LACE Presents: Artists’ Film International
Saturday, June 27, 2026, 2–7 PM
Heavy Manners Library
1200 N Alvarado St, Los Angeles, CA 90026
Free admission
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.
About nepantlera, 2025
nepantlera is an experimental video that documents a series of ritual-performances activated in specific locations along the bodies of water that delineate the border between México and the United States, that is the Gulf of México, the Rio Bravo/Grande River, the Colorado River, the Gila River, The Tijuana River and the Pacific Ocean. La nepantlera, a being/force/goddess/extinct creature embarks on a mythical journey to communicate with the waters that she gave birth to in ancient times. But she soon finds out that the rivers have been raped, and their waters have been partitioned by ambitious unsatiable men. Throughout la nepantlera’s pilgrimage, which begins at the mouth of the Rio Bravo/Grande River in Brownsville, Texas, and concludes at the Pacific Ocean in Tijuana, México, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the historical document that turned these waters into borders, is transgressed, transformed, and consumed through gestures such as marking, sound-making, ripping, chewing, salivating, and soaking. These gestures, involving natural dye, voice, rattle sounds, saliva, ocean and river water, touch, alter, and erode the treaty’s imperialist pages, challenging its authority and reimagining its significance.
This project was crafted out of a deep concern for the land and human violence that occurs daily in the border, while also considering this space as a complex multilayered watery place where resistance, reciprocity, memory, stories and new possibilities arise.
About the Artist
Kiyo Gutiérrez is a Mexican multidisciplinary artist. Trained in history, she turned to performance to explore the body’s potential as a tool of resistance. Her work emerged as a response to Mexico’s brutal realities, femicide, disappearances, and environmental devastation. Her ritual-performances often integrate archival research, sculpture, textile, sound and audience participation. Her work reexamines the construction of colonial history, uncovering how bodies and materials themselves bear the traces of extraction, exploitation, resistance and transformation. Kiyo performs in public spaces and has participated in Performance Festivals and exhibitions in México, Brasil, Colombia, Bolivia, Spain, Italy and the United States. She participated in Irrational Exhibits 13 and is an alum of Georgetown University’s Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics. Kiyo is a recipient of the Franklin Furnace Fund, the Macomber Travel Grant, the Fulbright Scholarship, and was nominated for the Gilder/Coigney International Theatre Award. She received her MFA in Fine Arts at the Roski School of Arts of the University of Southern California.
About Artists’ Film International
Artists’ Film International is a prestigious global film program, which is collectively curated and presented by a network of arts organizations from around the world. Originally founded in 2008 by Whitechapel Gallery, London, since 2024 the program has been convened by Forma.
Each year the program is uniquely selected, curated and presented across the partner network in an ever shifting format, from large scale gallery exhibitions to film festivals and online screenings. This gives way to distinct and exciting presentations of the line-up across the world, and the resulting conversation between works plays out across months and years, providing a legacy to each new cohort of artists and nurturing new creative collaborations. As of 2025, the program has seventeen partners across four continents.
Artists’ Film International is an alternative, lateral program that exemplifies non-hierarchical, borderless and collaborative curatorial models. Responding to urgent global topics, the program cultivates collective practice and cross-cultural dialogue, fosters the exchange of ideas and perspectives, and provides wide reaching visibility for artists.
Support
This program is supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Special thanks to our friends at Heavy Manners Library for their support while LACE’s Hollywood gallery is under renovation.
