Open Call: Beyond the Silence
Application deadline: 11 PM, 23 Aug 2026 (GMT+7)
Application form
From the organizer:
We invite artists, cultural practitioners, and interdisciplinary collaborations to develop projects that explore gender, power, care, and belonging through creative practice.
Overview
Beliefs about gender are woven into our everyday lives. They influence our bodies, our families, our communities, our institutions, and the stories we inherit. Gender is a network of relationships – a network of connection, belonging, unequal power, and violence.
How do we embody gendered expectations? Who teaches us what it means to be a woman, a man, or someone who exists beyond these categories? How do these ideas shape the ways we care for one another, build relationships, experience both belonging and violence?
Across Vietnam, where gender-based violence remains a pressing issue despite growing public discourse, artists and cultural practitioners have increasingly opened spaces where these questions can be explored with honesty, imagination, and care. Art can make room for difficult conversations, create new languages for lived experiences, and invite communities to reflect, care, laugh, listen, and imagine together.
The title of this Open Call, Đâm Toạc Chân Mây (Piercing the Horizon), inspired by Hồ Xuân Hương’s poetry, evokes a gesture of opening a breach in what seems fixed or unquestionable. We take this image as an invitation to explore how silence is challenged, how violence becomes speakable, and how practices of care can create possibilities for imagining and living otherwise.
Beyond the Silence / Đâm Toạc Chân Mây invites artists, cultural practitioners, and interdisciplinary collaborations to develop projects that explore gender, power, care, and belonging through creative practice.
We are looking for projects that…
Listen. Reflect. Disturb. Play. Dare. Unlearn. Connect. Reimagine.
Projects may, for example:
– create spaces for people to identify, speak about, and respond to experiences of violence through storytelling, listening, play, and shared reflection;
– examine how social norms, gender stereotypes, family expectations, and unequal power shape everyday experiences;
– explore patriarchy, heteronormativity, masculinities, queerness, care, or belonging from multiple perspectives;
– challenge dominant narratives around gender, sexuality, bodies, relationships, and community;
– cultivate practices of solidarity, collective care and mutual support;
– explore differences in how gender, violence, and care are understood across generations;
– investigate how digital technologies, including social media and artificial intelligence, hape experiences of gender, intimacy, and violence;
– imagine alternative ways of living together beyond violence.
These themes are intended as points of departure rather than categories. We welcome proposals that approach them from personal, collective, speculative, playful, or experimental perspectives.
Projects may take place in physical, digital, or hybrid spaces. We welcome initiatives grounded in artistic and creative practice, including—but not limited to—
– exhibitions;
– screenings;
– performances;
– literature projects;
– participatory and community-based artistic processes;
– multidisciplinary and experimental artistic formats
We particularly encourage projects that value process as much as presentation, recognising that meaningful artistic encounters often emerge through sustained collaboration, experimentation, and dialogue.
Projects whose primary outputs are academic research, reports, journal articles, or exclusively discursive events without a significant artistic component are not eligible.
Benefits
Selected projects will receive:
– financial support of up to EUR 2,000 per project (up to four projects will be selected);
– advisory accompaniment by artists, curators, or subject-matter experts where appropriate;
– opportunities to connect with institutional and community partners through Goethe-Institut Vietnam;
– communication support to increase the visibility of the projects.
Eligible Applicants
This Open Call is intended for artists, artist collectives, and cultural practitioners—particularly those whose work sits at the intersection of arts and civil society, and whose practice engages with feminist, queer, or gender justice perspectives.
Eligible applicants include:
– individual artists;
– artist collectives;
– artists working with specific communities through participatory or collaborative artistic processes;
– cultural organizations and independent arts initiatives;
– collaborations between artists or cultural organizations and civil society organizations (CSOs), where the artist or cultural organization serves as the lead applicant.
We encourage interdisciplinary collaborations that bring together artistic practice with community organising, education, advocacy, mental health, research, or other forms of social engagement.
Projects led solely by civil society organizations without meaningful artistic collaboration are not eligible.
Note:
– Projects engaging with experiences of violence are expected to work in a trauma-informed and survivor-centred way, with attention to consent, care, and the wellbeing of everyone involved, including the artists themselves.
– Projects whose primary outputs are academic research, reports, journal articles, or exclusively discursive events without a significant artistic component are not eligible.
– Projects led solely by civil society organizations without meaningful artistic collaboration are not eligible.
Timeline
August 2026 | Open Call
Open Call launched
Application deadline: August 23, 2026 at 23:00 (GMT +7)
Early September 2026 | Selection
– Jury review
– Interviews with shortlisted candidates
– Announcement of selected projects
October–December 2026 | Project Implementation
Selected projects will be implemented with financial support from Goethe-Institut Vietnam.
Advisors
Maik Cây
Maik Cây is an independent writer, playwright, and filmmaker based in Hà Nội. She is a founding member of Tiếng-Thét (The-Scream), a collective of original (queer) voices working along the edges of dominant culture, rooted in local spirit and radical imagination. Her creative practice unfolds at the intersections of queer heritage and neurodivergent sensibilities, of Asian traditions and indigenous resistances, of poetic grief and posthuman visions.
Her debut novella Wittgenstein of the Black Paradise (Trẻ Publishing House, 2018; second prize, the 6th Văn học tuổi 20 Award) earned critical in-country recognition and has been described by Vietnamese literary icon Nguyễn Ngọc Tư as ‘beautiful, singular, and mad.’ Maik’s later works continue to blur the lines between memory and invention, between sorrow and lines of flight, between temple-burning and ritual, and have since been featured in international publications, including the Room/Ystafell/Phòng anthology (Parthian, 2023). Her second novel, Museum of Hair, an interlinked prose collection centred on the fictional foremother Trần Bích Băng, is forthcoming; its short story The West Has Fallen has been selected as the source text for the 2026 Stevns Translation Prize, co-presented by Two Lines Press (US) and Peirene Press (UK).
Bui Duy Thanh Mai
Bui Duy Thanh Mai’s practice often questions the familiar divisions between art, knowledge, and personal experience. Many of her projects use dialogue as a form of collective creation, exploring questions of power, memory, and care. For more than 15 years, she has worked with civil society organizations, educators, and communities to nurture spaces for mutual learning and reflection.
In 2020, she co-founded bóc-hành, an independent research initiative that examines social inequalities through exhibitions, poetry-fiction-essay anthologies, and public conversations. One of the group’s projects, Tan Ca Thôi! (Time to Clock Out!), traces the often-overlooked experiences of office workers. Since 2023, she has been pursuing a long-term project on kitchens and everyday phenomena, close-reading them as sites where memory, labor, relationships, and affection are held and transmitted.
Moving between writing, translation, needle and thread, workshops, and participatory research, Mai is interested in how people make meaning together in the aftermath of loss, violence, rupture, and questions of belonging. She is a member of the Asia-Pacific Network for Philosophy for Children, the regional Young Feminist Creatives Network, and the collaborative community of Mekong Cultural Hub. Her visual works have been exhibited and screened in New Zealand, Taiwan, and Macau. She is currently co-translating Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life, scheduled for publication in Vietnamese in 2027.
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