Open call: Municipal Art Acquisitions

The 2020 edition of the Proposals for Municipal Art Acquisitions exhibition, organized by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, departs from a critical outlook on the museum collection. Seeking stories that are unseen, ignored, or deserve to be told more often, the Stedelijk Museum encourages artists and designers to send proposals that disseminate intangible, embodied, and personal forms of knowledge transfer to challenge prevailing knowledge power structures. A selection of artworks and design projects from this exhibition will be acquired for the museum collection.

Prevailing knowledge systems such as education curricula, public archives, and museum collections lead to selective inclusion of information classified as “valid” or “reliable” while other valuable forms of knowledge production are repeatedly excluded by organizations. These can include stories regarded as untraceable, controversial, or unreliable, such as intuitive knowledge, inherited wisdom, oral histories, and even childhood memories, gossip, and love songs. Such sources remain “unofficial” and are often left outside the structures that shape our collective knowledge. The risk of this segregation lies in the limited perspectives that “official” stories offer. There is a Dutch proverb, onbekend maakt onbemind (“what is unknown is unloved”), which exemplifies how the creation of knowledge gaps affects what we cherish and foster in the future. This leads to an urgency to constantly question knowledge management in organizations such as museums, and what they elect to value and collect.

This exhibition particularly seeks artworks and design projects that can contribute to a critical perspective. Artists and designers are encouraged to submit projects that can challenge existing or conventional ways of knowing.

This open call is aimed at artists and designers working and/or living in the Netherlands; nationality is not a criterion. The deadline for the application is November 14, 2019. Together with an international jury, curatorial duo Britte Sloothaak and Fadwa Naamna will make a selection from the submitted projects, which will be exhibited from the end of June 2020.

Practical information
–Artists and designers may apply with finished works, works in progress, or works they would like to produce for the exhibition.
–All applications must be submitted via the online application form.
–Inquiries may be sent to gka2020 [​at​] stedelijk.nl.
–Interviews with the jury will take place on November 27–29.