«Backslash Festival 2026»

The Backslash Festival has been running since 2016.

It is a major event.

The festival lasts for two evenings.

The festival showcases a variety of art forms.

There is dance and music, just like in clubs.

There are DJ sets, live music and performances.

There are also colourful visuals and lights.

25 artists are showcasing their work.

They come from different countries and cities.

Some of them are also from Zurich.

Backslash Festival is rooted in contemporary practices across live and experimental electronic music, performing arts and club culture. It approaches sound not as an isolated medium, but as something entangled with bodies, images, codes, and spatial conditions. Performance unfolds as a situation, constructed, unstable, and shared.

Curatorially, the festival follows a process-oriented approach. Categories such as club music, composition, performance or audiovisual art function as points of departure rather than definitions. They offer temporary orientation, while remaining open to distortion and overlap. Genres gradually erode through shifts in duration, intensity, spatial arrangement, and performative presence.

Each edition gathers artists working across formats, from live sets and performances to installations and collaborative projects. Some works appear for the first time, others take shape specifically in relation to the festival’s context.

Backslash Festival exists in a liminal space between a club night, a contemporary theatre and a niche concert program, without fully settling into any of them. It pays attention not only to how creations are made, but also to how they are experienced — physically, collectively, and in relation to its surroundings.

For two nights, the festival builds a temporary environment for encounter and transformation. A space where practices intersect, expectations shift, and where people move, lose focus and find it again. Nothing fully locks into place, and that’s kind of the point.

Since 2016, the transdisciplinary Backslash Festival has been presenting works that move between and beyond performing arts, club culture and visual arts. The festival is organised by the non-profit association Tokyo Data Collective, in co-production with the Theater Gessnerallee.