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What we are doing

Application deadline: December 6, 2026
Program starts:  March 1, 2027
Program Duration: 10 months

During these harsh and precarious times, navigating how to be an art professional comes with immense uncertainty and vulnerability. Nevertheless, collectivity, imagination, and hospitality are still available resources to tap into and assume as realities are being reshaped and relationships reinvented. New Agents formalizes this experience and creates a frame in which a small group of art practitioners is formed and brought together to try to harness their collective energies, desires, and tools, and mold them into a proposition to be realized and shared publicly.

Mophradat will compose this group of artists, curators, and researchers whose practices are singular, future facing, and actively involve public engagement. What the participants will also share is that they come from territories whose pasts are formed by overlapping cultural references and conditions, their present tainted by violence, and their situations unpredictable. It is exactly at the meeting point of the conditions of the present and the collective process that the outcome will find its meaning.

Over the course of ten months, the New Agents will collaborate and learn together by sharing and finding common stakes and concerns. Eventually, they will co-develop and realize a curatorial proposal that would be made public in the form of a live event, such as a conference, festival, exhibition, or something else. The event would be a platform for sharing their interests with an audience, foregrounding the collective curatorial experience rather than the participants’ individual practices.

Practically, from March till June 2027, the New Agents will take part in online workshops with invited artists; and organize and participate in a series of two-days long online seminars, each led and curated by one of the participants. Midway through the program, the group will start developing their proposal for the public event. The New Agents will be invited for a one-week retreat in Athens in July 2027 to work together on finalizing the concept, which will eventually be realized in close collaboration with the Mophradat team. The public event, for which Mophradat will define the production conditions, will take place at the end of the program in Brussels.

New Agents is primarily directed towards those who already have relevant experience and an ongoing practice. Participants in the New Agents program will receive a stipend of 6000 USD to be used at their discretion, while the retreat travel costs and a budget for the public event will be covered by Mophradat.

New Agents is only open to those interested in taking part in a collective process and enthusiastic to attend its scheduled activities; full participation is therefore mandatory. To fulfill the program’s aspirations, participants must be ambitious, generous, curious, and precise.

As most participants will be based in the Arab world, for everyone’s convenience, only applicants residing within the time zone GMT-1/+3 will be invited to participate in the program.

Specific eligibility criteria

In addition to complying with the general eligibility criteria that you can read here, please note the following:

  • The applicant should be interested in working collaboratively and in learning about every aspect of a public project, from conceptualization to production.
  • The applicant should be able to describe and demonstrate their commitment to an ongoing artistic practice and their current engagement in public projects.
  • The applicant should have a track record of previous completed art works/projects and should be actively working in the arts for at least five years.
  • Regardless of their heritage, the applicant should have significant firsthand living experience in the Arab world, and having travelled in the region will be considered an asset.
  • The applicant should be curious to engage with different kinds of practices, from the textual to the performative and beyond.
  • The applicant should be a native Arabic speaker or have a strong command of the language; and basic use of English is needed.
  • The applicant must be residing within the time zone GMT-1/+3

Selection Process

The participants will be selected through the open call and a pool of nominations. The selection process unfolds in three stages: a written application, a 5-minute online meeting for considered applicants, and a 30-minute interview with short-listed candidates.

  • Once applications are accepted as having fulfilled the program’s general and specific eligibility criteria, they are evaluated and selected by Mophradat.
  • Pre-selected applicants will be asked to respond to a specific question in a five-minutes online presentation on December 20, 2026. The question will be sent one week before this date for the applicant to reflect and prepare how they will express themselves beyond standardized forms and AI tools.
  • As a final step, shortlisted candidates will be invited to a 30-minutes interview on January 11 & 12, 2027.
  • All applicants, whether selected or not, will receive a response to their applications by January 15, 2027.
  • Upon selection, the program participants will sign a grant agreement with Mophradat and receive a timeline and detailed schedule to which they must fully commit.
  • The stipend will be released in three installments: A first installment of 2500 USD at the start of the program, a second installment of 2500 USD midway through the program, and the remaining 1000 USD at the end of the program year.
  • Participants take part in a feedback session at the end of the program and provide a narrative of their experience and reflections.

*Please note that, due to the high volume of applications and the confidentiality of the selection process, Mophradat cannot provide individual feedback explaining why an application was not selected.

Application

If you are interested in being considered to participate in New Agents, please fill in the form here and make sure you answer all parts of the questions. We want to get to know you through this application process and we don’t evaluate applications based on writing ability, so please be aware that we don’t want to read AI-generated answers.

In order to prepare your answers, you can already check the questions in advance here.

Any material sent by email will not be considered.

For any further questions, please email: opencalls@mophradat.org.