Medina Triennial: Art, Ecology, and Community in a New York Village

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Preview Medina Triennial: Art, Ecology, and Community in a New York Village

Just months before its opening on June 6, 2026, the new Medina Triennial is already shaping up to be one of the most anticipated events on the international calendar. This is not solely due to its format as a large, periodic, distributed exhibition, but also because of the context in which it is taking shape: Medina, a small town in New York State overlooking the Erie Canal. Far from metropolitan circuits, Medina has been chosen as a testing ground for a reflection that intertwines art, ecology, and civic infrastructure.

Curated by Kari Conte and Karin Laansoo, the inaugural Medina Triennial, titled All That Sustains Us, brings together 39 artists and collectives from five continents. Over 100 works will be displayed throughout the public space and a constellation of buildings and local sites, including disused schools, local museums, parks, churches, and hospitals. The exhibition deliberately eschews the centrality of the white cube, embracing the scale of the entire village. As Conte and Laansoo explain, “All That Sustains Us revisits a question that the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles (also featured in the exhibition) posed in 1969 and has continued to ask: what does it take to keep things going?”

“The Medina Triennial interrogates what forms of labor, knowledge, and commitment sustain civic life, ecological systems, and the built environment, especially under challenging conditions. The works gathered here are the result of research and dialogue with the artists, offering multiple perspectives. What unites them is a shared attention to the forces, materials, and ideas that hold communities together, and to the conditions under which these structures begin to crumble.”

With support from the New York Power Authority and the New York State Canal Corporation – public entities responsible for electricity and waterway maintenance, respectively – the project stems from a year of fieldwork and is based on a precise curatorial approach: reducing the environmental impact of artistic production by prioritizing local processes, while simultaneously fostering direct relationships with the local community, materials, and ecological systems. From this foundation, the exhibition’s thematic cores emerge: relationships with the land and extraction processes, water management, labor and repair, the construction of the public sphere, and the visible and hidden systems that regulate daily life.

The lineup includes established names from the international biennial circuit and historically significant artists, such as Lina Lapelytė (recipient of the Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale), Tania Candiani, Asad Raza, Harun Farocki, and Alice Bucknell. The exhibition also features artists whose research explicitly addresses geopolitical, ecological, and social issues. Among them are the Nigerian artist Victoria-Idongesit Udonian, who will also be present at the 2026 Venice Biennale, and the Palestinian photographer Taysir Batniji, who has long explored themes of mobility and conflict. Michael Wang‘s practice focuses on ecosystems and environmental economies, while Jane Jin Kaisen works with diasporic memories and colonial legacies. Selva Aparicio utilizes discarded natural materials, employing traditional artisanal techniques like weaving, carving, and sewing.

A central element is the Fieldwork residency program, which has enabled artists to develop their projects in situ, allowing for extended periods of work and deep immersion in the local context. This approach results in works that oscillate between installation, scientific research, and social activation, challenging the extractive model often associated with large international exhibitions. The Triennial’s headquarters, housed in a former sandstone hotel overlooking the Erie Canal, complements the main exhibition space located in a school that has been closed for over 30 years. A network of interventions involving the entire urban fabric will radiate from these hubs. Starting this spring, Aparicio and Wang will be in residence in Medina; the former to work on a sculpture, and the latter to realize Future Sugarbush, an artist-designed maple grove, and Sugarbush Energy, a canned maple sap drink that will be available free of charge throughout the Triennial and at select Medina businesses.

Many of the Medina Triennial 2026 projects are conceived as collaborative processes, often in dialogue with residents, researchers, farmers, and local institutions. Examples include Mary Mattingly’s Floating Garden, a floating garden built with the community, and Lina Lapelytė’s performance Faithfully Recording, where singers and workers collaborate on the creation of a public sculpture. In other cases, artistic intervention directly engages with the territory’s infrastructure, as in the work of Asad Raza, an artist based in Berlin but born in nearby Buffalo, who will redirect water from the Erie Canal to one of the exhibition venues.

Here are all the artists participating in the Medina Triennial 2026: