Informal Art

Open Call for Papers and Artistic Contributions

Global Informality in the Arts

15-16 January 2026, UCL and Pushkin House, London

The Global Informality Project invites submissions for the Global Informality in the Arts conference, to be held at University College London (UCL) and Pushkin House, London, 15-16 January 2026. This conference will examine the role of informality in artistic media, practices, creative labour, and cultural production. It will bring together artists, academics, and cultural practitioners to explore how informal networks, unwritten rules, and hidden practices shape cultural production across different contexts.

At the same time, the accompanying exhibition 'The Impossible Encyclopaedia: Informality in the Arts', Pushkin House (January-February 2026, dates TBC), will showcase the artworks already realised that challenge conventional categorisation, exploring themes of decolonisation, visibility/invisibility, subversion, resistance, post-humanity, self-care and environmental care, among others.

The conference and exhibition are organised as part of the interdisciplinary research initiative, Global Informality Project, led by the FRINGE Centre with support from the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Since 2014, the project has explored the social and cultural complexity of informal practices worldwide, culminating in the publication of three volumes of The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality (UCL Press, 2018, 2024). All accepted papers could be included in Volume 4.

We welcome proposals for papers and artistic contributions to the following panels: Patterns of Informal Power; Informality and Creative Labour; Lecture Performance and the Edges of Performative Informality; (Secret) Art in the Workplace; Protest Art and Informality; Visibility/Invisibility; Collecting as Art. The conference will take place in a hybrid format, allowing for both face-to-face and online participation. The conference will be held in a hybrid format, allowing for both face-to-face and online participation. However, recognising the limitations of rigid categorisation, we also encourage submissions that make a meaningful contribution to the planned volume of The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality: Informal Art.

Themes and panels:

Patterns of Informal Power This panel is an invitation to explore the invisible and immeasurable dimensions of informal power – the deep structures often associated with open secrets, unwritten rules, and hidden practices, collected from around the world and published in three volumes of The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality (UCL Press, 2018, 2024).

We aim to address the complex, anonymous, unpredictable, and seemingly irrational nature of informal power, which serves to hold society together, distribute resources, and mobilise people; and above all, to control and co-opt to ensure its own reproduction. Each contributor of a paper, art or performance is invited to capture, visualise, or reflect on patterns of complexity and ambivalence (doublethink, double motivation, double-deed, and double standards) among others.
For more information on how informal power works, see www.alenaledeneva.com/art.

Informality and Creative Labour

Informality is deeply intertwined with creative labour, manifesting both in the precarious conditions of cultural work and in the networks of support, collective resilience and collaborative action that sustain it (Alacovska 2018).
This panel takes a transnational perspective on informality in cultural production, bringing together diverse perspectives on how informal labour practices simultaneously challenge and sustain creative work. Panellists will explore issues ranging from the insecurity and precariousness of cultural employment to the forms of collaboration that emerge within creative ecosystems. Examining these dynamics in different contexts will shed light on the sometimes hidden social infrastructures associated with creative work.

Lecture Performance and the Edges of Performative Informality

Lecture performance is perhaps the most misunderstood and liminal medium in contemporary art. It can be likened to the metaphorical 'Bermuda Triangle' between experimental theatre, artistic performance and academic lecture. Museums and other 'formal' institutions have traditionally struggled with the disciplinary nature of the medium.
This panel will address the conceptual challenges of categorisation, museology and artistic framing of lecture performance as an exciting medium that thrives on informality.
The Lecture Performance Archive project will serve as a reference point and documentation site for the panel's interventions - https://linktr.ee/lparchive..

(Secret) Art in the Workplace

The workplace is a hierarchical site of constraints, competing motivations and performances. In response, workplaces are often also sites of informal tactical resistance and subversion by workers. These practices are covert (and sometimes deliberately overlooked) tactics that can result in unsanctioned spaces and moments of worker agency.
This panel explores how such workplace actions sometimes produce art - whether through artworks that use agency-producing tactics, covert artistic practices that take place in the workplace, practices that (mis)use aspects of the artist's daily work, or artworks that share the spirit of informal, ad hoc responses to restrictions.
We welcome submissions from researchers working on art-in-work issues as well as from artists working under these conditions. Contributions may include panel participation, short paper presentations, or submissions of completed artworks for inclusion in the accompanying exhibition at Pushkin House.

