ted & posca residency

A NEW TYPE OF RESIDENCY LAUNCHES

TED, the global platform for ideas and storytelling, and POSCA, a creative brand by uni Brands Corporation, are launching a new kind of artist residency: a globally distributed cohort of artists working across different geographies, cultures, and communities, united by a shared drive to shape public life through art.

Fine Acts, the external curatorial partner selected by TED & POSCA, is leading the curation, creative direction, and coordination of the initiative.

Today, we are announcing a global artist search to identify the first participating artists.

There is no single location. No central studio. Instead:

• Selected artists work within their own communities

• They follow a shared creative constraint – a unifying conceptual framework around repair, hope, and beauty

• Projects unfold in public space

• Community participation is key part of the work

• Process matters as much as outcome

2026 THEME: VISIBLE MENDING

This year’s residency theme, Visible Mending, explores repair as a creative and civic act. Inspired in part by Kintsugi – the Japanese practice of repairing broken ceramics with gold – the theme invites artists to consider how wounds, ruptures, and imperfections can become sites of transformation rather than something to hide.

Across communities around the world, people are finding ways to mend relationships, restore ecosystems, strengthen social bonds, and rebuild trust. We invite artists to investigate these processes of repair and make them visible through public interventions that spark reflection, dialogue, and collective imagination.

In 2026, four artists will be selected to develop community-rooted public interventions to be implemented in 2027.

While the term of the residency is one year, this initiative will run for multiple years, expanding the cohort year by year (2027, 2028, and 2029), while building an evolving global archive of civic artistic interventions connected through a shared conceptual framework.

THE IDEA

Art can help repair what’s broken. Mending can reveal strength. Imagination can be resilience. Beauty can be a form of civic action.

With these convictions in mind, TED & POSCA are building a different kind of artist residency: a globally distributed cohort of artists working across different geographies, cultures, and communities, connected through a shared conceptual framework around repair, resilience, hope, beauty, and civic imagination.

There is no single location. No central studio. Instead, artists work within their own communities, developing projects that unfold in public space and invite participation, reflection, contribution, and collective imagination. Community engagement is structurally embedded into the work itself, and process matters as much as outcome.

At a time increasingly shaped by fragmentation, isolation, and diminishing shared spaces for reflection, we believe art can serve as a powerful tool: capable of revealing invisible experiences, transforming everyday environments, generating dialogue across differences, and creating forms of connection that conventional institutions often struggle to produce.

Rather than approaching art solely as an object of display, the residency supports artistic practices that engage directly with people, communities, local realities, and shared experience. Each intervention remains deeply rooted in its own context while contributing to a broader collective narrative about participation, imagination, repair, renewal, and the social possibilities of art.

The TED & POSCA Global Artist Residency ultimately exists to support artists who are actively engaging with the social fabric of their communities – artists whose work reminds us that collective imagination, visible acts of repair, and shared acts of meaning-making remain essential cultural forces.

Timeline

January 1–June 30 2027
Residency projects developed, implemented, and documented.