TECHNO-ANCESTRALITY

Event

Exhibition

TECHNO-ANCESTRALITY

Festival Exhibition

8 April 2026
— 14 June 2026

12:00 — 18:00

Location: IMPAKT [Centre for Media Culture]

Exhibition opening times: Wednesday until Sunday from 12:00 – 18:00.

Exhibition tickets:
€7,- (Regular), €6,- (Discount CJP, Upas, Student, <18) or €3,50 (With Museumjaarkaart)

Tickets

This exhibition gathers works that approach technology not as a story of accelerated progress, but as a layered field of ancestral memory, inscription and survival. Textile, script, ceramic, image, sound and data become intertwined registers through which knowledge moves, adapts and endures. What emerges is an expanded understanding of technics – one that precedes the digital and extends beyond the industrial, rooted in practices that have long sustained collective life.

Patterns carry social bonds and cosmological orientation across generations. Clay receives the trace of global metrics, returning financial abstraction to material ground. Mapping loosens from its colonial function of demarcation and becomes a means of holding contested memory. The works in this exhibition situate technology within longer histories of adaptation and obligation rather than novelty alone. The works suggest that technics take shape under pressure – revised, re-inscribed and carried forward as conditions change. Invention here is inseparable from inheritance. Processes unfold gradually, sustained across generations and reactivated when survival demands it.

This is not a nostalgic return. Continuity appears as an active, negotiated practice. Innovation depends on what has been carried forward; sovereignty and collective life find room within systems of extraction through inscription, weaving, counter-coding, ritual and strategic refusal.

The exhibition of the IMPAKT Festival 2026: Techno-Ancestrality is a proposition: that the tools shaping our future remain entangled with older forms of knowledge, and that the future itself is accountable to those who have sustained it.

Artworks on show at IMPAKT [Centre for Media Culture]: Artcom Platform, Mounir Fatmi, Voluspa Jarpa, Kongo Astronauts, Inty Muenala Vega & Yauri Muenala Vega, Navid Nuur and Russell Watson

Credits: Kongo Astronauts, Aisle of Dreams, 2019

BALQAŞ JYRY / THE SONG OF LAKE BALKHASH

Artcom Platform

DARK DARK DARK

Mounir Fatmi

COUNTER-CARTOGRAPHIES OF RESISTANCE: INNOVATION AND ANCESTRAL MEMORY

Voluspa Jarpa

POSTCOLONIAL DILEMNA TRACK# 05 (IN THE PROCESS OF)

Kongo Astronauts

RISHPA TIGRASHPA

Inty Muenala Vega and Yauri Muenala Vega

I AM BECAUSE OF YOU

Navid Nuur

ADINKRA-05

Russell Watson

Artcom Platform Mounir Fatmi Voluspa Jarpa Kongo Astronauts Inty Muenala Vega Yauri Muenala Vega Navid Nuur Russell Watson

Artcom Platform

― Artist

Artcom Platform is a collective of artists, researchers and curators founded in 2015 in Almaty. Working at the intersections of contemporary art, ecology, and community engagement, Artcom develops community-based infrastructures of care rooted in the steppe and lake ecologies of Central Asia. In 2020 we initiated Care for Balkhash - open initiative of care, where together with local communities, cultural practitioners, and researchers we develop new forms of care for Lake Balkhash to safeguard its ecosystems. We weave together contemporary art, interdisciplinary research, and public education, creating spaces where communities, scientists, and cultural institutions can act together in response to ecological and social challenges. Artcom’s work has been presented internationally at biennales, exhibitions, and academic forums, while remaining deeply connected to local communities. The collective sees art as a form of solidarity, ecological justice, and care for memory and future generations.

