Call for text proposals

Occasional Groundwork (an alliance of three European biennials EVA (Ireland’s Biennial of Contemporary Art), GIBCA (Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Sweden), and LIAF (Lofoten International Art Festival, Norway) is delighted to announce a call for proposals for its Groundings series of commissioned texts.

Groundings
Groundings is the first public initiative of Occasional Groundwork. Groundings is a series of co-commissioned texts by writers, artists, curators, and academics, exploring themes of internationalism, sustainability, audience, and infrastructure within the context of the contemporary art biennial and the shift in conditions imposed by the ongoing pandemic. The first texts published in the Groundings series are Taru Elfving’s Time to take time to get grounded (online here) and Grégory Castéra’s Composing the near and far (online here). A third text in the series, by Omar Kholeif, will follow in the summer of 2021.

Call for Submissions
As a continuation of the Groundings series, Occasional Groundwork openly invites proposals for texts, by writers, artists, curators, administrators, and others. We are particularly interested in proposals to address themes of internationalism from operational or infrastructural perspectives, a selection of which will be commissioned as longer-form texts (2000 – 3000 words), published both online and in a print publication due for release in Spring 2022.

Submissions are invited via email to occasionalgroundwork@eva.ie by Sunday, July 25 at 5pm GMT to include an abstract or text proposal of no more than 350 words, together with a short biography. Selections will be made by representatives of the Occasional Groundwork network, with external assessment by artist Dennis McNulty. A total of six text commissions will be awarded and subsequently published online and in a forthcoming print publication. For further information, please see submissions guidelines available here.

For further information about Occasional Groundwork, please click here.