Beyond the Silence
Open call

Overview

Beliefs about gender are woven into our everyday lives. They influence our bodies, our families, our communities, our institutions, and the stories we inherit. Gender is a network of relationships – a network of connection, belonging, unequal power, and violence.
How do we embody gendered expectations? Who teaches us what it means to be a woman, a man, or someone who exists beyond these categories? How do these ideas shape the ways we care for one another, build relationships, experience both belonging and violence?

Across Vietnam, where gender-based violence remains a pressing issue despite growing public discourse, artists and cultural practitioners have increasingly opened spaces where these questions can be explored with honesty, imagination, and care. Art can make room for difficult conversations, create new languages for lived experiences, and invite communities to reflect, care, laugh, listen, and imagine together.

The title of this Open Call, Đâm Toạc Chân Mây (Piercing the Horizon), inspired by Hồ Xuân Hương's poetry, evokes a gesture of opening a breach in what seems fixed or unquestionable. We take this image as an invitation to explore how silence is challenged, how violence becomes speakable, and how practices of care can create possibilities for imagining and living otherwise.

Beyond the Silence / Đâm Toạc Chân Mây invites artists, cultural practitioners, and interdisciplinary collaborations to develop projects that explore gender, power, care, and belonging through creative practice.

We are looking for projects that...

Listen. Reflect. Disturb. Play. Dare. Unlearn. Connect. Reimagine.

Projects may, for example:

• create spaces for people to identify, speak about, and respond to experiences of violence through storytelling, listening, play, and shared reflection;
• examine how social norms, gender stereotypes, family expectations, and unequal power shape everyday experiences;
• explore patriarchy, heteronormativity, masculinities, queerness, care, or belonging from multiple perspectives;
• challenge dominant narratives around gender, sexuality, bodies, relationships, and community;
• cultivate practices of solidarity, collective care and mutual support;
• explore differences in how gender, violence, and care are understood across generations;
• investigate how digital technologies, including social media and artificial intelligence, hape experiences of gender, intimacy, and violence;
• imagine alternative ways of living together beyond violence.

These themes are intended as points of departure rather than categories. We welcome proposals that approach them from personal, collective, speculative, playful, or experimental perspectives.

Projects may take place in physical, digital, or hybrid spaces. We welcome initiatives grounded in artistic and creative practice, including—but not limited to—

• exhibitions;
• screenings;
• performances;
• literature projects;
• participatory and community-based artistic processes;
• multidisciplinary and experimental artistic formats

We particularly encourage projects that value process as much as presentation, recognising that meaningful artistic encounters often emerge through sustained collaboration, experimentation, and dialogue.
Projects whose primary outputs are academic research, reports, journal articles, or exclusively discursive events without a significant artistic component are not eligible.

Benefits

Selected projects will receive:

• financial support of up to EUR 2,000 per project (up to four projects will be selected);
• advisory accompaniment by artists, curators, or subject-matter experts where appropriate;
• opportunities to connect with institutional and community partners through Goethe-Institut Vietnam;
• communication support to increase the visibility of the projects.

Eligible Applicants

This Open Call is intended for artists, artist collectives, and cultural practitioners—particularly those whose work sits at the intersection of arts and civil society, and whose practice engages with feminist, queer, or gender justice perspectives.

Eligible applicants include:

• individual artists;
• artist collectives;
• artists working with specific communities through participatory or collaborative artistic processes;
• cultural organizations and independent arts initiatives;
• collaborations between artists or cultural organizations and civil society organizations (CSOs), where the artist or cultural organization serves as the lead applicant.

We encourage interdisciplinary collaborations that bring together artistic practice with community organising, education, advocacy, mental health, research, or other forms of social engagement.

Projects led solely by civil society organizations without meaningful artistic collaboration are not eligible.

Note:

• Projects engaging with experiences of violence are expected to work in a trauma-informed and survivor-centred way, with attention to consent, care, and the wellbeing of everyone involved, including the artists themselves.
• Projects whose primary outputs are academic research, reports, journal articles, or exclusively discursive events without a significant artistic component are not eligible.
• Projects led solely by civil society organizations without meaningful artistic collaboration are not eligible.

Timeline

August 2026 | Open Call

Open Call launched
Application deadline: August 23, 2026 at 23:00 (GMT +7)

Application form

Early September 2026 | Selection

• Jury review
• Interviews with shortlisted candidates
• Announcement of selected projects

October–December 2026 | Project Implementation

Selected projects will be implemented with financial support from Goethe-Institut Vietnam.