During our Open Call this year, we received over 7000 applications and were completely overwhelmed by all the amazing artists, who took part. Today we are very pleased to announce this years' Open Call Winner Damien Cifelli (1991, UK).

Damien Cifelli is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist from Edinburgh, now based in London. His work explores a fictitious land named Tarogramma.

Inspired by personal histories, the creativity of the diaspora, ancestral stories, and recent collective experiences, he has built a detailed culture with its own aesthetic, way of living, and understanding of the world; one that is at once alien, and eerily similar to our own.

Damien Cifelli has exhibited internationally and was shortlisted for the East London Art Prize 2023, UK New Artists Award 2022 and Delphian Open Call 2022. He has upcoming exhibitions at Whitechapel Gallery, Union Gallery and Moosey Gallery.

“I use fictional anthropology, through storytelling, to examine the idea of searching – the impulse we all feel to look beyond what we know.

Do we, by virtue of looking for an alternative, critique the present? And by creating a fictional world, can we hold up a mirror to ourselves? Inspired by personal histories, the creativity of the diaspora, ancestral stories, and recent collective experiences, I have created a world distilled down into the simplest necessities – human connection and a sense of community. Values that have become infinitely more important in recent times. Tarogramma is a vessel for all these ideas.” Damien Cifelli