INDEX 2026: Art and Technology
The third edition of INDEX — Biennial of Art and Technology explored power as an invisible structure shaping bodies, territories, and imaginaries. As one of the major flagship events of Braga as a UNESCO Creative City of Media Arts, the biennial reinforces the city’s commitment to fostering critical engagement between art, technology, and civic life. For ten days, Braga became the stage for an urgent reflection on the systems that govern us and on the forms of art and technology that reveal, disrupt, or reinvent them.
From May 7 to 17, 2026, INDEX — Biennial of Art and Technology spread its programme across five city venues — the Monastery of Tibães, Theatro Circo, Forum Arte Braga, Muzeu, and gnration, transforming Braga into a living cartography of questions about authority, resistance, and collective agency. During the festival, a total of 40 artists led performances, lectures, exhibitions, and educational activities.
The theme of this edition, Power / Poder, began from a premise as simple as it is unsettling: power rarely shows itself. It operates through algorithms, borders, languages, architectures, and bodies. The curatorial framework of INDEX 2026 proposed a transdisciplinary reading of this phenomenon, bringing together artists, researchers, and thinkers who work precisely in the zones of friction between the technological and the political, the sensorial and the structural.
Among the performance programme’s most compelling presences was Lawrence Abu Hamdan, collaborating with Supersilente, one of the most incisive voices working at the intersection of sound, law, and state violence. His practice explores voice and noise as forensic evidence, treating power as something that can be heard, that leaves an acoustic trace. At Theatro Circo, the performance transformed the theatre into a listening tribunal, where sound became both proof and testimony.
Arkadi Zaides, artist and researcher whose practice centres on archives of violence and bodily memory, brought to INDEX a reflection on how power writes itself onto bodies and how movement can render legible what official records erase. His presence spanned both the performance programme and the talks series, where he entered into dialogue with Margarida Mendes on ecologies of power and extraction.
The Forensis & Bill Kouligas project and the Zabra collective were part of a performance programme that, through light, image, and music, made Theatro Circo and gnration into physical extensions of thought spaces where contemplation was also a form of sensorial resistance. Nídia & Valentina / SUPA brought the performance cycle to a close with a proposition that located power also in the margins: in the sonorities the canon ignores, in the bodies that technology excludes or surveils.
The talks programme deepened these questions across different registers. McKenzie Wark brought their reflections on the hacker class and the contradictions of vectoral capitalism a theoretical framework that resonates directly with the tensions between digital platforms and cultural sovereignty. Georgina Voss and Nicolas Maigret examined the hidden infrastructures of technology: the matter, the energy, the flows that sustain the digital world yet rarely become visible. Yves Citton and José Gil closed the series with a rare encounter between the philosophy of mediations and a phenomenology of affect — two traditions that converge on a single question: how does power act on us before we know it? Three online conferences extended the dialogue beyond the physical boundaries of the city.
Circuito , Braga Media Arts’ Educational Service , brought INDEX to younger audiences and school communities through the WE! Workshops, an initiative that proposes critical and artistic thinking as tools for reading the world. On the biennial’s weekends, guided tours of the exhibition venues invited participants not merely to be spectators, but interlocutors in a conversation about power that directly concerns them.
With this edition, INDEX consolidates Braga as a space of situated thinking, a city that does not observe the present from a distance, but interrogates it from within.
