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Contextile 2022 International Exhibition Open Call

Contextile 2022

CONTEXTILE invites all artists (national and international) to present artworks to the competition for the International Exhibition (competitive), integrated in the programme of its 6th Edition, Contextile 2022 – Contemporary Textile Art Biennial, to be held in the city of Guimarães, Portugal, from the 3rd September to the 30th October 2022.

In 2022, the Contextile biennial focuses its activities on the thematic concept RE-MAKE – Dialogues for a textile culture, transversal to all the rubrics of its programmatic contents.

The International Competitive Exhibition will be composed by 50 artworks from 50 artists. Will also be accepted and selected 2 artworks for implementation outdoors (public space).

The artistic works will be selected by an international jury, composed by Lala de Dios (curator and teacher of textile), Janis Jefferies (professor of visual arts and curator), Monika Grasiené-Zaltê (textile artist and curator), Orenzio Santi (teacher and textile artist), Claudia Melo (artistic director of Contextile 2022).

The jury will also award an Acquisition Prize of 6000 € (six thousand Euros) and Honourable Mentions, at the moment of the biennial’s opening. Any of the 50 works of the international exhibition may also be selected, during the biennial, for the ATP Acquisition prize and the ASM Acquisition prize, in the amount of 2500 € euros each.

The interested artists may apply with new creations or recent artworks, until the 5th March 2022, being
accepted all artistic expressions in the visual arts disciplines. The proposals and artworks submitted for the competition will have to be around the textile element, through its concept, theme, techniques or materials. The artworks will have to be highly creative, original and technically competent.

Will be accepted artworks of free thematics or developed from the thematic concept below.

RE-MAKE: DIALOGUES FOR A TEXTILE CULTURE

Considering that convulsions have the power to place us in confrontation with the world, one imagines in this contemporaneity (here and now) a willingness to re-make, based on a critical thinking.

The title is a constructed and polysemic term, resulting from the “space in between” the action and the reaction.

There we operate in prefix, in the origin, in the cause, in the creation, in the construction, in the thought, in the connection, in the transformation.

This will be the condition and the possible space for us to think the world, and wish to access some (few) answers, through the countless intra-textual, intertextual, contextual and interdependent relations – of the ecosystems, their emergencies and their “-cides” – body, history, politics, society, economy, territory, ecology.

From this condition crossed dialogues emerge, questions are provoked and one acts in mutatis mutandis.

But what changes can we, then, propose? How can we re-make? What are the new materializations of that making that acts in a “space in between”, based on an urgency for new significations of the actions and thoughts?

This reflection is proposed from the contexts of textile culture, their inter and intra-texts, and their possibilities of, in a re-make, to rethink themselves and the world: textile as potential matter, its story and importance in the history of humanity itself and in the construction of the world, the conditions of labor, its industry and impacts on the territories and their communities.

Textile and art are presented as an action and reaction to time and to space, in response to the political and social conditions, as alchemical body, reacting to stimuli, such as fiction or fantasized reality and new imaginaries, as an experimental medium attentive to the new ecologies of production, as a questioner of borders and limits or their nonexistence.

Textile and textile art (or textile in art) are therefore affirmed, as inciters and convenors, also capable of provoking change and response in a time that is of now. Able to make, to make again, to re-make.

For more information and to submit your work please visit THIS page.

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