Hidden Door 2026 will take place from Wednesday 3rd to Sunday 7th June 2026, and we are now inviting visual artists to submit proposals to exhibit existing (or nearly finished) work.
Hidden Door opens up forgotten urban spaces for the public to explore and discover incredible music, art, theatre, film, dance, spoken word and more. Through our Open Calls, we invite creatives to be part of this immersive, multi-art-form festival that celebrates new, emerging and breakthrough talent in Scotland.
We have now launched our Visual Art Open Call, with more to follow in the new year.
Deadline: 23:59 on Sunday 11th January
For Hidden Door 2026, we’re not just building an exhibition, we’re building a myth – a shared architecture shaped by the works themselves.
Hidden Door invites visual artists to help shape this architecture for our 2026 programme.
This direction grows from last year’s collaborative work at the Paper Factory, where marks, objects and actions were treated as evidence of a building with its own memory.
We have not yet announced our venue for 2026, but whatever the location, the world we create will be constructed from these works, the festival space treated like a portable building — formed from memory, residue, tools and imagined industry.
We invite existing or nearly finished material works that behave less like exhibits and more like fragments of a world — things that feel found, remembered, reused or ritualised.
Works should anchor a space the way ruins, tools or ritual might, altering how the place is sensed: how people move, pause, gather or notice.
These works should speak to at least one of our core themes below.
Out-of-Place Objects – Fragments that don’t belong, materials repurposed, objects carrying memory into new contexts.
Stone Tape Theory – The building and walls as recorders – surfaces which store traces, gesture, memory or emotion: the space remembers.
Myth of a Building – A structure remembered, half-invented, part ruin, part belief; a portable architecture made from objects and fragments of a half-remembered place.
These themes do not set a single narrative. They create a shared architecture which will be shaped by the works selected.
You may apply if you are:
This opportunity is for artists based in Scotland or with a meaningful connection to Scotland (through residence, study or origin). Artists without this connection are not eligible for this call.
Eligible media include: sculpture, installation, moving image, painting, print, ceramics, textiles, object-making, performance-as-installation, and mixed material practice.
We are not seeking gallery-style display. We welcome works that use material presence, spatial behaviour, or trace, including:
Material forms, such as:
Works that act on space, such as:
Works that embed or record traces, such as:
These are examples, not limits.
We are selecting:
We will not select works not yet in progress at this stage.
Artists selected through our Open Call will be paid to install and adapt existing work, rather than producing new work.
SAU Installation Rates (2026)
Some artists may be invited to join programme workshop sessions to:
We select the objects first. We build the world together.
Please submit your application via this online form.
You will be asked to submit:
If selected, artists will be expected to: