Open Call – Awareness 2026: ReHeritAge

Cultural Memory in the Digital Age

Awareness 2026 continues a five-year curatorial platform dedicated to contemporary art in Cyprus, fostering dialogue between local and international artistic practices through free public access, interdisciplinary exchange, and inclusive cultural programming. Since its inception, the platform has presented more than 100 artists and welcomed over 800–1,000 visitors per edition.

ReHeritAge proposes heritage as an active process rather than a static inheritance. It asks how cultural memory is continuously reconstructed through technological innovation, artistic experimentation, and changing social realities. As digital infrastructures increasingly mediate how knowledge is produced, archived, and circulated, the exhibition examines the ways memory is preserved, transformed, and reimagined across physical and virtual environments.

Rather than treating the past as something to be preserved unchanged, ReHeritAge understands heritage as a living ecology of stories, materials, practices, and relationships that are constantly renegotiated. The exhibition invites artists to investigate how inherited histories intersect with digital cultures, environmental concerns, collective identities, and emerging technologies, proposing new ways of imagining the future through the reinterpretation of the past.

We welcome proposals from artists and collectives working across contemporary visual art, architecture, design, moving image, sound, installation, performance, digital media, and interdisciplinary research. Projects may explore themes including:
Cultural memory, archives, and speculative histories
Digital heritage and emerging technologies
Artificial intelligence, data, networks, and algorithmic cultures
Virtual, augmented, and immersive environments
Materiality, craft, and hybrid forms of making
Identity, migration, belonging, and collective memory
Sustainability, circular practices, and ecological futures
Participation, social engagement, and new forms of community
Particular consideration will be given to works that critically engage with the relationship between culture, technology, and sustainability, including projects that employ recycled or repurposed materials, experimental digital processes, interactive media, audiovisual installations, expanded spatial practices, and participatory formats.

The open call is open to independent artists and collectives. Applicants may submit up to three works or project proposals; however, submission does not guarantee the selection of all proposed works. Selected artworks must be delivered ready for exhibition.

Through ReHeritAge, Awareness 2026 seeks to create a space where artistic practice becomes a form of cultural inquiry—bridging memory and innovation, local histories and global perspectives, material heritage and digital futures.

The exhibition aims to support both emerging and established artists while strengthening connections between Cyprus and the international contemporary art community through accessible, critical, and participatory cultural experiences.