Open Call

Summer School 2025

As part of Performing Exiles there will be a Summer School from 16 to 28 June 2025. This will offer workshops, seminars and mentoring. The participants will see the performances and guest productions in the festival programme and visit artistic initiatives and cultural institutions in Berlin that operate across a wide range of disciplines and contexts. A public presentation of the participants’ current work and research at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele will complete the programme.

In terms of theme, the Summer School’s collective thinking, discussion and work will be focussed around the concept of “freedom”. On one hand, this is essential to maintaining any kind of democracy. At the same time, it has been instrumentalised by populist and neofascist forces for explicitly anti-democratic purposes – especially in the last decade.

Public discourse founded on the exchange of differing views and a joint evaluation and fact-based scrutiny of different arguments has entered a state of crisis – in part due to the political realignment of technology companies and the social media they operate following the re-election of Donald Trump as President of the USA.

What is the current state of intellectual and artistic freedom in Germany and in the world at large? To what extent are people with a migrant background, in the diaspora and with increasingly insecure residency status affected by the dangers posed to democracy in Germany by incitement to racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia? What effects does this have on artists’ working practices?

Artists and curators, scholars and activists including Gürsoy Doğtaş, Julia Grosse, Amir Reza Koohestani and Juliane Rebentisch have already agreed to take part, and additional faculty members will be announced at a later date. Christoph Gurk is the programme’s artistic director.

A total of 20 participants will be selected for the programme. The Summer School welcomes artists at the beginning of their careers who work with a variety of media – digital, moving image, painting and printing, performance, photography, sculpture, sound and text. Their working methods may also include archival research, the production of knowledge, placemaking and social engagement.

Twelve Berlin residents plus eight more artists and cultural creatives who are resident abroad will be selected by the Performing Exiles and Summer School team through an open call.

Participants will be selected according to the relevance of their work for the topics of the Summer School on the basis of their completed works and planned projects. The jury consists of lecturers and the artistic director of the Summer School.

Artists and cultural workers are invited to apply regardless of age, heritage or nationality. Applicants must be in a position to commit to attending for the full duration of the two-week series of events. The working language is English.

Application information at a glance

1. Dates

Deadline for applications: 9 March 2025
Jury decision: provisionally by the end of March 2025
Notification of participants: from 1 April 2025

The Summer School will take place from 16 to 28 June 2025.

2. Terms of participation

The participants will receive an allowance for expenses of 250€. The costs of travel and accommodation for international participants will be covered by the Berliner Festspiele. Please note that the Summer School does not provide paid scholarships.
If you have any questions in advance, these can be directed to summerschool@berlinerfestspiele.de.

3. Required documents

Please record your personal data in our onlinetool and upload the required documents as a pdf file.

2-page biography
portfolio of existing works
personal statement (300–500 words in English or German)

Disclaimer

As an international festival that is actively engaged with the issue of exile within a network of political negotiations, Performing Exiles considers it has a responsibility to join its artists and audience in actively opposing anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, racism and discrimination and supporting respectful mutual dialogue – a dialogue that is in a position to tolerate contradictory positions, experiences and perspectives. Artists who present their works at the Performing Exiles festival and as part of 100° Diaspora or the Summer School, will participate actively in this process of argument.

Performing Exiles endeavours to achieve an experimental, transnational and transdisciplinary programme that includes and reflects on different points of view. The dignity of human beings and protecting them from animosity of any kind form the bedrock for this endeavour.