Aesthetics of Power

Call for Art: Aesthetics of Power

Curator: Mahwish Chishty

Application Deadline: August 15, 2025

As tools of harm grow more remote, outsourced, and hidden, their impacts continue to rapidly shape our lives. While the mechanisms may be out of sight, their impact remains immediate, shaping the human experience, memories, and the cultural archive. This exhibition invites artists to share their work that respond to that contradiction: a world where power hides in plain sight, but leaves its unmistakable marks.

A.R.C. Gallery invites artists to submit work for The Aesthetics of Power, an exhibition juried by artist Mahwish Chishty. This show looks closely at how aesthetics can be used to express layered, quietly disruptive ideas. We are drawn to work that surprises, that reveals itself slowly, and that occupies the fragile space where beauty unsettles rather than soothes. Submissions should be layered and unexpected: artworks that linger in the uneasy space between attraction and unease.

We are especially interested in work that explores:

Cultural Memory and Erasure

• Preservation and re-imagining of cultural symbols and ideals
• The manipulation or erasure of tradition
• Artistic resistance to the flattening or reframing (?) of cultural heritage

Ornament as Language

• Pattern as encoded meaning
• Ornament as a shield or a weapon
• Meditative aesthetics used in resistance to violence

Craft and Geopolitical Violence

• Forms of traditional craft brought into conversation with ominous themes
• The intersection of aesthetic tradition and geopolitical critique
• Visual languages considered domestic juxtaposed with anonymous institutional and political rhetoric

This is a call for work that suggests more than it states. We’re not looking for easy answers, but are drawn instead to work that lives in complexity. We invite artists to reflect on how aesthetic interpretations carry the weight of history, how beauty might obscure or reveal power, and how what is finely wrought can also bear witness.

Deadline for Submission of Applications: Friday, August 15 at 11:59pm CST