Curatorial Call Out 2022

The irrepressible, indomitable creative pulse of the city beats on against the odds. Artists, we count on your luminosity. The lights may all go out, but your ideas will still glow.

Needle to fabric, brush to canvas, your work is a summoning circle, a howl, an outstretched hand. It sneaks up on us, punctures the comfortable, gathers us in. Assembled in hushed rows, listening to the sounds of another body, tangled up in togetherness, we are earthed amidst the enormity of the change we are living through. We glimpse futures, we accelerate, we renew our belief in reinvention. Your art expands our capacity for feeling. In 2022, we give ourselves wholly to all things: rest, rage, revelry.

Rest is a shapeshifter. Find power in the pause, clarity in the stillness, follow a thread just because you want to. Slow down with us, share the exquisite granular, the luxurious slow-time. We’re in search of work that carves out better ways forward, introduces new methodologies and invites a growing community of voices. Cultivate safe spaces for communal reflection, for gathering resources, for collective laughter. Lose the run of yourself, indulge, be silly. Rest looks different for everyone, so re-shape working structures tailored to individual needs. For what’s most precious, we’ll champion the value beyond the cost; art and togetherness, stories and truth, beauty and play, defiance and divilment. 

Let your ideas be ferocious, incandescent. Rage is fuel for rapid transformation. Harness it to craft furiously, to research vigorously. Sink your fingers into the raw form of things: we want to see work that exposes us, makes us feel too much. Give us the tangible, the cathartic, the undeniable. Right now, there is a turf war for the soul of Dublin, and we know which side we’re on. We’re making noise, holding space for artists and preserving places to dance. We crave unity, to be sharing and shouting as one. Show up for each other, and for the kind of community you want to live in. 

Joy and curiosity have been left fallow. Sow seeds of sensation, collect fresh cuts of the unseen and uninvited. Snap us out of the crisis of mundanity. Exhilarate us. We want inky stamps on wrists, can-you-believe-she-just-did-that moments and take-it-straight-to-the-group-chat scenes. We’re here for your shimmer, your grime, your boldest tricks. We want spit-takes, paint splatter and dirt under our fingernails. The glorious and the improbable, performances that inspire shouted conversations about art and meaning on crowded street corners, revelry that spills from night into morning. Time with strangers never felt so cherished. Together never felt so good. 

Use the festival as a testing ground, a place to send up a flare. Look beyond traditional performance: consider installations, the airwaves, the power of print and timely reclamations of space. Build creative contexts for us to share ideas, to riff, to co-conspire. Look out for each other so we can be dangerous together. Whether you want to see something, or show something, Fringe will be there for you in September. The times may be relentless, but so are we.

Artists, for us, it begins and ends with you. So, all you pied pipers and master poets, deep thinkers and filthy hounds, lads-in-waiting and one-liner queens, joy foragers and rural connoisseurs, club dwellers and trouble makers, wildlings and wordsmiths, world builders and radical techies, fizzy queers and blue-light witches, tender boys and tough bitches, drag kings and glamour hermits, music goddexxes and gas buzzers, maestros of mess, agents of change, forces for craic and those who leave it all on the dancefloor.

It's time to: 
             make art
             make new
             make things happen

 - Ruth McGowan, Artistic Director & CEO and Bee Sparks, Artistic Projects Manager

For information on applying to Dublin Fringe Festival 2022, click here.