à½à½AV

The Cultural Institute and the Public Engagement Team are offering four paid opportunities for artists (£250 per artist) to spend a day with a à½à½AV researcher on campus in Leeds, to develop initial ideas around the creation of a new artwork for light festivals. 

Are you an established artist making work based in light or projection? 

Do you have a strong professional track record of making work in this field? 

Are you interested in involving a research dimension in your development of new work? 

The à½à½AV is a partner in Leeds City Council’s annual Light Night Leeds, which attracts over 190,000 visitors annually. The University part of the programme offers a relaxed atmosphere and a programme of installations and activities which are family-friendly and linked to à½à½AV research.  

The aim of this opportunity is to seed exciting new collaborative conversations that may in time lead to new commissions for Light Night Leeds or indeed other Light Festivals.  

Over 60 researchers from across the University have expressed an interest in being involved in Light Night conversations. 

How it works

At this stage these conversations are exploratory, with no guaranteed follow up or commission, but we aim to develop at least one project via the University Light Night Leeds programme arising from the conversations in the next two years. If you would like to be considered for this, we will ask you to outline your idea in a light touch expression of interest following the artist/researcher conversations. 

The researcher will retain ownership of any of their research material explored during the conversation and the artist will own any artistic materials they create (sketches/concepts etc) developed. The artist will be free to take this forward in other contexts. 

The artist fee for this opportunity is £250 to include VAT and travel, so it may be best suited to artists within easy reach of Leeds. 

We welcome applications from artists with protected characteristics. We are committed to encouraging diversity and intersectionality in the arts, and we actively encourage proposals from artists from under-represented communities, including people who experience racism, identify as working class, have disabilities, are from the LGBTQ+ community, are care experienced, discriminated against or neurodivergent.    

We encourage you to apply for this opportunity no matter what your age, caring responsibilities, disability, gender, gender identity, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief and sexual orientation.  

How to apply

To apply, please look through the list of participating researchers and complete the following form, specifying which researcher you would like to work with. 

The deadline for applications is 23:59, 20 March.

Decisions will be made by the team producing Light Night Leeds on campus, and we will aim to let applicants know if they have been successful within two weeks of the closing date.