Jouissance Open Call NYC 2026 | Experimental Film, Installation, Performance & Printed Works

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

–––––––––––––––––––––––

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.

–––––––––––––––––––––––

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.

–––––––––––––––––––––––

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.

–––––––––––––––––––––––

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.

–––––––––––––––––––––––

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.

–––––––––––––––––––––––

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

Open Call for Artists: Soft Map of NYC

“So complete is each neighborhood, and so strong the sense of neighborhood, that many a New Yorker spends a lifetime within the confines of an area smaller than a country village. Let him walk two blocks from his corner and he is in a strange land and will feel uneasy till he gets back.” — E.B. White, Here Is New York

Soft Map of NYC is an open call for artists living or working in New York City. From this call, 26 artists will be selected and invited to photograph their own neighborhood using a Polaroid camera.

Across 2026, each artist will take a one-week turn creating a small suite of Polaroid images grounded in tenderness, attention, and the emotional textures of place. Every other week, three of their photographs will be released for sale on a split commission. The remaining images from their roll of eight will form the basis of a 2027 exhibition and publication with Bad Saturn, together creating a soft, analog map of New York City.

Rather than documenting the city in any traditional sense, Soft Map of NYC gathers images of sensation, an affective cartography of intimacy, stillness, and connection. The project extends the methodology of Michèle Saint-Michel’s A Map of All My Tender Places (forthcoming, Bloomsbury 2026), approaching photography as relic and ritual, capable of carrying emotion in its surface and imperfections.

While many lens-based artists are expected to apply, the call is open to all practices that treat tenderness as method and attention as a form of care, including performance, sound, text, and interdisciplinary work.

Submissions open Friday, November 14, 2025, and close Wednesday, January 1, 2026.
Open to artists living or working in any of the five boroughs.

Submission fee: $15 supports materials, scanning, production, and admin.

To apply: Submit your name, borough, neighborhood, short bio, link to work, and a 150-word reflection on where tenderness lives for you in the city.

Artists retain full copyright. By participating, they grant non-exclusive rights for exhibition, publication, and promotional use with credit.

Soft Map of NYC is curated by Michèle Saint-Michel, film curator and artist whose work engages tenderness as method, somatic memory, and the quiet intensities of the everyday.

For inquiries: michelesaintmichel@gmail.com

---

Current Open Calls

Jouissance: Due Feb 1

Soft Map of NYC: Due Jan 1

---

Open Call: Skin in the Game — Group Exhibition & Poetry Publication

Curated by Michèle Saint-Michel
Risograph publication via Bad Saturn Media
Hosted at Millennium Film Workshop, Brooklyn, NY — October 24–30, 2025

Skin in the Game, a group exhibition and poetry publication curated by Michèle St. Michel. October 24–30, 2025 at Millennium Film Workshop, Brooklyn. Poster design by Bad Saturn.

Skin in the Game is a group exhibition, screening, and risograph poetry collection, exploring what it means to put your body—your real, pulsing, breakable body—on the line. In love. In labor. In protest. In performance.

The works in this show will speak from the surface of the skin and the space just beneath it: the site of contact, vulnerability, memory, and commitment.

We are currently accepting submissions from artists, filmmakers, writers, performers, poets, and interdisciplinary creators. We’re especially interested in work that engages somatic and surreal processes—work that treats the body as both map and threshold. Pieces may lean into vulnerability, trace pain, track sensation, or reflect states of transformation.

You might be working in movement, sound, moving image, sculpture, text, or something that refuses to stay in one category. We welcome both tender and feral approaches—work that speaks from love, grief, protest, performance, memory, or metamorphosis.

We are especially interested in:

• embodiment as resistance or risk

• somatic memory, wounds, and healing

• surreal or speculative approaches to self-mapping

• clothing, fabric, or veils as material containers for the body

• gestures of intimacy, care, rupture, resistance, or emotional exposure

• the body as archive, battlefield, altar, or document

This is not a metaphorical call for neat ideas dressed in flesh. This is a call for the messy, the tender. Artists who are living their questions. Work that holds a pulse. Presence and exposure. The body as archive. The body as question. The body as offering.

---

Submission Categories

Short Film & Video Art
Runtime: Up to 15 minutes
Main screening on Friday, October 24

Installation, Visual Art, & Sculptural Work
For gallery display. The venue is small and best suited for 3 to 8 works.
Please outline technical and spatial needs.

