Vector Festival 2023 – Call for Submissions

View the official Call for Submissions on InterAccess’s website.

DEADLINE: MARCH 22ND, 2023 at 11:59PM EST

You are standing in a line that bends and curves. You reach the front of the line and lean your body against the service desk; a moment of rest. The clerk greets you curtly, you smile back. She asks for your name, your email, your date of birth, and your place of residence. You comply. She asks for your phone number. “I don’t have one right now.” Your request cannot be processed without one. “But I don’t have a phone.” A long moment passes. The line leading to her desk is still bending and curving. You make something up, the computer accepts it, your request has been processed and you await results in the coming 10 business days.

Vector Festival 2023’s flagship exhibition, shadow work, engages the formal and informal and mundane and arcane ways that classification systems attempt to contain the messy realities of our lives and shape our conditions. Confronting the work that both maintains and disrupts these systems, shadow work presents interventions on labour, the calculability of human life, the ungovernable, the echoes and reverberations of colonization and propositions for new, “life-giving” languages. Cue to SZA’s “Ghost in the Machine” (2022), “I need humanity”.

Anecdote adapted from an experience with a US tax preparer, recounted by Martha Lampland and Susan Leigh Star in Standards and their Stories (2009).

Mitra Fakhrashrafi, Vector Festival 2023 Flagship Curator

This helps programming committee & curators properly address you upon deliberation.
This helps programming committee & curators properly address you upon deliberation.
Select the festival category(ies) to which you are applying. If you intend to submit multiple works, please apply for each work in a separate submission form.
(approximately 300 words)
Please select the option(s) that reflect the medium of the artwork you are submitting for consideration.
Outline the technical requirements for the presentation of the work. Please outline which materials are to be provided by the artist and which materials required from the venue.
Click or drag files to this area to upload. You can upload up to 5 files.
Add up to five images of your work (JPG or PNG, maximum file size 1MB each)
Link to streamable audio/video documentation. 5 minutes max of material will be viewed.
(approximately 150 words) Please include your nationality.
Click or drag a file to this area to upload.
(PDF, maximum file size 1MB)
Please indicate if your work has a thematic, conceptual, or historical connection to Toronto, or if you have a biographic connection to the Greater Toronto Area (including if you attended university in the GTA). We are considering works from local and international artists - connected to the GTA is not required, but if relevant, we're interested to know.
If you have an artist website, please include a link here.