Conversation

A welcome conversation between artist Babi Badalov and curator Sara Raza introducing the exhibition and Badalov’s experiments with visual poetry, language, hybridity, migration, exile and cultural translation.

Performance

Through lecture, poetry, dance and DJing, Dharma Songs explores Cambodian history, diaspora, memory and healing. Moving between the legacy of the Khmer Rouge and the ancient cultural connections between South and Southeast Asia, Samboleap Tol reflects on inheritance, resilience and the ways we carry the past. Audiences are invited to activate the work themselves, becoming part of an intimate and collective ritual of remembrance, questioning and connection.

Conversation

Plants travel. They cross oceans, take root in new landscapes and carry with them histories of trade, labour and empire. In this conversation, artist Ishita Chakraborty and Manuel Rabaté, CEO and Director of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), follow these journeys from the Amazon, where Ishita has just continued her research, to New Delhi and Paris, where her series Where the Wild Things Roam is currently shown at KNMA and in the Grand Staircase of La Monnaie. Through Ishita’s ecofeminist methodology of repair and Manuel’s experience leading museums between France, Abu Dhabi and India, the talk explores how artworks, knowledge and histories circulate between territories and institutions, and what a museum of the 21st century can be.

Performance

Conceived by artist and music curator Attia Shiraz, Safarnameh is a continuous loop of moving image, spoken word, sound and music, celebrating global resistance through a mix of Shiraz’s personal travels and archives from the Global South.

Conversation

Conversation

Performance

Ruby Chen is a London-based artist working primarily in sculpture and painting. Her practice investigates how technological progress reconstructs archaic systems of domination under guise of innovation, tracing links between military imperatives behind technological advancement and the weaponization of perception. She works with humanoid materials, industrial components, including fur, skin-textured rubber, synthetic hair, and metal frameworks, exploring the gradual disappearance of the body into technological infrastructures.

In this live performance and installation, Chen examines the relationship between the body, acceleration and militarised infrastructures, questioning how bodies are transformed, controlled and gradually absorbed by technological systems. Presented by 2 curators 1 collapse as part of their RING/CAM series, the collective invites us to consider our relationship with (sur)veillance technologies.

Performance

The Matsutani Prize is back on the occasion of Asia NOW at the Monnaie de Paris. Created by the SHŌEN Foundation, this annual prize recognizes a France-based artist with 5 to 25 years of experience for the originality and strength of their work. Featuring a €15,000 grant, the prize is awarded by a jury composed of renowned artists, curators, and collectors. For this edition, curator Cédric Fauq is serving as guest rapporteur. The four finalist artists are Camille Bree, Hatice Pinarbasi, Kim Farkas, and Lucas Erin.

Conversation

Born from the friendship between France and Saudi Arabia, Villa Hegra is a new space for contemporary creation, research and intercultural dialogue in AlUla. In this one-hour conversation, Gaël Charbau, Artistic Director, and Fériel Fodil, Executive Director, will introduce Villa Hegra, its vision and programme, and discuss its role in connecting local practices with international artistic perspectives.

Performance

Named after the Filipino rice cake and the artist’s drag persona, Bibingka brings together drag, contemporary dance and storytelling to explore the boundaries of ritual and spectacle. Drawing on Alvin Collantes’ experience as a drag performer in Berlin and the lives of Filipino migrant workers, the work questions who is entertained – and at what cost. For Asia NOW, Collantes presents an adaptation of this powerful and intimate performance, exploring the body as a site of both labour and resilience.

Performance

Cinema NOW

NOWNESS is a global video platform celebrating creativity and storytelling across art, culture, fashion, design, music and beyond. With a strong focus on emerging and established creative voices, it brings together sensorial and thought-provoking moving image works from around the world. Following their ongoing collaboration, NOWNESS and Asia NOW return this year with two evenings of screenings, presenting a selection of films and moving image works that explore contemporary Asian perspectives and the diverse voices of its diasporas.

