OUR TURN: Commission Opportunities - Bradford Visual Arts Festival

About the Open Call

OUR TURN: Bradford Visual Arts Festival is the first of its kind, bringing together new and established artforms, supporting artists and audiences. Organised by South Square Centre in collaboration with Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture, Bradford Producing Hub, and Yorkshire Contemporary, the festival runs from 26th September – 28th January 2026 across venues and unusual spaces throughout the city. The festival aims to be bold, experimental, and authentically Bradford, enabling artists to be more ambitious, providing training, and inspiring engagement with 'Made IN Bradford' art. It seeks to trial a district-wide visual arts festival, create commissioning opportunities for visual artists, showcase talent, enhance audience engagement, develop sector relationships, and offer talks and training. This open call focuses on Commission Opportunities for Bradford-based creatives across three levels: Main Commission (£2,500 plus expenses), Small Grant (£750), and Development Bursary (£500). Applications are open to artists working in any visual art medium, including traditional fine arts, video, sculpture, craft, design, textiles, film, interactive art, and digital art. Submissions can be for exhibitions, events, pop-ups, publications, or talks. Artworks can be exhibited in traditional gallery spaces, DIY spaces, outdoors, as pop-ups, in publications, or digitally. The program explicitly commits to platforming under-represented groups, including neurodivergent, disabled, people minoritised by race, sexuality, gender identity, and class. The festival will also coincide with Bradford hosting the Turner Prize 2025.

What is Offered

Artists will receive a financial award (up to £2,500 for Main Commission, £750 for Small Grant, £500 for Development Bursary), along with additional project expenses for Main Commissions. All opportunities include mentoring from the South Square team or Artist Steering Group, flexibility in funding use (materials, technical help, studio access, training, fabrication, framing), opportunities to connect with a network of artists and venues, a platform to present their work, publicity, and support with Access Rider. Small Grants also offer production support or guidance.

Requirements

Applicants must be living or working in a Bradford District postcode and have a committed practice in visual arts and/or crafts. They must be able to work to a tight programme timetable, have a desire to communicate their practice to an audience, and be able to manage their own budgets or organise assistance. Expectations include producing a finished piece of work/outcome for the OUR TURN festival between September 26th and January 28th, documenting and providing feedback on progress, acting as an ambassador for the festival, working closely with the South Square and OUR TURN teams, being willing to attend site visits, meetings, and networking events, and providing updates and promotional material.

How to Apply

Submissions can be in written, audio or video format, addressing all points in the application form. For audio/video, recordings should be no more than five minutes, equivalent to the written word limit. Applicants are also invited to complete an optional Equal Opportunities Form for monitoring purposes. Support in completing submissions is available via email at ourturn@southsquarecentre.co.uk. Two online Q&A sessions were hosted on July 8th and July 11th. The selection process involves members from the Visual Arts Steering Panel and the South Square Centre staff team.