A unique residency in Athens that supports artistic research, collective reflection, and critical making—without the demand for final works or exhibition pressure.

Process, Not Product: Onassis AiR 2026/27 as a Radical Space for Research, Collaboration, and Situated Reflection – The Onassis AiR 2026/27 Open Call invites thirty international practitioners across disciplines—from visual arts, sound, and dance to writing, film, and curatorial research—to immerse themselves in a ten-week residency that redefines what it means to dwell, think, and create within a shared artistic ecosystem, based in Athens and embedded in the Onassis Culture infrastructure, this residency operates as a laboratory of transdisciplinary encounter where production pressure is suspended in favour of speculative research, critical inquiry, and sustained dialogue, what distinguishes Onassis AiR is not only its material support—enhanced artist fee, housing, research budget, and travel—but its ideological commitment to art as an evolving, processual practice, resisting the demand for performative outputs and instead foregrounding infrastructures of care, listening, and peer exchange, a notable development in the upcoming cycle is the collaboration with the Cavafy Archive, a partnership that opens poetic and archival dimensions for new research trajectories, particularly for those navigating text-based or historical methodologies, simultaneously, the residency expands its material focus via Onassis Ready, integrating crafts, fashion, and applied design into the wider community of AiR, thereby collapsing false binaries between conceptual and embodied practices, a key feature of the programme is the Open Days, where participants share glimpses into their research process rather than finished works, reaffirming that unfinishedness itself can be a rigorous aesthetic form, beyond resources, what truly defines Onassis AiR is its emphasis on collective intelligence, where curated visits, feedback sessions, and co-learning structures generate a plurivocal and politically aware creative environment, this is particularly urgent in a context where precarity and symbolic extraction increasingly dominate the art world; here, the residency responds by fostering a more sustainable, situated, and responsive form of engagement, where the right to opacity and refusal is protected as much as production is supported, thus, the value of Onassis AiR lies not in what is shown, but in what is incubated: ideas that take time, relationships that hold tension, and practices that resist finality.

Ephemeral Encounters and Enduring Resonance: How UJ’s 2026 Arts & Culture Programme Reimagines Temporality and Collective Experience in the Arts

Framed under the theme Ephemeral, the 2026 UJ Arts & Culture Programme emerges as a sensorial palimpsest where performance, visual art, and participatory encounters collide to articulate the fragile beauty of the momentary, aligning with the University of Johannesburg’s commitment to Pan-African excellence, social impact, and creative innovation, this year’s offering presents a curatorial ethos that privileges presence over permanence, creating an aesthetic of transience that resists commodification and instead foregrounds shared, embodied experience, the season unfolds as a dynamic procession of events—from Gregory Maqoma’s diasporic choreography and Bev Butkow’s suspended installations, to the inaugural ARAK Fellowship and risk-aware student theatre by Jade Bowers—that reveal how art dissolves borders while amplifying dialogue, these temporal interventions act as catalysts for reflection: whether in the haunting reverberations of Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph’s Human Rights Oratorio, the spatial poetics of Chronogram, or the spiritual jazz-inflected chants of ESINAM and Sibusile Xaba, each component of the programme enacts ephemerality not as disappearance, but as an imprint, a spectral architecture of thought and feeling that persists beyond the artwork’s physicality, one emblematic case is The Bacchae: An African Choral Ballet, a bold synthesis of classical myth, African cosmology, and choral choreography that exemplifies how transient events can generate sustained transformation across artistic and cultural registers, directed by Jay Pather and scored by Neo Muyanga, the production confronts the viewer with the porous threshold between tradition and experiment, conclusionally, UJ’s 2026 initiative doesn’t merely programme events—it curates moments that matter, asking audiences to embrace the liminality of live art as a generative force, shaping the social imaginary long after lights dim and spaces empty, and in doing so, the institution reinforces its role as a cultural conduit, where temporary works ignite enduring resonance.