Visible Award for Socially Engaged Art: Deadline for Entries - 6 April

2015 Visible Award

The Visible Award is the first international production award devoted to art work in the social sphere, that aims to produce and sustain socially engaged artistic practices in a global context. 

The Visible Award is looking for artistic projects that, in a radical and proactive way, are able to rethink our cities in their approach to urban and rural communities, put into question education models while reconsidering different ways of sharing knowledge, support alternative models of economic development and new ideas for the allocation of resources, rethink the access to information or the priority of ecological and environmental needs, as well as experimenting with participatory and democratic political models while starting these open-ended projects. These are just few examples about how artistic processes can create areas for reflection and mobilization, acting as a field for action within the public domain, in favour of a reading of participation in art that considers the social body as a potential power for bringing about responsible change and social transformation.

The Visible Award not only takes up the discussions about the development of art in a responsible relationship with the complexities of social change, but it also offers artists real opportunities to produce, and thus the possibility to experiment and work on new visions that can have a significant impact on the shared imaginary and on reality itself. The award intends to break away from the conventions governing the production of public art in the form of monumental objects, in order to focus on a new form of commitment in art, and on the relationships between the production of art, science, and culture. In order to achieve this, it is essential to create new spaces and processes, rather than producing self-contained objects, and finding potential new areas for interaction, in which spectators can be considered as proactive subjects.

With a renewed advisory board composed of 36 curators, working and operating in emerging or more established scenes all over the world, the visible prize comes to its third edition, and takes a step further in its aim to research, support and offer a discursive and productive platform to innovative artistic projects that are able to become visible also in fields other than the artistic ones. Art works that are actively engaging within the social sphere, understanding art as a tool to make visible other fields and issues within the traditional art system and thus sharing an awareness about artistic production as an active element and agency in contemporary society, and with critical and future oriented aspirations.

A call for proposals is open until midnight April 6 (UTC+1) to let artists and collectives submit projects, from which a selection, chosen by the pre-selection committee, will join the proposals nominated by the advisory board and will be published on the Visible website. 

The shortlisted projects, chosen by the pre-selection committee (composed by Charles Esche, Van Abbemuseum director; Francesco Manacorda, Tate Liverpool director; two representatives of the two foundations, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Andrea Zegna, and the Visible project curators) in May, will enter the jury phase which will be held as a public event at Tate Liverpool in October 2015 in the form of a temporary parliament, chaired by Chris Dercon and involving a great number of socially engaged artistic practices experts and users.

Go to the entry form and read the guidelines and description