Open Call: BIEN 2026 - 2027 "Tunnels"
The Trzic Museum,Trzic, SI
Deadline: 30.04.2026
Source: BIEN
BIEN 2026 - 2027: TUNNELS – Art Collaboration Proposal
BIEN invites textile and interdisciplinary artists to apply for the special project Tunnels. This project offers an opportunity to engage in a collaborative research and artistic process with the team of the Tržič Museum, selected Slovenian artists, and textile professionals across the field. Together, participants will explore difficult heritage and critical historical contexts, using textile art as a site for dialogue, reflection, and embodied practice.
The Tržič Museum manages the memorial park and museum dedicated to the prisoners of the Ljubelj/Loibl concentration camp, a satellite camp of Mauthausen. Prisoners were forced to dig a tunnel through the mountain between present-day Slovenia and Austria - an infrastructure project of strategic importance, connecting the German Reich with the Balkans.
Within this context, visual representation becomes a crucial entry point - particularly the role of textile in systems of control. Uniforms, markings, and enforced material conditions functioned as tools of dehumanisation, stripping individuals of identity while simultaneously inscribing power onto the body.
This open call is intended for individual artists or small groups who are prepared to engage with complex and sensitive subject matter. We are looking for practices that demonstrate the ability to navigate dark history and a genuine interest in themes such as war, displacement, labour, grief, and collective storytelling.
The project engages with questions of power and movement, the layered meanings of infrastructure, and broader socio-economic and historical contexts. It approaches the tunnel not only as a site of violence, but also as a charged metaphor of connection, division, parallel construction, and misaligned intentions. The idea of building from two sides toward a shared point becomes a starting place for reflection, dialogue, and the possibility of rethinking inherited narratives.
This is a demanding and emotionally complex context, but also a deeply meaningful and layered one. Motivation, sensitivity, and responsibility are essential.
Through collaboration between international and Slovenian artists, the project seeks to open space for new perspectives - where dialogue becomes a method, and textile a medium through which fragile, difficult histories can be approached, held, and transformed.
Submission deadline: 30.04.2026
Online info session (Zoom): April 24, 2026, 10:00-11:00 CET
Application form: click here
More information: www.layer.si/bien/