About
Who We Are
ARTIFACT Futures is a research-driven cultural institution with bases in New York, Hanoi, Shanghai, and Abu Dhabi.
Rooted in the long-term research and cultural work of Vietnam Art Collection (VAC), the founding initiative of ARTIFACT Futures, our institution brings together practices that are often developed in parallel, including art and collecting, interdisciplinary research, cultural production, public and institutional engagement, and the cultivation of emerging artists, builders, and researchers. Rather than organizing our work around disciplines, we are guided by questions that require depth, experimentation, and sustained attention.
We believe that many of the forces shaping our future can no longer be understood through a single field of expertise. Artists, builders, researchers, and institutional leaders increasingly confront the same questions from different directions. Our role is to create the conditions for these perspectives to meet—not to dissolve their differences, but to deepen the conversation between them.
What We Are Building
Our work unfolds through three enduring practices.
Journal serves as the intellectual centre of the institution. Through essays, conversations, visual projects, and research, the Journal brings together voices across art, technology, science, and public life to examine questions that shape our shared future.
Residency provides a space for sustained inquiry and independent practice. Through residencies and fellowships, we cultivate people whose work benefits from time, reflection, and interdisciplinary exchange. More than a place to produce work, Residency creates the conditions for artists, curators, researchers and builders to develop their practice, articulate their ideas, and contribute to broader cultural conversations.
Programme convenes forums, exhibitions, workshops, public conversations, and institutional collaborations that extend these ideas beyond the residency and the page, creating opportunities for dialogue across disciplines, sectors, and geographies.
These practices are not separate departments, but interconnected ways in which ARTIFACT Futures works. A resident may become a journal contributor. A published conversation may develop into a public programme. A forum may inspire new research. Relationships formed through one practice often continue through another. We are interested not only in supporting projects, but in accompanying exceptional people as their practices evolve over time.
Who We Hope to Work With
We would like to meet people like these — and if you are one of them, we would be very glad:
Artists, especially those who feel that the way they sense the world should not stay only within the art world. We would like to bring you into conversations that usually leave artists out of the room.
Scholars and researchers, especially those who want their work to reach beyond a singular disciplinary readership. We would like to bring your thinking into exhibitions, policy, experimental projects, and public conversation.
Scientists, builders and technologists, especially those who, while building, find themselves troubled by the question of whether what they are making will still matter in a hundred years. We would like to stay with that question alongside you.
Curators, writers, and independent practitioners — those who have always found existing institutions not quite the right fit. We are that kind of people too.
We especially hope to meet those who do not belong to any single category. People who make art and build technology. Who do research and also practice. Who publish and also curate. We are ourselves an institution pieced together by exactly these kinds of people, so we know what it feels like not to have a seat. If you know that feeling too — we may be looking for you.
A Note on Where We Are
We are early. We are not the largest of any kind of institution, and have no intention of becoming so. We are still working out many of the most basic things — how to place an exhibition and a policy report inside the same workflow, how to bring artists and founders to the same table in a way that feels real, how to keep the patience for long-term thinking inside a world that runs on quarters.
The one thing we feel fairly certain about: we hope that a hundred years from now, the work we supported is still being read, still used, still remembered — by communities of thought and forms of life we cannot yet picture.
If what you are doing is something you think about on a similar timescale, we would very much like to meet you.