Conversation

A conversation with Jon Cuyson and Mara Gladstone, artist and curator for this year’s Philippine Pavilion at the 61st La Biennale de Venezia as they reflect on their experiences and describe their strategies to maximize the project’s impact and value. Making an exhibition at the Venice Biennale is one of the most prestigious and complex places for an artist and curator to realize a dream project. Media, commercial interests, and budget crunching are dynamic forces alongside the community-building and collaboration required to produce a large-scale site-specific project. What is the value of participating in a major international art exhibition such as the Venice Biennale? How do we understand the different meanings of value through which our creative work circulates? How does the value of the project shift as it moves from Manila to Venice and back again? What have we gained and lost moving from the local to the global, and how do we create value together?

Performance

Ruby Chen is a London-based artist working primarily in sculpture and painting. Her practice investigates how technological progress reconstructs archaic systems of domination under guise of innovation, tracing links between military imperatives behind technological advancement and the weaponization of perception. She works with humanoid materials, industrial components, including fur, skin-textured rubber, synthetic hair, and metal frameworks, exploring the gradual disappearance of the body into technological infrastructures.

In this live performance and installation, Chen examines the relationship between the body, acceleration and militarised infrastructures, questioning how bodies are transformed, controlled and gradually absorbed by technological systems. Presented by 2 curators 1 collapse as part of their RING/CAM series, the collective invites us to consider our relationship with (sur)veillance technologies.

Conversation

Performance

What if chaos had its own hidden structure? In Fivefold: The Anatomy of Chaos, Sehaj Malik explores the patterns that emerge through repetition, accumulation and layers in a five-hour performance accompanied by a participatory food installation. Extending the experience into the realm of taste, audiences are invited to create their own chaat, a popular South Asian street food that brings together contrasting flavours, textures and ingredients. A multisensory exploration of order and disorder, where performance and food become unexpected ways of understanding complexity.

Conversation

Strangers House is a gallery of Contemporary Art initiated through perspectives on alternate art history, universalism, black consciousness , Cheikh Anta Diop & Ambedkar. Based in Bombay with deep connections to Africa, Latin America & India. We seek Universalism in Art as a precursor to a visual imaginary that encompasses aesthetic philosophies that could be drawn between Africa, Latin America and India, that are read from the writings of Dr B R Ambedkar & Cheikh Anta Diop, founded on humanity emerging from secularism and black consciousness. We practice a material reality of production through artisanship & simplicity – wood, bronze, terracotta, print, ceramic and paint that define us as artists. Inviting Strangers as Guests, it is a house that enters a long existing dialogue that Bombay makes us inhabit in its architecture, people, spontaneity and function.

Conversation

Mohammed is an international financier and philanthropist. He is the Co-Chairman of the Guggenheim Middle East & North Africa (MENA) Acquisition Committee), a founder member of the British Museum MENA Acquistion Committee, a patron of the Agha Khan Museum, on the David Rockefeller council at the MoMA, New York, an advisory board member of Art Dubai and is Chairman of the Mohammed Afkhami Foundation. Mohammed obtained his BA in Economics with a concentration in finance from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and currently sits on the international advisory board of the Huntsman Program.

Conversation

Artist Kimsooja joins curator Sara Raza for a conversation exploring visual poetry as a language of gesture, material and embodied experience.

Workshop

This workshop weaving as a quiet act of care, connection, and healing. Through working with natural and organic materials, participants are invited to slow down, engage with their hands, and discover how the simple act of making can create a space for reflection and restoration. Together, we will explore weaving through repetition, touch, patience, and attention. Rather than approaching it as a traditional craft with a fixed outcome, the workshop encourages participants to listen to the material, respond to its natural qualities, and allow the process to unfold intuitively.

Poetry Reading

Poet and artist Larena Amin explores ancient histories, social cultures and inner consciousness, informed by facets of her upbringing such as relations to Kurdish histories of resistance. Followed by a discussion with Sara Raza.

