Colectivo Los Ingrávidos is a Mexican film collective founded in Tehuacán in 2012. The collective’s work draws inspiration from the works of the historical avant-garde and their commitment to using form and content as strategies of resistance against alienating realities of life. In 2026, the award will be presented for the ninth time in collaboration with the KW Institute for Contemporary Art. The prize, worth 15,000 euros, includes a solo exhibition curated by Liberty Adrien, Chief Curator at the KW, which is due to open in autumn 2027. As part of the exhibition, the artist collective will create a new work and produce an accompanying publication.
Image above: Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Video still, El Nido del Sol, 2021. Photo: © the artists.
Works by Colectivo Los Ingrávidos have recently been screened at film festivals such as the VIENNALE International Film Festival Vienna, IFFR International Film Festival Rotterdam and TIFF – Toronto International Film Festival, as well as at art and film institutions including the Harvard Film Archive, The Brakhage Center at the University of Colorado Boulder and ICA International Contemporary Arts in London. Their work has also been screened at MoMA as part of the Modern Mondays series; at the Tate Modern Film Series; at the Block Museum – Northwestern University, Chicago; at MoMI – Museum of the Moving Image, New York; at The Flaherty Film Seminar, New York; at the 2019 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art; at the 2025 Seoul Media City Biennale; and at فن سينما ڤابس, Gabès Cinema Fen in Tunisia.
The jury explains its choice from a total of 11 nominated artists as follows:
“Through its diverse range of film and video-based works, the film collective Colectivo Los Ingrávidos aims to decipher the contexts of meaning and structures of established audiovisual media and to expose the ideology underpinning them. By combining analogue and digital film footage, archival material, mythology, agitprop, social protest and documentary poetry, their works critically examine both the forms and the content of media, not least cinema. The collective’s work seeks to counteract the sense of alienation that the media have engendered. Their works can be described as visual tapestries and acoustic soundscapes; they break down entrenched structures and reveal the hidden political potential of media. In this way, the films and videos by Colectivo Los Ingrávidos document collective struggles, particularly as they manifest in the Anthropocene era. Sounds and images merge into hypnotic collages, exploring sensory boundaries and opening up a decolonising view of the world. Their critical and collective practice, as well as their texts such as the manifesto Thesis of the Audiovisual, pave, as Colectivo Los Ingrávidos themselves put it, ‘a cosmopolitan path to rethinking and reshaping audiovisual art’.
In times of profound social, political and ecological crises, the subversion of Empire Cinema and its normative discourses – along with the accompanying call to rediscover cinema as a tool of protest against aesthetic hegemony – takes on great significance. By rejecting forms of passive media consumption and the retreat into the private sphere—and thus habits that increasingly characterise modern life—the collective’s plea for cinema could not be more timely. Ultimately, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos succeeds in making cinema an experience that is both collective and immersive, one that demands an engaged critical consciousness.
“The jury has awarded the 2026 Schering Foundation Prize for Artistic Research to Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, both to recognise their unique working methods and to enable them to bring their research-based practice to the attention of a wider public.”
The jury consisted of Antonia Alampi (Artistic Director, Spore Initiative, Berlin), Emma Enderby (Director, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin), Charlotte Klonk (Professor of Art and New Media, Humboldt University of Berlin; Member of the Board of Trustees of the Schering Foundation), Damian Lentini (Deputy Director, Ludwig Forum Aachen) and Jenna Sutela (Artist, Berlin).
