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Some festivals use landscape as decoration. AIR Festival seems more interested in what happens when the landscape starts to behave like a collaborator.
Returning to Aspen from July 27 to 31, 2026, the festival brings together performance, film, literature, music, architecture, and live art under the title Figures in a Landscape. Presented by the Aspen Art Museum, this year’s edition treats the mountain town not simply as a scenic backdrop, but as an active force shaping how bodies move, speak, gather, and imagine.
The programme borrows its title from a recurring phrase across painting, cinema, and literature, using it to think about the relationship between body and place. What happens to a performance when it leaves the gallery? What changes when art unfolds in theatres, chapels, alpine peaks, or open terrain? At AIR, the answer seems to be that location does not merely hold the work. It alters it.
This year’s line-up moves through a wide field of artists and forms. Highlights include Adrián Villar Rojas’s First Gods, Lost Animals, alongside new commissions by Camille Henrot, Ivan Cheng, Lucy Raven, Matthew Barney, and Lyle Ashton Harris. Performances by Los Thuthanaka and Kali Malone extend the festival’s sonic and bodily register, while filmmaker Julie Dash appears as a keynote speaker.
Also appearing as one of the 2026 Bluhm-Kaul Keynote speakers is Miranda July, whose work across film, fiction, performance, and art has long turned ordinary life into something unstable, intimate, and quietly strange. Following the success of All Fours, her presence gives the programme another kind of charge: a language of reinvention, desire, identity, and the private weather of contemporary life.
What makes AIR Festival compelling is the way it refuses the clean boundaries of a traditional art event. It is not only an exhibition, not only a talks programme, not only a performance series. It feels more like a temporary ecosystem: artists, musicians, filmmakers, poets, architects, and audiences moving through Aspen as if the town itself were part of the score.