Open Out 2026: Dreaming in the Dark

Save the dates: 5 – 12 September 2026 ✦

Dreaming in the Dark brings together 18 international artists for this year’s Open Out Festival. Across exhibitions, performances, workshops, excursions, music, conversations, and collective moments, we’ll gather in Tromsø to dream together.

The full programme and participating artists will be revealed over the coming weeks. Follow Open Out on Instagram to get the latest news.

Dreaming in the Dark

Queerness is a state of becoming that sometimes begins in the dark.If darkness is not an absence, could it then be a fertile condition for queer world-making – where bodies drift, shift, dissolve, and reassemble into new constellations of relation? Where magic can occur? Where dreams are the only light you see?

In moments when we are blinded by an experience we have not learned to handle, we listen to our inner voice, and navigate our way through the dark towards the sparks of desire and love. We let go!

Here in Tromsø, the dark season is not only a metaphor but a lived atmosphere, a slow, enveloping teacher that reshapes rhythm, perception, and relation. By embracing this darkness, we learn to listen more closely, to trust non-visual forms of knowing, and to attune to the subtle, queer capacities that emerge when light no longer dictates how we move through the world.

In darkness and in dreams, things are complex, fluid, shape-shifting: places of possibilities, of new beginnings, of odd encounters. What are the dreams you dream in the dark?