Ed. 6: Call for Artistic Submissions

Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture

Edition 6: "Boundless: Art and Identification across Borders"

Call for Artistic Submissions

Due: 3/31/2017

Cultures have used visual means to record, define, interrogate, and delimit individual and collective identities, their historical context, and presence in time and space. Identity must be articulated before it exists and so art and artists enact, create, resist, and reify individual and collective identities, often challenging both material borders and conceptual boundaries that determine identity in contrast to the Other. Interrogating bounded concepts of identity in the visual world opens up new avenues for understanding social and aesthetic interactions and their relationships to constructed geographical, ideological, and temporal limits. 

In its 6th edition, Contemporaneity seeks artistic submissions that cover a wide range of issues, topics, media, and disciplines with an emphasis on the complexity of art and identification in time and space. While submissions dealing with the effect of borders on national and regional identities are particularly welcome, we also encourage artworks addressing borders and race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and other categories of identification. 

The deadline for submissions is March 31, 2017. Submissions should include the candidate’s full name, e-mail address and telephone number, a brief biography,, an abstract presenting the artist’s work, 3-5 keywords, and a single PDF containing high-quality image(s) of each work to enable the selection committee to form as accurate an idea as possible of the applicant’s practice. There is no entry fee and no monetary publication reward. Applicants working exclusively in the medium of video are advised to provide a link to a video hosting site such as Vimeo or YouTube or to their own site where the video can be viewed. 

To make a submission, visit contemporaneity.pitt.edu, click Register and create an Author profile to get started. We recognize that submissions may take many forms. As such, proposals and questions can be directed to the editors at contemporaneityjournal@gmail.com.

Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture is an open access journal organized by the History of Art and Architecture Department at the University of Pittsburgh. Visit contemporaneity.pitt.edu and constellations.pitt.edu for more information.