open call after the winter – window gallery

The ERSTE Foundation in Vienna has already presented three exhibitions in its Window Gallery in cooperation with Office Ukraine.

Since March 2022, this initiative has been supporting Ukrainian artists who have fled to Austria due to Russia’s war of aggression. The fourth Window Gallery exhibition After the Winter featuring 15 Ukrainian artists will be presented at the ERSTE Foundation in Vienna from July 16 to August 16, 2026.

We are looking for works that can be adapted to a window gallery format. Selected works will be printed and installed directly onto the window surface, so submissions should consider composition, visibility, and spatial constraints.

After the Winter approaches winter not as a season, but as an environment. Darkness, cold, and the absence of water and electricity are not temporary conditions, but realities that reshape perception and the experience of space. Domestic elements — rooms, radiators, blankets, power banks, generators — become units through which life is measured. Space absorbs tension, fear, fatigue, and anticipation.

This Open Call invites artists to respond not to the event itself, but to its duration. What happens to the body and to space when cold becomes routine? What does a city sound like without electricity? What is now, and what comes next?

After the Winter attempts to hold a state that follows a point of maximum exhaustion. Yet “after” here does not imply resolution. It names a brief interval in which experience has not yet settled into history. Memories and experiences remain unstable, they still await continuation. More so, in July, the exhibition will exist within a different climate and a different infrastructural reality. Summer stability sharpens the fragility of what was endured and what’s coming.