About the project
We invite women-identifying artists, designers, architects, urbanists, and creatives based across Africa to submit works to this participatory project exploring how women shape and experience urban life. The project honours women’s everyday forms of knowledge and the many creative ways they imagine, care for, and transform their cities.
Guiding questions
- How do women’s experiences shape urban life?
- How can we represent the various ways of knowing that shape our understanding of space?
- How do we celebrate that knowing?
- How do we recognise the different roles played by different women, not as a monolith, but in their vitality amidst change and flux?
- How might this speak back to the women before us?
- How can we create spaces of rest, reflection, and celebration that are truly inclusive?
Eligibility
- Open to all women-identifying creatives, artists, urbanists, researchers, and architects based on the African continent.
Submission criteria
- Works should be durable and consider their legacy—how they will persist beyond the project and embody the resilience, strength, and vulnerability of women’s informal urban knowledge.
- Contributions may include installations, performances, visual works, or design interventions.
- Preference for works that are easily transportable and consider the carbon footprint.
- Transportation of works covered for artists based in Nigeria, Benin, Togo, and Ghana.
- For submissions from outside Ghana, Nigeria, Togo, or Benin, where we are unable to cover shipping costs, we ask contributors to consider forms such as film, digital prints, music, or other media that can be shared without transport.
- Responses should engage with the rhythms of the city through your own perspective.
- Works can be new or existing. If they remain after the exhibition, artists are asked to think about how they continue to play a role in the space.
- Exhibition spaces are mainly covered by open air, so works must be suitable for outdoor display.
Selected works will be exhibited in open-air public spaces in Accra, Ghana, celebrating women’s diverse ways of knowing and city-making through art, performance, music, design, and participatory practice.
How to submit:
Complete the application form below that includes;
- A brief artist statement (written or video, 150–250 words) describing how your work engages with the project’s themes and legacy
- Visual or descriptive documentation of the current or proposed work
- Technical/logistical requirements (size, materials, display needs)
- A portfolio of previous works
Commissioned artists receive £400 and a two-year membership at Edan Studios & Spaces, Accra.
Incomplete or ineligible applications will not be considered. Unfortunately, we are unable to provide individual feedback on submissions.
Submission Deadline: October 24, 2025
Notification of Selection: November 15, 2025
Project Activation: December 2025 – January 2026
For more information, please visit;
BFA Open Call Information