TONO, the time-based art festival that cycles through Mexico's cultural institutions, is back in March 2026 with a program that feels less like a curated collection and more like a sustained conversation across borders.
The festival runs March 6–22, anchored in Mexico City's major venues—Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Casa del Lago UNAM, Museo Jumex, Museo de Arte Moderno—with an additional foothold in Puebla at Museo Amparo. What makes this iteration distinct is how deliberately it's threading together local and international practitioners, treating the Global South not as a destination for art tourism but as a network of practitioners talking to each other.
The Shape of the Program
The live program includes work by Tino Sehgal, Space Afrika, Franziska Aigner, and Kelman Duran, alongside new commissions and a dedicated exhibition by Ho Tzu Nyen. Mexican artist Avantgardo debuts a special project. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, who's having a retrospective at Museo de Arte Moderno that same month, is creating a new live work specifically for TONO. Melanie Smith will participate in programming timed to her exhibition at Museo Jumex—the kind of synchronicity that makes a festival feel less scattered and more like a sustained moment.
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Start Your News DetoxDance is getting real estate here too. The festival is bringing Alexa West's Jawbreaker through 99 Canal, and choreographer Alessandro Sciarroni's work via Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels. There's also a joint evening with Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie, and a curated selection of Thai filmmakers brought in by Kunsthalle Bangkok's moving-image curator Rosalia Namsai Engchuan—a deliberate gesture toward linking practitioners across the Global South rather than defaulting to North Atlantic references.
Parallel to the festival, TONO is co-producing Camille Henrot's exhibition Água Viva at São Paulo's Instituto Bardi as part of the 2025 France–Brazil Cultural Season. The show revisits two of Henrot's foundational works—Is it possible to be a revolutionary and love flowers? and Grosse Fatigue—and introduces a new sculpture inspired by Clarice Lispector's The Stream of Life. It's the kind of institutional coordination that suggests TONO has moved beyond being a single festival into something closer to a network.
Full scheduling details arrive closer to March.
