AIR Festival Returns to Aspen With Villar Rojas, Barney, Raven, and Henrot
Aspen’s summer art calendar is set to widen again this July, as the AIR festival returns for its second edition with performances, exhibitions, talks, and music spread across the mountain town from July 27-31. Organized by the Aspen Art Museum, the program is built around the theme “Figures in a Landscape,” a phrase that suggests both the physical drama of the setting and the way artists are being asked to think through place, scale, and human presence.
Several artists from last year’s inaugural edition are back, but with new commissions or expanded presentations. Adrián Villar Rojas, the Argentine artist who appeared in conversation with novelist Álvaro Enrigue during the first AIR, will present a two-floor exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum and also speak during the festival. The museum said this year’s programming was shaped in part by Villar Rojas’s concurrent exhibition there, which it described as grappling with the limits of human intelligence in relation to an infinitely complex universe.
Matthew Barney will also return, this time with sculptures connected to his TACTICAL Parallax performance, commissioned for AIR last year. Those works will be installed just outside Aspen, near the historic field house on a ranch in Snowmass where Barney performed previously. The site once served as a training ground for a World War II-era U.S. military unit focused on mountain warfare, adding a charged historical layer to the presentation.
Lucy Raven, who took part in a pre-festival retreat last year, will present Murderers Bar as an outdoor film-performance work with a newly commissioned ensemble score by Deantoni Parks. Camille Henrot will unveil Commedia dell’arte, a newly commissioned performance work described as an operatic collaboration that places stock characters from Italian Renaissance theater inside a modern-day New York City apartment building.
Music will also play a central role. Los Thuthanaka, the duo known for blending traditional Andean sounds with textured electronics, will perform, as will Kali Malone and Stephen O’Malley, whose commissioned piece for the Holy See Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale draws inspiration from the 12th-century mystic Hildegard von Bingen.
The festival will also include performances and talks by Lyle Ashton Harris, Ivan Cheng, Morgan Bassichis, Nuar Alsadir, Kaveh Akbar, and Paige Lewis, with additional names still to come. Filmmaker Julie Dash will deliver the keynote talk.
In a statement, Aspen Art Museum artistic director and CEO Nicolas Lees framed AIR as a model for a non-collecting institution: a place where artists are given time, space, and resources to test ideas before they fully resolve. That emphasis on process, rather than product, gives the festival its particular shape — and helps explain why Aspen is becoming a site for work that feels provisional, ambitious, and closely tied to the conditions of its making.
