First Names for Conflux Festival 2026

Alex Zhang Hungtai is a multidisciplinary artist focused on improvisation and its correlation with the unconscious. After retiring his project Dirty Beaches, Zhang has focused on explorations of improvised music, free jazz, and his role as a composer. His more recent compositions predominantly work with saxophone and drums while also delving into electronic music.

Besides his solo work, his past collaborators include Tashi Dorji, Che Chen, Chris Williams, Sam Shalabi, David Maranha, and Gabriel Ferrandini. Zhang currently works as a composer for film soundtracks, alongside acting in independent films.

He appeared in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return alongside Dean Hurley and Riley Lynch under the fictitious band name Trouble. His latest film score, Godland by Hlynur Pálmason, was featured in the Un Certain Regard competition at the Cannes Film Festival.

Amrith de Zoete uses industrial materials and techniques such as stainless steel, industrial plastics, pneumatics, and motors, while keeping them connected to their original environments. By using these materials, he suggests that the medium itself is the message, often referencing industrial production facilities.

These seemingly soulless yet lively devices and machines, as seen in factories, are built for speed and inhuman precision. They are responsible for the pristine products we consume. De Zoete aims to reveal this bleak, alienated, yet fearsome system that surrounds us, as it is part of us and defines modern life.

Anne Wenzel works on a strong and distinctive oeuvre of monumental ceramic sculptures and installations that are often placed in an accurately orchestrated setting. Wenzel takes a more subversive position between tradition and modernity. Departing from historical iconography, she tackles contemporary and often political themes by using a consciously chosen traditional medium: clay. 

Out of a fascination for the language of heroism, she questions the manipulative force of nationalist architecture and sculpture. Investigating their formal language and history, Wenzel reinterprets the symbolic value by connecting it to current tendencies in political culture.

We rely on systems we hardly notice, until the lights go out or the network fails. But in those moments, another kind of knowledge arises: DIY solutions, forgotten analog technologies, and collective ways of making and being.

Off-Grid collects stories of protest infrastructures assembled in neighborhood yards and encrypted Telegram chats, internet cables stretched between apartment blocks, DIY practices, attempts to build a toaster from scratch, and a self-sustaining research capsule designed to operate for up to 120 days in isolation. This book moves across rural art institutions, repurposed power plants, exhibitions curated within forests and farmlands, and the early digital networks of the 1990s to explore what autonomy can mean in a world built on fragile, interconnected systems—and how much room for maneuver remains within them.

A vegan, straight edge noise project of Masami Akita from Japan. Merzbow started out in the noise industrial scene of early 1980s and began releasing music. In the 1990s, Merzbow were influenced by grind core and released an album on the death metal label Relapse. In the late 1990s, he resonated with Mego's "punk computer music" and were one of the first in Japanese Noise Scene to adopt a live performance technique using laptop computers.

Since around 2003, he has practiced veganism from the perspective of "animal rights." He creates works on themes such as "anti-whaling," "anti-dolphin fishing," "anti-fur," and "liberation of livestock animals." In recent years, he has been creating music that is not limited to digital or analog. Recently, he has been experimenting with incorporating AI into album artwork.

He has also collaborated with Balazs Pandi, Mats Gustafsson, Thurston Moore, Boris, Keiji Haino, Richard Pinhas (Heldon), Duenn, Nyantra, Lawrence English, Xiu Xiu, Gezan, Alessandro Cortini, Vanity Productions, Vatican Shadow, Bastard Noise, Meat Beat Manifesto and others.

Dante’s Circle is a collaborative audiovisual performance by Nicky Assmann and Robert Pravda in which continuously changing prismatic colors are created by burning copper panels with automated burners. The panels are positioned in a circular spatial setup and played as a live instrument. The sounds coming from the burners and heated plates are used as a source for the soundscape. This soundscape is further spatialized by means of a rotating loudspeaker setup which is placed at the center of the installation. The copper plates function as both the screens for the prismatic visuals as well as the acoustic reflectors for the projected sounds coming from the circle. As artifacts of the performance six burned copper screens will remain.

Tools for Action develops new forms of assembly and political action through participatory performances, open source skill-sharing workshops, and large-scale inflatable social sculptures. Monumental yet fragile, playful yet confrontational, these inflatable tools become mobile barricades, swarms, and tactical media interventions through choreographed direct-action training. Working across climate justice, anti-fascism, memory culture, and queer and trans* visibility, the collective creates spaces for resistance, solidarity, and collective imagination.

Founded in Berlin in 2012 and emerging from the former Eclectic Electric Collective, Tools for Action has worked internationally in shifting constellations of artists and activists. Since 2019, the collective has operated from Rotterdam through the Tools for Action Foundation. Core collaborators have included Bambi Benkö (formerly Artúr van Balen), Katherine Ball, Jakub Simcik, Tilly Gifford, Sarah Drain, Pascal Espinosa, and Shailoh Phillips.

Sonic sculptor, composer and scholar Yara Mekawei operates at the threshold, where urban pulse meets mythic echo, where Coptic breath and the Book of The Dead converge with algorithmic code. Ancient texts and scriptures are her music composition source.

She transmutes the ambient rhythms of cities, the liturgical whispers of Sufi antiquity, and the poetic geometries of esoteric texts into immersive divin-sonic architectures that dissolve borders between history and identity.

The auditory alchemy; a synesthetic ritual that turns sound into space, silence into structure. A chant’s glory, a kinetic installation. Breath, mapped as collective memory. This is transubstantiation, not translation. For Mekawei, sound is vessel, voyage, and verb: carrying ancestral wisdom, threading temporal layers, speaking across sensorial divides.