The Villa Hegra project titled Tables Around: Perspectives on the Saudi Scene, curated by Gaël Charbau, Artistic Director of Villa Hegra, and Basmah Felemban, Curatorial Advisor at Villa Hegra, brings together the work of six female artists exploring the table as both an object and a symbolic space for exchange, memory, and imagination. Each artist transforms the table into a living environment through sculptural landscapes, imagined territories, and intimate encounters, revealing fragments of lived experience that are at once open, expressive, enigmatic, and layered.

Artists:

Raghad Al-Ahmed & Reem Olyan, Latifa AlBokhari, Reem Ali, Reem Al Nasser, Zahra Bundakji, Bashaer Hawsawi

Founded by Maximiliano Modesti and Mohammed Amine Dadda, Kalhath Foundation champions excellence in Indian embroidery, presenting a dialogue between craftsmanship and contemporary creation. Kalhath will also present works by artists who participated in residency programs at the Kalhath Institute in India.

Artists:

T. Venkanna, Yassine Balbzioui, July Ancel, Pauline Guerrier, Dalila Dalléas Bouzar, Cécile Palusinski and Elsa Mroziewicz, Lauren Januhowski, Pierre Roy-Camille and Amina Benbouchta.

Architectural installation as “second skin” of stacked terracotta cups, creating a porous, light-filtering envelope that radically reimagines the relationship between craft, material, and space. Following their Kulhad Pavilion with Wallmakers at the 2025 Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa, the work extends Nirmiti’s exploration of vernacular materials and collective making into an immersive architectural environment.

A vessel holds. It carries water, soil, thread, archives, and stories across generations. It cracks, it is mended, it is remade.  Vessels of Memory brings together 10 artists from Biennale Jogja to present contemporary Indonesian practices in Europe. The exhibition proposes memory not as something stored in the past, but as a practice we do in the present — through our hands, our communities, and the materials we live with.

Across Java, Sumatra, Bali, Papua, Sulawesi, and diasporic routes, these artists work with painting, weaving, soil, performance, and archival research. They trace how knowledge moves: through myth, through craft, through ecology, and through displacement. In doing so, they ask what we choose to inherit, what we choose to repair, and what new forms memory can take under pressure.

Artists:

Citra Sasmita, Ines Katamso, Hashel Al Lamki, Timoteus Anggawan Kusno, Jumaadi, Nathalie Mochamad, Dicky Takndare, Natasha Tontey, Amalia Laurent, Rani Jambak.

Asia NOW is proud to host Punk Orientalism Studio, founded in New York by Dr Sara Raza, an award-winning international curator, art historian and author, and Chief Curator of the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), Tashkent.

For its 12th edition, Asia NOW presents I Open My Mouth and Speak Art, a special project by Punk Orientalism Studio in collaboration with Paris-based artist Babi Badalov. Taking Badalov’s radical exploration of alphabets, hybrid languages and visual poetry as its point of departure, the Studio transforms into interdisciplinary salon for artistic and intellectual exchange.

Bringing together artists, architects, curators, writers, poets and musicians, the programme explores migration, displacement, translation, resistance and belonging through conversations, poetry, performance, publishing, sound and live interventions.

With contributions from Babi Badalov, Kimsooja, Marco Scotini/ Disobedience Archive, Daniel Jonas Roche/ Anti-Fascist Architecture, Feda Wardak, Azad Asifovich, Larena Amin, Berirouche Feddal and Attia Shiraz, among others, the salon creates a dynamic space for dialogue across artistic disciplines, languages and cultural geographies.