David Boring’s live act for In the Zone: A Happening draws from their latest album Liminal Beings and Their Echoes (2026). Cycling through trauma, survival, healing, and dialogues with liminality, the magnetic performance excavates the human psyche's darkest contours by oscillating between annihilation and rebirth. The experimental mix of noise-rock, electronic body music, and spoken word generates a complex audiovisual landscape that harmonizes punk urgency with emotional introspection. Through the live performance, the audience is invited into a space of electrifying contradictions - brutality with tenderness; dark transgression with cathartic sublimity.

Roger Garcia is known for his outstanding work with Modern Films Production, a group he created in the early 1980s. This small production house supported an impressive array of experimental and essay films, including Garcia’s own, expanding Hong Kong’s moving image culture beyond the dominant structures of the commercial industry. The group worked primarily in Super 8 and 16mm film, embracing a ‘do-it-yourself’ approach to create personal responses to cinema within available means. As a key guest of the festival, Garcia will present a selection of works from the Modern Films catalogue. He will also participate in conversations to discuss M+’s recent restoration of some of these films as well as his successful journey in independent filmmaking by establishing an agile and creative network of like-minded film professionals.

ikkibawiKrrr contemplates space through rock fabric, resilient overgrowths, and human connections. Their ecological philosophy frames their inquiry into the intersection between land, community, and history. Taking Korean rural life as their starting point, ikkibawiKrrr conducts extensive field research in fading East Asian villages amid rapid globalisation and urbanisation. While these communities represent viable models of mutual aid and coexistence with nature, they are rapidly losing their place in the modern world. Through screenings, video installations, and workshops, ikkibawiKrrr invites us to remember the spirit of these villages and rediscover communal joy.

Takashi Ito is one of the leading avant-garde filmmakers in Japan. His festival presentations include a screening of his early 8mm and 16mm experimental films and his latest work, Distant Voices (2024). Both programmes illustrate the artist’s long-standing interest in space as a motif, concept, and structural principle.

The earlier films exemplify Ito’s extraordinary skills in creating visually stunning and psychologically haunting spatial experiences with analogue film. The empty architecture of familiar places—occasionally inhabited by isolated figures—are energetically animated through optical effects and layered, multi-angle compositions, which are further transfigured in the editing process through techniques such as acceleration, flicker, superimposition, colour manipulation, and dissonant sound.

In contrast, Distant Voices offers a contemplative exploration of space through the portrait of two young, alienated female figures. Ito will also give post-screening talks to unpack his own practice in the context of the Japanese avant-garde.

Pioneering Korean sound artist Daham Park will be our resident DJ over the course of the festival, showcasing experimental, improvised, and independent music across Asia. At the festival party In the Zone: A Happening and during Park’s various sets performed in the Festival Lounge (with special collaborators), visitors will enjoy an innovative curation of songs infused with different cultural genres, from dangdut, bhangra, and pansori all the way through to techno and hard beats, reflecting Park’s diverse musical tastes. Visitors will dance and feel through the festival’s spaces as they learn about Park’s unconventional story and multifaceted and collaborative sound practice.

Artist duo Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind will present a series of screenings and conversations about the complexity of physical and emotional displacement. Their films feature futuristic sets and scenarios that speculate on the impact of exile and inherited trauma grounded in historical events, local traditions, and personal histories. Narrated in Arabic, the films draw from the aesthetics and storytelling of sci-fi in mainstream cinema while addressing specific geopolitical conditions and their effects on people in the past, present, and future. The artists’ stunning cinematic language, rich in political and symbolical meaning, offers a pertinent reflection on how space is never neutral and how its access and distribution are intrinsically linked to power.

As a pioneering figure of relational aesthetics—a mode of art-making where the artist facilitates social experiences and communal exchange within a space—Rirkrit Tiravanija will create various experiences during the festival. These experiences provide visitors new ways to engage with the museum and connect with one another. They include convivial moments and informal conversations in the Festival Lounge, as well as the installation of two sets of ping-pong tables from his HONEY IN ROCKS WATER IN STONES series, allowing visitors to play and observe the game in an unfamiliar setting. The festival will also present Tiravanija’s film Lung Neaw Visits His Neighbors, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2011. Lastly, a poetic text-based work created in response to M+’s architecture draws our attention to how space shapes our perceptions of the world and fosters our relationships with our surroundings.

Chinese pioneer artist Xu Bing’s work critically engages with the filmic apparatus to question the gaze of the camera, voyeurism, and spectatorship. As a guest of AAGFF, he will present a selection of moving image works, including Dragonfly Eyes (2017), a poignant love story entirely constructed from public surveillance footage, and A Case Study of Transference (1993–2018), a site-specific installation that confronts viewers with the sight of mating pigs. His latest space art project, which incorporates satellite imagery and sends experimental videos back to the orbiting satellite to be shown to viewers from outer space, will be a highlight of the festival. Through the project’s presentation, also part of a forthcoming M+ digital commission, Xu will engage with visitors to discuss his outer space experiments and the politics of contemporary image production.

Artist duo Zheng Mahler use technology to explore the sensory worlds of non-human species and their relationships with humans within the ecological realm. Featured at the festival is What is it like to be a (virtual) bat? (Phase II–IV) (2023) from the M+ Collections. Displayed as two videos at the East Entrance and as a VR experience in the Festival Lounge, the work offers an immersive experience to embody the journey of a bat. Zheng Mahler will also do a screening and discussion in the Festival Lounge on their latest digital commission with M+: The Twenty-Three Thousand Sexes of Schizophyllum Commune and Other Stories (2026), a work that explores the lives of fungi species found on Lantau Island, Hong Kong.