade of uncanny events among tenants, as the tragi-comedic play attempts to make sense out of the senseless, ultimately collapsing into it. The performance was developed in collaboration with set designer Adam Charlap Hyman, Charlap Hyman & Herrero, costume designer Sandra Berrebi, writer Estelle Hoy, playwright Justine Gelfman, choreographer and rehearsal director Sigrid Lauren, and lighting designer Dan Stearns, with original music by Mauro Hertig and Aaron David Ross.
Ivan Cheng
Ivan Cheng staged one of his emblematic “live situations for camera,” continuously filming himself in real time as he traversed an iconic Aspen landscape. Blending self-reflexive monologue, improvisation, song, and chance encounter, the performance unfolds as a playful feedback loop between action and documentation. Gestures, speech, and incidental encounters are immediately translated into image. The camera creates a shifting dialogue between the live audience and its mediated double as Cheng navigates the space between spontaneity and rehearsal, performance and observation.
Kali Malone
Kali Malone presented an early morning organ concert on Aspen Chapel’s newly restored pipe organ. Malone composes with slowly evolving harmonic cycles that extend perception and dissolve conventional notions of duration. The performance featured the US premiere of Concentric Circles of The Choirs of Angels—a new work commissioned by the Vatican in honor of Hildegard von Bingen for the 2026 Venice Art Biennale—alongside selected works from her expansive organ repertoire, including pieces from her critically acclaimed albums The Sacrificial Code (2019) and All Life Long (2024).
Lucy Raven and Deantoni Parks
Staged in a high alpine meadow, this film-performance marked the first outdoor presentation of Lucy Raven’s Murderers Bar (2025), projected vertically on a monumental curved screen set among the aspens, against the dramatic backdrop of Pyramid Peak. Accompanied by a newly commissioned ensemble score by Deantoni Parks performed with musicians from Aspen Music Festival and School, Lucy Raven’s transportive use of aerial cinematography and underwater imaging techniques traces the surge of water to the Pacific following the detonation of a century-old dam along the Klamath River in Northern California, before returning upriver with its renewed flow, where Chinook and Coho salmon are once again free to run.
Lyle Ashton Harris with Darnell L. Moore and Raymond Pinto
On Oracle gathered voice, image, and memory into a “performative montage.” Staged on the rooftop of Aspen Art Museum, the voices of performers accumulated within a field of video projections that interweave imagery, personal stories, and cultural histories, transforming disparate visual and sonic elements into a living archive that echoes and evolves in real time. Developed through a choral structure, On Oracle builds on Lyle Ashton Harris’s earlier explorations of multivoiced narration, assembling oral histories into a layered act of live storytelling.
Matthew Barney
In the wake of TACTICAL parallax, Matthew Barney’s AIR 2025 performance, ZONE DEFENSE: Old Snowmass Parallax extends the artist’s ongoing exploration of endurance, mythology, and material transformation. Installed on the grounds of a ranch adjacent to the original performance site, the large-scale sculpture occupies a field marked by diagonal axes that converge at its center, recalling the spatial logic of both athletic play and parallax. Cast in stainless steel and aluminum, two abstract forms appear suspended in near collision, joined by the jerseys of NFL players Darryl Stingley and Jack Tatum. Referencing the violent 1978 impact that left Stingley paralyzed, the work reflects on systemic violence, historical memory, and the power structures embedded within the mythology of the American West.
Los Thuthanaka
Los Thuthanaka—the sibling duo of Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton—performed atop Aspen Mountain, drawing from their recent, groundbreaking musical outputs. Rooted in Indigenous lineages from the Andes, the music reached toward distant peaks, where saturated electronics, electric guitar, and traditional instrumentation met the rapidly shifting light and atmosphere of the early morning.