The National Gallery of Iceland is accepting applications for a funded artist residency in Reykjavík, hosted through the Vasulka Chamber (Vasulka Stofa) as part of the European CUSP project. Applications close 3 September 2026 at 23:59 GMT, and the residency itself runs for up to four weeks in early 2027, with exact dates arranged with the selected artist.
The details
- Deadline: 3 September 2026, 23:59 GMT
- Residency: up to four weeks, early 2027, in Reykjavík
- Eligibility: international artists based outside Iceland who reside in a Creative Europe participating country (EU member states plus eligible EEA/EFTA, candidate and acceding countries, and European Neighbourhood Policy nations), whose practice involves time-based media, emerging technologies, or related interdisciplinary approaches — the call explicitly names AI, sensors, blockchain, software, sound, video, and hybrid practices
- What’s provided: accommodation, working space, a travel and subsistence stipend, and an artist fee for participating in an open lab and masterclass; hardware and software access is possible depending on the project and availability. The call does not publish a fixed figure for the stipend or fee
- How to apply: a form submission with an artistic statement, motivation letter, CV, portfolio (files capped at 10MB each), and a concept for the masterclass you’d deliver
- Contact: cusp.residency.is [at] gmail.com
Why this particular residency is worth the application effort
The Vasulka Chamber is a research archive within the National Gallery of Iceland’s research library dedicated to the legacy of Steina and Woody Vasulka — the Icelandic-Czech duo who, from the late 1960s onward, treated video not as a recording medium but as an electronic signal to be bent, and who co-founded The Kitchen in New York. Their work is upstream of a remarkable amount of what this site covers: signal-as-material, custom instruments built because nothing suitable existed, image and sound as two views of the same waveform.
Working in that archive is a genuinely unusual context for an artist doing sensor, AI, or software-based work today, and the hosting institution isn’t asking for a demo — it’s asking for engagement with how time-based media survives.
That’s the frame of the wider CUSP project: a Creative Europe cooperation across five countries — Iceland, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Norway, and the Netherlands — addressing the preservation and presentation of time-based media art, combining artist residencies with conservation research and sustainable digital preservation methods. Preservation is the least glamorous and most urgent problem in media art: work made on obsolete hardware, in dead software, or against an API that no longer exists disappears far faster than a painting does. An artist who has thought seriously about that will have material for a strong application.
Before you apply
Note the eligibility constraint carefully — it’s residency-based, not citizenship-based, and it’s tied to Creative Europe participation, so applicants based in the US, UK, or elsewhere outside that framework should check the country list before investing time. Build the masterclass concept properly rather than treating it as a formality; it’s a required part of the submission and the artist fee is explicitly attached to the open lab and masterclass component.