M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2023 - open call

For the 2023 M1 Singapore Fringe Festival, an open call is announced which does not focus on a specific curatorial theme. Read more about the thinking behind this artistic call, which aims to tackle current issues of the day.

Over the past 17 years, the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival has been a key event in Singapore’s arts and cultural calendar, presenting cutting edge, contemporary work curated around a specific theme chosen for the year. We had consciously selected themes that reflect what we regard to be urgent issues of the day. As a festival that prioritises social engagement, we had aimed for the Fringe to be a platform for meaningful and provocative art, to engage our increasingly connected and complex world.

Given the multiple crises mounting by the day, rather than highlighting a single curatorial theme for the Fringe, we feel the time is ripe for us to open the platform up more fully.

We want to hear what artists are concerned with in the world today, and how your artistic response is a call to arms, a healing process, or a road map to a different, better future.

For the first time, the Fringe will not provide a curatorial theme to determine our programming. Instead, we want artists to tell your stories with authenticity, and in doing so, shape the conversations that the Fringe offers to the public. Our focus on presenting work fuelled by socially engaged practice remains. That means we are looking for robust artistic processes and accessible presentations that are centred on responding to gaps in communities, collaborative, and tackling current issues of the day.

Without a predetermined curatorial theme, this also means artists will no longer be burdened with the need to contort the rationale behind their work to fit the theme. This in turn should allow for more honesty—both in our discourse amongst artists and with audiences—and engender shared understandings as we navigate this increasingly fraught and fragmented world we live in.

We are looking for contemporary, cutting edge and socially engaged works that can be presented as live or digital performances and participatory events. We welcome proposals that use alternative models of presentations to include the disabled and immunocompromised, to encourage environmental sustainability, and/or to reduce air travel.

M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2023
4 – 15 January.
Get involved.

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: 4 March 2022