CIFRA Announces Open Call “RestArt Reality”

CIFRA Announces Open Call “RestArt Reality”

CIFRA launches RestArt Reality, an international open call inviting digital artists to examine how truth is constructed, staged, and manipulated. The initiative welcomes screen-native works that question authorship, evidence, and narrative authority through fiction, reconstruction, and synthetic media.

Truth is under construction. Reality is a draft.

Artists have long revealed how fragile our sense of certainty can be. Through montage, mockumentary, invented archives, synthetic images, and performative identities, they expose the mechanics behind what we accept as real. The fake is not merely deception. It can be a strategy. A poetic method. A critical gesture.

RestArt Reality invites artists to reveal the architecture of truth: how narratives are written, how memory is edited, how authority manufactures evidence. Participants are encouraged to “fool” the viewer in ways that sharpen perception rather than obscure it – to let fiction become a tool for clarity.

The open call seeks digital works engaging with pseudo-evidence, invented archives, alternative chronologies, reconstructions, and “false” testimonies. Submissions may include internet narratives, post-cinema, found footage, montage essays, AI-generated imagery, glitch aesthetics, hybrid cinema and other forms of screen-based practice.

Medium: any form of digital art – video art, animation, 3D, AI, glitch, hybrid cinema and related formats.
Documentation of physical works will not be considered.

Awards
Five selected artists will receive an award of €1,000 each.

The jury includes:

• Sohyeong Roh (South Korea) – Founding Director of Art Center Nabi; General Director of ISEA2025

• Irini Mirena Papadimitriou (UK / Saudi Arabia) – Director of Exhibitions at Diriyah Art Futures; previously Creative Director at FutureEverything; curatorial roles at the V&A and Watermans

• Sabine Himmelsbach (Germany / Switzerland) – Director of HEK (House of Electronic Arts) Basel; previously Exhibition Director at ZKM Karlsruhe; Artistic Director of Edith-Russ-House for Media Art

• Li Zhenhua (China) – Curator working between Zurich, Berlin, and Hong Kong; active in contemporary art since 1996 across curation, art-making, and project management

With RestArt Reality, CIFRA continues its commitment to examining how digital culture reshapes perception, memory, and collective imagination.

Further details regarding submission guidelines and deadlines will be announced via CIFRA’s official channels.