We believe that post-contemporary art will question our current understanding of authorship, and that collaboration within the arts will become increasingly relevant as a way to increase knowledge of the creative process, as well as make artistic manifestations more relevant to society and closer to the general public. Collaboration can mean that artists express not only their own vivid imaginations but also our collective ones, making art more empathic towards the communities it touches. How can autonomy, be turned into a community, and how can the prestige of the individual artist become an act of solidarity with the collective? Art and individual artists are certainly able to provoke and protest, but can collaboration also charge art with the ability to unite communities and build coalitions between peoples?

In this spirit, we look for new IST programmes that touch on the methods of collaboration but also utilise these methods to create artistic expressions otherwise not possible. From a theoretical point of view, questioning and de/restructuring the idea of authorship in a collaborative setting is a worthwhile undertaking and we also welcome applications that connect to this. We are also interested in how to bring different stakeholders such as artists, curators, grants, collectors and so forth together in order to enhance each other's contributions towards common goals.

Examples of topics for courses are:

• Interdisciplinary solidarity: how to build a collaborative art practice?
• Rethinking authorship in the arts: from autonomy to collective
• Artists as representatives: towards a methodology for social change

Within the theme of Critical Materialities, we aim to explore how art and design practices interact with and exist within the material world. Materialities refer not only to the material qualities of a specific object, body or environment but also to the cultural, economic and historical relationships through which such material qualities are created and understood in society. In Critical Materialities, we approach materials as sites of meaning. Where do materials come from, and to whom do they belong? What knowledge do they carry, and what do they represent? How does their extraction or creation impact the earth? And how do we care for them? With these questions, we hope to encourage art students to critically reflect on the material dimension of their artistic practices, and to (re)consider how their works can contribute to conversations around consumerism and sustainability, representation and appropriation, colonialism and extractivism.

We are specifically looking for proposals that allow students to engage and experiment with materials, objects or environments, whether they are physical, digital, corporeal, ephemeral or imagined. Students are eager to increase their material knowledge and skills, in relation to their conceptual thinking. Examples of topics for courses are:

• Biomaterial workshop: from funghi to bioplastics, how can we forge materials for a better and biodiverse world?
• The art of repair: mending and restoring wounds in society
• Set in stone? Reimagining monuments for hyperdiverse communities
• Environmental justice: making the voices of the earth tangible

During a time of ongoing and increasingly political, technological and environmental disruption, how can art build movements that spark political change, or full-blown revolutions? At a time of war, when does it become more useful to be a soldier than an artist? How does art need to adapt to the ongoing disruption to remain relevant and useful for society? Politicians have long mastered the political power games that makeup West’s ‘professionalised’ democracies. Many feel unsettled, vote between the lesser of two evils or refuse to participate in the current system at all. But politics isn’t only for politicians, and while many artistic practices are socially engaged substantively, few artists have really adopted a specific political strategy. Can artists also be diplomats, leaders, peacemakers or warmongers?

Here, we look for ISTs that have the potential to create political movements, or on a theoretical level, investigate the power that art and artists can have politically. To do this, we also need to understand the current politics of art, and the institutional and systemic issues facing the sector. Are there hierarchies in culture as well that hinder the progressive processes? An example, how can art and culture do the work of decolonization, if the sector is itself governed by institutions in which colonial remains are vividly present?

• The crossroads of art & politics: artists as policymakers, diplomats and leaders
• Imagining equity: how can art and culture do the work of decolonization?
• Does somebody say revolution? How to use art to build a movement
• Art & Design beyond the West