Issue 2: Situations, call for submissions

holt journal for artistic research is launching a second call for submissions on the theme situations. We have selected Situations as our theme given the wide parameters of application. Claire Doherty, in her edited book Situations: Documents of Contemporary Art (2009, 14), poses the following question as the premise for her editorial choices, “How might we understand or describe the potential for artistic agency in specific places?” 

In this second call for submissions, holt seeks to revisit this question and open up new ways to address transformative practices and artist’s agency. Situations are context dependent, addressing the multiplicity, complexity and limitations of site, or offer avenues to destabilising a sense of place. We are interested in artistic and practice-led methodologies that could expand on the meaning of the term situations, as well as examine broad, local, and multiple related interpretations or propositions, which might include:

• artistic agency and transformative practice, the social, culture and political determinations of the artist

• notions of the problematic, crisis, difficulty and how these inform artistic enquiry.

• sets of circumstances; location, place, non-place, public space, context and time, events in progress, the production of new localities, fractures in place

• contemporaneity, engagement and interventions

• site specificity; performative writing, happening

• the local and the global, globalisation

• social systems and interactivity, publicness

• environmental, economic or social regeneration 

• construction/disruption of systems, interactivity, simulations, and isolation. 

This is not an exhaustive list, please openly interpret this theme when considering your submission.

We welcome all submissions of research that are situated in and through artistic practice.

holt journal for artistic research was founded in 2022 as a vital, inhabited space for artistic and practice-led research. holt aims to nurture early career practitioners and the research being produced; to grow research into vivid forms for dissemination (which we will showcase through publication), and to render visible new pathways for interdisciplinary connection.

We differentiate our peer-reviewed journal within the larger ecosystem of research journals, by encouraging our submissions to develop experimental means of communicating their research to a wider, non-specialist audience. This experimentation may at times challenge the confines of the A4 page, reconfiguring relationships between text and images, and creatively translating the purpose and function of the original research in a lively way that leads to new inquiries through publishing.

Please share with us your approaches to and embodied methodologies of artistic and practice-led research dealing with the notion of situations. 

Submissions are limited to a maximum of 3000 words or 18, A4 pages. Our default stylistic format for the journal consists of A4 portrait style pages, 1 inch margins, and 12pt Times New Roman font, but submissions are welcomed to alter this format as necessary. The layout, like the content of the submissions, should be determined by the author(s).

Please submit the following for consideration:

• A4 pdf document of your research, a maximum of 3000 words or 18, A4 pages; without your name

• an abstract (max. 300 words)

• a short biography

• three to five key words

• relevant images embedded into the document and as email attachments (saved as jpg files).

All entries should be written in UK English. We welcome international submissions. Please use the Harvard referencing system with endnotes.

Author(s) must hold copyright over all materials submitted.

Submissions should be sent with the subject line “OPEN CALL TWO SUBMISSION” to: holtjournal@gmail.com 

Deadline for submissions: March 30th 2023.

Please see our Frequently Asked Questions page or contact us at holtjournal@gmail.com for more information.

holtjournal.co.uk