Theme for Guest Room

We live in a time when the ground beneath us, political, social, technological, ecological, and even perceptual, feels in constant motion. Borders shift, narratives fracture, and the coordinates through which we orient ourselves are repeatedly unsettled. In such conditions, images often register these transformations before language can fully articulate them. Like seismographs of the present, images capture subtle tremors of displacement: movements of people, identities, landscapes, and systems of meaning.

For this Guest Room, we invite photographic and image-based works that engage with displacement as both a lived experience and an aesthetic condition. Displacement may emerge through migration, body transformation, exile or environmental change, but also through more subtle forms: the dislocation produced by digital mediation, algorithmic vision, and the fragmentation of attention in contemporary image cultures. We are interested in artists who explore how images themselves can shift, circulate, and transform across contexts, platforms, and geographies.

In this sense, displacement is like a method. Images may act simultaneously as anchors and agents of movement: stabilizing fragile memories while opening new perceptual thresholds. They can reveal how identities and territories are continuously renegotiated, and how visual practices might resist fixed narratives by embracing ambiguity, opacity, and multiplicity.

Rather than documenting instability from a distance, the works we seek inhabit it. They explore how images respond to uncertainty, how they translate rupture into form, and how they imagine alternative ways of inhabiting a world defined by movement and transformation. We are particularly drawn to practices that experiment with the image as a site of negotiation: images that fracture, migrate, repeat, or mutate; images that hold together multiple temporalities or perspectives. In this sense, instability becomes a challenge and a space of potential, an opening through which new visual languages and new imaginaries of collective life can emerge.

How can images articulate forms of displacement, migration, technological mediation, ecological change, or emotional estrangement? And how might they also propose new forms of orientation within a constantly moving world?

Why submit to Guest Room?

• Get the chance to be awarded a 250 € Der Greif Guest Room Scholarship
• Be discovered by an expert in contemporary art and photography
• Get published in an online showcase on Der Greif alongside emerging artists from all over the world
• Submit for free or pay a voluntary donation of 10€
• Win a Face-to-Face feedback session with the curators
• Please note: Images which have been selected for a previous Der Greif opportunity are not eligible for re-submission. We want to support the broadest range of photographers possible and therefore encourage you to submit work that has not yet been selected by our past Guest Curators. Any images which do not comply with these terms will be removed from the selection process.

Voluntary donation

Der Greif is a registered non-profit. In these challenging economic times – especially for arts organizations and artists – we are convinced to provide a vital platform for our community. If you're in the position to support this mission, we value your support.

Since launching Guest Room in January 2015, we've invited a broad range of professionals (gallerists, editors, curators) to create opportunities for artists to share their work and get it in front of an international network they might not have access to otherwise. We are more commited than ever to continue this work.

We suggest a voluntary 10€ donation to help us sustain these efforts. If you'd like to support us further, we also accept regular donations via our Raisely page.

If you're unable to contribute financially, please email voucher-guestroom-2@dergreif.org to receive a 50% or 100% discount code. Your artistic and financial contributions enable our continued growth.

About Auronda Scalera

Auronda Scalera is an Artistic Director, curator, and lecturer working at the intersection of contemporary art, digital culture, and critical theory. She is curator of “DIng Yi: Cosmotechnique” at Fondazione Querini Stampalia during the Venice Art Biennale 2026. Together with Dr. Alfredo Cramerotti, she forms a curatorial duo that has advised and curated major international initiatives including Alula Design 2026, Noor Riyadh Festival, Art Dubai Digital, the Lumen Prize for Sotheby’s.

About Alfredo Cramerotti

Dr. Alfredo Cramerotti is a curator, writer, and cultural strategist. He is Director of the Media Majlis Museum at Northwestern University Qatar, President of IKT, the International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art and Chair of Digital Steering Committee of AICA. He has curated more than 90 international exhibitions, biennials, and festivals, and is the author of five books on art, media, and communication.

About Der Greif Guest Room

Guest Room is a monthly online exhibition with open submissions curated in real-time by personalities from the international photography scene. Der Greif is an award-winning organization for contemporary photography. It is print-publication, online-publication, curatorial team and joint project all at once. Der Greif connects the digital and the analogue, exploring and expanding the borders and limits of image-distribution and -reception in the digital era.