Category: 2022 Exhibitions + Events
Complete listings of exhibitions and upcoming events brought to you by the Queer Arts Festival.
Jun 19 & 26 | 2pm
Queer Arts Festival partners with Cross Cultural Walking Tours in celebration of Pride Month for two Cross Cultural Queer & Trans Walking Tours! Cross Cultural Walking Tours are ‘queering’ their 2.5 hour multi-guided tours to build awareness of the contributions of Indigenous and early immigrants in the past, bridging communities and cultures around the city now, all through a diverse 2SLGBTQSIA+ lens! This tour starts with a walkthrough of Queer Arts Festival headquarters at Sun Wah Centre, led by QAF Artistic Director Mark Takeshi McGregor, right in the midst of QAF 2022: Hauntings!
Find out more on Facebook and Instagram or visit www.crossculturaltours.ca
Stops on this tour include:
- Queer Arts Festival
- Massy Books
- Creating Accessible Neighbourhood
- JQT Vancouver
- Vancouver Japanese Language School & Japanese Hall
- Sher Vancouver
- Forbidden Vancouver’s The Really Gay History Tour
- Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden (walking tour ticket includes free admission to the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden.)
- And diverse 2SLGBTQIA+ community voices!
Tours take place on the unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and sə̓lílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.
Location: Tours will start in Chinatown and end in Chinatown. Participants will receive the exact starting location upon registration.
Fri Jul 8 | 7pm
Sun Wah Centre, 2nd Floor — 268 Keefer St.
Join us for the festival closing party at the Sun Wah Centre: three glorious floors of art, plus music and performances by the Queens, Kings, and Things of the House of Rice, including the fabulous Shay Dior and Haina from China!
A night of literary readings
Wed Jul 6 | 7pm
Sun Wah Centre, 2nd Floor – 268 Keefer St.
Berend McKenzie, Curator
This year our artists will present works that inspire, provoke, and titilate while exploring the theme, the Masc & Femme We Wear: what are the costs of masking or revealing one’s inner self under the glaring stage lights of colonialist supremacy? How do the expectations of a salacious supremacist gaze fit, chafe, bind, haunt or even unravel the BIPOC queer body and spirit? How is the BIPOC queer body eroticized and fetishized?
Berend McKenzie (he/she/they interchangeably) is an award-winning playwright, actor, producer, screenwriter, and published author living on Treaty 6 land otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta. Berend is best known for his ground-breaking, Jessie Richardson Award nominated one-person show NGGRFG. He has worked with Oscar-winning actresses Halle Berry and Angelina Jolie. Berend is currently writing his first auto-fiction novel, Adopted. In October 2021, Berend’s short story Hockey Night in Canada was published in the anthology Between Certain Death and A Possible Future: Queer Writing in Growing up with the AIDS Crisis (Arsenal Pulp Press) and has just completed writing their first TV pilot under option with Warner Media.
Sat Jul 2 | 3pm
Followed by an opening reception:
Sat Jul 2 | 5pm
Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art – Unit 205, 268 Keefer St.
Adwait Singh, Curator. SD Holman, Visual Art Exhibition Creative Director.
Our curated visual art exhibition, Vanishing Act, becomes fully realized and fully materialized on Jul 2, when Centre A opens its doors as our festival partner. We’re celebrating our complete complement of curated artists with a building-wide tour of the entire exhibition led by the exhibition’s Curator, Adwait Singh, Visual Art Exhibition Creative Director, SD Holman, and visiting guest artists. Join us as we tour the multiple rooms that make up our most ambitious curated visual art show yet!
Featured Artists:
Aryakrishnan Ramakrishnan
Fazal Rizvi
Omer Wasim
Renate Lorenz & Pauline Boudry
Shahana Rajani
Syma Tariq
This event is ASL interpreted.
Tue Jun 28 | 7pm
Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre Performance Centre – 181 Roundhouse Mews
Gabriel Dharmoo is a music composer and experimental vocalist. Bijuriya is a drag artist engaging with South Asian culture. Gabriel values innovation and risk taking as he navigates Eurocentric artistic scenes. On social media, Bijuriya lip-syncs her way into the hearts of brown queers. Both of them have marginal practices but they have very different audiences. But Gabriel and Bijuriya are one person – and it’s time to bring them together on one stage. Code-switching between drag performance, original songs, experimental sound design and the porosity between singing and lip-syncing, this piece celebrates the artist’s brownness through an array of unexpected talents. A quirky yet vulnerable exploration of their inadequacy to fully represent the subcultures they seek to embrace.
