Visual art Curator: Jonny Sopotiuk
July 16 – July 26, 2020
Wicked brings together a multigenerational group of artists living and producing work across Canada and the United States as they explore the body, community, and architecture of homonormativity.
In 2020, we’re learning to live through a new form of containment during a global health pandemic. Our long fight for recognition and the foundations of community infrastructures that we created to sustain us are being fundamentally questioned.
2020 Events
Too Spirited
Indigenous Burlesque | July 17 | 7 pm Embrace your too-muchness with bombastic burlesque brought to you by the badass babes of Virago Nation , Turtle Island’s first all-indigenous burlesque collective. Featuring special guests Monday Blues and Lynx Chase! Whether you’ve seen it before or always wanted, now’s your chance...
Closing Binge | July 26 | 4 PM Get your dress jammies on, grab a drink and binge-watch the entire Queer Arts Festival with us (take it all in!!). Expect surprises and special prizes. ...
Art Show | July 16 -26 From the roots of the Queer Arts Festival, this open visual art show honours our founder, Two-Spirit artist Robbie Hong and 21 years of Pride in Art organizing. This show will launch online on July 16 and run through to July 26. 2020 Artists...
Dance Performance | July 25 | 7 PM | July 26 | 2 PM In his Swan Song, contemporary dance legend Noam Gagnon sashays the fine line between pain and pleasure in a fetishization of something glamorous and beautifully twisted: a monster beautified. Synopsis: This piece is a reflection on...
Lunch Discourse | July 25 | 12 pm Hiromi Goto and Erica Isomura explore the nuances of intergenerational mentorship as queer POC writers. Hiromi Goto , an emigrant from Japan, gratefully resides on the Unceded Musqueam, Skwxwú7mesh, and Tsleil Waututh Territories. She’s the author of many books. Her first graphic...
Drag Performance | July 24 | 7 pm | The QAF proudly welcomes The Darlings — Continental Breakfast, PM, Rose Butch and Maiden China —to the stage, ahem, screen , with a new performance created around the festival theme of ‘wickedness.’ The multidisciplinary, non-binary drag performance collective has been taking...
Speculative Theatre | July 23 | 7 pm | Underground Absolute Fiction is an immersive play-meets-punk-concert, inspired by the apartment theatre of 1980s Poland. It invites audiences into a secret meeting at a post-Communist home. There, they join a queer punk band and Lena, a Polish-Canadian settler. Created by Anais...
Literary Readings | July 22 | 7 pm | A Night of Storytelling is back for its fifth year and once again hosted by the much-beloved Danny Ramadan, this time around as a new online experience. Spend a night in with the talented LGBTQ2+ voices of the CanLit scene. Danny...
| July 18 + July 19 | 7 PM Rupture Probe and Return to Sodom North look at the continuity of themes across the two decades that separate the works. They also illustrate the resilience of shorter experimental forms that emerging queer festivals preferred and rapidly evolving technologies coveted. However,...
Curated by Jonny Sopotiuk | July 16 - 26 | Curator Statement Queer life is a reality of ongoing survival. From government and societal oppression, to family rejection and social isolation our memories and experiences have been defined and shaped by the structures that are designed to contain us. Our...
Curated by Jonny Sopotiuk | July 16 - 26 | Queer life is a reality of ongoing survival. From government and societal oppression, to family rejection and social isolation our memories and experiences have been defined and shaped by the structures that are designed to contain us. Our identities and...