Artist-Run Initiatives

Space52 founded by the artist Dionisis Christofilogiannis in 2017 and supports Athens based artists and continuously seeks collaborations with art spaces and professionals from abroad. Our community and network grow by facilitating collaborations, exchanges and research-based project. Space52 serves as a hub for local and international creatives, intellectuals and theoreticians. Main focus of all our engagements is the current inquiries of our growing dynamic community. Space52 is the Athens incubator of ideas and experimentations.  

PHOTO IS:RAEL is a non-profit organization dedicated to fostering dialogue via research and the highlighting of artistic and social issues through the language of photography. For further details: https://www.photoisrael.org/opencall

  The Foundry Art Centre is a dynamic community art center dedicated to the creation and presentation of contemporary visual arts. Our mission is to connect everyday people with the arts through our studio artists, educational classes, special events, and exhibitions. Featuring a state-of-the-art gallery space, the Foundry hosts national and international juried fine art exhibitions and curated traveling exhibitions.

BERLIN-WEEEKLY was founded in June 2010 as an art project space by Stefanie Seidl. The 4,5, meter high room is a double-glazed former gateway for horse-drawn carriages in the historic Jewish Scheunenviertel in Berlin Mitte. The showcase space, which is illuminated until late at night, can be regarded as a kind of public stage on which the artists can stage an installation, representative of their work. The potential of the public showcase is to reach a wide, diverse audience. As a result of its one-sided orientation to the street BERLIN-WEEEKLY thus functions as an artistic intervention in public space. The exhibitions do not change weekly (as the name suggests and was initially planned), but every month. Though the installations are clearly visible from the outside until late at night, the room itself is always closed except for the regular openings and for special events and presentations. The interested viewer can get more information on the website with photos and brief informations about the respective installations and a direct link to the artist’s webpage. BERLIN WEEKLY is aimed primarily at artists who work predominantly sculptural and spatial. The artists have complete freedom regarding the concept, content and realization of their installation, […]

  Ayatana offers intensive research program for artists to learn about ecology. We host specialized residency on birds, sound, plants, insects, biology, water, mushrooms, death, geology, evolution and microscopy. Ayatana’s residency location changes every year.

Oika is a small but growing community of artists, storytellers and media-makers dedicated to manifesting ecological intelligence through our work. We are creating a new culture in alliance and alignment with nature. Oika elevates the value of art by aligning it with the power and abundance of nature. Our artists are in deep communion with nature and manifest ecological intelligence in their creations. This alliance between nature and artist affords a moral, ecological imperative. “Oikadelic” art brings ecological intelligence to culture through nature and ecological healing to nature through culture. Into the Artmosphere is Oika’s core educational program for artists, storytellers and media-makers. Throughout 2020 Dr. Rich Blundell is traveling to diverse artistic communities introducing the principles and practices of ecological intelligence. We teach artists how to practice Oika for creative inspiration and give them the language, concepts, and confidence to publicly communicate the eco-cultural value of their work Oika seeks to surface and capacity-build ecologically intelligent artistic communities. Into the Artmosphere presents a progressive on-ramp for artists and curators to get involved. Responding appropriately to the climate crisis requires a whole new category of media-maker. In addition to specialized technical skills, we need new creative professionals with a fine-tuned […]

  Picasso Pupils is an art society with the branch in India and in Slovakia whose main mission is to provide a platform for cultural exchange. The main aim is to use art as a language between diverse cultures. The organization arranges art residency programs, exhibitions and educational activities in India and in Slovakia which share the ideas of togetherness between diverse cultures, preservation of traditional and contemporary art and spread the art education and social awareness through art.  

  Elsewhere is an eclectic, radical, experimental, whimsical, grass-roots, rural sci-fi, imaginative residency space in Paonia, Colorado that provides nourishment for the creative soul.  

Cementa is a unique, regionally situated, socially-engaged, artist-led organization dedicated to cultivating contemporary art in our regional context. Our annual program of residencies and special projects culminates in our major production, Cementa Festival. Our biennial festival of contemporary art brings together over 60 regional and urban artists for a four-day celebration of Australian contemporary art and the small town that hosts it. This is done through the exhibition of video, installation, sound, performance and 2D/3D artworks in venues and locations across the town and surrounds. Venues include shopfronts, vacant lots, the scout hall, local museum and community centre, the golf course, front yards and public parks. Taking its regional situation as its focus, Cementa celebrates the rich diversity of voices that can be heard within our contemporary arts communities.    

