Open Call for the Exhibition Secondary Function at London Design Festival 2025

Theme: Secondary Function
Since the 1980s, de-functionalization has emerged across disciplines as a form of resistance against normative systems, with artists often abandoning utility to pursue purely spiritual or conceptual expression. However, unlike other artistic mediums, function maintains a deeper and more enduring bond with applied arts, continually cycling between the centre and the periphery of discourse. Through successive acts of decoding, function has gradually shifted from a question of how something is used to how it organises action, expanding into a broader framework for agency.

This exhibition focuses on the vitality of function in contemporary practice. Function can serve as an active strategy to challenge visual centrism, guiding audiences to perceive works through multiple sensory and spatial dimensions; it can act as a central axis, connecting the viewer with their surrounding environment to co-construct broader narrative fields; it can also serve as an entry point for cultural inquiry—revealing behavioural patterns that reflect deeper questions of culture, relations and material politics.

We invite you to respond to the question: After function withdraws, in what ways does it return?

Deadline: August 10, 2025 (Rolling review – early submission encouraged).

Conditions:
This exhibition welcomes works across a wide range of disciplines, including jewellery, object design, ceramics, painting, photography, wearable art, and interactive installations etc. We are particularly interested in practices that engage with the following directions:
 

• Interaction: Works that provoke specific actions or behaviors during the process of wearing or use.
• Functional elements that are not immediately apparent but emerge gradually through interaction.
• Inventive reimaginings of use, where familiar functions are playfully deconstructed or subtly reoriented.
• Functional logic translated into alternative forms such as metaphor, symbol, or new visual language.

We also welcome works that approach and reimagine function from other, unexpected perspectives.
 
Key Dates:
Application Deadline: August 10, 2025.
Exhibition Dates: September 16 – 21, 2025, 10:30 AM – 6:00 PM.
Private View: September 15, 2025, 6:00 – 8:30 PM.

Shipping Information：
All selected works must arrive at Alsolike Gallery (16 Chance Street, London, UK, E2 7JB) by September 12, 2025. (We strongly recommend that participants based outside the UK arrange for international shipping at least 20 days in advance to ensure timely delivery.)


Venue: Alsolike Gallery，16 Chance Street, London, E2 7JB.
Curators: Xuan Xu, Yating Xie.
Programme Director：Yiru Zhang.
Organiser: Alsolike Gallery.
Academic Support: TaJo Studio.