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 ContributionsCalling
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 ContributionsWe 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 2026For more information and your submission, please visit the
website
of ELIAFor any questions, feel free to reach out to ELIA Conference Manager Janja Škerget at
janja.skerget@elia-artschools.orgOr the Department of Support Art and Research at Angewandte:
support_kf@uni-ak.ac.at
