LACE is proud to present the 2026 edition of Artists Film International (AFI’26), a touring film program which is collectively curated and presented by seventeen international arts organizations and convened by Forma. AFI’26 introduces the work of talented moving image artists to worldwide audiences, and will be live over 300 days, with exhibitions, screenings and public programs hosted across four continents. 

This year the AFI partners have commissioned or selected recent artists’ films which respond to the theme “A Kind of Power,” which brings together moving-image works that consider what it means to look, to witness, and to be seen in an age when images move instantly across borders and where surveillance looms. The program traces the ways acts of looking produce power—how they can shelter or expose, affirm or diminish—and how responsibility inflects every encounter between the camera, its subject, and its viewer.

The camera has never been neutral. From early cinematic practices that cemented patriarchal and colonial worldviews to present-day regimes of biometric capture and algorithmic scrutiny, the gaze has long shaped who is made visible and on what terms. Today these histories collide with the speed and saturation of digital imagery.

In an era of unrelenting visual circulation, we follow wars, uprisings, and injustices in real time, as our own movements are watched, tracked, and recorded. Visibility promises accountability yet also generates new forms of vulnerability. 

AFI’26 invites artists to respond to these shifting conditions: to examine the politics of witnessing and being watched; to confront the legacies of race, gender, class, and empire that continue to structure perception; and to imagine forms of resistance, opacity, and care within contemporary visual culture. LACE’s selection for AFI’26 is nepantlera (2025) by Kiyo Gutiérrez.