Reflecting, Reimagining, Becoming
There are moments when identity feels stable — and moments when it quietly slips out of reach. Evolving Identities 2026 invites artists to explore identity not as a fixed state, but as a lived, evolving process. Open call for application until 15 February 2026. Residency period 4 May – 28 June 2026. Apply now!
A change of place. A shift in language. A body that no longer feels familiar. A story inherited, altered, or forgotten. Often, we only become aware of identity when it is challenged, stretched, or asked to become something else.
For artists, these moments are not interruptions; they are starting points.
Evolving Identities 2026 invites artists to explore identity not as a fixed state, but as a lived, evolving process — shaped by memory and movement, relationships and rupture, environment and imagination. In a world marked by constant social, technological, and ecological change, this residency offers space to pause, reflect, and respond through artistic practice.
What is Evolving Identities 2026?
Evolving Identities 2026 is an open, exploratory artist residency that invites creators to reflect on how identity is shaped, unsettled, and reimagined in a world in constant motion.
Rather than offering fixed definitions, the residency opens space for artists to approach identity through their own perspectives — personal and collective, cultural and environmental, embodied and digital. Participants are encouraged to bring their lived experiences, questions, and creative practices into a shared environment of exchange, reflection, and experimentation.
At its heart, this residency values process as much as outcome, offering time to slow down, listen, and explore how identity continues to evolve through place, memory, relationships, and change.
Areas of Inquiry
Artists may engage with the theme through a wide range of approaches. These are offered as points of departure rather than limitations:
Personal and Collective Narratives
Memory, ancestry, language, belonging, and the stories we inherit or resist.
Migration, Movement, and Hybridity
Displacement, diaspora, borders, and the negotiation of multiple cultural identities.
Embodied and Material Identities
The body, gesture, craft, materiality, and the physical presence of self.
Digital and Technological Selves
Online personas, networks, AI, mediation, and the shifting boundaries between the virtual and the real.
Gender, Fluidity, and Intersectionality
Expanding understandings of identity are shaped by gender, race, ability, and social structures.
Ecological and Place-Based Identities
Relationships with land, environment, climate, and more-than-human worlds.
Artistic Practice as Identity-Making
How the act of making itself shapes, questions, or transforms identity.
Residency Experience
Evolving Identities 2026 takes place at Studio 88 Artist Residency, set within the rustic landscape of Doi Saket, Chiang Mai, Thailand — an environment that encourages focus, slowness, and meaningful exchange.
The residency offers:
Dedicated time and space for research and creation
A supportive, interdisciplinary community of artists
Dialogues, informal critiques, and shared reflections
Opportunities for public sharing and engagement
Space for experimentation, collaboration, and process-driven work
Who Should Apply?
This residency is open to artists across all disciplines — visual arts, performance, writing, film, sound, new media, social practice, and interdisciplinary approaches.
We welcome artists at different stages of their practice who are curious, reflective, and open to dialogue, and whose work engages with questions of identity in nuanced, thoughtful, or experimental ways.
Why Evolving Identities?
Identity is not something we arrive at once and for all. It is shaped through encounter, context, and creative practice. Evolving Identities 2026 offers artists a space to pause, reflect, and respond. It allows us to explore who we are, how we change, and what it means to belong in a world in flux.
Residency Period 4 May to 28 June 2026
Closing Date for submissions: 26 February 2026
Application submission is free. Once selected, artists are requested to pay for residency fee.
Residency rate and what is provided are listed on our website.
Studio 88 Artist Residency 