Concept and performance: Gabriel Dharmoo (Bijuriya)
Technical Direction and Light Design: Jon Cleveland
Assistant to Light Design and to Tech Direction: Michael Tonus
Sound Design: Gabriel Dharmoo
Original songs: Bijuriya and Gabriel Ledoux
Voice, cello, steel pan and harmonium: Bijuriya
Electric guitar: Gabriel Ledoux
Additional vocals: Vidita Kanniks
Costumes: Bijuriya, Julie Pichette, Angela Rassenti
Wigs: Heaven Genderfck, Keith Fernandez
Sets accessories: Bijuriya
Sun Jun 26 | 7pm
Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre Performance Centre – 181 Roundhouse Mews
CS Fergusson-Vaux & Ben Siegl, Curators
Did you hear that sound? What could it be? A monster, a masked assailant, a man-eating shark, a spectral haunting tethered to our plane, neither alive nor dead until suddenly…! The jump scare—a mirror, a blade, a bloodied hand on your shoulder…
The horror film is a ripe framework for queer storytelling; a tense and violent confrontation with the unknown leaves you questioning your safety while inextricably inviting an experience that is both courageous and pleasurable. A haven of expressive catharsis, queer horror offers illusionary renderings of modern fears that give room to pick apart our monsters. The malevolence witnessed in the theatre is complex and personal, reminders of a history tucked under beds and hidden inside of closets—a lot of these monsters are our former roommates. Afterall, “…if something is both queer and gothic, look under the surface to disinter the insidious trauma buried there.” (Lauren Westengard)
“Reel Eerie” showcases filmmakers who have bravely picked-up a shovel and started to dig. Sifting through everything the genre has to offer—from the delightfully campy to the existentially terrifying—the films illustrate that our “real” journey from danger is always made in the hopes of heading towards liberation. Not all of us arrive, but we all do try.
This event is ASL interpreted.
Featuring Films by:
Jonathan Wysocki
Mary Galloway
Assistant Curator Benjamin Siegl is an artist, administrator and occasional curator hailing from the great state of Florida. Born in Philadelphia, he holds a BFA from Florida State University (2011) and a MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2017) and currently resides on the unceded Coast Salish territories of Vancouver, BC. His interests include experimental animation and painting, and he is currently collaborating on a project with a PhD of molecular biology exploring the intersections of art and science.
Associate Artistic Director CS Fergusson-Vaux is a Black Carib Immigrant Artivist, and Historian with a fervent belief in decolonizing our community, encouraging and aiding in bold cultural endeavours, and constructing an ethical and inclusive artistic legacy. She uses Performative History, Transnational Studies, and JEDI based engagement to facilitate just artistic exchange between newly arrived diasporic and local queer commuities. She is currently pursuing studies in Social and Environmental Arts Practice.
Fri Jun 24 | 7:30pm
Performance Works, Granville Island – 1218 Cartwright St.
Queer Arts Festival proudly partners with Coastal Jazz and Blues Society to bring you a night of stunning R&B vocal artistry: Adria Kain and Janette King. This special event is part of the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival, taking place at Performance Works on Granville Island.
**Please note that tickets to this event are not included in QAF’s festival pass, and tickets must be purchased through Coastal Jazz.
Adria Kain
Sharing stories of ardour, resilience, and self-actualization, Adria Kain’s voice, at once powerful and restrained, is a balm for times of tumult and noise. Chronicling a range of experiences, from the palliative effects of the natural world to embracing her identity as a queer Black woman, Adria’s new album When Flowers Bloom reminds us what it’s like to fall in love for the first time—or to discover an artist whose music can pierce your soul.
Janette King
Through the prism of alternative R&B, house, and pop, Caribbean-Canadian vocalist/producer/multi-instrumentalist Janette King’s What We Lost unpacks the complexities of grief with a wisdom you wouldn’t wish on someone so young. It’s a statement that — like contemporaries Victoria Monét and Snoh Aalegra — fuses deeply personal assessments of life with glass-half-full soundscapes that “ought to place her right near the top of the list of this country’s up-and-coming R&B artists” – Exclaim!
