new agents (open call)

During these harsh and precarious times, and with the colossal impact it is having on the Arab world and its diaspora, navigating how to be an art professional today comes with immense vulnerability and confusion. Nevertheless, collectivity, imagination, and hospitality are still resources available to tap into and assume as realities are reshaping, and relationships being reinvented. Mophradat’s program, New Agents, formalizes this experience and creates a frame in which a group is formed and brought together to try to harness their energies, desires, and tools, and mold them into a proposition to be realized and shared publicly.

Through this open call, Mophradat will compose a group of six people from across art fields whose practices are singular, future facing, and committed to public engagement. What the participants also share is that they come from territories whose pasts are formed by overlapping cultural references and conditions, their present tainted by overwhelming violence, and their future unpredictable.

Practically, the New Agents will collaborate and learn together and eventually co-develop and realize a proposal that would be made public, in the form of a live event such as a conference, festival, exhibition, or something else. Over the course of one year, the New Agents take part in online workshops with invited artists; one-on-one conversations with an advisor from Mophradat to support them in their individual trajectories; and organize and participate in six weekend-long online seminars, each curated by one of the participants for the group. Midway through the program, the New Agents will be invited for a one-week retreat to work together to produce a complete proposal for the public event that will take place at the end of the year.