Sound / Performance / Movement
Live or embodied pieces will be programmed for Saturday, October 25.

Concrete Poetry for Risograph Publication
Bad Saturn will publish a curated collection of concrete, visual, and somatic poetry in conjunction with the exhibition. Please submit up to 2 poems or 2 pages total, formatted to fit 5.25 x 8 inches, portrait or square. Accepted work will be printed via risograph and released during the show.

Key Dates

• Submission Deadline: Friday, August 1, 2025 at 5pm EST

• Notification of Acceptance: September 8, 2025

• Installation: Thursday, October 23, 2025

• Main Screening & Opening: Friday, October 24, 2025

• Performance Night: Saturday, October 25, 2025

• Gallery Exhibition Run: October 24–30, 2025

• Deinstallation: Thursday, October 30, 2025

We have a limited number of sponsored entries available for those with financial need. To request a fee waiver, email michelesaintmichel@gmail.com with a brief note.

Open Call: Quantum Intimacies – Submit Experimental Film, Poetry & Media ArtUPDATE: See the exhibition!

A Screening & Exhibition on Quantum Presence, Time, and Poetic Entanglement

Calling experimental filmmakers, poetic technologists, time-based media artists, and dreamers working across dimensions—Quantum Intimacies considers the forces that bind us beyond proximity, the echoes of presence in absence, and the paradox of being both here and elsewhere. Drawing from quantum mechanics, somatic memory, and poetic speculation, this exhibition and screening bring together works that explore relationality across distance, the fluidity of time, and the ephemeral architectures of intimacy.

Quantum Intimacies is a space where grief, longing, and love exceed their representational limits and take shape as forces in themselves. It asks not just how we touch, but how we are touched—by each other, by time, by the things we cannot see but always feel. Artists are invited to submit works that seemingly exist in multiple states at once: shifting, unfolding, and resonating across dimensions of time and space.

How do we touch across time? How does longing refract across parallel selves?

Quantum Intimacies — a multi-sensory screening and exhibition exploring presence beyond the visible. June 19–20, 2025 · Curated by Michèle Saint-Michel · Hosted by Millennium Film Workshop and Sponsored by Bad Saturn Media, Brooklyn.

What We’re Looking For

We invite submissions from artists, collectives, filmmakers, writers, and creative technologists working in time-based media. We’re especially drawn to interdisciplinary, experimental work that engages with quantum themes, including but not limited to:

• Non-Local Love & Entanglement: Long-distance intimacy, ancestral memory, or digital remnants of lost connections where time and space collapse.
• The Poetics of Probability: Embracing randomness, uncertainty, and intention in quantum states and artistic creation.
• Superposition & Multitemporality: Films that shift with each screening, fragmented narratives, or experiences shaped by the viewer.
• Somatic Frequencies & Resonance: Interactive, body-responsive works using sound, heartbeats, or immersive environments to explore presence.

Exhibition Details

Dates: June 19–20, 2025
Location: Millennium Film Workshop, Brooklyn, NY
Curated by: Michèle Saint-Michel

Submission Deadlines

• Early Bird Deadline: Friday, April 18, 2025 (5 PM EST)
• Final Deadline: Friday, May 16, 2025 (5 PM EST)
• Notification Date: May 23, 2025

How to Submit

Complete the submission form and include the following:

• Basic contact details
• A short artist statement or bio (100 words)
• A 100-word description of how your work engages with the exhibition’s quantum themes

Media Submission Instructions

• Film/Video: Submit a Vimeo or YouTube link (with password if applicable)
• Gallery Installations: Email a proposal (PDF, up to 3 pages) with sketches to badsaturnmedia@gmail.com. Space is limited.
• Performance/Movement/Multimedia: Email a proposal (PDF, up to 3 pages) with sketches to badsaturnmedia@gmail.com
• Single Poem/Digital Artwork/Digital Poetic Instance: Send a 1–3 page PDF to badsaturnmedia@gmail.com

Multiple entries are permitted. Payments are accepted via Venmo and PayPal through our publisher. Submissions will not be reviewed until payment is received.

Contact

Questions? Reach out at badsaturnmedia@gmail.com.

