Chasing Rainbows: Charlotte Colbert on Dreaming the World Differently
Artist in Conversation · 2026
Chasing
Rainbows
Charlotte Colbert on dreaming louder, seeing together, and why the horizon keeps moving
There is something of the perpetual horizon in Charlotte Colbert's work — always just within reach, perpetually eluding. Her sculptures, films, and installations operate in the liminal space between waking and dreaming, between what we see and what we dare imagine. And now, at monumental scale, they have arrived in New York.
With Chasing Rainbows, Colbert's singular visual language has been transposed into the public realm across the Meatpacking District and Flatiron NoMad — surrealist forms rising from the street, initiating unexpected encounters between strangers, inserting new symbolic vocabularies into spaces historically authored by power.
This spring, she also announced her second feature film as writer and director — Becoming Capa — alongside upcoming works along the Grand Canal at the 2026 Venice Arte Biennale. We spoke with Charlotte about the space between dreaming and doing, why collective imagination is not a whimsical luxury but an urgent necessity, and what it means to be the one dreaming rather than the one being dreamed.
Your work draws heavily on dream imagery, surrealist archetypes, and the unconscious — but surrealism has a complicated relationship with women, often casting them as muse rather than author. How consciously are you reclaiming that language, and what does it mean to be the one dreaming rather than the one being dreamed?
Surrealism is amazing in that it attempts to jar us out of the status quo of our minds into rethinking the world afresh. It's a playful way of questioning the order of things and giving space for the potentiality of a different order of things. It's an interesting way to engage and question gendered politics — and to question who gets to tell the story and what stories are told.
You work across sculpture, film, and writing — three forms with radically different relationships to time, the body, and the viewer. Is there a version of yourself that belongs more fully to one of these disciplines, or are you most fully yourself in the movement between them?
I'm fascinated by stories. The stories we tell ourselves as a culture, as individuals, but also the ones we tell our children — through fairy tales and archetypal tales. How do we become who we are as a people and as ourselves? Are we anything other than the narratives through which we understand ourselves?
We're in a war of images and narratives at the moment. I'm as lost as everyone else, but the different mediums allow me to explore and interrogate questions that I find overwhelming or confusing. They're all just different ways of circling the same unknowns.
The title "Chasing Rainbows" carries both longing and futility — a beautiful thing perpetually out of reach. What are you personally chasing right now, as a human being, not just as an artist?
Yes — it's like the horizon: there, always just within reach, but always eluding us. What am I chasing? Oh my… that's a question and a half.
What I'd love is for us all to be able to look around and see there is so much good — and that we could create something so amazing on Earth with everything around us, and that maybe there are paths that aren't so destructive and violent. We imagine war in the same way we imagine peace. Can we imagine better futures towards which to strive?
Science fiction writers of the 60s, 70s, and 80s are unwittingly defining our futures because they fed the imaginations of the geeky tech entrepreneurs of today. It's much easier to work towards a future that has a defined vision and aesthetic. It would be wonderful to bring together creative minds from all fields to imagine what positive futures on Earth might look like — to create similar excitement and brain drain for that, rather than for tech or space, which are naturally attractive due to their strong and clear storytelling and aesthetics.
"We imagine war in the same way we imagine peace. Can we imagine better futures towards which to strive?"
Charlotte Colbert
What does it feel like — physically and emotionally — to stand in front of your own work at that scale?
So exciting! It's taken years. New York is such a mythical city. It evokes possibility, reinvention, adventure. I've grown up mythologising its writers, characters, theatre, films, architecture — and being able to enter, even on a small level, a dialogue with this city is so thrilling to me.
New York and New Yorkers have got an amazing, amazing energy. There's always that thing when you walk around in New York — even the wind gives you that sense that anything can happen. I just hope that kind of energy, that kind of possibility, is able to be generated around the pieces. That two strangers might strike a conversation and different worlds connect and exchange would be wonderful.
The Symbol of the Eye
The eye has become central to Colbert's practice — not as surveillance, but as its opposite. It has come to symbolise the importance and power of collective imagination. We are creatures of language. We live in invented structures. Everything around us was invented by someone before — our trousers, our buildings, our political structures.
What we imagine today becomes tomorrow's reality. Collective imagination is the basis of the structures we live in and we can't let those be taken away from us. We have to imagine our own futures, not let them be imagined for us by corporations or big tech.
"The version of the future they are presenting is just one among millions. The more impossible it seems to reimagine our futures, the more essential it becomes."
We are living through an era of acute anxiety about democracy, about the environment, about the erosion of rights that many thought were settled. Does that political reality enter your studio? Does it change what you feel art is for right now?
So much darkness. How is one to remember there is light somewhere? Perhaps in talking to one another — connecting. In an age where the information we get and who we speak to is carefully monitored and controlled, breaking algorithms and talking with strangers feels like an act of defiance. Two humans meeting can change the world.
The symbol of the eye is central to my practice. It has come to symbolise for me the importance and power of collective imagination. In referring to imagination I don't mean it as a whimsical thing. We are creatures of language. We live in invented structures. Everything around us was invented by someone before. What we imagine today becomes tomorrow's reality. Collective imagination is the basis of the structures we live in — and we can't let those be taken away from us.
The Venice Biennale has always been a site of national representation and geopolitical statement — this year more charged than ever. What does it mean to you to show work along the Grand Canal in 2026, and what conversation do you hope it enters?
Venice is the ultimate feat of collective imagination. As such a strange, impossible place, it really does feel like a dream that decided to become architecture.
To show work there, along the Grand Canal, is incredibly special. It's a city where the level of imagination embedded in the architecture is almost mind-boggling — it feels like a kind of futuristic past, like a spaceship from the 15th century.
It's a reminder of the possibility of collective imagination and the urgency to reclaim it so as to create a future for ourselves that we actually want to live in.
"Venice feels like a dream that decided to become architecture — a spaceship from the 15th century."
Charlotte Colbert — on showing at the 2026 Venice Arte Biennale
Writer · Director
Becoming Capa
Starring Esther McGregor (Babygirl) & Mark Eydelshteyn (Anora), with Emily Carey, William Gao, Nabhaan Rizwan, Rossy de Palma, Mathieu Demy, Bruno Gouery, Clémence Poésy & Danny Huston
Colbert's second feature as writer and director tells the story of celebrated war photographers Gerda Taro and Robert Capa — a tale of love, audacity, and defiance against a world in political turmoil.
The film takes on war photography, myth, masculinity, and the ethics of the image — asking who shapes our visual record of history, and at what cost.
Previous Feature
She Will (2021)
Golden Leopard, Best First Feature — Locarno Film Festival · New York Times Critic's Choice · BIFA Nominated
Upcoming
Possible Landscapes
Opens May 5 · Palazzo Corner della Ca' Granda & Aman Venice
Dallas Installation
Becoming Capa
New public art installation, Dallas TX — announced 2026
Current & Upcoming Exhibitions
New York City
Chasing Rainbows
Meatpacking District & Flatiron NoMad
Through May 27, 2026
Venice, Italy
Possible Landscapes
Palazzo Corner della Ca' Granda & Aman Venice
May 5 — End of September 2026
Venice Arte Biennale 2026
Grand Canal
Works shown along the Grand Canal
2026
Where Angels Live Meatpacking District © 2026 Charlotte Colbert. Photo © Timothy Schenck