After an inaugural edition last year, the AIR festival will return to Aspen, Colorado, in July with a program of performances, exhibitions, talks, and other events in the high-flying mountain town. The second edition, slated for July 27-31, will feature some artists who participated last time and others presenting work in Aspen for the first time, all under the theme “Figures in a Landscape.”
Adrián Villar Rojas, who last year featured in a talk with novelist Álvaro Enrigue, will present a two-floor exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum, which organizes AIR, and will give a talk during the festival. And Matthew Barney will return with a presentation of sculptures related to his TACTICAL Parallax performance commissioned for AIR last year. The works will be installed just outside of Aspen, near where he performed last year: a historic field house on a ranch in Snowmass that was a training site for a World War II–era US military unit focused on mountain warfare.
Lucy Raven, who participated in a pre-festival retreat last year, will be back with an outdoor film-performance presentation of her film Murderers Bar, with a newly commissioned ensemble score by Deantoni Parks. Camille Henrot will present a newly commissioned performance work: Commedia dell’arte, an operatic collaboration that “incorporates the stock characters of the Italian Renaissance theatrical tradition within a modern-day New York City apartment building,” according to a press release.
Music of very different kinds will figure in two performances: one by Los Thuthanaka, a duo who meld traditional Andean sounds with textured electronics, and another by Kali Malone and Stephen O’Malley, who will perform a piece commissioned for the Holy See Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale inspired by the 12th-century mystic Hildegard von Bingen.
Other performances and talks will feature Lyle Ashton Harris, Ivan Cheng, Morgan Bassichis, Nuar Alsadir, Kaveh Akbar, and Paige Lewis, with more names to be announced. And a keynote talk will feature filmmaker Julie Dash.
“AIR embodies the ideal of a non-collecting institution: a place where artists have time, space, and resources to explore their ideas, even in their most nascent stages,” Aspen Art Museum artistic director and CEO Nicolas Lees said in a statement. “The programming for this year’s festival showcases the iterative nature of the program, with commissions and dialogues emerging from the questions posed over the last year. This year was also deeply informed by Adrián Villar Rojas’s concurrent exhibition at the museum, which grapples with the limits of human intelligence in the face of an infinitely complex universe—a challenge that artists are particularly adept at addressing.”
