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Open Call - ARE 2026

INTERNATIONAL CALL FOR ARTISTIC RESEARCH WORK
ARE 2026

Unstable Grounds: Artistic Research Lines of Flight

April 2026 | Online through April 2027 | are.filmeu.eu

The European University FilmEU continues to foster and advance artistic research within Higher Education in Europe by supporting innovative, critical, and cross-disciplinary practices. FilmEU brings together eight European higher education institutions dedicated to developing artistic methodologies, expanding cultural perspectives, and addressing urgent social, political, ecological, and technological questions through the arts. Each year, FilmEU_WIRE organises the Artistic Research Exhibition (ARE), offering a crucial platform for sharing artistic research outcomes from across FilmEU and beyond. ARE foregrounds the value of artistic knowledge production and demonstrates how such practices resonate across cultural industries and wider society.

Theme: Unstable Grounds — Artistic Research as Line of Flight

The 2026 edition of ARE invites artistic researchers to engage with the instability that defines the contemporary moment. Across the world, artists and researchers are navigating environments shaped by accelerating AI systems, political extremism, ecological precarity, economic volatility, and tightening forms of censorship and surveillance. These pressures shape not only public discourse but also the conditions of artistic production, reception, and survival. Yet within this turbulence, artistic research continues to open spaces of resistance, speculation, and imaginative reinvention.

ARE 2026 asks contributors to explore indeterminacy as a productive condition: a dynamic interval in which established structures, social, technological, ecological, epistemic, begin to loosen, allowing new forms of relation, knowledge, and expression to emerge. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the line of flight, the theme centres on practices that carve pathways through rigid or oppressive systems, generating cracks where the molecular intensities, affects, flows, tentative beginnings, can circulate and mutate. These unstable grounds hold the potential for new developments, but also carry the risk of collapse, co-option, or reterritorialisation. ARE 2026 encourages proposals that grapple with this ambivalence: works that sense, map, or provoke the uncertain futures taking shape in the present.

Artists and researchers are invited to respond through audiovisual and media-based forms that reconsider how art can illuminate instability, enact critique, cultivate resilience, or imagine alternative trajectories at a moment when no future feels fully secured.

Who Can Submit

Postgraduate researchers of any nationality and academic level whose practice engages with artistic research. Applicants must be affiliated with an academic institution. Submissions from non-European institutions are welcome.

As in previous editions, at least two works by researchers external to FilmEU will be selected. In addition, works from FilmEU institutions will be chosen, alongside works supported by the FilmEU_WIRE Student Pilot Call and the FilmEU_WIRE Novus Call.

Guidelines for Submission

  • Works must be audiovisual or media-based, resulting from (or informed by) an artistic research practice.
  • All works must be submitted in a downloadable mp4 format, suitable for single- or multi-screen installation with minimal technical set-up.
  • Please include a brief technical description (maximum 100 words) and any sketches or diagrams required for display.
  • Works must be no more than two years old.
  • Submissions may consist of completed works or preliminary research outputs that can be presented as finished artistic projects.
  • Each submission must include:
    • an abstract (maximum 350 words),
    • optional images (within a single A4 page),
    • a link to the applicant’s CV.

Works should be emailed to: are@filmeu.eu

Deadline for submission: 2 February 2026
Notification of acceptance: 15 February 2026

By submitting, applicants grant permission for their work to be exhibited at ARE 2026, both in physical and online formats.

Selection Committee

  • Aleksandra Ianchenko – Tallinn University, Estonia
  • Elena Trencheva — NATFA, Bulgaria
  • Érica Faleiro Rodrigues — Lusófona University, Portugal
  • Lina Kaminskaitė-Jančorienė — LMTA, Lithuania
  • Lies Van de Vijver — LUCA School of Arts, Belgium
  • Martina Mullaney — IADT, Ireland
  • Michelle Kranot — VIA University College, Denmark
  • Žofia Ščuroková — VŠMU, Slovakia

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The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the granting authority.