  P8 cooperative gallery was established in 2008 at 8 Poriya street in Jaffa. The power of synergy is at the heart of the group’s approach, stimulating it to advance and progress within the artistic sphere, utilizing personal resources as curating, production and promotion collaboratively. Naturally, the use of personal resources dictates sophisticated and humble conduct. As a non-profit organization, any income (from sales for example) is reinvested in the gallery, either for maintenance or for special projects. The group is on a constant search for new modes of action and collaborations that would be beneficial, original and innovative. The gallery holds exhibitions of the members as well as other artists and curators. We are always open to cooperation and new ideas. We encourage artists, galleries, curators and other individuals or institutions to send us proposals and suggestions for collaborative work in and outside the gallery.

  CAMERA is focused on promoting the work of emerging visual artists, especially photography-related, as well as installation art, new media, mixed media. The name CAMERA is referring both to the device used in photography, and to the latin meaning of the word camera – chamber, which the artist-run space actually resembles. The latin concepts of camera obscura and camera lucida are other important connections regarding the name of the artist-run space. CAMERA is the artist-run space of Irina Dumitrașcu Măgurean, Cluj-based visual artist.  

  Love’s Remedies is an initiative by artists BRD (Bridget Rosalia Driessen) and Hannah Kim Varamini. Started in 2018, Love’s Remedies uses the artists’ collective interest in care and attention as media, and invites other artists to utilize them and their resources for their own benefit. For their inhabitance at ArtCenter DTLA through 2020, Love’s Remedies continues to investigate the relations between friendship and artist networks, professional practices and expansive action.

  Art Dream Foundation is an upcoming online artist-run gallery and a collaborative project between two artists based in London and Zurich. They want to create a space that promotes hidden talent and artists that are underrepresented and often ignored. Joined by emerging young curators to collaborate on online exhibitions, residencies and creative projects, the Art Dream Foundation aspires to become an open platform for aspiring and emerging artists.

  The M1 Singapore Fringe Festival is an annual festival of theatre, dance, music, visual arts and mixed media created and presented by Singaporeans and international artists. Themed differently each year, the Festival aims to bring the best of contemporary, cutting-edge and socially engaged works to the Singapore audience.

During Soviet times, arts and culture were promoted, financed and used by the state and the communist party as an instrument to underpin the state, their party values and ideology. Cultural content had to align with ideological propaganda and be broadly understood by the general public. It also had to instill into people a feeling of being a part of the USSR family alongside its objectives and achievements. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the concomitant economic dip and scarcity of state resources in the newly independent Kyrgyz Republic, the arts and culture community and Kyrgyz Union of Artists not only lost its financing but more importantly its role in society and the state. Twenty years after independence, like other newly independent states, the multi-ethnic Kyrgyz Republic is still struggling with a new national identity appealing to all constituent parts of the country. There is also a lack of understanding of citizen responsibility in a pluralistic market economy. Б’Art Contemporary was founded in 2007 by Shaarbek Amankul as an artistic research project and mobile art practice aimed at developing and promoting contemporary art in Kyrgyzstan as an alternative to the traditional view of and approach to art. VISION: […]

  kimyo is an Art and Design Gallery. Contemporary textiles, material and craft based art and design projects. Rotating exhibitions of 3 weeks, showing works of emerging artists. An artist community and a gallery space where artists have more authority to curate one’s own exhibition.  

  ERGO Collective is a creative platform founded on the premise of collaboration. We approach collective creativity as mode of encouraging dialogue and triggering stimulating ideas on the critique and collapse of borders between Art’s disciplines. Our team is formed by permanent and guest artists and other curious people from various places and spaces. Our journey began in a nomadic manner with an emphasis on site specific shows. Today ERGO occupies a physical space in Athens making its first steps as an artist-run-space. Our new space allows the collective to be more spontaneous on realizing projects, ideas and activities. To have a home, means to be a host and therefore ERGO is welcoming creatives from around the world to share and propose ideas on exhibitions, performances, workshops, symposia, screenings or any other intriguing event. ERGO Collective (Non-profit Organization) was initiated in September 2017.  

  As the longest-running ARI in Perth, Paper Mountain is a highly reconfigurable studio collective and gallery with co-working and event spaces. Constantly evolving, our core ethos aligns with queer, decolonialist, anti-patriarchal, and anti-ableist ideas and working methods. Our priority is supporting underrepresented and courageous new voices, for learning as we go and adapting to the realities of a damaged world by generating experimental structures and creative solutions. We welcome artists, community groups, organizers, and workers in other disciplines.

  From 2010, W is the collective of artists and the art studio dedicated to working, meeting, research, experimentation and diffusion of contemporary art. Artists from different plastic backgrounds (sculpture, painting, video, photo, performance) shared their desires and the values to create a place for work, exchange of ideas and diffusion of contemporary art. On two floors, we have from the outset dedicated the first floor of 110m2 to artistic practice and the ground floor of 80m2 to exhibitions, projects and monthly events. Beyond our individual practices, this space welcomes artists from all horizons and geographies, rich exchanges and meetings without partitioning between the actors of the project (artists, children, neighbors, musicians, craftsmen, artists…).