Open Call: Between a Frame and a Soft Place

OPEN CALL: “Between a Frame and a Soft Place”
Curated by Michèle St. Michel with Guest Deep Reader Curator Ari-Duong Nguyen
Exhibition & Screening: April 11–17, 2025 at Millennium Film Workshop, Brooklyn, NY
Submission Deadline: Friday, February 28, 2025 at 5pm
Notifications: March 14, 2025

Link to submit: https://forms.gle/1fmUkyS1jbdp2Ne36

Now Accepting Proposals:

• Short Film & Video Art (Up to 13 min)

• Installation, Wall-mounted Visual Work, Sculptural Work 

• Sound / Performance (Live or pre-recorded)

• Zine Contributions (poetry, prose, artwork)

Join members of the London-based Digital Bodies Collective and other New York-based artists for a group exhibition featuring short films, performances, sculptural installations, and a special zine release. "Between a Frame and a Soft Place" is a group exhibition of time-based works, performance, and immersive installations that meditate on the concept of the digital body, and how it moves, morphs, and manifests in both tangible and intangible realms. The exhibition bridges film screenings, gallery installation, experimental publishing, and performance, inviting visitors into the cracks where spillage and glitching of physical and digital realities can be glimpsed.

Through this hybrid format, the show examines how technology reconfigures identity and presence, prompting us to consider where the human ends and the digital body begins. In this liminal space, the body becomes an evolving assemblage, shaped by ecology, power structures, and the screens we inhabit.

Seeking submissions that explore:

• Embodiment & identity: How digital interfaces reconfigure our sense of self

• Techno [trans]formations: Emerging tech reshaping human interaction

• Memoria & myth-making: Personal or collective narratives in a screen-saturated age

• The spectral & sensory: Immersive or experimental works that blur the line between data and flesh

Link to submit: https://forms.gle/1fmUkyS1jbdp2Ne36

---

About

For over fifty years, Millennium Film Workshop has served as a world renowned center for independent experimental film production and exhibition.

Michèle Saint-Michel is a filmmaker, curator, and poet based in Brooklyn, NY. She works around issues of power, feminist ecologies, and somatic memory. Her latest co-curated event was a sold-out screening in NYC, featuring 65 local and international filmmakers. Letters of Intent (LOI) available for international artists. All encouraged to apply.

---

Key Dates

• Submission Deadline: Friday, February 28, 2025 at 5pm

• Notification of Acceptance: March 14, 2025

• PV, Opening & Main Screening: Friday, April 11, 2025 at 8pm

• Sound / Performance Events: Saturday, April 12 - April 17, 2025

• Zine Release & Reading Event: Sunday, April 13, 2025

• Gallery Exhibition: April 11–17, 2025

• Deinstall: April 18, 2025

Link to submit: https://forms.gle/1fmUkyS1jbdp2Ne36

Michèle Saint-Michel Co-Curates The Poetic Lens at Millennium Film Workshop

Brooklyn, NY — Curator and poetry filmmaker Michèle Saint-Michel and renowned performance artist and film diarist Erica Schreiner are thrilled to announce an open call for The Poetic Lens, a curated screening of poetry films to be held in 2025 at the iconic Millennium Film Workshop in Brooklyn, NY. Submissions are open now through December 10, 2024, with free entry for artists worldwide.

“The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world.” — Derek Walcott

The Poetic Lens promises to be an extraordinary evening celebrating the synergy of poetry and filmmaking. The event will explore the vast possibilities of the poetry film genre, showcasing works that traverse boundaries and defy categorization. From poems read aloud on film to cinematic poetry, kinetic typography, soundscapes, visual poetics, and abstract experimentation, the screening aims to ignite dialogue about the genre’s fluidity and creative potential.

With The Poetic Lens, Saint-Michel and Schreiner bring their shared vision of championing innovation and boundary-pushing artistry to the Millennium Film Workshop, a historic space long known for nurturing experimental and independent film. This partnership has already inspired hundreds of submissions, setting the stage for a groundbreaking celebration of the poetic image.

Key Details:

• Deadline for submissions: Tuesday, December 10, 2024

• Submission fees: Free

• Eligibility: Open to all artists, regardless of location

• Submit

This event invites creators to embrace and redefine the poetry film genre, contributing to a vibrant discourse that blends visual and literary artistry.

About the Curators:
Michèle Saint-Michel is a poet and filmmaker whose work explores themes of grief, longing, and feminist ecologies. With an MA in Artists’ Film and Moving Image and two published poetry collections, her innovative approach has been celebrated internationally. Erica Schreiner is a trailblazing experimental filmmaker whose work has been showcased in galleries and festivals worldwide, known for her intimate and evocative style.

Join us for a night where poetry and film converge, and the boundaries of storytelling dissolve into the sublime.