Open Call ELIA Biennial Conference 2026
Going Off Centre
Einreichfrist: 16. Januar 2026
In volatile times it becomes clear that no centre is fixed or permanent. When things
fall apart, both crisis and imagination arise. We find ourselves on edge.
It is arts schools and socio-cultural institutions
who maintain open spaces for multi-dimensional and divergent thinking – trying to convene shared community spaces.
Polarisation is the collective shift away from communal centres leading to
deeper misunderstanding and eroding common values. As a result, institutions that gather and embolden communities through
the arts, education, heritage, and social justice can struggle to re-imagine and risk being dismantled.
For this
reason, ELIA Biennial Conference 2026 calls on artistic practitioners, researchers, educators, students, administrative
staff, technicians and leaders to ‘go off centre’. We ask participants to step out of binary-thinking comfort zones, pull
back from the mainstream towards the alternative, break from the fulcrum, and head to the margins. We encourage a rethinking
of positions and roles held within these shifting forcefields.
Hosted by ArtEZ University of the Arts, over four
days in the city of Zwolle, participants will explore the act and art of decentring and embrace the tension this brings. Through
provocative keynotes, paradoxical presentations, imaginative and strategic workshops, cultural tours, and artistic interventions,
we will reposition the art school not by restoring a lost centre, but by reforming as a body of knowing (1): a living, breathing
whole that resists being bricked in by definitions, dogmas, or hierarchies.
(1) Instead of a body of knowledge
(as is common in education), a body of knowing is porous. It breathes, doubts, forgets, is vulnerable and mobile. It stands
open to voices that are usually not heard, and to ways of knowing that cannot be captured in categories, language, frameworks,
or curricula. M.Boumeester, “On the Ontology of Synthetic Desire: The Politics of Recursive Imaging” in Cadernos PROARQ, (Rio
de Janeiro: FAU, 2025).
Call for Contributions
Calling all artistic practitioners, performers,
philosophers, researchers, educators, students, pedagogues, admin staff, technicians, leaders and makers!
ELIA
Biennial 2026 invites you to explore what forms of knowledge, practice, art and paradoxes emerge when we decentre dominant
narratives, disrupt habitual hierarchies, and shift our attention toward the marginal, the local, the peripheral. We welcome
contributions that go off centre. Seeking forms of Community, Counterculture, Courage, and Criticality, we look to you for
alternative methodologies and modalities, moments of failure and resistance, that move us towards new possibilities of a shared
becoming as a body of knowing. ELIA deeply understands the illuminating capacity of arts education and the idea that the form
of a presentation can inspire and inform its content. At the ELIA Biennial 2026, a wide variety of formats are welcome, including
academic papers, artistic and performative interventions, creative poster presentations, experiments, and workshops.
Student-Led Contributions
We encourage students to join the conversation at the ELIA Biennial. We
welcome student-led contributions that amplify student voices and explore the Biennial theme through the lens of community,
courage, criticality, and counterculture. Share your practice, process, and alternative perspectives. Selected students from
ELIA member institutions will receive bursaries covering the cost of travel to and from Zwolle, as well as accommodation for
the duration of the event. These bursaries are funded by the ELIA Supporting Members Fund. Be provocative. Be creative. Your
chosen format should stimulate lively debate, enable co-creation, facilitate dialogues, encourage participation and move towards
creating a common understanding.
Deadline: 16 January 2026
For more information and
your submission, please visit the website of
ELIA
For any questions, feel free to reach out to ELIA Conference Manager Janja Škerget at janja.skerget@elia-artschools.org
Or the Department of Support Art and Research at Angewandte: support_kf@uni-ak.ac.at
