Call for papers

CALL FOR PAPERS:

INDEX JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ART #22

DOSSIER: “Art Today, After the Present”

Crisis of contemporaneity, multiple temporalities, and futures in the plural

Índex Arte Contemporáneo—an academic journal published by the Visual Arts Program at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador—opens its call for submissions for issue 22. The journal aims to disseminate research-based and critical work on the visual arts, with a special emphasis on thought produced from Latin America.

This issue will feature a special thematic dossier titled:

Art Today, After the Present

Crisis of contemporaneity, multiple temporalities, and futures in the plural

Over recent decades, “the contemporary” has become a politics of the now: a regime of visibility and circulation in which the present operates as a privileged horizon. Yet today that present appears exhausted—or even uninhabitable. Everyday experience is shaped by ecological collapse, fragile economies, algorithmic automation, crises of representation, simultaneous wars, and a widespread sense of foreclosed—or at least radically uncertain—futures. Everything happens “now,” but that “now” is not necessarily felt as openness; it is often lived as overload.

This dossier invites authors to rethink contemporary art 50 years later—as a historical period marked by the consolidation of “the contemporary” and its infrastructures—by placing its promises and limits under critical pressure: the plurality of narratives, scenes, and temporalities; the global expansion of institutions and circuits; and the management of difference through visibility criteria that often remain centralized. We are especially interested in how multiplicity is incorporated into the system as “scene,” “case,” or “programmatic diversity,” without necessarily redistributing the power to narrate, legitimize, and circulate.

We propose approaching contemporaneity not as a single shared time, but as a friction of times: an algorithmic present that updates the world at platform speed; a geopolitical present shaped by simultaneous conflicts; a climatic present operating on scales beyond a human lifespan; an economic present made of crises, bubbles, and precarity; and a geological/planetary present indifferent to our narratives. From this vantage point, the dossier asks what aesthetic, political, and institutional forms emerge when the “present” no longer functions as a unit, but as a layer.

Suggested lines (non-exclusive)

  • Exhaustion of the present, crisis of contemporaneity, and crises of futurability.
  • Multiple temporalities: frictions between algorithmic, geopolitical, climatic, economic, and geological scales.
  • Artistic autonomy and new heteronomies (market, platforms, state, cultural industry).
  • Contemporary infrastructures: circulation, hierarchies, translation, curatorial extractivism, and the management of difference.
  • Situated knowledge: disputes over narration, plural art histories, local scenes without folklorization.
  • Art, algorithms, and technical images: automation, AI, data, and the governance of seeing.
  • Non-human temporalities and active materialities: deep time, geology, climate, infrastructures, and objects.
  • Futures in the plural: situated, partial, conflictive futures without teleology.
  • Critiques of biennialization, art fairs, and the market as a dominant apparatus of recognition and circulation in 21st-century cultural capitalism (attention economies, institutional branding, speculation, the precarization of artistic labor, center/periphery inequalities, funding, sponsorship, corporate philanthropy, collecting, and artwashing).

Types of contributions

We welcome research articles, critical essays, case studies, analytically framed interviews, and critical reviews aligned with the dossier’s thematic axis.

In addition to the dossier, submissions are also welcome for other sections under the following general areas

  • Methodologies of contemporary artistic practice
  • Art history
  • Arts management
  • Art criticism
  • Curating
  • Reviews of publications related to the visual arts
  • Reviews of artistic works
  • Art collecting and the art market
  • Art and new media
  • Critical thought related to the visual arts
  • Visual studies

Dates

  • Submission deadline: August 3, 2026
  • Publication date: November 30, 2026

Submission guidelines

  • Submissions must be original and unpublished. Manuscripts under review elsewhere will not be considered, nor will publications derived from previously published theses.
  • Length: 4 to 12 pages.
  • Formatting: Times New Roman 12 pt, 1.5 line spacing. Footnotes in 10 pt.
  • Citations and references must follow APA style.
  • Submissions must be uploaded as two separate files:
    • Manuscript: title in Spanish and English, resumen and abstract (150 words), keywords (5–10), main text, and references.
    • Author information: name, short bio (max. 150 words), institutional affiliation, ORCID iD, academic background, and selected works.
  • Images with credits and cleared rights must be provided in high resolution (300 dpi) and sent separately via WeTransfer or Dropbox.
  • Submissions must be made exclusively through the journal’s Open Journal Systems (OJS) platform.
  • Authors must comply with the editorial policies published at: http://revistaindex.net/index.php/cav/about
  • Please review the submission checklist prior to uploading.

Failure to comply with these guidelines will be grounds for rejection.