Open Call for Participation in the “Counter-Archive” Dialogues
The A. M. Qattan Foundation, within the framework of the Dialogic Spaces project, announces an open call for artists working across disciplines (including visual arts, design, architecture, writing, and others) to participate in the “Counter-Archive” Dialogues programme. The programme seeks to explore readings of the Palestinian landscape archive across three temporal dimensions: pre-Oslo, the Oslo period, and speculative futures.
The dialogues programme will run over a three-month period, from June through August 2026, through weekly sessions that combine in-person and online participation. It includes a series of collective discussions among participants, structured around selected readings, thematic enquiries, and the development of artistic works. The programme will culminate in a group exhibition curated by Nouran Joulani.
The programme examines the relationship between the archive and the Palestinian landscape and seeks to situate participants’ artistic propositions collectively within an extended temporal continuum—one that resists treating the present as a fixed endpoint. Instead, it approaches the imagination of the future as a critical tool through which past, present, and future may be re-read together, beyond the constraints of predetermined social imaginaries or the implications of technological hegemony.
The Palestinian landscape has been subject to continuous and systematic transformation and redefinition—through confiscation, settlement expansion, shifts in agricultural structures and land use, the erasure of memory, and the imposition of extreme narratives. In response, the programme invites participants to envision the landscape fifty years into the future, encouraging the development of speculative propositions that critically revisit its present condition and unravel its past. This process aims to explore what has been lost, and what may still be reclaimed through acts of re-imagination.
The resulting artistic propositions become, in themselves, forms of archiving the future. The exhibition thus functions as an entry point into an evolving archival platform—one that brings together both the works and their processes of production in an attempt to construct a collective visual narrative that begins in the present yet is not confined by its limits.
Eligibility & Application Details
- This open call is intended for emerging artists.
- Application deadline: Sunday, 10 May 2026, at 23:59.
- Selected applicants will be notified via email following the close of submissions.
- Applications can be submitted via the following link:
https://system1.formstack.com/forms/fadaa_hawariya
Selection Process
Applications will be reviewed by the programme’s artistic supervisor, Nouran Joulani, in collaboration with a representative from the Foundation’s Community Engagement Unit. Selected applicants will be notified no later than 20 May 2026. We regret that only selected applicants will be contacted.
Dialogic Spaces is a project that aims to strengthen the communal dimension of cultural and artistic practice—both during the process of production and beyond the presentation of works—by fostering an interactive, collective environment in which art functions as a tool for expression and dialogue.