arachnophobia | open call for exhibition design proposals

In summer of 2025, KAJE will host a thematic group exhibition loosely organized around Arachnophobia. The exhibition will feature work by 8 artists whose practices span across media and discipline. This Open Call solicits proposals for an intervening design or system of display for the collected works’ exhibition.

What might such a design or system constitute ?

• A Modular architecture;
• A Hanging device, set of devices, network or Web;
• A Set of gatherings, happenings, or facilitated exchanges;
• A Ritualized instruction;
• A Text;
• A Lighting program;
• An Audio sequence;
• A Mini exhibition, embedded within the greater exhibition;
• A Virtual livestream or online portal;
• A Transitional object, or trompe l’oeil;

Etc...

Utilizing arachnophobia as a frame to understand how artists engage in the construction of phobic objects, bodies, volumes, and mediators, the exhibition will present artworks ranging from sculpture to painting to reference-object to replica, in order to examine the unstable object relations which emerge out of “phobia”—particularly where the art object is concerned.

As a disorder, phobia is defined by the irrational, persistent, and excessive fear of an object or situation. Artists, for their part, often excel at creating irrational, persistent, and excessive objects and situations—but where does fear or anxiety enter the equation? When you look at and actively see something, what is actually taking place? Inspired in part by early experiments in exhibition-making and systems of display, opening the arachnophobic group exhibition to influence beyond KAJE controls builds upon a history of exhibition-making leaving its given frame of representation, toward a collectively constructed limit-case; something else, difficult to define and in need of participatory testing grounds.

Timeline:

Exhibition Install: June 14—25th

Exhibition Opening: June 26th, 2025