23/12 2025
Open call | Golden Watermelon 10.0 Young Artists Award
The Metamedij Association, in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art of Istria, is announcing a competition for the Golden Watermelon 10.0 Young Artists Award, intended for artists and art collectives working in the field of contemporary art, new media and innovative artistic practices.
The competition and award were launched in 2017 with the aim of encouraging young artists to reflect on contemporary socially relevant topics and to provide support in their professional development through promotion and professional evaluation. The expert jury, consisting of Oleg Šuran (UMAS), Olga Majcen Linn (KONTEJNER), Ketrin Milićević Mijošek (Museum of Contemporary Art of Istria) and Pavle Mijuca (winner of the Golden Watermelon 9.0 award), will select up to ten finalists. Their works will be exhibited at a group exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Istria in Pula from April 17 to May 17, 2026, at the opening of which the winner of the competition will be announced.
In cooperation with the Lapidarium Museum, one of the finalists will also win a special Rigo Gallery Award. Launched at the initiative of the Lapidarium Museum and the Metamedij Association, the award includes the realization of a solo exhibition at the Rigo Gallery during 2026. The winner of the award will be selected by the Lapidarium Museum during the opening of the Golden Watermelon exhibition in Pula.
The tenth edition of the Golden Watermelon Award, under the umbrella theme of “Walking through Liminal Spaces”, examines the evolution of liminality in its physical and metaphorical manifestations – from anthropological rituals of transition and architectural in-between spaces, to contemporary online folklore embodied in genres such as backrooms, vaporwave and dreamcore – with the aim of finding works that, through different media and hybrid processes, map the discordant states of dissociation and presence, and all that elusiveness that hovers on the border between tangible reality and digital echo.
- Competition Theme
Walking through Liminal Spaces
Have you ever found yourself in spaces that exist between the real and the unreal, on the thresholds that divide the known from the unknown, between ‘‘here’’ and ‘‘there’’, or at intersections where the external penetrates the internal? Whether they are the physical spaces of foggy late-night train stations, lonely gas stations, labyrinths of empty hotel corridors, deserted airports that suddenly seem paranormal, or metaphorical places of transitivity and separation. They are simultaneously emptied of life and filled with an eerie sense of presence. When we look at them, the image turns into a grainy, flickering display, and any clear sound is muffled into buzz and noise. Presence in such a space is more reminiscent of playing a video game in the first person than an actual experience. It is in such spaces that intricate and ambivalent emotions are born, oscillating between nostalgia and unease.
At once physical and metaphorical, such liminal spaces are places that mark in-between spaces, thresholds, and places of transitivity. They are places that betray expectations of their actual purpose or context, and even expectations of reality itself. (…) In the last decade, liminal spaces have inspired an aesthetic that inhabits the wasteland of the digital world. (…) These phenomena become a specific Internet folklore shaped by the logic of the platforms on which they originally emerged (4Chan, Reddit, Discord and YouTube) and permeate video games, films, television series, music, literature and visual arts. Just as liminal spaces evoke a sense of disorientation, these multimedia phenomena are ”elusive, complex, difficult to define, … [and] the speed with which they change and evolve makes them impossible to define” (Tanni 2024: 12). The fascination with liminal spaces manifests itself as a collective construction of memories of the pre-Internet era: a romanticized version of the past that younger generations, paradoxically, inhabit as a space of their own nostalgia, even though they have never physically resided in it.
(…) Within these uncertain and changing circumstances, the question arises as to how these changes are reflected on us, what new affective reactions do they provoke? What are the new aesthetic trends and artistic forms that emerge in the context of an increasing presence in the virtual? How to think about these spaces and the emotions associated with them outside the framework of two-dimensional images, in the medium of sound, light, video, movement, process, hybrid combinations of different elements…? In this year’s 10th edition of the Golden Watermelon award, we are looking for anachronistic objects that try to capture memories and emotions on the run, disorienting spaces and nostalgic sounds, chimeras of analogue and digital. We invite you to explore and map pathways, physical or neural, where incompatible states of dissociation and presence coexist, nostalgia for the unlived, incomplete memories and everything that floats between the tangible and intangible. (Marijeta Bradić)
- Proposals and application procedure
The call is intended for artists or art collectives, up to 35 years of age, from the Republic of Croatia, who work at the intersection of art, science and technology, and whose practice is based on research processes, transdisciplinarity and experimentation, with a special emphasis on hybrid forms and new media that redefine the contemporary art space. Completed works created after January 2023 can be submitted to the competition, and the same applicant can send a maximum of two applications.
The winner of the Golden Watermelon Award will win a cash prize of 1,000 euros. All finalists will be provided with travel expenses, accommodation and per diem during the exhibition.
The application should contain:
– name and surname of the author/artistic collective with a list of all members
– contact information (e-mail address and phone number)
– title of the work in Croatian and English
– description of the work/artistic concept in Croatian and English (max. 1 text card, .doc, .docx or .odt format)
– biography of the author in Croatian and English (max. 1 text card, .doc, .docx or .odt format)
– 3 high-resolution photos for the catalogue (JPG format, min. 300 dpi)
– sketches and additional documentation (photographs, recordings, etc.)
– list of necessary equipment for the exhibition
– portfolio/link to the author’s website
– the application must indicate the method of delivering the work to the gallery.
Applications with the indication “Golden Watermelon 10.0” should be sent exclusively to the e-mail address mediterraneafest@gmail.com by March 13, 2026 at 11:59 p.m. Incomplete applications will not be considered. Authors of papers will be notified of the outcome of the competition by e-mail by March 30, 2026.
Udruga Metamedij je korisnik institucionalne podrške Nacionalne zaklade za razvoj civilnoga društva za stabilizaciju i/ili razvoj udruge.
