Call for Submissions

M4C Practice in Motion Exhibition

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📍 Centrala, Birmingham
📅 5–6 June
🕔 Opening event: Friday 5 June, 5:00 PM​​

 

We invite current PhD students to submit practice-based work for a two-day long-table event, exhibition, and discursive performance at Centrala, Birmingham. 

The event is included as part of  Birmingham’s well-known Digbeth First Friday which takes place on the first weekend of the month, when arts venues across the city open late, attracting a large and diverse public audience.

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Practice in Motion Exhibition foregrounds artistic practice as live, process-oriented, and performative, prioritising artistic doing, experimentation, and shared inquiry over formal verbal presentation. Conceived as both a discursive performance and a micro-laboratory for artistic inquiry, the event brings together installations, pop-up or incidental performances, and practice research artefacts or documents. Participants and visitors will move between exhibition, conversation and live practice, generating new provocations that emerge directly from artistic doing.

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The event will also include three invited keynote speakers from practice-research and contemporary arts backgrounds, whose work critically engages with the tensions and possibilities of being both an artist and an artist-researcher.

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Programme overview

 

Friday | 5:00–11:00 PM — Exhibition
Day One focuses on exhibition and live performance, offering attendees the opportunity to encounter and engage with the practices introduced throughout the day. The programme will include a welcome speech and informal networking over drinks and informalities at the bar.

 

Saturday — Day One: Exhibition & Long Table discussions

Day Two centres on discursive and performative practice, using a Long Table format (https://www.split-britches.com/long-table) interwoven with live, process-based artworks. This structure encourages open dialogue, collective thinking, and embodied research exchange.

 

What we’re looking for

 

We welcome submissions that prioritise practice over explanation, including (but not limited to):

• Film and moving image works

• Sound works and sound installations

• Installation-based or research-led practice

• Short live performances or performative interventions

• Spoken word or poetry (where speaking is intrinsic to the work)

• Experimental, hybrid, and process-led formats

 

Format suggestions are open and encouraged, particularly those responding to the gallery context and the long-table structure.

 

Space & technical notes

• Centrala is a gallery space (no dance floor)

• Live works should have minimal technical requirements

• Limited lighting options

• Focus is on liveness, process, and experimentation rather than theatrical production

 

We are seeking submissions of practical artistic work and research. However, applicants who are more interested in contributing primarily to the long table discussions on Saturday are also encouraged to apply and to indicate this preference clearly in the application form. We invite contributions that are open to any themes and concerns of artistic practice. However, curatorially we will prioritise work that examines embodied relationality, materiality, the kinaesthetic experience of encounter, co-creation, and participation.

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The following are suggested themes for those who wish to submit a provocation:

• tensions between professional and academic agendas
   

• power dynamics and funding structures
   

• navigating multiple identities as artists and researchers
   

• curating discursive space between artworks and conversation
   

• pushing the boundaries of artistic research​

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Please note: Anyone selected to contribute their practice must be available on both Friday and Saturday of the event. M4C funded students will be able to claim return travel costs butwill not be able to claim funding for accommodation.

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Participation & support

• Open to current PhD students

• Displaying artists will have one return fare travel covered

• Participants may attend on Friday or Saturday (or both); however, only one return journey will be covered by Midlands4Cities (if PhD is funded by M4C), with any additional travel or accommodation to be funded by participants’ home institutions.

 

This event offers a space to test ideas, share evolving research, and collectively explore how artistic knowledge is generated through practice, material, sound, movement, and interaction.

 

Please fill out the following application form: https://forms.gle/shHtvd8MN5SfAVHB7. The deadline to submit will be the 27th of March 2026. 

 

If you require any further information or if you have any questions or access requirements please email: exhibitionm4c@gmail.com.

 

We are excited to receive your applications!

 

Greta Gauhe (Coventry), Henrietta Hale (Coventry), Teddy Hunter (Birmingham)