Un_Becoming: Group Exhibition Open Call for Art

Organized by SomoS Arts House
Deadline: May 31st, 2018, 18:00h
Application fee: None
Eligibility: artists working in any medium

For the “Un_Becoming” group exhibition, taking place October 23-28 2018 at SomoS Art House in Berlin (coinciding with the Berlin Pornfilm Festival), the SomoS curatorial team is calling for submissions for performative projects and ephemeral installations as critical and radical responses to the following themes:

• The overlapping of sexualized and gendered bodies with technology.
• The intersections between transhumanism and/or critical posthumanism with technology, pornography and eroticism.
• The spectrum of darkness and lightness that interweaves dystopian and utopian perspectives on our technologically mediated view of sexuality, and society more broadly.

Un_Becoming is a multi-faceted and fluid play on words. It is many things. It is the process of transgressing corporeal boundaries, and questions of how our technologically mediated view of society is shifting what it means to be human. It is the notion that pornography itself is Unbecoming; taboo, shocking and ill-fitting to the normative and capitalist model of an ideal lifestyle/relationship/sexuality. It is an unfixed and fluid state; (Un)Becoming and not being. It is the plethora of contradictions and paradoxes that pervade debates around pornography and technology: distance/proximity, public/private, emancipation/oppression, utopia/dystopia etc. As such, it is also the understanding of Becoming as construction, and Unbecoming as deconstruction.

We invite artists to explore one, or multiple, of these meanings of Un_Becoming.

Artists may ask themselves:
• In light of pornographic saturation and our technologically mediated society, what are we Becoming? What are we Unbecoming?
• What happens to the human body when it interacts with the technologies associated with pornographic production and consumption, for example the internet, the computer screen, the video camera, sex toys or haptic devices? Is it still bound by flesh or might it be extended to the virtual and digital?
• What about human eroticism, how does it change in light of pornographic technologies?
• In how far does virtual content reflect what happens IRL? How are the lines between virtual and real blurred?
• How is pornography interwoven into the tools of capitalism?
• Are pornography and eroticism products or players in the journey towards a technological or societal utopia? Dystopia? Both? Neither?

Responses may be personal, societal, futuristic, reflective… They may build on actual phenomena, or imagine transformations and worlds of their own.

Submissions to Un_Becoming should include detailed plans for artworks. We are looking for installation based pieces, works that are durational, participative and/or interactive, for example, performances, and other works that take shape over time, works that are built in situ during the exhibition, works that create their own environment or that involve building an environment that is the backdrop to a performance.

Selected artists/performers will be invited to participate in an exhibition at SomoS Art House in Berlin that will take place from October 23rd to 28th, coinciding with the Porn FilmFestival Berlin. Artists/Performers must be available in Berlin during this period.

To gain an impression, please view last year’s edition of the exhibition: The Beholder, here: http://www.somos-arts.org/beholder/