Founded by Dr. Najam Ul Assar in 2026, VXR is a travelling festival of virtual and extended reality that moves from city to city and country to country, establishing itself for a season and then moving on. It has no fixed home by design. Each edition takes shape in dialogue with the place that hosts it, drawing on local artists, institutions, and audiences, and carrying forward the works, relationships, and questions gathered along the way. The festival is nomadic because the field it serves is global, and because immersive art is best understood not from a single vantage point but through the accumulation of many vantage points.
The festival exists to present virtual and extended reality as a serious cultural form. It treats immersive media as a space for authorship and inquiry rather than demonstration, and it holds that space open to artists working in every register, from the contemplative to the political. VXR commissions, exhibits, and circulates work in this field, and it convenes the people who make, study, and care for it. Its purpose is to give immersive practice the sustained critical and public attention that other art forms have long received, and to do so wherever that attention is needed rather than only where it is already established.
VXR is built on the conviction that authorship in virtual and extended reality is plural and worldwide. It resists the assumption that immersive technology flows from a few centres outward, and instead connects scenes that rarely meet, so that artists and institutions encounter one another as equals across borders. By travelling, the festival becomes a channel through which works, ideas, and people move between contexts that would otherwise remain apart.
The festival serves three publics at once. It offers a wide audience the chance to encounter immersive art as culture rather than novelty. It gives artists, studios, and curators a platform and a set of international connections that outlast any single edition. And it provides the institutions that host it with a model for taking this work seriously. Through its programme of exhibitions, screenings, workshops, and public dialogue, VXR aims to establish itself as a lasting international platform and to advance a shared understanding of virtual and extended reality as a cultural practice of consequence.
VXR operates by working directly with two constituencies at once: the artists who make immersive work, and the venues that can host it. From artists, studios, and immersive practitioners across the world, the festival gathers a body of virtual and extended reality works — pieces that might otherwise remain confined to the scene or country in which they were made. These works form a living, travelling collection that the festival carries from edition to edition, growing it wherever it goes.
The festival then works with venues to bring these experiences to their audiences. Rather than arriving with a fixed programme to install, VXR builds each edition in partnership with the host — museum, gallery, institution, or cultural space — shaping the selection, the staging, and the public and educational programme around that venue's audience, resources, and ambitions. The host gains access to a curated international body of immersive work along with the curatorial, technical, and production support to present it well; the artists gain new audiences and contexts for work that is often difficult to circulate; and the audience encounters immersive art that would rarely, if ever, reach them otherwise.
In this way the festival functions as a bridge. It connects makers who need reach with venues who need work, and it moves both across the borders that usually keep them apart. Each host becomes a node in a widening network, and each edition adds to the works, relationships, and expertise that VXR carries onward to the next.