How We Programme Outburst Queer Arts Festival
Outburst Queer Arts Festival is a curated week of brilliant new queer ideas in art and culture. Our emphasis is on work that goes beyond identity alone to explore queer ideas and radical imagination and that has a particular resonance with conversations and ideas we need now. The festival flows and changes depending on what’s happening in the world and what’s happening for queer artists, writers and thinkers. The forms and platforms can vary too, with some years being more heavily performance-led and other years focusing more on writing, visual arts, whatever. Our programming is all about risk-taking queer art and how that looks is ever changing.
We cook up a mix of work that we’ve seen and can’t wait to share, along with shows, publications, events and happenings that we’ve commissioned or co-developed in collaboration with queer artists and other co-conspirators at home and beyond. We programme performance, theatre, visual and sensory art, film, literature events, music, participatory events, digital events, markets, talks, panels and much more.
We also curate some events through a focused Open Call, so that the door is open for artists not already on our radar to have the opportunity to share their work within the focus of the programme.
All of the work we showcase in the festival is work that is new to Belfast, keeping it fresh and vital for audiences and relevant to the moment we are in. We love creative ideas that take audiences beyond the obvious and the normative. So we centre intersectional work that challenges our thinking, asks interesting questions, brings us to unexpected spaces and places and reimagines the possibilities of queer art to transform.
Tender transgressions and beautiful disruptions can come in surprising forms, big and small, loud and quiet, and we’re here for it all.
Open Call 2025
We always make sure there’s room for as many hidden treasures and exciting new creative voices as possible in Outburst, so we accept open submissions on a rolling basis between February and May each year.
We have a primary focus on work from queer artists and writers in Northern Ireland / the North Of Ireland / This Place but we programme work from all over the world.
After 18 years of the festival, our 2025 Open Call will focus more on the risk-taking intersectional queer work that challenges and stirs imagination around the personal, political and social challenges being experienced globally by queer people.
We’ll offer more detail on that here when we launch the Open Call in early February.