Protest Art and Informality

Political or protest art often focuses on political crimes and illegalities - the repression of peaceful protests, the illegal shadow surveillance of citizens, and corruption at all levels. This panel invites scholars, artists and art practitioners to think collectively and creatively about the workings of informal powers that give meaning and often normalisation to political crimes - from corruption and nepotism to violent and illegal crackdowns on dissent. How did artists of the past think about informal power in both democracies and autocracies? What kind of visual languages and pictorial or performative critiques emerge in artistic fields when artists think about, with or against informality and its pervasive practices? Can we collectively propose a conceptual tool to explain artistic re-evaluations and explorations of informality in the grand political but also the mundane everyday? Can we draw artistic and performative conclusions about similar or different approaches to representing and critiquing informality in protest art?

Visibility/Invisibility

Visibility is never neutral. It is shaped by power, by apparatuses that range from satellites and surveillance systems to the movement of a cursor and the gaze of an eye. In our daily lives, telepresence – especially videoconferencing – has become an informal yet deeply structured practice of being seen and unseen. This panel explores the artistic tactics that emerge within these conditions: the ways in which visibility is negotiated, erased, or subverted. How do informal gestures – glitches, distortions, refusals – reshape what can and cannot be seen? How does the act of looking become a form of governance, and how can it be disrupted? What are the sanctions of the visual, the thresholds beyond which visibility becomes exposure, risk, or disappearance?

Submission guidelines:

We welcome submissions from scholars, artists, and practitioners working on the themes outlined above.

• Deadline for abstract submissions: EXTENDED DEADLINE 21 September 2025
  

• Abstract length: 250-300 words
  

• Formats accepted: Papers (15-20 minutes), lecture performances, artistic interventions, and completed artworks (please include photos or websites for exhibition consideration)
  

• Submission email: informalart2024@gmail.com.
  

Submissions should include the title of the proposed paper or artistic contribution, an abstract, a short biography (150 words), and whether the participant intends to present in person or online.

For further information about the project, please visit the Global Informality Project.

We look forward to receiving your submissions!

Organising Committee Global Informality Project

NO TALKING // NO READING // NO DRAWING (2019)

The Invigilator Research Network (IRN) is an evolving group of visual artists who work as gallery guards, while using their jobs as sites of performance. Produced by this partially anonymous UK network of 16 guards, the 2019 exhibition examines the informal practices contesting the existing rules for invigilators. This contemplative collection of drawing and writing when on duty explores the degree of privacy and freedom at the workplace. Such practices have no collective name: they are less universal than individual doodling at meetings, but more consolidated, even if by word-of mouth, as practices of secret resistance to the gallery management culture. Identifying these semi-covert, knowingly overlooked, or unacknowledged informal practices is a step towards the conceptualisation of the transgressive, bottom-up performances of self-expression by invigilators in art galleries and museums across the United Kingdom.

Author: Invigilator Research Network

Venue: Transforming Finance Conference 2019 by People's Private Equity, University of Greenwich, London

Link to the work: https://invigilatorresearch.org/nodrawing/

Direct link to the catalogue: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BJ6JGFF1ToKBiSF7QKA8qFlADehnQC-m/view

Gallery: See more

Further reading: Mathur, S. and Singh, K. eds., 2017. No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: the Museum in South Asia. Routledge

NO TALKING // NO READING // NO DRAWING © 2019 by Simon Farid is licensed under CC BY 4.0 / Attribution 4.0 International

The Informal Museum (2024)

The project emerged from research into informal vending practices and related production networks on Istanbul´s streets. The gained knowledge was then transferred into the museum context, dealing with creative and flexible strategies of art production and how these might enable a more open and participatory form of museum. By editing architectural sections of the venue, the drawings first break with the form of the museum before adding new „informal“ ideas. It´s not their intent to musealise informality, but to create awareness of social groups which are excluded from museum institutions and the art scene.

Author: Helen Hümmer

Venue: Pera Museum, Istanbul, Türkiye

Gallery: The Informal Museum (2024)

As Beru (2024)

The photos attached were taken during the Kazakh custom named As Beru (literally: giving out the meal). It is given to show respect and remembrance of one's ancestors. The host invites guests who are familiar with their ancestors. Usually, guests are people from the same village, colleagues, and other relatives. From the perspective of informality, the host family organizing the event establishes its status and power among other members of the community. This is demonstrated through organization and leading the event (Picture 2) and through financial investments (Picture 3). The event also involves financial donations (bata) for local religious leaders (imam) (Picture 4).

Artist: Madi Zhakupbayev

Date and Venue of Exhibition: 16 June 2024; Dolon Village, Beskaragay District, Abay Region, Kazakhstan

Gallery: As Beru (2024)