Mounir Fatmi

― Artist

Born 1970, Tangier, Morocco, Fatmi lives and works between Paris,Lille and Tangier. By using materials such as antenna cable, typewriters and VHS tapes, Mounir Fatmi elaborates an experimental archeology that questions the world and the role of the artist in a society in crisis. He twists its codes and precepts through the prism of a trinity comprising Language, Architecture and Machine. Thus, he questions the limits of language and communication while reflecting upon these obsolescent materials and their uncertain future

Voluspa Jarpa

― Artist

Since 1994, Voluspa Jarpa has maintained an extensive artistic practice, presenting solo and group exhibitions in Chile and internationally. Her work is grounded in long-term research into archives, memory, and the cultural and symbolic dimensions of social trauma, with a focus on the Cold War in Latin America and the artistic activation of U.S. declassified intelligence archives. More recently, she has examined Andean social uprisings (2018–2024) in Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, and Venezuela, tracing state violence, environmental sacrifice zones, mining, urbanization, and the weakening of democratic systems—dynamics that remain entangled with colonial legacies. Notable exhibitions include the 31st São Paulo Biennial (2014), In Our Small Region Over Here at MALBA (2016), the 12th Shanghai Biennale (2018), and Altered Views, Chile Pavilion, Venice Biennale (2019). She received the first Julius Baer Prize (2020) and an Acquisition Prize at the 16th Cuenca Biennial (2023).

Kongo Astronauts

― Artist

Invented in 2013 by two artists based in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kongo Astronauts traverses the vertigo of worlds; to the disturbances and syncopations of the contemporary cyborg, K.A. responds with artistic acts. A fluid collective, K.A. is built through the confrontation of experiences and through an attempt to resist the psychic ghettos that cover multiple postcolonial realities. K.A. manifests in the interzones of digital globalization, where past, future, and present collide and intersect with the politics of intimacy and the identities of urban and rural lives.

Inty Muenala Vega

― Artist

Inty Muenala Vega is a visual artist, Mindalae, and cultural manager. Studied Art at the Central University of Ecuador (1995–1999). A multidisciplinary artist, he frequently works with painting, video art, ritual performance, and drawing. He explores the spiritual relationships of Andean thought with symbolic geometry, eco-social issues, identity, and migration. He participated in the 10th International Biennial of Cuenca in 2009. He has exhibited in Peru, the United States, France, Italy, and Russia. He has received awards at the Intercontinental Biennial of Indigenous, Ancestral, and Millennial Art and has collaborated in organizing some of its editions. He is a founding member of the art collective Cosas Finas.

Yauri Muenala Vega

― Artist

Yauri Muenala Vega is a visual artist, educator, and currently a cultural activator at Yachay Tech University. He has served as a research professor at the National University of Education (UNAE). He holds a Master’s degree in Visual Anthropology from the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO). He won 2nd place at the 63rd edition (2024) of the Salón de Julio. He was also a winner in the arts research category of the Mariano Aguilera National Prize (2022–2023). In his artistic practice, he explores the connections between craftsmanship and intercultural collaborative practices. He has presented various artistic and cultural interventions in countries such as Mexico, Bolivia, Colombia, Brazil, the United States, Italy, France, and Ecuador. He is the author of the book *Kikinkunawan Visualidades Comunes*.

Navid Nuur

― Artist

Navid Nuur (Tehran, 1976) lives and works in The Hague. He began as a graphic designer and illustrator but chose autonomous visual art about ten years ago. Nuur quickly became a rising star in the international art world. Solo exhibitions have been shown at the Marta Herford Museum in Herford, Germany; Centre Pompidou in Paris; Parasol Unit in London; and the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht. For his work, Nuur has received the Volkskrant Visual Arts Prize (2010), the Charlotte Köhler Prize (2010), the Royal Award for Modern Painting (2011), and the Discoveries Prize at Art Basel in Hong Kong (2013).

Russell Watson

― Artist

Russell Watson is a Barbadian artist, filmmaker and educator working across cinema, photography and digital media. He is Lecturer in Cinematography at The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, and holds an MFA and BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His practice spans moving image, installation and photographic work, engaging with Caribbean histories, memory and speculative narrative through materially and conceptually driven approaches to image-making. His feature film A Hand Full of Dirt has been presented at international festivals including the Pan African Film Festival, the African Diaspora International Film Festival, and the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival, where it received the ReelWorld Audience Award. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Dakar Biennale and CARIFESTA. Watson has also held key roles in arts education and curatorial practice at the Studio Museum in Harlem and Barbados Community College. Alongside his artistic work, he leads the RSTUDIO Arts Archive, an ongoing initiative dedicated to the preservation and digitisation of Caribbean cultural memory.

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