Fiker Institute & Dirwaza Lab announce the launch of a Micro Fund under the theme of "Creating in Times of War: Responses from the UAE". This open call invites artists to propose a new work that responds to the war through their own lived, observed, and mediated experiences within it. We are interested in practices that reflect on what it means to encounter, process, and make work in relation to the war from within the UAE.
The Gulf is not a space. It is a body. A geographic, ecological, political body with its own depth, its sun, its borders.
The sea here is both memory and threat. The land holds the weight of what has been built and what has been transformed. Cities rose in decades. People arrived, stayed, left, stayed. And underneath all of it, a region with its own time, its own language for things, its own way of knowing what is coming before it arrives. Right now, this space is a literal site of global crisis. The Gulf is not peripheral to what is happening. It is where it is happening.
The urgency to respond, to create, to experiment is not new. Every major rupture in this region has produced a corresponding eruption of creative work. Not after the fact, but during. What emerged from those periods wasn't only documentation; it was thinking in real time through making.
This microfund is a structural argument: that this time, the infrastructure exists in the UAE to support that eruption rather than leave artists to absorb the cost of urgency alone.
The criteria is responsiveness & urgency.
Visual artists, photographers, printmakers, writers, poets, sound artists, filmmakers, video artists, choreographers, and performance artists working in any medium.
Applications close May 14 — submit your proposal via the form below.
Submit your proposal ↗