New York Experimental Arts Festival
A public platform for experimental performance, moving image, installation, sound, hybrid practice, and site-responsive artistic work.
ELSEHERE’s Experimental Arts Festival is a public-facing program for artists working across live performance, moving image, installation, sound, writing, spatial practice, and interdisciplinary forms.
The festival creates temporary environments where artistic work can unfold through site, duration, atmosphere, audience movement, and public encounter. Rather than treating the festival as a sequence of presentations, ELSEHERE approaches it as a living structure: a place where artists, viewers, materials, and spaces meet under specific conditions.
The program supports work that does not always fit conventional exhibition, theater, screening, or gallery formats. It is designed for artists whose practices move between disciplines, languages, bodies, images, objects, research, and public space.
Program Orientation
Experimental work often needs more than a venue. It needs a frame.
ELSEHERE’s Experimental Arts Festival provides a curatorial structure for practices that require proximity, risk, atmosphere, and attention. The festival is interested in work that asks how performance inhabits space, how images move through bodies, how sound gathers publics, how installations carry memory, and how artistic forms change when they meet a specific site.
We support practices that are process-based, time-based, embodied, research-led, site-responsive, or formally difficult to categorize.
The festival is built around encounter.
What the Festival Supports
01 Live Performance
Performance works that engage body, movement, voice, action, ritual, presence, duration, or choreographic structure.
02 Moving Image
Single-channel video, experimental film, expanded cinema, projection, screen-based work, and moving image practices that relate to space, time, and spectatorship.
03 Installation
Spatial, sculptural, environmental, image-based, sound-based, or site-responsive installations developed in relation to the festival context.
04 Sound & Listening
Sound works, sonic interventions, listening environments, experimental music, voice-based works, and hybrid sonic forms.
05 Hybrid Practice
Works that move between performance, film, writing, installation, digital media, public engagement, research, and experimental formats.
06 Site-Responsive Work
Projects developed in relation to place, architecture, landscape, public space, memory, ecology, or the social conditions of a site.
Curatorial Framework
The festival is shaped by a commitment to artistic forms that remain open.
We are interested in work that resists easy classification, carries unresolved questions, and makes new relations possible between artist, audience, material, and site.
Each edition of the festival develops through a specific curatorial framework. That framework may emerge from a location, a public condition, a theme, a spatial constraint, or an artistic question.
Across editions, ELSEHERE’s Experimental Arts Festival remains committed to:
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experimental artistic practice
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site-responsive production
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public encounter
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cross-disciplinary presentation
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embodied and time-based work
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moving image and spatial practice
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artist-centered documentation
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international and cross-cultural exchange
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long-term visibility beyond the event
Current edition:
Entangled Garden | New York Experimental Arts Festival 2026
Entangled Garden is the 2026 edition of ELSEHERE’s Experimental Arts Festival.
The festival will take place from October 8–11, 2026, at Le Petit Versailles in the Lower East Side of New York City.
Presented by ELSEHERE International Arts Nexus
Hosted at Le Petit Versailles, an Allied Productions program
Location: Lower East Side, New York City
Dates: October 8–11, 2026
This edition unfolds in an outdoor garden environment, bringing together performance, moving image, installation, sound, and site-responsive artistic practices.
The garden is approached not as a decorative setting, but as a living structure of relation: a site of growth, residue, boundary, exposure, intimacy, and public gathering.
Open Call & Artist Applications
ELSEHERE accepts applications for selected festival editions through public open calls.
Open calls may invite artists working in performance, moving image, installation, sound, hybrid practice, and site-responsive forms. Each call includes its own eligibility, deadline, submission requirements, selection criteria, and production framework.
For the current festival application, please visit the official open call page.
Tickets & Visiting
Ticketing and visitor information are announced according to each festival edition.
Some programs may be free and open to the public. Others may require advance registration, timed entry, or ticket reservation depending on venue capacity, production conditions, and public access requirements.
For the current edition, ticket and attendance information will be published closer to the festival dates.
Documentation & Publication
ELSEHERE understands documentation as part of a work’s public life.
Festival projects may be documented through photography, video, interviews, artist statements, program notes, publication materials, or post-event editorial features. Documentation allows a temporary encounter to become part of a longer artistic record.
Selected festival projects may be considered for editorial coverage, artist profiles, interviews, or publication-related materials through ELSEHERE’s broader platform.
Publication and documentation opportunities are selective and do not guarantee publication in STRATUM Journal.
Partners & Hosts
ELSEHERE develops festival editions through partnerships with sites, organizations, artists, curators, and cultural workers.
Each festival context is shaped by the conditions of its host site and the people who make the program possible.
For partnership, hosting, sponsorship, or institutional inquiries, please contact:
Enter the Festival
Artist Development
ELSEHERE also offers artist development, editorial publication support, and international artist support through a separate Artist Development pathway.
For professional support, publication-based visibility, project representation, and international career documentation, visit Artist Development.
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