Long before the 2026 festival took shape, three artists were already influencing how we thought about public art and the forces that move culture.
We had followed Marigold Santos’ extraordinary career for years, watching her explorations of identity, migration, folklore, and the body. In January, we visited her solo exhibition Epiphytic Elucidations in Toronto while she was simultaneously preparing to make her 2026 Venice Biennale debut. Witnessing the depth and emotional power of her work left us with a profound sense of possibility. In the same winter, an international research trip took us to the heart of one the great public art cities of the world, Mexico City, where we experienced Said Dokins’ Inscriptions at Laboratorio Arte Alameda. Seeing an 18th century church transformed through language, light, and a thrilling re-imagining of the city’s geography reinforced just how expansive art can be when it challenges the very ways we read and remember a space – it opened us to new ways of seeing.
The previous summer, we welcomed Ken Lum to Calgary as keynote speaker for the BUMP Urban Art Conference. Long admired for his public art works, like Vancouver’s iconic East Van Cross, and for a career dedicated to questioning monuments, identity, and the politics of the public realm, Ken left us asking larger questions about who cities are built for, and how artists can reshape civic life in strange and wonderful ways.
In the midst of all of their inspiring and (very) busy lives, we approached them with an ambitious invitation: help us imagine what public art in Calgary could become. We are forever grateful that they said yes.
These three curatorial voices from Canada, Mexico, and the United States have shaped the vision for the entire 2026 festival. Marigold Santos and Said Dokins have assembled this year’s mural program, bringing together artists whose practices explore identity, language, memory, transformation, and belonging through the lens of Simmering, and the Surge. Ken Lum has conceived and curated BUMP’s inaugural Public Sculpture Program, which will launch this fall and introduce ambitious new permanent works into Calgary’s Beltline.
Every artwork, panel, talk and public gathering in this year’s festival exists within their shared curatorial vision. We believe that more than a collection of individual projects, the festival moves as a single energetic frequency – one where several thinkers and their output are all in conversation with one another. They are all asking how ideas travel, how cultures intersect, and how public art can become a potent portal for imagining the city differently.
— BUMP Festival Team 2026
What is forming beneath the surface eventually breaks into view.
A MESSAGE FROM OUR CURATORS
Change rarely announces itself. It gathers beneath the surface, then arrives almost without warning. Of Simmering, and the Surge asks how that happens, to look at the forces that shape the public realm, the personal ones and the systemic ones. What ideas and small refusals take root in the margins, in back alleys and half-finished conversations? And how do they build until they break the surface and change the spaces we all move through?
We’re interested in how an idea is born, breathes and then travels. It can keep its shape while passing through very different hands, bending policy and getting bent by it, then carrying on. That is where BUMP situates itself: as a catalyst for cultural change, creating the conditions for new ideas to enter public life and reshape how Calgary understands its walls, its public spaces, its histories, and ultimately, itself.
Communities are where ideas are tested, challenged, and refined before they transform public life. You can see it when artists and neighbours reclaim a stretch of wall or a forgotten piece of public space, testing something in public, in real time. A city is never a blank backdrop. It carries grudges, dreams, history and a lot of unspent energy. Art is where we watch this happen. A mural, a tag, a rave, an installation: each one is a question asked out loud, and each one talks back to the block it sits on. It can lift a neighborhood or pick a fight, sometimes both.
This festival brings together artists whose practices emerge from different geographies, histories, and ways of making, yet all are attentive to the pressures that precede transformation. Some works speak softly, others arrive with force. They invite you to keep your ear to the ground, listening for what is already beginning to move. “Of Simmering, and the Surge” asks you to watch for what’s building underneath, and to be there for the moment it comes up for air. Better yet, to have a hand in it, to feel the turn from slow simmer to full surge.
— Marigold Santos, Said Dokins, Ken Lum