Conversation

This panel explores the changing landscape of private patronage across China and India: how motivations, models and definitions of cultural influence are shifting; how a new generation of patrons is approaching collecting and institution-building differently; and how private individuals can contribute to a more connected cultural ecosystem both locally and internationally.
Through perspectives from both countries, the conversation will consider what the next generation of private cultural leadership might look like — and how patronage can move from collecting art to shaping the cultural landscape around it.

Performance

Named after the Filipino rice cake and the artist’s drag persona, Bibingka brings together drag, contemporary dance and storytelling to explore the boundaries of ritual and spectacle. Drawing on Alvin Collantes’ experience as a drag performer in Berlin and the lives of Filipino migrant workers, the work questions who is entertained – and at what cost. For Asia NOW, Collantes presents an adaptation of this powerful and intimate performance, exploring the body as a site of both labour and resilience.

Cinema NOW and Conversation

Private images, public bodies brings together four films by Anhar Salem spanning more than a decade of artistic practice: Eyes (2015), Labyrinth (2015), Love & Revenge (2025), and corporating/discorporating (2026).

From private homes and neighborhood streets to social-media platforms, fictional spaces and digitally altered bodies, this program examines how images, whether we create or consume them, shape the ways we act online and offline.
It begins with the intimate scale of the video diary, then moves to the unstable life of images online and finishes with the rawness of grief altered by artificial intelligence. The self here appears as a gesture, a face, a memory, a performance and an avatar.

Together, these films trace a movement from the first experience of self-documentation to the loss of control over one’s image and finally toward a body transformed by mourning and technology.

The screening will be followed by a 30-minute open conversation with Anhar addressing self-representation, privacy, digital image circulation, grief, surveillance, and the evolving possibilities of video in our current age.

Conversation

With the growing international interest in K-Culture, this session would look at the evolution of Korean visual art from traditional practices to contemporary and digital art. Rather than separating tradition and technology, the conversation would explore how Korean artists across different generations reinterpret heritage, identity, materials, and new technologies in their work today.

Conversation

Following Babi Badalov’s UTOPIA UTOPIA at Espace Niemeyer, Badalov is joined by Azad Asifovich for a conversation revisiting the project and its encounter with Oscar Niemeyer’s architecture.

Conversation

A conversation considering architecture in relation to displacement, migration, borders, public space, collective memory and belonging, and asking how contemporary architectural practice can respond to the political and social conditions that shape place.

Conversation

A discussion on the infrastructures supporting emerging Saudi artists, with a focus on education, investment and artist residencies. The panel will bring together three speakers: an emerging artist, a representative of the Saudi government working in the cultural sector, and the founder of an artist residency programme.

Conversation

On the occasion of the recent opening of the exhibition The Heart’s Desire at the Musée d’Art et de Culture Soufis MTO, exhibition artists Rand Abdul Jabbar and Burçak Bingöl join curator Jessica Cerasi for a conversation around their respective practices in relation to longing. Bringing together new works by six artists in dialogue with the museum’s collection, The Heart’s Desire considers what it means to live with absence, to sustain hope across distance, and to allow longing to become a means of connection, transformation, and spiritual depth.

Conversation

Book Presentation

Presentation of Antifascist Architecture: A Genealogy of Antifascist Architects, Buildings, History, and Theory, co-authored by Andrew Santa Lucia and Daniel Jonas Roche. Roche introduces the research behind the publication and its investigation into architecture’s relationship with antifascist histories, politics and practice.

Performance

Workshop

This workshop weaving as a quiet act of care, connection, and healing. Through working with natural and organic materials, participants are invited to slow down, engage with their hands, and discover how the simple act of making can create a space for reflection and restoration. Together, we will explore weaving through repetition, touch, patience, and attention. Rather than approaching it as a traditional craft with a fixed outcome, the workshop encourages participants to listen to the material, respond to its natural qualities, and allow the process to unfold intuitively.

