In an era shaped by the proliferation of images across material and technological environments, images no longer function primarily as stable representations but as mediators of experience, authority, and meaning. Rooted in the Latin pictus(“depicted”), pictoriality has always been entangled with material and cultural conditions, and today extends beyond visual art into broader social frameworks that shape memory, evidence, and belief.

Between Image and Index explores this reconfigured condition through practices foregrounding traces, material contact, and spatial situations. Bringing together 33 artists and artist groups from Hong Kong, Macau, Shenzhen, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Lisbon, Kraków, and Katowice, the exhibition unfolds across HKBU’s Koo Ming Kown Exhibition Gallery, AVA Gallery, and Art Basel’s main hall as a distributed spatial constellation where meaning emerges through encounter, movement, and embodied experience.