The European Media Art Festival in Osnabrück reaches its 40th edition in April 2027, and its call for entries is open now. There is a new wrinkle in it that changes how you should treat the deadline.
The cap
From the festival’s own announcement:
“Please note the following change: The call for entries will close as soon as 2,200 entries have been received, or the latest on 15 December 2026.”
EMAF has not capped submissions before. The stated reason is “the significant increase in entries in recent years” — and the justification is one worth quoting, because it is a choice about jurying rather than about administration:
“it is also important to us that we are able to devote the necessary time and attention to all works and projects entered during the viewing process. For this reason, we have decided to limit the number of entries.”
Entry remains free of charge. That is the context for the cap: an open call with no fee has no financial brake on volume, and the pressure valve has to be somewhere. EMAF has chosen to put it on the number of works rather than on the submitter’s wallet, which keeps access open and makes timing matter.
The practical consequence is simple. 15 December is a ceiling, not a date. If the festival hits 2,200 in late November, the call closes in late November. For anyone used to treating a submission deadline as a thing to work back from, this one can arrive early and without warning.
The three sections
| Section | What it takes | Selected for |
|---|---|---|
| Film | Experimental films, any length, any subject | International Selection (short and medium-length) and Features |
| Installation | Installative, interactive, site-specific or sculptural media artworks | The exhibition |
| Expanded | Performances, live events, workshops | Performance programme, or talks & workshops |
Two rules apply across the board. Works must have been completed no earlier than 2026. And for Film, there is no premiere requirement — a detail that distinguishes EMAF from a lot of festival circuit programming and means a film that has already screened elsewhere is still eligible.
The theme applies to one section only
This is the part most worth reading carefully, because the requirement is asymmetric.
Installation entries “must relate to the theme of the 2027 festival.” Film and Expanded carry no such constraint — Film is explicitly “any subject.”
The 2027 theme:
“The focus is on the archive as an instrument of knowledge production, a site of critical intervention, and a space for alternative visions of the future.”
Three distinct framings there, and they are not the same brief. An archive as an instrument of knowledge production is about how recording shapes what can be known. As a site of critical intervention it is about working against a collection’s own organising assumptions — what was kept, what was catalogued under whose terms, what was discarded. As a space for alternative visions of the future it inverts the direction entirely: the archive as a source of futures that were proposed and not taken.
For a festival marking its 40th edition, programming the exhibition around the archive is a fairly pointed piece of self-reflection. EMAF has been collecting four decades of media art that ran on hardware, and much of it is now only accessible as documentation — which is itself one of the better available arguments about archives as instruments of knowledge production.
Dates and practicalities
| Call closes | 15 December 2026, or at 2,200 entries |
| Entry fee | Free |
| Festival | 21–25 April 2027, Osnabrück, Germany |
| Exhibition | 21 April – 23 May 2027 |
| Eligibility | Works completed no earlier than 2026 |
| Premiere required | No (Film) |
Read the Regulations PDF before entering — the sections above summarise the call, and the eligibility and rights terms are in that document.
The festival is also separately seeking an exhibition curator for the 40th edition, at Kunsthalle Osnabrück, announced in July.
If you are deciding whether to enter
Three things tilt this one favourably compared with most open calls: no fee, no premiere requirement for film, and a 40th-anniversary edition that will attract more attention than a typical year. The constraints are that the installation theme is mandatory and reasonably specific, and that your work has to be from 2026 or later.
Against that, the cap. If you are submitting to Film or Expanded, where there is no theme to work to, there is no reason to wait — and a 2,200-work ceiling on a free call is the kind of thing that fills faster than organisers expect.
Sources
- EMAF 40 — Call for Entries
- EMAF 40 Call for Entries — Regulations (PDF)
- EMAF entry forms
- European Media Art Festival