Immigrant Artist Biennial Returns to ‘Celebrate Joy and Resilience’

The Immigrant Artist Biennial (TIAB), the nomadic, interdisciplinary show that presents the work of immigrant artists across diverse formats, has announced this year’s list of participants, alongside its theme: Identity Card.

The 2026 edition, which will take place in New York City during October and November, will be co-curated by Sanna Almajedi, Sofia Thiệu D’Amico, Eva Mayhabal Davis and Anna Khimasia. Across venues including Nguyen Wahed, Brooklyn Art Haus and BRIC, the biennial will include screenings, performances and panel events. 

TIAB director Anna Mikaela Ekstrand said: “By centring the immigrant body through time-based media and public programmes, our incredibly talented curators present a powerful new space to explore migration, technology and human rights. I hope that Identity Card’s gatherings inspire reflection and celebrate the joy and resilience that are important facet of the immigrant experience.” 

Identity Card is not only inspired by the physical or digital object used to denote immigration status and the right to live in a specific country, but also by the wider significance of what holding an ID card means: determining who has freedom of movement and who remains unrecognised.

Artists, activists and organisers will explore institutional censorship, collective memory, territorial sovereignty, embodied forms of knowledge and mutual aid, and how these can be denied by authorities or regimes in societies where cultural and physical mobility are not evenly distributed. 

The title also references Mahmoud Darwish’s 1964 poem Identity Card, which contains the lines: “Write down!/I am an Arab/I have a name without a title/Patient in a country/Where people are enraged.” 

A statement from TIAB’s organisers said: “The 2026 biennial invokes states of being neither here nor there; with or without a land, home, citizenship, roots or community.” 

Among the 16 exhibiting participating artists are Rawya El Chab, whose work explores the civil war in Lebanon, Rachelle Dang, who considers colonial histories across the Pacific and Hawai‘i, and the National Coalition Against Censorship, which works with, among others, curators and artists resisting art censorship.

A PDF catalogue, designed by photographer and sculptor Alice Herbert, will feature essays and texts. TIAB’s organisers said the catalogue will “further envision resistance to indexing as a means of asserting individual and collective insurgence against dehumanising global forces”.

Contributors to the catalogue include philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler and writer and professor of comparative poetics and global politics at SOAS in London, Rebecca Ruth Gould.