Artworks 2023: Open Call

VISUAL and Carlow Arts Festival are delighted to announce Remembering the Future as the title and theme of Artworks 2023, the annual open call exhibition hosted by VISUAL as part of Carlow Arts Festival.

This year’s exhibition explores time, and the ability of memories, real or imagined, to collapse past, present, and future together. We are also looking at memory and imagination as a utopian tool; as the starting point for dreaming different worlds and for preserving the past.

Artists are invited to submit existing work in any medium for selection. The 2023 exhibition Remembering the Future will be presented in the galleries at VISUAL from 7 June – 31 August 2023. All artists selected will receive an artist’s fee. ARTWORKS 2023 is open to visual art in all mediums.

Invited and commissioned works for this year’s Artworks include the first complete exhibition of the Irish Names Project’s AIDS Memorial quilts. The quilts represent the lives of those affected by the AIDS epidemic, and are an anchor point of the season.

Existing works and a new large-scale commission by Sinéad Kennedy from her ongoing Grandland project, that creates the civic paraphernalia of an imagined world, sit alongside Brianna Hurley’s painting of Castalia, a fantasy planet whose people have been oppressed by a conquering force and where Hurley is their ally in fighting for freedom.

Jane Fogarty’s public sculpture, Many Hands, made in collaboration with 130 children and young people from across Carlow County, will be installed outside VISUAL.

The selection panel consists of Benjamin Perchet, Artistic Director & CEO of Carlow Arts Festival, Emma Lucy O’Brien, Artistic Director & CEO of VISUAL, Benjamin Stafford, Visual Arts Curator, VISUAL and artist Alice Rekab.

The deadline for submissions was Friday 17 March at 5pm – submissions are now closed.

If you have any questions, please email Ferga Moran, Programme Coordinator at Carlow Arts Festival: fmoran@carlowartsfestival.com.