Call for Collectives

“If we look back historically, collectives tend to emerge during periods of crisis, in moments of social upheaval and political uncertainty within society. Such crises often force reappraisals of conditions of production, re-evaluation of the nature of artistic work, and reconfiguration of the position of the artist in relation to the economic, social, and political institutions.”¹ [Okwui Enwezor]

Taking Okwui Enwezor’s insight as a prompt, BlackFlash Expanded is developing a series that looks to the role collectives have played in shaping the artistic ethos—both past, present, and future—of the prairies. 

In anticipation of this focus, we are developing an online archive to map those collectives that have impacted the artistic sector across the prairie region (colonially defined as the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba). While Enwezor prompts looking across broader art history for legacies of alignment, we instead focus on the geographic, and consider the role such projects have had in shaping our region’s artistic discourse, as well as the new directions we might be headed toward. 

We could use your help. BlackFlash Expanded invites you to contribute collective projects to be included in the archive: those that have come and gone, as well as those that are currently active. It might be a collective you were part of yourself, or one that inspired your own engagements within the arts. We leave the definition of “arts collective” to you to define, but again, Enwezor’s writing helps us tease apart two potential types: those where the authorship of making and practice “represents the expression of the group rather than the individual artist”; and those that “emphasize a flexible, non-permanent course of affiliation, privileging collaboration on a project basis rather than on a permanent alliance.”²

Submissions will be open through early spring to then be mapped and archived on the BlackFlash Expanded website. Have a collective you’d like included? Please fill out this google form. Please direct any questions to: expanded [at] blackflash [dot] ca

1. Okwui Enwezor, “The Production of Social Space as Artwork: Protocols of Community in the Work of Le Groupe Amos and Huit Facettes,” in Collectivism after Modernism, ed. Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 225.
2. Enwezor 2007, 225.