Deadline: 15.02.2018
Location: London, East (Bethnal Green)
Call Type: Open Submission / Contemporary Portraiture & Expanded Practices
The Portrait Gallery, London invites submissions for an open call dedicated to what may—hesitantly but deliberately—be termed metamodern practice: a condition of cultural production situated between conviction and doubt, sincerity and irony, construction and collapse.
This is not a thematic prompt in the conventional sense. It is an inquiry into whether portraiture, as a historically stabilising form, can still hold subjecthood in an age defined by oscillation.
CONTEXT
Contemporary visual culture has inherited a dual exhaustion:
the certainty of modernism, and the refusal of postmodern critique.
Between these positions emerges a third register—often described, imperfectly, as metamodernism: a cultural logic of pendulation, where meaning is neither fixed nor dissolved, but continually reassembled under conditions of instability.
This call does not affirm metamodernism as doctrine. It treats it instead as a working condition: unresolved, provisional, and structurally unstable.
THE BRIEF
We are seeking works that engage portraiture not as representation, but as negotiation.
Not: who is the subject?
But: how does subjecthood persist under contradiction?
We are particularly interested in practices that:
- treat identity as a fluctuating system rather than a fixed state
- stage sincerity without stabilising it into affirmation
- work across image, performance, text, sound, or hybrid forms
- acknowledge historical pressure within contemporary visual language
- resist resolution as a curatorial endpoint
The figure of the “meta-subject” is not a proposal for heroism. It is a question about endurance within contradiction.
ON OSCILLATION
Metamodern discourse proposes oscillation as structural condition:
between irony and belief, construction and collapse, optimism and refusal.
We are not interested in resolving this tension.
We are interested in whether portraiture can still function inside it.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Applicants are invited to submit:
- artist name / practice alias
- medium(s)
- portfolio or website
- a concise project proposal (max 300 words)
Submissions should be sent to: dt500mag@gmail.com
Eligible practices include (but are not limited to):
visual art, performance, photography, text-based work, sound, installation, digital media, sculpture, and expanded or hybrid forms.
TIMELINE
Submissions are reviewed on a rolling basis.
Final deadline: 2 March, midnight
NOTE ON DISCOURSE
This initiative operates within a lineage of experimental cultural publishing and interdisciplinary visual platforms concerned with the collapse of genre boundaries and the persistence of image-based thought.
It acknowledges, critically, the influence of countercultural and post-institutional publication models, while resisting their nostalgia as methodology.
CLOSING POSITION
If postmodernism refused resolution, and modernism demanded it, metamodernism—if it exists at all—oscillates between the two without settling.
We are not seeking certainty.
We are seeking practices capable of remaining structurally unsettled without collapsing into aesthetic drift.
#PORTRAIT AS FIELD CONDITION
#OSCILLATION STUDIES
#POST-CYNICAL IMAGE
#RAPTURE!
Arthur Sopin and Andreas Rod 26.11.2017 LONDON
#dt500mag 