Image description: A male football team and others pose for a group photo on a pitch. The word “Art” is written on the chest of all the player’s jerseys.

VISUAL and Carlow Arts Festival are pleased to announce Dreamtime Ireland as the title and theme of Artworks 2025, the annual open-call exhibition hosted by VISUAL as part of Carlow Arts Festival.

The exhibition is formulated as part of a wider research project by artist Sean Lynch that brings together overlooked, forgotten, controversial or unrealised artworks. Dreamtime Ireland invites applicants to think of art’s potential both as a tool of communication, and as a way of shaping and understanding the world; one that is investigative, egalitarian and celebratory.

Dreamtime Ireland will point to often undervalued yet vital cultural forms of commentary, interaction, exchange, and provocation towards the shape of the world and its environment, both today and historically. These are represented by ideas of public art, art as social practice and ecology, and speculative forms of what art and culture can be.

Artists are invited to submit existing work in any medium for selection. The 2025 exhibition will be presented in the galleries at VISUAL from Thursday 5 June-Sunday 31 August 2025. All artists selected will receive an artist's fee.

All selected entries will be eligible for one of five Artworks Awards of €1,000 each. Given to works or practices of outstanding quality, the awards will be announced at the exhibition opening on 5 June.

The selection panel consists of VISUAL’s Curator Benjamin Stafford and CEO and Artistic Director Emma Lucy O’Brien, Carlow Arts Festival’s Artistic Director Benjamin Perchet, artist Sean Lynch, and Aurora Tang, independent curator and programme director at The Centre of Land Use Interpretation, Los Angeles.

Deadline: Friday 21 March 2025 at 5pm.

The online application form can be filled in here or downloaded as a PDF here. For queries and any assistance needed, please contact Ferga Moran at fmoran@carlowartsfestival.ie

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