What does it mean to unfold?

When we set the theme for Unfold, our 2027 open call with Fabrica, we knew it would spark wildly different ideas. Some artists will take it literally: paper, fabric, a crease, a hinge. Others will hear something slower and bigger, like a life changing, a landscape shifting, or a story revealing itself over time.

Both are exactly right.

To get your ideas moving, we’ve pulled together fifteen contemporary artworks that unfold in very different ways. None of them is a template. They’re here to show how wide this theme can stretch, and how many ways in there are.

1. The literal fold

Sometimes the most powerful response is the most physical one.

Tauba Auerbach – Fold paintings
Auerbach creases a raw canvas, sprays it with paint from an angle, then unfolds and stretches it. What’s left is a flat surface that remembers being three-dimensional, a painting that records its own making.

Lygia Clark – Bichos (Critters)
In the 1960s, the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark made hinged metal sculptures that visitors were invited to handle, folding and unfolding them into new forms. The artwork was never fixed. It became something new in every pair of hands.

Wolfgang Tillmans – Lighter and Paper Drop
Tillmans folds, curls and bends photographic paper until the photograph becomes an object. These works are a brilliant reminder that photography doesn’t have to stay flat.

El Anatsui – Behind the Red Moon
Anatsui’s monumental hangings, made from thousands of bottle tops and metal fragments, are folded and draped differently each time they’re installed. His 2023 Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern showed how a work can unfold anew every time it meets a space.

2. Revealing the hidden

Unfolding is also about exposure: opening up what was out of sight.

Rachel Whiteread – House
In 1993, Whiteread cast the inside of a Victorian terrace in East London in concrete, turning private domestic space inside out for everyone to see. It won her the Turner Prize, and it was demolished within months.

Cornelia Parker – Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View
Parker had a garden shed blown up, then suspended the fragments around a single light bulb. A violent instant becomes a slow, frozen revelation, and the shadows unfold across the walls.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude – L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped
By hiding one of the most familiar monuments in the world, the artists made people look at it again. Concealment and unveiling are two halves of the same idea.

3. Time unfolding

Some artworks don’t happen in a moment. They happen over hours, years, even centuries.

Katie Paterson – Future Library
A forest planted in Norway in 2014 will become the paper for an anthology published in 2114. Each year, one author contributes a manuscript that no one will read for a century. It’s an artwork that unfolds across generations.

Jem Finer – Longplayer
At Trinity Buoy Wharf in London, a piece of music began playing at the turn of the millennium, composed to run for a thousand years without repeating. Sound artists, take note.

Christian Marclay – The Clock
A 24-hour montage of thousands of film clips featuring clocks, synchronised to real time. Watching it, you’re aware of every minute unfolding.

Bill Viola – The Greeting
Viola stretched a few seconds of three women meeting into around ten minutes of slow motion. Emotions we’d normally miss in a blink unfold in extraordinary detail.

4. Growth, decay and change

Nature is the original unfolding. These artists let it do some of the work.

Anya Gallaccio – preserve ‘beauty’
Hundreds of red gerberas pressed behind glass and left to wilt and rot over the course of the exhibition. The artwork isn’t the flowers. It’s the change.

Andy Goldsworthy – ephemeral works
Goldsworthy’s leaf, ice and stone works are made to be undone by tide, melt and weather. Each photograph captures a single moment in a process that keeps going long after he walks away.

5. Participation and becoming

Sometimes a work only unfolds when other people get involved.

Yayoi Kusama – The Obliteration Room
A completely white domestic interior. Visitors are handed coloured dot stickers, and over the run of the show the room slowly transforms into an explosion of colour.

Lucy Orta – Refuge Wear
Orta designed garments that unfold into tents and shelters as a response to homelessness. It’s a powerful example of how the theme can carry social urgency.

Do Ho Suh – fabric architecture
Suh recreates places he has lived at full size in translucent fabric. The pieces fold down into suitcases and unfold in each new gallery. They are works about memory, migration and how home travels with us.

Your turn

What links all fifteen works isn’t a medium or a style. It’s that each one is about how something comes to be. That might be a painting that remembers its folds, a room changed by its visitors, or a forest growing into a library.

That’s what we want to see in Unfold. Painters, printmakers, sculptors, ceramicists, photographers, jewellers, filmmakers, sound artists and performers are all welcome, as long as you have a UK connection. Selected works will be exhibited at Fabrica in Brighton from 17 April to 9 May 2027, and every selected artist is automatically considered for our two prizes. Those are the Fabrica + Sussex Contemporary Window Gallery Award and the WeAreSussex Prize.

The theme is a starting point, not a rulebook. Take it somewhere we didn’t expect.

Deadline: 21 February 2027, 11.59pm
Entry: £20 per work, up to three works

Enter Unfold 2027 →

Unfold: 15 Contemporary Artworks to Inspire Your Response