Critical Condition
Open Call

Proposals close Monday 22 June 2026.

COMMODE is commissioning a series of essays exploring alternative methods of working within and beyond contemporary art institutions.

Critical Condition considers how artistic and curatorial practices might move beyond the atmosphere of institutional anxiety and political ambiguity that increasingly shapes the arts in New Zealand and internationally.

Over the last decade, especially since Covid-19, contemporary art institutions have become increasingly defined by precarity and fear around controversy or instability. Political language has come to circulate widely through exhibitions, public programmes, wall texts, statements, and funding applications, though often without material consequence. Critique, when it happens, is often aestheticised. In this environment the political is becoming symbolic.

At the same time contemporary art in New Zealand increasingly finds itself confronting a growing sense of irrelevancy on the global stage. As international crises intensify and cultural discourse becomes increasingly shaped by genocide, nationalism, colonialism, displacement, economic collapse, and resistance, the arts within New Zealand often appear caught between liberalism and diplomacy. Within the small settler colonial nation which is heavily dependent on state supported cultural infrastructure, political ambiguity frequently becomes institutionalised as a type of professionalism. Risk is minimised and critique is rendered symbolic in order to preserve a sense of stability and funding relationships.

Recent international controversies have made these tensions increasingly visible. Globally, institutions have faced public scrutiny over their censorship of the genocide in Palestine, labour conditions, and problematic funding relationships. Debates surrounding New Zealand’s silence and unwillingness to participate in the May 8 strikes against the Israeli pavilion at the Venice Biennale have brought these concerns home, and raised questions about the relevancy of contemporary art from New Zealand internationally, and what forms of political and artistic expression are permitted when art becomes entangled with state representation.

Within New Zealand, these conditions are intensified by the small scale of the sector itself. The concentration of funding, limited art media, and overlapping professional networks often produce environments where disagreement or critique can carry significant professional consequences. Under such conditions caution, or risk aversion, is often mistaken for care, and in turn institutional silence has become normalised as neutrality.

At the centre of Critical Condition is a broader question surrounding infrastructure itself. If existing institutions are increasingly constrained by administration and financial precarity, what alternative infrastructures become necessary for artistic and political life to remain possible? What forms of organisation, publishing, education, collectivity, and support can emerge outside dominant institutional models? How might artists, curators, and cultural workers build structures capable of sustaining debate, experimentation, dissent, and long-term political thinking beyond the limitations of state or market approval?

This project is particularly interested in infrastructures that already exist such as artist-run spaces, independent publishing platforms, queer nightlife and social spaces, alternative economies, reading groups, digital networks, mutual aid structures, autonomous education models, and other modes of cultural organisation that operate without the stability afforded to major institutions. Critical Condition understands infrastructure as the conditions that make artistic and political life possible in the first place.

This project asks what underlying conditions produce the atmosphere of anxiety shaping contemporary art, and what forms of practice become impossible under such conditions. It asks why artistic and curatorial practice in New Zealand often appears structurally unable to sustain debate or have political consequence and whether this contributes to a broader cultural irrelevance beyond the local context. What forms of art remain possible when institutions increasingly operate through fear? What kinds of cultural production emerge when consensus becomes preferable to consequence?

Rather than positioning the project purely as critique, COMMODE is interested in practices that attempt to produce other conditions for cultural work. Essays may engage artist-run infrastructures, collective organisation, underground scenes, pedagogies, alternative economies, withdrawal from institutions, non-commercial forms of practice, or examples of cultural organisation that exceed the limits currently imposed within our local context.

The series welcomes proposals from artists, writers, curators, organisers, academics, activists, and cultural workers. Contributions may be analytical, speculative, historical, theoretical, or experimental. COMMODE is particularly interested in writing grounded in lived organisational experience and in perspectives operating outside dominant institutional structures.

Alongside invited contributors, a number of commissions will be selected through this open call.

To apply, please submit a short proposal of approximately 300–500 words alongside a brief biography and examples of previous writing or practice documentation, combined in a single PDF.

Proposals close Monday 22 June 2026.

Submissions and enquiries can be sent to info@commode.co.nz

Essays will be published progressively throughout 2026 via COMMODE.

Each essay will be between 1500 and 2000 words and commissioned at a fee of NZD $800.