POWER: ON/OFF
Introducing the new season on CIFRA (July–December 2026)
ART GAVE POWER A FACE
Power has always relied on art — not as decoration, but as a tool. States understood this instinctively. They funded urban plans that turned entire cities into monuments to ideology. They commissioned murals that made doctrine part of everyday experience, erected buildings scaled to dwarf the individual, and built cinemas — rooms designed to be dark, collective, and captive. Soviet Constructivists redesigned entire cities. Mussolini's EUR district imagined Rome reborn. New Deal murals covered American post offices wall to wall. Nazi cinema transformed mass spectacle into political ritual. Art didn't simply illustrate ideology — in many cases, it became ideology, given a form people could walk through, look up at, and sit inside.
Roman Triumphal arch panel copy from Beth Hatefutsoth, showing spoils of Jerusalem temple
Palazzo di Lavore (Palace of Labor), in Mussolini's Esposizione Universale Roma (EUR) complex south of Rome
THE TECHNOLOGIES EVOLVED. THE LOGIC REMAINED REMARKABLY FAMILIAR
The triumphal arch became the platform interface. The state broadcaster became the recommendation algorithm. What changed is legibility. The older machinery was at least visible — you could see the arch, read the mural, notice the film was propaganda. Today's systems operate through design decisions, training data, and automated moderation. They appear technical, yet shape political realities in profound ways.
Leni Riefenstahl at shootings for the film 'Lowlands'
The Russian Propaganda Film: October, or Ten Days That Shook the World, 1927
LINES OF RESISTANCE
Resistance evolved too. Counter-cultures, underground media, tactical interventions, and acts of refusal are as old as the systems they push against. Art's position here is never clean — it operates within the very economies and systems of attention it often seeks to critique. That tension is where some of the most compelling work emerges.
Banksy Street Art, London, Free Stock Photo
POWER: ON/OFF runs on CIFRA from July through December 2026 across three chapters, each curated by a member of the CIFRA Artistic Vision Council.
AUTOMATED EXPECTATIONS BY MARTIN HONZIK
Martin Honzik opens the season with human sub:version, examining how power has shifted from visible institutions to invisible infrastructures — the systems quietly shaping everyday life. Algorithms and automated systems increasingly shape everyday life. The question is no longer whether technology is neutral, but where responsibility resides. The programme approaches automation as a condition of everyday life — asking what forms of agency and imagination remain possible inside systems designed to predict and govern. Running alongside is the first duo exhibition presented on CIFRA: Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne, working across art, software, and activism. Their projects treat surveillance systems, carbon markets, and AI tools as artistic material, exposing the limits of technological solutionism with humour and sharp political insight.
IN THE SHADOWS OF PARADISE BY DAVID ELLIOTT
David Elliott's chapter explores what he calls "sequential modernities" — overlapping visions of the modern world, where different ideas of modernity exist side by side rather than following a single Western narrative. Artists from China, Japan, Singapore, Ethiopia, and beyond move through mythology, ecological collapse, political memory, and speculative futures. Paradise here is not a destination but a contested construct.
GULF FUTURISM BY DANIELA ARRIADO
Arriado closes the season with The Future Was Already Here: Gulf Futurism between Petro-Power and Sacred Ecologies — approaching the Gulf not as a distant vision of tomorrow, but as a place where many planetary futures have already arrived. Artists from across the MENA region and its diasporas explore the entanglement of extraction, sacred geographies, consumer spectacle, and the accelerating pace of technology.
Monthly meetups bring artists and curators into conversation with the CIFRA community throughout the season. It closes with the CIFRA Award — an international open call inviting artists to respond to the season's central question. More will follow as POWER unfolds.