Open Call: MONITOR 16
Deadline: November 10, 2025
Calling all artists and filmmakers! SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) is now accepting submissions for MONITOR, its longstanding experimental film and video program. The 16th iteration will be collaboratively curated by Sameena Siddiqui and Vicky Moufawad-Paul.
MONITOR is dedicated to the presentation of experimental short films and videos that initiate dialogue around the shifting nature of politics, economies, and landscapes across the Global South and its diasporas. Since 2005, SAVAC has engaged an international community of artists, curators, and audiences through artists’ works that transcend languages, borders, and political divides.
Artists and filmmakers are invited to submit new, independent, and innovative works that balance aesthetic explorations with critical narratives and subject matters. We encourage artistic approaches that are creative, unconventional, and take risks in their form, content, and style.
Explore past editions of MONITOR.
Selected works will be screened throughout 2026 in Toronto, Canada, and internationally. Artists will receive screening fees based on payment standards set by IMAA (Independent Media Arts Alliance). Due to the high volume of submissions, only those selected will be contacted by February 2026.
ELIGIBILITY GUIDELINES
- Short format works only (under 20 minutes)
- Works must be produced in the last 3 years (in or after 2023)
- All submissions must be digital vimeo, youtube, or google drive links (private/password protected are accepted).
- Each artist may submit up to 2 works.
- Artists living anywhere in the world are welcome to apply.
- First-time directors are welcome.
- Collaborative projects are welcome.
- Films and videos must be independent projects. This means that you, as the artist, retain complete creative and artistic control of the project.
- Artists who screened their work in MONITOR 15 are not eligible to re-apply until MONITOR 17.
HOW TO APPLY
SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS
- Name, address, country, phone, email, website, instagram
- Title of work
- Year of production
- Brief synopsis of the work (75 words max)
- Detailed description of the work (250 words max)
- Brief biography of the artist (200 words max)
- Indication of whether the work has been shown in Toronto
- Video link (with password if applicable)
- Artist CV (3 pages maximum)
- 3-5 High-resolution production stills (jpeg or png, preferably 1920 x 1080 pixels at 72 dpi resolution or larger)
IMPORTANT: Please label your CV and all stills with your last name prior to uploading.
QUESTIONS?
Don’t hesitate to contact Artistic Director Abedar Kamgari at abedar@savac.net.
ABOUT THE CURATORS
Sameena Siddiqui is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory at the University of British Columbia. She has presented her academic research at international conferences, residencies, and has published in peer-reviewed journals. Her scholarly and curatorial work engages with vernacular modernisms, photography and digital cultures, environmental humanities, and the politics of resistance, refusal, and futurity. She examines how visual practices intersect with histories of labour, citizenship, marginalization, erasure, caste, occupation, and settler colonialism. Situated within decolonial feminisms and transnational frameworks, her research foregrounds politically engaged artistic practices that interrogate infrastructures, migration, ownership, difference, belonging, collective care, and radical imaginaries.
Vicky Moufawad-Paul is a Toronto based curator and writer. She is the Director/Curator at A Space Gallery. She situates her work in terms of curatorial praxis which simultaneously offers substantive analyses of world politics and embodies processes of enacting justice. She is interested in the ways that experiences of colonialism and complex diasporic intersectionalities can demonstrate new possibilities for transnational solidarity. Given the significant archival silences on the subject, she is particularly interested in strategies for self-determination, including opacity and refusal.
She has curated exhibitions at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Carlton University Art Gallery, Gallery 101, MAI: Montreal arts interculturels, Latitude 53, Museum London, McIntosh Gallery, Contact Photography Festival, InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre, Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art, A Space Gallery, and 16 Beaver. She has an undergraduate degree from the University of Western Ontario and an MFA in Film and Video from York University. Moufawad-Paul has published texts on several artists including Harun Farocki, James Luna, Emily Jacir, Wafaa Bilal, Taysir Batniji, Paul Dennis Miller, Deirdre Logue, Mohammed Mohsen, Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen, Juan Ortiz-Apuy, Basil AlZeri, Erica Lord, John Halak, Rehab Nazzal, Adam Broomberg, Oliver Chanarin, Akram Zaatari, and Yto Barrada.
Poster design by Miao Xuan Liu with images from works by Ali Satri Efendi, Abeer Khan, Nimisha Srivastava, and Paribartana Mohanty.
