The Playground present: Play time: No instructions
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We are seeking artists, collectives, and cultural workers to participate in The Playground Present, a collective exhibition exploring play as a radical, queer, leftist practice.
Playgrounds are not neutral.
Historically, they emerged alongside industrialization as tools for discipline, social regulation, and norm-making, designed to manage bodies, enforce gendered and racialized behaviour and rehearse obedience. At the same time, play has been steadily removed from public life. Public space is privatized, policed, and surveilled. Hanging out becomes loitering. Joy without profit becomes suspicious. The playground shrinks, and with it, our ability to imagine other ways of living together.
This exhibition treats the playground as a site of breakdown and reconstruction. A place where the rules no longer function and where new relations, gestures, and forms of collectivity can be rehearsed. This is about play as refusal, joy as strategy, and experimentation as survival.
We invite work that uses play to question power, undo hierarchy, resist productivity, and imagine otherwise.
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What We’re Looking For
We welcome proposals in any medium, including but not limited to:
• Visual artist
• Installation
• Performance & live interventions
• Participatory and social practices
• Sound, video, and digital works
• Zines, posters, and printed matter
• Games, scores, instructions, or rulesets
• Workshops, assemblies, or skill shares
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Accessibility & Care We are committed to building a space centered on access, consent, and care. Please share any access needs or conditions your work requires. We will do our best to meet them.
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Selection Process
Selections will be made collectively. We prioritize:
• Alignment with the exhibition’s values
• Experimentation and risk
• Works that benefit from being in shared space
We cannot accept everything, but every submission will be treated with care.
Play is not extra.
Play is infrastructure.
Play is how we survive.
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Click HERE for the submission
Email us if you have any questions