Cultivating Diasporic Futures: Uprooting Hate Open Call for Emerging Photographers Under 31
Cultivating Diasporic Futures - Uprooting Hate s a pilot mentorship programme supporting five under-31 BLK and/or diasporic intersectional photographers to envision and create transformative futures. Working alongside an established artist-mentor, selected practitioners will develop new visual projects that uproot structures of hate and cultivate new possibilities for liberation, resilience and joy.
This mentorship programme explores hate in multiple, complex, and layered forms: black/brown hate, misogyny, afroqueerphobia, homophobia, transphobia, fatphobia, disablism, classism, colonialism, and cultural or institutional violence. At the same time, centring practices of care, reparative action, resistance, and world-building. Your project may document collective action, celebrate community resilience, trace intimate stories, or imagine new ways of being and seeing. Your project could be rooted in memory work or speculation on new radical ways of being, belonging, and living otherwise. We're interested in bold, subversive, transformative, and/or imaginative lens-based work that refuses to let hate have the final word: engaging photography as a tool for witnessing, for world-building and for envisioning liberatory, diasporic futures.
For this year's Pilot project, we would like to clarify that "diasporic" means individuals and communities shaped by historical or ongoing displacement from their ancestral homelands or places of origin - including but not limited to African/Caribbean diaspora, Palestinian/Middle Eastern, South Asian, and other diasporas. This includes those who have experienced displacement, or forced/voluntary movement from ancestral homelands (recent or generations ago) who navigate relationships with multiple geographies, states of belonging and histories.
This diasporic futures season culminates in a month-long group exhibition and four programmed public events at Four Corners Gallery (October 21 - November 14 2026). The exhibition will be accompanied by a small publication booklet showcasing the work created and amplifying the artists’ voices in print.