Book Signing

Daniel Jonas Roche presents a book signing of Antifascist Architecture: A Genealogy of Antifascist Architects, Buildings, History, and Theory, co-authored with Andrew Santa Lucia in collaboration with Librarie Volume. 

Conversation

Across the world, forests, mountains and historical sites are becoming new platforms for artistic production, cultural exchange sand experimentation. This panel explores how art, architecture and landscape can interact; how cultural initiatives can respond to local histories and communities while participating in international networks; and whether these emerging cultural geographies can offer new models for cultural institution.

Cinema NOW x Conversation

Conversation

Against a global backdrop that increasingly highlights a diverse range of artistic profiles, professionals with varied backgrounds and experiences discuss their work—both within institutions and through artistic events—to foster greater inclusivity and transcontinental exchange. By exploring current and future challenges related to rights, access, and the understanding of less-represented scenes and practices, they underscore the vital importance of cultural dialogue and curatorial research.

Conversation

For many years, Kim Jongku has worked with iron powder, the black dust left behind when steel is ground. In his hands, this industrial residue becomes a kind of ink: spread, drawn and inscribed on the floor, it turns into landscapes and writing.
At Asia NOW, his Large Iron Powder Carpet (390 × 810 cm) is shown in the public programme at the Monnaie de Paris. In conversation with Francine Méoule, the artist looks beyond the technique to the questions behind it. Why paint with iron powder today? What personal memory does iron carry for him? And what does the image of the tank say about history, dictatorship and today’s climate of war?

Conversation

In 1937, around 172,000 Koreans in the Soviet Far East were deported by train to Central Asia. Their descendants call themselves Koryo-saram. Artist Daria Kim, whose work is currently on view in TURANDOT: To the Daughters of the East, a Collateral Event of the 61st Venice Biennale, grew up in Tashkent with her father’s of more than 1,500 works by Korean artists of Uzbekistan. For the first Bukhara Biennial, she animated paintings by two of them in the film 1937: Khristofor Kan, deported as a child, and Anatoly Ligay, born in exile. With curator Zuleykha Ibad, she talks about inherited pictures, family collecting, rice flour as sculpture, and what it means to be Korean in Central Asia, almost ninety years on.

Lecture Performance

London and Montreal based artist Berirouche Feddal presents a lecture performance and reading, taking the baguette as a starting point to explore histories of imperialism, colonialism and migration. Followed by a discussion with Sara Raza.

Cinema NOW

Presented by Asia Now, this moving-image programme gathers five films by Asian artists exploring the intersections of tradition, musicality, community, and illegibility. Featuring works by Choy Ka Fai, Chris Zhongtian Yuan, Eunji Cho and Mayuko Inui, the selection moves through rhythmic choreography, sonic landscapes, and fragmented archives. Together, these artists reframe cultural heritage and collective memory, embracing abstraction and ambiguity to disrupt conventional narratives while opening space for resonance, resistance, and felt understanding across moving images.

Conversation

Eunice Tsang, Billy Tang and Chris Zhongtian Yuan to explore moving images, artistic process, and experimental storytelling.

Conversation

The talk will explore Ma Ke Lu’s distinctive artistic practice, from his gestural and atmospheric abstraction to his exploration of movement, repetition, and the expressive potential of colour and form. His paintings evoke shifting, almost weightless forms suspended between appearance and disappearance, creating a dynamic tension between fullness and emptiness, gesture and stillness. The discussion will consider how his work transforms the pictorial surface into an open, immersive space, where painting becomes a way of sensing time, energy, and the relationship between presence and absence.

Conversation

The crux of Chow and Lin’s practice is to understand a world defined by transition and complexity. In this one-hour conversation with Leanne Sacramone, Senior Curator at Fondation Cartier, the artist duo will share about art created from systems studies on how identity, values and memory are embedded in objects, emphasizing the physicality of time.

Fun Fair / Atelier Enfants