OPEN CALL for ‘DEEP TRASH in The Underworld’

DEADLINE: WEDNESDAY 16 AUGUST 2017

CUNTemporary is now accepting proposals for a new episode of ‘Deep Trash’, the unique multi-disciplinary exhibition and performance club night in London.

Calling for performances, videos and artworks to be shown on Saturday 21 October 2017 at Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club. We accept proposals by artists of any artistic background and nationality. We are also keen to hear from writers and academics responding to the call either in written form (theory and cross-genre) or through performative lectures, which will be presented during the symposium ‘Performing the Occult: Magick, Rituals and the Monstrous in Live Art’. This will be hosted by the Department of Drama at Queen Mary University on Thursday 19 October 2017, with a keynote talk by Dr. Patricia MacCormack.

This call looks at the dimensions of the occult and the supernatural, witchcraft and magics, pagan rites and shamanism, voodoo practices and transcendence… We welcome proposals that engage with discourses of queerness, feminism, postcolonialism and blackness, and related artistic frameworks.

This event’s applications may include, respond to, be affected by, but not restricted to:
- Queer ethics of monstrosity in demons, vampires and teratological ‘aberrations’.
- Shamanic gender transcendence.
- Tarantism: dancing mania and ‘hysterical’ women.
- Dance and trance in possession or ritualistic ceremonies within Africa and its diaspora.
- Re-configuring the female body in the horror genre – from victim to agent.
- The Babadook effect: the queer art of inventing icons.
- Zombies and other queer mutants between death and life.
- Non-gendered and non-integrating oozing and leaky creatures.
- Afrofuturist perspectives of replicants and bots as liminal figures of sexuality.
- Non-phallic desire and sexual ambiguity in the figure of the Vampire.
- Channelling the afterlife, spirits and unearthly entities through performance, masks and costumes in folklore and occult practices.
- Tattoos, prosthesis and scarifications: subjectivity and the bare skin.
- Pushing the boundaries of anthropocentric views through horned creatures, transpecies, talking beasts, unicorns, pixies and ‘humanimals’.
- Defying bodily integrity: extreme body transformations, apotemnophilia and mutations in ritualistic practices.
- The sticky state of mucosity: viscous connectivity and feminine thresholds.
- Vodou, Voodoo, Hoodoo: critical analyses of contemporary Western appropriations of the religious and spiritual practices of Africa and its diaspora.
- Witches and misogyny: queer-feminist critiques of sexist trolling in the media in relation to representations of female sexual empowerment, anti-normative femininity, ageing wicked bodies and monstrous mothers.
- Queer and feminist takes on tarot readings, divination and astrology.
- Neo-Paganism, ecosex, ‘green witches’ and radical faeries: pansexual communities, menstrual magick, anti-capitalist critique, herbalism and the power of healing with nature.
- From Lilith’s seductions to the Greek she-monsters: the monstrous, raging feminine and its influence on art, literature and cinema.

For more INFORMATION and HOW TO APPLY check out our website: http://www.cuntemporary.org/open-call-for-deep-trash-underworld