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Six artists will each receive €1,000 prizes. An international jury will select five recipients, while one Audience Award will be decided by public vote on the CIFRA platform. Submissions close on 1 November 2026.
CIFRA, a curatorial media art platform, has launched an international Open Call for POWER ON/OFF, inviting artists working with moving image and screen-native formats to explore how power operates today — and how our position within it can change.
Today, power flows through algorithms and platforms, institutional systems and social conventions, images and media, as well as the less obvious infrastructures of everyday life. Artists often notice these changes before they are widely named. Their responses may include refusal, humour, distortion and disruption, or forms of repair and collective support.
POWER ON/OFF approaches power not as a simple opposition between having it and escaping it. Between control and agency lies a spectrum of positions: power can be resisted, redirected, shared or reclaimed. The Open Call asks artists to consider what becomes possible when that position shifts.
CIFRA seeks works that engage with shifting expressions of power, uncover its concealed operations, or re-examine the role of images in both domination and empowerment. The call also prioritises artists creating new visual languages through resistance, refusal, disruption, restoration or solidarity.
Six €1,000 Awards
Six selected artists will each be awarded €1,000. Five will be chosen by an international jury; one will receive the Audience Award through a public vote on CIFRA. All winning works will appear on the platform and be shared across CIFRA’s editorial and social channels.
The international jury includes:
- Leyla Fakhr — curator and Artistic Director at Verse, where she directs SOLOS, a programme supporting artists who incorporate technology into their practice or analyse its effects on contemporary culture. She previously worked for more than eight years at Tate, across Tate Britain and Tate Modern.
- Gonzalo Herrero Delicado — independent curator, educator and architect whose work spans architecture, digital culture and ecology. Recent exhibitions include Reworld at the Istanbul Digital Art Festival (2026), After the Technological Sublime at Art Dubai (2025), and Virtual Beauty at Somerset House (2025) and HEK (2024).
- Kay Watson — researcher, producer and curator focused on art and advanced technologies, photography and video games. She is Head of Arts Technologies at Serpentine in London.
- Günseli Yalcinkaya — artist, curator, writer and researcher examining the intersection of online culture and contemporary technologies. She is an artist-in-residence at Somerset House and Associate Lecturer at London College of Fashion.
How to Apply
Artists must create and complete a CIFRA profile that includes a profile image, a short biography and relevant links. The work must then be uploaded publicly to CIFRA together with a description and cover image.
Only screen-native works hosted directly on CIFRA are eligible. External links, including those to Google Drive or Vimeo, will not be accepted.
Key Dates
- Submission deadline: 1 November 2026, 23:59 GST
- Audience Award voting: 13 November 2026, 14:00 GST – 3 December 2026, 23:59 GST
- Winners announced: 5 December 2026, 14:00 GST
Submit your work: opencall.cifra.com
About CIFRA
CIFRA is a curatorial media art platform that enables the ongoing, context-rich presence of media art beyond temporary exhibition cycles. It connects artists, institutions, galleries, curators and audiences, creating a space in which works can remain visible, accessible and continuously available.
