Open call

Toaster and Den Frie Udstillingsbygning are seeking original ideas from professional artists within a cross-aesthetic field between food, taste and performativity. This call is specifically part of a larger performance festival in June 2025 with a curated program that includes some of the most exciting Danish and international performance artists. The curated program will be centered at Den Fries inner exhibition halls and expand out toward adjacent areas of the city. This call is open for artistic ideas within food, taste, and senses as an expanded aesthetic approach. We seek artists who can or wish to experiment with and create though-provoking ideas between eating and performances, formalized as performance pieces for a public audience experience.

Deadline for the open call is June 1st, 2024.

Who can apply?

Professional visual artists, performing artists or others with experimental background in food and performance. We emphasize cultural diversity, welcome all minorities, and encourage cross-genre collaborations across age, culture, gender identity, and social status.

What we aim to support:

We support ideas that challenge how our senses, which are not limited to the visual register, can be activated through eating, tasting, or perhaps smelling and so forth. We are interested in conceptual ideas that challenge how we connect food and consumption to present agendas. How are food and taste entangled into societal questions, be they political, activistic, anthropological, philosophical, or other culturally challenging ideas? How can performativity and taste together bring forward thought-provoking concepts, which relates to us all as eating and reflecting beings?

We wish to support by commission:

• Focused project pitches that are conceptually strong, radical, utopian, unpredictable, beautiful, courageous, and ambitious projects.
• Projects that aim for experimenting with entirely new formats between food and performance.
• Artists that are open to collaborative environments, where the works of other artists are being included before and after events as part of a larger curated program.
• Realistic in planning and execution and based on sustainable working methods and production in collaboration with café Pegasus and its kitchen staff.

Things to consider:

• The performance will be part of a larger curated program of performances, which will be held both inside and outside of Den Frie Udstillingsbygning and in the area around Oslo Plads.
• The performance must be able to accompany an audience of 20 to 30 people and could be explored through conceptual performance dinners, taste challenging events, or any other possible experimental formats.
• The public duration of the piece should not extend 2 hours (excluding preparation)

What should the application include:

• Short pitch (max 250 characters in the form)
• Production description (max 2000 characters)
• Brief CV of the main people involved (maximum 1 page each)
• Budget
• Photos
• List of collaborators

Application process:

June 1: Deadline for applications

End of August: Response to all applications.

June 5-15, 2025: Actualization of program.

Budget

There is a contribution of max 70,000 DKK for each of the selected ideas. This amount is intended for artist fees and to cover expenses related to production. Den Frie will offer support by café Pegasus, who can help develop ideas and help manage the food production in the kitchen.

All projects will be notified by end of August, 2024