Call for Proposals: Digital Installation Commission at London Museum

About the commission

This commission will realise a temporary, highly accessible digital installation rooted in lived experience, co-production and disability-led storytelling. The work will explore disabled people’s nightlife in London across the 1930s, 1980s and today, celebrating joy, creativity and the right to be present, whilst also imagining a future where nightlife is accessible to all. 

 The work will centre disabled people as active creators of culture, joy and resistance, rather than as marginal or excluded figures. Drawing on oral histories, archival material and contemporary perspectives, the installation will explore three interconnected moments:

• The 1930s: Ballroom dance, intimacy and interdependence
• The 1980s: Punk, counterculture and alternative nightlife spaces
• The future: A collectively imagined, fully accessible dream nightclub

The final work is expected to take the form of a 12–18 minute digital experience, using film, animation and sound, and designed for presentation within the museum gallery space.

When we talk about access, we are not only talking about ramps, captions or technical adjustments. A lack of access is often rooted in invisibility, misunderstanding and prejudice. In whose voices are heard, whose experiences are centred, and whose needs are considered from the outset. For disabled, deaf and neurodivergent people, barriers are frequently cultural and attitudinal as well as physical or digital. Shaped by assumptions about who spaces are for and who they are not.

This commission invites artists to think expansively about access in all its forms. We are interested in proposals that respond to the realities of the site and its constraints, while also questioning how access can be reimagined, negotiated or made visible. This might include (but is not limited to) physical access, sensory access, digital access, interpretive access, and the emotional or social experience of navigating cultural spaces. We recognise the scale of this challenge and are keen to support ambitious, thoughtful approaches that acknowledge both the limits and the possibilities of the space.