OPEN CALLS

Title: MODUS
Deadline:
Feb. 27. 2026

Exhibition date: October 2026 TBA
Installation, video arts, sonic arts (headphone-playable), performances.

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OPEN CALL — MODUS
An exhibition grounded in children’s modes of experience

Modus invites artists to participate in a group exhibition that takes children’s experiential mode as its conceptual point of departure. The exhibition does not address children as a target audience, but rather approaches childhood as a way of sensing, understanding, and inhabiting the world — one defined by immediacy, physical engagement, curiosity, and multisensory perception.

In contrast to conventional exhibition formats, MODUS seeks to dismantle established norms of audience behaviour within the exhibition space. The traditional separation between artwork and viewer is deliberately challenged. Instead, the exhibition proposes an environment where bodily presence, interaction, and sensory exploration are not secondary to interpretation, but fundamental to it.

A central and non-negotiable criterion of the open call is that all artworks must be fully touchable. Visitors must be able to engage physically with the works. Touch is not supplementary or symbolic, but a primary mode of encounter. Artists applying to Modus must therefore conceive works that are structurally, materially, and conceptually intended to be handled, activated, worn, moved, pressed, entered, or otherwise physically engaged.

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The exhibition embraces a curatorial perspective inspired by the child’s relationship to the world: one in which knowledge emerges through action, where meaning is produced through doing, and where sensory experience precedes explanation. Sight, sound, texture, weight, movement, resistance, and proximity are treated as equal contributors to understanding.

We invite artists working across disciplines — including installation, sculpture, sound, textiles, digital media, performance-based structures, and hybrid practices — to propose works that reconsider authorship, vulnerability, durability, and participation. Works may be playful, poetic, chaotic, fragile, rigorous, or quietly immersive, but they must accept interaction as an inherent condition rather than a risk to be managed.

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MODUS aims to create an exhibition space where the rules of conduct are rewritten, and where visitors of all ages are invited into a shared field of exploration — a space shaped not by restraint, but by attentiveness; not by distance and sight, but by contact.

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for more info: contact: essbeckperson(at)gmail.com

Fee: dependent on funding. - Otherwise sparse.
Applicants from outside of Denmark must be able to handle and cover own expenses for transport/visa etc.