OPEN CALL: Jouissance
Pleasure. Pressure. Release.
Experimental Film, Installation, Performance, and Printed Work
Curated by Michèle Saint-Michel
Millennium Film Workshop, Brooklyn NY
Art Book Presented in collaboration with Bad Saturn Press
Exhibition Dates April 3 – April 9, 2026
Opening Night + Film Screening Friday, April 3, 2026
Performance Program Saturday, April 4, 2026
Submission Deadline Sunday, February 1, 2026
Notifications February 20, 2026
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NYC Open Call for Experimental Film, Installation, Performance, and Artist Book Pages
Jouissance is a major New York City open call for experimental film, installation art, performance, and printed works. This Brooklyn-based exhibition and publication opportunity is designed for artists working at the charged intersection of sensory experience, embodied cinema, erotic intensity, and psychic pressure.
This open call also includes a parallel submission opportunity through Bad Saturn Press, an independent art publisher producing a limited-run artist book for the exhibition.
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What We’re Seeking
• Short Film Submissions (up to 14 minutes)
• Installation Proposals wall-based, sculptural, sensory, hybrid
• Live Performance Proposals for April 4
• Scanned Pages for Art Book Publication by Bad Saturn Press
Focus Areas in the Gallery multisensory work, scent-based installations, haptic or olfactory environments, radical printed page experiments, repetitive structures, desire-driven forms, and embodied or psychic threshold states. Expanded cinema and installation film pieces with economy of space in mind.
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Exhibition Theme: Pleasure, Pressure, Release
We’re seeking work operating at the edges: tension, ache, insistence, refusal to resolve. We’re interested in submissions shaped by:
• the body at or beyond a threshold
• desire or compulsion as structure
• repetition, duration, or excess as formal engines
• sensory or olfactory activation
• relational, erotic, or psychic intensity
• moments where meaning thins and something charged emerges
Jouissance from French, where it names pleasure at its most heightened, but Lacan uses it to describe the moment when pleasure exceeds itself. I’m drawn to that threshold—where intensity becomes insistence, where the body or psyche keeps going even after comfort breaks. This exhibition brings together films, performances, and installations that stay with that edge instead of smoothing it, holding the tension where pleasure turns into something else.
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Bad Saturn Press Submission Opportunity
Limited-Run Artist Book • Brooklyn, NY
Bad Saturn Press will publish a small-format art book to accompany the exhibition. This publication is an additional NYC open call within the open call, offering artists, poets, and image-makers the chance to be featured in a new limited-edition print release distributed during the show.
Submit up to three scanned pages (8.5 x 11 inches):
• scanner as camera
• scanned drawings
• collage and layered Xerox work
• text and poetry
• photographic scans
• page-based experiments that generate tension, rupture, heat, or repetition
Scanned on a flatbed scanner or Xerox machine. This includes any scanner accessible to artists, libraries, studios, and community spaces.
Selected works will appear in a 2026 Bad Saturn Press Artist Book, released opening night.
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About the Curator, Venue, and Publisher
Millennium Film Workshop
A historic center for experimental cinema, performance, and independent moving-image art in New York City for over fifty years.
Bad Saturn Press
A Brooklyn-based small press producing art books, limited editions, risograph prints, and experimental publications. Recent releases include zines, journals, hybrid artist books, and exhibition-linked editions. Bad Saturn specializes in page-based works that explore embodiment, intensity, and nonlinear archives.
Michèle Saint-Michel
A filmmaker, curator, and poet based in Brooklyn whose work moves through power structures, embodiment, and the sensory forces that act beneath language. She has curated sold-out screenings featuring over sixty artists. LOIs available for international submissions.
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Key Dates
• Submissions Open: December 1, 2025
• Deadline: Sunday, February 1, 2026 at midnight EST
• Notifications: February 20, 2026
• Opening Night Screening: Friday, April 3, 2026 at 8pm
• Performance Program: Saturday, April 4, 2026
• Exhibition Open: April 3 – April 9, 2026
• Deinstall: April 10, 2026
Submission Link: https://forms.gle/ER5PQssY4CrxFzTm8
Current Open Calls
Soft Map of NYC: Due Jan 1
Jouissance: Due Feb 1