M+ CHANEL Senior Curator Silke Schmickl on Building a New Era for Asian Avant-Garde Cinema

The third edition of the M+ Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival (AAGFF), supported by CHANEL, concluded on May 31st after three days of film, music and performance exploring space as both an artistic principle and a geopolitical subject. Highlights included the world premiere of ‘Lamya Gargash × Vivian Wang: Tracking Nomadism (Live)’, a newly commissioned live cinema collaboration supported by Chanel, alongside Rirkrit Tiravanija’s interactive ping-pong installation and screenings of landmark works by Nam June Paik and Xu Bing.

Now in its third year, AAGFF has cemented itself as one of Asia’s most vital platforms for experimental film and moving image art, drawing independent filmmakers, artists and creative communities across the region under one roof. This edition’s theme built on last year’s exploration of time, turning its attention to space as a subject that cuts across composition and perspective in artmaking, the evolution of lens-based technologies and the geopolitical realities reshaping the world today. Below, CHANEL Senior Curator and Head of Moving Image at M+ in Hong Kong, Silke Schmickl, reflects on the programming.

“Space is a critical principle of artmaking in all media and particularly interesting in lens-based media where artists have challenged the frame through expanded cinema and now ‘frameless’ immersion.”

The festival title, “Space Enter Shift,” is pretty open. How did you land on it? The title is first and foremost an invitation for audiences to enter the festival space and to be shifted by what they experience. It acknowledges the importance of technology in the creation and reception of time-based art forms and is a playful nod to three essential keyboard keys: ‘space’, which inserts a blank character; ‘enter’, which confirms input or begins a new line; and ‘shift’, which modifies other keys. Space is a critical principle of artmaking in all media and particularly interesting in lens-based media where artists have challenged the frame within the image, through expanded cinema and now “frameless” immersion. The theme is also a subject matter to reflect on the global geopolitical shifts we are witnessing at the moment.

Larissa Sansour’s film tells of a Palestinian pirate reclaiming colonial artefacts. What made you want to bring that work to M+? Sansour’s practice investigates the political, social, economic and cultural dimensions of space grounded in her personal experience of exile. Her latest film ‘A Sunken Tale of Losses Delayed’ provided an excellent opportunity to premiere her work in Asia. The repatriation of looted objects is an important topic in the context of Asia’s post-colonial institutional history, and the motif of a ship interested us as a heterotopia in the sense of Foucault. The position of the main character, a pirate, introduces a radical shift in perspective. This edition has also seen several presentations of female artists from West Asia including Sansour, Samia Halaby, Basma Al-Sharif and Lamya Gargash.

Xu Bing built Dragonfly Eyes entirely from surveillance footage. Where do you see the most interesting boundary-pushing in moving image right now? ‘Dragonfly Eyes’ is a prime example of how conceptual artists might no longer create their own images but find new ways of recontextualising and critically analysing the huge amounts of visual data that is produced every day, such as surveillance camera footage in Xu Bing’s case. Such self-reflexive approaches that shed new light on the excessive production of images and their potential instrumentalisation are some of the most boundary-pushing responses by contemporary artists today.

Paik’s Wrap Around the World was a live global broadcast in 1988. What does it feel like to screen that in 2026? It was powerful to revisit his techno-optimism in a pre-globalised world. The utopian tone, freespirited and eccentric performances of some of the late 20th century’s most remarkable makers showed us what we have lost when the internet became a market-driven utility, but also what is always possible when we bring people together to converse and co-create.

CHANEL has been backing this festival for three years. How do you manage that relationship when the programming is often deliberately uncommercial? The working relationship between M+ and CHANEL has always been very cordial, open and inspiring. M+ has full autonomy over the curatorial content while CHANEL helps us tell the stories with greater impact and bring artists, filmmakers, cultural practitioners and audiences together — which is critical for the festival’s success in establishing itself as an essential platform for artists’ moving images.