Background photo credit: Cheryl NgOpen Call:
artist-in-residence
The Community Design Research Lab and the Cambridge Room Research team invite proposals from artists or small collectives for a £2,000 commission.
We are looking for a project that explores how Cambridge is represented and understood — through its social, spatial, historical, and cultural layers. The project should explore ways of documenting a city (what to document?), examine the epistemological injustice in the process of documentation (who to document?), and discuss the power, ethics, and limitation of participatory visual methodologies (how to document?).
The selected artist or collective will work collaboratively with researchers and local communities during March or April 2026 to test and develop a new work. This can be in any medium, including video essay, photography, installation, performance, mapping, publication, or digital media.
This call is open to artists and practitioners in visual arts, performance, socially engaged art, literal arts, and/or curatorial practices. Projects must be based in Cambridge and may focus on the city as a whole or on a specific area/group. It can be a radical manifesto with grassroots initiatives, a response to archival materials, or other approaches. The final work will be exhibited at the Cambridge Room and presented as part of a public event in May 2026 at CRASSH.
Submission deadline: 19th January 2026 (5pm)
How to apply:
Please send a short proposal (max 2 pages) with your idea, approach, bio, and examples of past work (up to 10 images or links) as a single PDF to Zhuozhang Li zl367@cam.ac.uk.
For enquiries, please contact Zhuozhang Li zl367@cam.ac.uk and/or Minna Sunikka-Blank mms45@cam.ac.uk.