Endangered conceptual worlds

23-26 June 2026, University of Galway, Ireland

Deadline for submissions: 1 March 2026

This year’s International Forum on Artistic Research explores how artistic research engages with endangered conceptual worlds and minoritised languages. It considers precarious forms of knowledge as epistemic resources and practical potentials; cultural sedimentations shared between generations and across contexts that provide unique ways of making and being in the world.

These forms of knowledge are often complex yet fragile, dominated, exploited, and threatened. The drive of platform capitalism to optimise human behaviour for economic ends, the homogenising forces set free within synthetic realities and the pressure of aesthetic and narrative standardisation have put the very idea of diversity and creativity at risk — not only theoretically and politically, but practically.

However, conceptual worlds and minoritised languages sustain and provide valuable counter-models to the all-encompassing tendencies of maximisation, simplification and instrumentalisation. They counteract the algorithmic and affordance-driven flattening of linguistic and cultural heterogeneity; they have become emblematic of what is at stake in broader struggles over which forms of knowledge are valued, and why. 

By opening horizons within and across academic disciplines, institutional and non-institutional environments, artistic research is uniquely positioned, not only to explore and celebrate the value of non-hegemonic knowledges and languages, but also to take a stand on broader, emergent divisions in this world. 

Embracing the anti-hegemonic potential of endangered conceptual worlds and minoritised languages, the 2026 Forum challenges the isolation of artistic research. It does this by highlighting its connectivity, unpacking its conceptual foundations and exploring how it can be transposed and translated into other, even scientific, contexts.

The 2026 International Forum on Artistic Research will explore and discuss artistic research in all its diverse forms as well as its untapped potentials within the dense social, cultural, and political contexts in which it operates. It provides an extraordinary opportunity to rethink the relationship between cultural heritage and creativity, while thoroughly investigating the impact of colonial and extractivist legacies on contemporary artistic practice.

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The 2026 International Forum on Artistic Research calls for contributions within and across the multiple modalities of artistic research. Proposals are invited on the following themes:

• Making seeable and sayable: artistic research in the interplay of power and language

◦ Demonstrating the peculiar role of situated knowledges in artistic research

◦ Outlining the impact of arts-based insights from within minoritised language communities

◦ Discussing the capacities of endangered conceptual worlds to generate distinctive forms of innovation

• Exploring the ineffible: artistic research and endangered arts practice beyond the verbal

◦ Dance, movement, and gesture as minoritised or endangered embodied knowledges

◦ Minoritisation and endangerment in visual, sonic, and digital cultures

◦ Subjugated knowledges, coloniality, and unsayability

• Resilience, resistance, revival: artistic research strategies in relation to minoritised languages

◦ Investigating oral traditions and vernacular arts

◦ Exploring intersections between oralities and literacies

◦ Promoting experimental art practices and artistic research methodologies

• Artistic Intelligence: experimenting with collective agency and the production of newness and novelty

◦ Reflecting on artistic research in the face of synthetic and post-synthetic realities

◦ Revisiting digital arts practices against the current urgencies of epistemic souvereignty

◦ Building capacities to work with polylocal knowledge systems in independent digital infrastructures

 

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Contributions to the 2026 Forum on Artistic Research can take different formats:

• Peer-reviewed project presentation (20 minutes + 10 minutes Q&A)

• Workshop or training session (between 90 minutes and 180 minutes)

• Laboratory or experimental format (flexible time slot)

• Roundtable discussion (60 minutes including Q&A)

• Performance (to be discussed)

• Poster presentation (no time limit)

• Other formats

 

The submission form will be open until 1 March 2026:

https://sar2026.ie/form/submit-contribution

 

The following information is requested when you submit your proposal: 

• Title (max. 255 characters)

• Format (choose from the formats listed above)

• Abstract for the conference programme (max. 2,000 characters)

• Link to an accompanying exposition in the Research Catalogue (obligatory for project presentations). Please register on the RC as soon as possible to ensure that your registration can be processed in time. Creating a full RC account is free of charge but requires authentication: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/portal/register

• Short biographies of the presenter(s) (max. 600 characters)

• An image for the conference programme (300 dpi, 1920x1440 px)

• Additional information on the presentation format (max. 1,000 characters)

• Spatial and/or technical requirements (max. 500 characters)

• Potential risks or ethical concerns (max. 500 characters)

• Previous presentations or iterations of the research

 

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Selection criteria

Submissions of in the format of an artistic research presentations will be assessed by independent peer reviewers according to the following main criteria:

• Relevance and research quality

• Adequacy of the methodological approach and contextual framing of the proposal, including references to earlier artistic research projects and/or other forms of research

• Adherence to the criteria of the Frascati manual: novel, creative, uncertain, systematic, transferable and/or reproducible

• Clarity and focus regarding the conference themes as well as expectations from conference participants.

To ensure a fair and coherent evaluation of all submissions, the overall assessment will also take into account the exposition that must be submitted to the Research Catalogue and linked to the submission. Reviewers are expected to produce a written statement that will also be made available to those who submitted the proposal.

Submissions in a format other than an artistic research presentation will be assessed by the conference committee according to their relevance to the 2026 Forum's themes and overall programme.

The Committee will only accept submissions that are presented in person at the Forum.

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Additional support

You can access a webinar on creating an exhibition as part of an application to a SAR Conference at:
https://www.researchcatalogue.net/shared/5d5a2109c8b2f767692b067bf6f1cc91

Subscribe to the 2026 Forum Newsletter:
https://sar2026.ie/newsletter

Join us on Mastodon:
https://mastodon.social/@sar2026

For further information, please contact the conference hosts at:
creativity@universityofgalway.ie