Funding Queerness Queering Funding

Queer artists and activists applying for international funding are faced with navigating legibility, visibility, and safety, among other issues. This raises a number of urgent questions: in what ways are queer art and activist practices talked about and presented by both funders and those receiving funding? How do queer practitioners navigate the dynamics of visibility and risk within their work? And how can we collectively spark up new ways of queering funding?

Funding Queerness/Queering Funding—taking place online on 27 September, 13:00-15:00 CET—aims to reflect on these (and more) questions, in conversation with visual artist, activist, and founder of queer-feminist webzine My.Kali, Khalid Abdel-Hadi; performance artist, activist, and 2021 Seed Awardee, Elyla; storyteller, translator, social sculptor and 2022 Building Beyond Awardee, Mika’il, the Muezzin; and a Ugandan writer and visual artist,  who will join us under the pseudonym Otherandelse for their own protection given the recent anti-LGBTQIA+ in their country. 

This online event requires registration. To ensure your attendance, please fill out the registration form below. 

Together, we will consider how queerness is perceived and treated by international arts funding, how queer practices are made legible to funders, and how artists in different contexts balance the needs of visibility and safety amidst different perceptions of queerness at home and abroad. The event also aims to serve as a space to initiate novel ways of thinking about (and queering) funding. And so, we will be discussing how funding can be part of a wider network of queer solidarity, and why this is a matter of urgency. 

Funding Queerness/Queering Funding is part of the ongoing event series Seeing Like a Fund, through which the Prince Claus Fund brings together cultural changemakers from its network to critically examine vital issues shaping how culture is supported globally, sparking new ways of thinking about and doing funding.