OPEN CALL: Artists for Artists Workshops Accepting 2022 Applications

Artists for Artists is now accepting applications for its fourth online edition, Language is Never on the Ground. The upcoming edition will include workshops led by Advising Artists Radio Alhara, Lydia Ourahmane, Katarina Zdjelar and guest-lectures by Hiwa K, and a suite of international artists.

Artists for Artists (AfA) is an international pedagogical program run by artists. The guiding ethos of AfA is that care, community, exchange, and solidarity are each central to the art-making process. AfA aspires to contribute to the development of early-career artists from diverse geographies, with a focus on the global south. A fundamental aspect of Artists for Artists is the AfA Micro-Grant, a peer-to-peer (P2P) support—a form of educational and economic solidarity. Moving away from traditional transactive models, AfA generates seed-funding through enrollment donations and redistributes them as Micro-Grants to selected participating artists through a P2P voting system.

So far, 50 artists from over 30 countries have participated in online workshops by leading international artists, including Megan Cope, Decolonize This Place, Noah Fischer, Terike Haapoja, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Ahmet Ogut, Maria Papadimitriou, Vivien Sansour, Gregory Sholette, Stefanos Tsivopoulos, and Dmitry Vilensky. Previous AfA editions include Radical Care, Institutional Collapse, and Politics of Sharing.

The upcoming edition will address the nexus between language and displacement. A shorthand of subjectivity and power, language repeatedly emerges as central to contemporary political activity. Embodiments of movement, memory, exchange, and knowledge systems, our languages float, and our tongues are shorthands of subjectivity and power. Entitled Language Is Never On The Ground, the fourth AfA online edition engages artistic practices that examine themes including language as an impediment, sound as a measure of displacement, voice as survival, and acoustics as somatic memory.

Artists for Artists will select a group of ten early-career artists for a five-day online program between February 10–14, 2022. AfA will introduce Participating Artists to methods, practices, and cultures of collaboration, cooperation, and co-imagining. They will access three online workshops, six lectures, and AfA’s broad international network and activities. All participants are automatically eligible for the AfA Micro-Grant.

Early career artists (including groups and collectives, musicians, activists, and cultural professionals) across all disciplines, as well as postgraduate students, are welcome to apply. The primary language is English.

Applications are now open. Complete the online form and submit a proposal or a project affiliated with this edition’s topic by 21 January 2022.