Dear Artists and Designers!

Dead Darlings will stage our second anonymous auction for OBSESSED! Jewellery Festival on 30 November 2023. The auction-performance will serve as a fabulous closing event for the festival, celebrating the theme All Strings Attached! Dead Darlings #17 — All Strings, No Regrets! gives all of you makers a chance to bring forth and highlight an artwork you want to apologise to, not for!

This is an Open Call for your boundary-pushing jewellery and your wearable artworks! We invite you to contribute to our auction with your dead darlings! We aren't asking for your discarded creations, but rather the hidden treasures you may have overlooked.

Perhaps you overlooked their inherent beauty, neglected to find a rightful place for them, or misunderstood your own motives in creating them. Or, gravest of all, failed to envision how they might be desired and cherished by someone else… Here is your chance to make things right!

Use our auction to apologise, reconcile with and embrace the pieces you once abandoned. Contemplate your reasons, and craft an apology text that will be printed in the Dead Darlings #17 catalogue. Help your darlings find the love they always deserved.

Let this auction be a catharsis for you, and a clean slate for your artwork!

All the artworks are auctioned anonymously so the buyer can connect to what they love! Participating artists are listed, but the name is not revealed in relation to the piece until after the sale. *60% of the final selling price goes directly to the maker, with 40% held back to cover production costs.

CLICK HERE TO SUBMIT YOUR PIECE,
DEADLINE: 30 SEPTEMBER 2023

In keeping with the established traditions of both Current Obsession and Dead Darlings, we continue to push boundaries by fostering connections across diverse creative disciplines. We bring together various genres within the realm of jewellery-making and encompass works that may be classified as jewellery, but originate from other fields such as design, fashion, sculpture and beyond.

Dead Darlings is an anonymous art auction initiative established in Amsterdam. Our platform delves into the intricate dynamics of the love triangle involving artists, artworks, and collectors. By blending elements of performance and exhibition, we spotlight artefacts whose value remains enigmatic—these are our dead darlings. This term encapsulates works that, for various reasons, fell through the cracks and have never seen the light of day.

We kickstart our auctions with reasonable starting prices and maintain anonymity between the lot and its creator until after the sale. We re-assess notions of commerce and value, while celebrating each and every artwork that comes under our hammer.