Installation view of Saavdhaan: The Regimes of Truth, an apexart Open Call exhibition in New Delhi, India in 2018.

Following a month-long submission process and a one-month voting period, apexart is happy to announce the winning exhibition proposals from their International Open Call. These four exhibitions will be presented as part of the organization’s 2019–20 Exhibition Season.

apexart Open Call exhibitions are selected through a crowd-sourced voting process, in which hundreds of anonymous proposals are rated by an international jury of more than 350 people. Connections and personality do not matter, jurors review only the written proposal idea, communicated in 500 words or less. This selection process ensures that the ideas are unique, compelling, and reflective of the hundreds of people who want to see them transformed from a proposal into an exhibition.

Four proposals were selected from 432 submissions, rated by over 350 jurors who cast nearly 12,000 votes, and submissions and jurors represented more than 67 countries.

The Winning International Open Call Proposals for 2019–2020

Bamako, Mali
Fatima Bocoum, Founder of Openletr (Brooklyn, NY)
Musow Ka Touma Sera
While women are the backbone of Malian society, speaking out about gender-based violence, specifically sexual abuse, is considered disruptive to the common good. Translated as “The Era of Women has Arrived,” this exhibition addresses the socio-political condition of Malian women, and is the first exhibition in Mali organized by a woman and featuring only women artists.

Seoul, South Korea
Kang Seung Lee and Jin Kwon, Artist and Curator at Seoul Museum of Art respectively (Los Angeles, CA and Seoul, South Korea)
Untitled (QueerArch)
Through re-emphasization and re-imagination of the QueerArch (also known as the Korea Queer Archive), this project—consisting of newly-commissioned works by Korean LGBTQ identified artists—makes an important step in acknowledging the unique lineage of queer history outside of the Western context. Engaging collective voices, it underscores marginalized individual experiences and absences in the history of art and related discourses.

Tehran, Iran
Elnaz Mohammad Tehrani and Anahita Rezaallah, Service Designer and Architect respectively (Tehran, Iran and Milan, Italy)
WOMEN C(A)REATE
Addressing gender-based inequities and stigma around drug addiction in Iran, this exhibition presents works by artists and designers who incorporate the rich history of tapestry into installations. The project doubles as a form of art therapy and activism, as each artist collaborates with a group of recovering female addicts. WOMEN C(A)REATE uses art and design as tools for collective empowerment, expression and negotiation.

São Paulo, Brazil
Clarissa Aidar, Artist, writer, and community organizer (São Paulo, Brazil)
Fantasy Battleground
A frightening spike in homophobic and transphobic assaults has intensified an atmosphere of fear in the Brazilian queer community. To defy the ascending heteronormative desire for massacre, the exhibition explores fantasies and dreams as strategies of radicalizing our imaginations. Through installations, six transgender women artists imagine what we could or must turn ourselves into in order to survive this dystopian turn of events together.

Read the original proposals, and find out more about how to submit to apexart’s NYC Open Call, held in October 2019. Or consider being a juror for the next apexart Open Call. Learn more here.