OPEN CALL: Futureless - QueerFeminist Group Exhibition

For the upcoming Futureless group exhibition, taking place between April 1 and 9 at SomoS Berlin, the SomoS curatorial team is calling for ephemeral installations, durational art pieces, performative lectures/projects as well as discourse-based work and other art forms that deal with topics related to queer/feminist* futures, including:

• The role of imagination, fantasy, fiction and speculation in shaping alternative futures.
• Digitization, technological and scientific development.
• Earthly, ecological and environmental precarity.
• Ecosexuality and the relationships between humans and the rest of nature.

Deadline: January 26, 2020, midnight

Application fee: none

Eligibility: international artists working in any medium

From their political root, queer/feminist identities, ideas and actions offer alternative perspectives on how society can be continuously shaped and reshaped differently. With the capitalist dream of progress fading, the Futureless group exhibition recognises an important history of queer/feminist futurism that generates possibility through imagination; the writing of Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler, films such as Lizzy Borden’s Born in Flames, Shu Lea Chang’s Fluido and the cult-classic Rocky Horror Picture Show, as well as the art of Juliana Huxtable and Rebecca Belmore, all come to mind to name just some examples.

The loss of a future once thought by some as great and bright leaves us in a futureless state. Such a state may feel at once empty and ominous, yet also appear as a vast and promising site for speculative fiction and fantasy. In this futureless void, queer/feminist answers become not only increasingly relevant, but also more articulate. What does it mean for queer/feminist thought and art that the future is missing? How can we dream of and interpret the present as seen from the future? 

Artists may respond to some of the following questions:

• Which mythological, fantastical or other-worldly perspectives or examples are beneficial for life on a precarious planet? 
• What does a queer/feminist utopia look like? In contrast, what does a queer/feminist dystopia look like?
• What is the future of gender?
• How can we foster a queer/feminist ecosystem?
• To what extent is ecological struggle the struggle for universal emancipation?
• How may we perform rituals to recognise the loss of the future?
• What are the connections between queer/feminist perspectives on future and others that are formed out of minority positions or resistance, e.g. Afrofuturism, indigenous futurism, decolonization, Trans Futurism, among others?

Both existing works as well as new works are eligible for participation.

Submissions to the exhibition should include a detailed description of the artwork or project. We will look at any proposal with great interest and an open mind, but are especially eager to include 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 before or during the exhibition, works that create their own environment or that involve building an environment that is the backdrop to a performance as well as works that invoke all these forms and incorporate discourse into them through lecture, text etc.

Selected artists/performers will be invited to participate in a group exhibition at SomoS Art House in Berlin that will take place from 01.04.2020-09.04-2020.

*Please note: Considering the common questions of gender and sexuality, we included both queer and feminist perspectives in this Open Call. We encourage submissions that are both queer and feminist, as well as other submissions that lean towards one term or the other. We aimed to express this through the formulation of queer/feminist throughout the Open Call.

Please visit our website below to find out more and to submit your proposal.