OPEN CALL FOR APPLICATIONS FOR THE FIRST VILNIUS BIENNIAL OF PERFORMANCE ART
The 1st Vilnius Biennial of Performance Art will take place in 2023 across the city’s public and semi-public spaces. The biennial will present performances by both established and emerging artists from Lithuania and abroad to the city’s residents and visitors.
This event is one of the initiatives for the 700th anniversary of Vilnius. The ongoing Vilnius 700 project was initiated by Vilnius City Municipality and is managed by the Vilnius tourism and business development agency Go Vilnius.
The main focus of this Biennial is the city of Vilnius, but also a city per se, as a human-made and human-dominated environment that we share with other life forms, where different histories, myths, activities, interests, desires and visions collide, coexist and overlap. The city as an organism that is born, thrives, but also dies or is killed. The city as an artificial but living structure with certain rules, certain trajectories of circulation that some life forms follow and others choose to disregard, creating new ones. The city as a dense network knitted with both visible and invisible threads and charged with various tensions. The city as a platform and a stage.
The biennial will consist of a curated programme, created by the artistic director of the biennial, Neringa Bumblienė, and a competition programme for which an international jury will select 10 to 15 works to be presented at the biennial.
The competition programme is open to all artists regardless of age or any other criteria. We invite artists to submit both new and existing performances, which have not yet been shown in Vilnius, and which in one way or another resonate with the theme of the biennial. The biennial team will provide curatorial and production assistance in creating and presenting works, and in discussion with each selected artist or collective of artists, will seek to find the human and financial resources necessary for the realisation of the work.
Due to the jury being international, please prepare and send your application in English. The total size of your application files must not exceed 5 MB.
JURY:
- Maria Arusoo – Director of the Estonian Center for Contemporary Art, long-term commissioner of the Estonian Pavilion at the Venice Biennial, currently in curatorial residency at Kumu Art Museum, curator
- Neringa Bumblienė – curator and writer, artistic director of the Vilnius Biennale of Performance Art, curator of the Lithuanian Pavillion at the 59th Venice Biennale, currently working at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius
- Joanna Zielińska – an art historian, writer and performance curator, presently a senior curator at M HKA – Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, Belgium
APPLICATIONS
When submitting your application, please include:
– a description of the project (no more than one A4 sheet). If known, please indicate the preferred location for the performance in Vilnius;
– visual material to support your idea (preliminary visualisations, sketches, photomontages – no more than 10 images);
– equipment, technical requirements, and other resources needed for the performance;
– a portfolio of previous work (no more than 5 pages);
– each applicant may submit a maximum of 3 performance proposals.
Applications should be sent no later than 16 August to info@vilniusbiennial.com, with Competition Programme. Full name in the subject field.
Selected participants will be announced by 5 September.
The biennial will take place in July and August 2023.