The Octopus Programme is a guided research-based educational program that encourages artistic research and production-based collaborations across academies and art institutions, students and professionals, diverse presentation modes, and processes of research and documentation in different geographical regions. While the program functions as a support mechanism for emerging artists, its main objective is to accumulate experience-based collective and creative output by taking geopolitical, social, ecological, and educational urgencies and diversities into consideration.

The program intends to develop and point out new critical perspectives and prominent aspects to process artistic research and practices.

In this respect, by merging the viewpoints of academic entities and contemporary art institutions, along with their different capacities of commitments through curators, facilities, interests, and activities, the program has developed a generative research methodology by creating an autonomous network.

The Octopus is the final exhibition and the most comprehensive iteration of the experimental curatorial and educational path the Octopus Programme has pursued. The exhibition features an accumulation of research and process-based works by its participants as well as corresponding areas of inquiry and interest. The Octopus also features examples from some of the guest lecturers who have left their traces in the program, alongside selected works by associated actors and from the curated archive.

The exhibition not only intends to bridge and acknowledge social and cultural diversities in its targeted geographical regions – Europe, the Mediterranean, and Africa – it also values and connects the diversities between and/or among socio-political realities and perspectives; interdisciplinary approaches; academic and non-academic intellectual models; forms of artistic research and practices; divergent perspectives on artistic production methodologies; individual and community-based approaches; top-down and grass-root organization models; accessed and distributed resources and facilities; strategies of environmental sustainability; artistic challenges and opportunities; different funding possibilities; institutional and alternative curatorial practices; forms of engagement of artists, audiences, institutions and forms of innovative and technology-driven mindsets; and diverse knowledge production models.