INDEX 2026 returns to Braga through 17 May, with exhibitions and performances examining how technology shapes systems of power and digital culture.
Braga is once again becoming a meeting point where contemporary art meets the machinery of the digital age, and this time the focus is unmistakably on power.
INDEX – Biennial of Art and Technology has returned for its 2026 edition, running through 17 May across the Portuguese city.. The biennial gathers artists. theorists and musicians whose work probes the relationship between technology and the contemporary systems that organize. control and influence everyday life.
At the center of this year’s programme is a major exhibition curated by Joel Valabrega. which approaches the theme of power without collapsing it into a single. easy story.. Instead of offering a generalised account of authority. the curatorial direction treats power as something that can feel staged. exaggerated or distorted—an effect created through the very technologies and systems being examined.
Valabrega’s approach also suggests that control does not always announce itself.. It can appear through monstrous figures. or it can be encoded in subtler sound textures. such as the hum associated with drone recordings.. These choices reinforce a key premise running through the exhibition: the mechanisms of control may be experienced indirectly. but they remain present.
The exhibition brings together work by a range of internationally recognized artists. including Hito Steyerl. Gabriel Abrantes. Cemile Sahin and P.. Staff.. Their presence frames the biennial as a space where different artistic languages—visual. conceptual and sonic—intersect around how technology mediates reality and reorganizes agency.
A standout component is a major presentation by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Raven Chacon.. Chacon’s work examines drone surveillance within Native American communities. foregrounding how remote technologies can be entangled with specific histories. geographies and lived realities rather than functioning as neutral tools.
Crucially, the exhibition avoids fixed answers.. Symbolic material is designed to circulate quickly, and meanings are allowed to shift rather than settle.. That decision shapes the viewing experience: the programme does not ask audiences to accept a single interpretation. but instead invites attention to how power can be re-read depending on where. when and how it is encountered.
The wider biennial programme extends these concerns beyond the central exhibition through newly commissioned performances, live events and discussions.. By adding live formats—where presence. reaction and improvisation can matter—the programme broadens the question of power into the atmosphere of contemporary participation. not just the walls of a gallery.
Collaborations and exchanges also cut across disciplines and political inquiry. including projects involving Forensic Architecture. Lawrence Abu Hamdan and McKenzie Wark.. Their involvement positions INDEX at the intersection of contemporary art and technological investigation. bringing in approaches that interrogate how information is produced. verified and used.
As the biennial unfolds across Braga. it also continues to build a platform for artists working through the political and psychological conditions of today’s digital culture.. The emphasis on both the political and the psychological points to a larger argument: digital systems do not only structure institutions; they also shape how people perceive threats. possibilities and their own capacity to act.
In a year when debates about surveillance. algorithmic influence and technological authority are increasingly visible in public life. the programme’s insistence on shifting meanings reads as a deliberate counterpoint to digital certainty.. By staging power as something encoded. performed and continuously reinterpreted. INDEX 2026 turns the spotlight on how contemporary culture learns to live inside systems it may not fully understand.
For audiences in Braga, the appeal may lie in how the biennial treats technology not as backdrop, but as a contested force. From drone soundscapes to live collaborations, the message is that digital culture is never merely technical—it is also political, and it is experienced.
INDEX Braga 2026 art and technology digital culture power and surveillance drone recordings Raven Chacon contemporary art