Artist Call-Out: Liverpool Arab Arts Festival 2022

Liverpool Arab Arts Festival (LAAF) is inviting proposals for their 2022 festival. The festival will be held 8-17 July, 2022 and it will be twenty years since the first Liverpool Arab Arts Festival was held in the city.

As a festival, we work with artists across a range of artforms, including: music, performance, theatre, literature, spoken word, visual art and more. You can see examples of previous festival programmes on our website.

Proposals can be in any of these artforms. Outputs can include live or digital performances, events, artworks, exhibitions, workshops, public realm works, talks, panel discussions or young people’s activities.

The call-out is divided into two parts; new artist commissions and existing works.

Next year our theme explores our language, how it sits at the heart of our culture, but also how we use it to connect. How we understand each other, how we come together to engage and cross our cultural boundaries. This is how we create a bridge, connecting language and culture. It is how we discover what we have in common and how we communicate. If language is at the foundation of our culture and identity, how we translate to understand each other provides a valuable meeting point.

By its very nature, translation is not purely rooted in language. It can be how we navigate our mixed identities, how we code-switch, changing how we speak and appear when in different situations.

In 2022, Liverpool Arab Arts Festival explores the meeting points for language, the intersections are the places we want to explore.

Eligibility: Whether in Liverpool or online, we work with Arab artists who are living and / or working in the UK, in an Arab country or within its communities, or identify as having Arab heritage.

What you get: Artist Commissions will be paid with support extending to marketing, exhibition, and production. Artists will be supported throughout the process of the commission and / or staging of new and existing work by an experienced festival team.