Presented in association with Coastal Jazz and Blues Society
Now With Me
Thu Jun 23 | 7pm
Sat Jun 25 | 2pm
Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre Performance Centre – 181 Roundhouse Mews
A comedy show. A protest. A cabaret. Winner of the 2020 Vancouver Fringe New Play Prize, Catalina La O explores the life of khattieQ and Puerto Rican singing legends Myrta Silva and Ruth Fernández. The ravages of a storm have forced Catalina La O to take shelter in an abandoned television studio. None of her live audience has arrived, but she broadcasts her one-woman show anyway to the millions of viewers she hopes are watching. Created by the duo jk jk (khattieQ, musician/performer; Jenny Larson-Quiñones, director/writer), Catalina La O is a piece for queer communities, a piece for colonized bodies, a piece for Puerto Rico, and a piece for anyone who has experienced heartbreak.
“Catalina La O gives voice to […] untold Latinx women’s stories, and to their struggle and resilience.” – Stir Vancouver
This event is ASL interpreted.
Read the press release for Catalina La O Presenta: Now With Me – English version / Versión en Español
Una payasa. Una protesta. Un cabaret. Ganadora del Premio de Mejor Obra Nueva en el Festival Fringe de Vancouver 2020, Catalina La O explora la vida de khattieQ y de las cantantes legendarias de Puerto Rico, Myrta Silva y Ruth Fernandez. Los estragos de una tormenta han forzado a Catalina a refugiarse en un estudio de television abandonado. La audiencia en vivo no ha llegado así que Catalina decide transmitir el show a los millones de espectadores que, ella espera, estén viendo el show por televisión.
Creada por el duo jkjk (Jenny Larson-Quiñones directora/escritora y khattieQ músicx/ejecutante), Catalina La O es una obra para las comunidades queer. Esta pieza es para los cuerpos colonizados, para Puerto Rico, para todas las personas que conocen la angustia.
Este evento va a ser interpretado en ASL.
Productor: From The Corner Productions
Co-presentador: Rumble Theatre
Una produccion asociada de frank theatre company y Neworld Theatre
jk jk
jk jk es Arte de la Performance creada por khattieQ(músicx/ejecutante) y Jenny Larson-Quiñones(directora/guionista). La pareja crea arte de performance queer ideado en colaboración, para magnificar las historias de los marginados y perturbar el status quo.
Catalina La O presenta Ahora Conmigo fue desarrollada con la ayuda de Playwrights Theatre Centre y la dramaturgia de Joanna Garfinkel y el apoyo creativo de Adrienne Dawes.
Presenting Partner:
Presenting Partner:
Performer: khattieQ
Playwright and Director: Jenny Larson-Quiñones
Producer: Shanae Sodhi
Associate Producer: Anahita Monfared
Composer: Anton Berrios
Sound Design: Erika Champion
Lighting Designer: Abby Levis
Set Designer: Kimira Reddy
Costume Design: Michelle Thorne
Stage Manager: Katie Voravong
Assistant Stage Manager: Rachel Brew
Production Manager: Jasmin Sandhu
Technical Manager: Victoria Bell
Catalina La O presenta: Now With Me was developed with Playwrights Theatre Centre and has received dramaturgy from Joanna Garfinkel, and creative support from Adrienne Dawes and Neworld Theatre. Produced with support from Canada Council for the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and Canadian Heritage
jk jk
jk jk is performance art created by khattieQ (musician/performer) and Jenny Larson-Quiñones (director/writer). The couple creates collaboratively-devised queer performance art to magnify stories of the disenfranchised and disrupt the status quo.
Jun 20 – Jul 8
Exhibition open Wed thru Sat, 12 – 6pm
The James Black Gallery – 144 E 6th Ave.
Opening Reception: Mon Jun 20, 7pm
Long regarded as the bedrock of our Festival, the Pride in Art Community Show honours the legacy of founder, activist, and Two-Spirit artist Robbie Hong. This year we’ve teamed up with our queer partner-in-crime, The James Black Gallery, to showcase the audacious artwork of our local 2SLGBTQIA+ communities. Come see what haunts the artists in our midst …
Featured Artists:
Darius Kian
Holly Steele
Israel Aguayo
Juno
Kali Fish
Katharine Hoehn
Kwiigay + Paperwave
Nicholas Frenette
Nicole Melnicky
Steven Broome
Curated Visual Art Exhibition
Jun 18 – Jul 8
Wed thru Sat, 12 – 6pm
Sun Wah Centre 3rd Floor, 4th Floor – 268 Keefer St.
Adwait Singh, Curator
SD Holman, Visual Art Exhibition Creative Director
Vanishing Act at Centre A:
Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
Sat Jul 2
Sun Wah Centre 2nd Floor – Unit 205, 268 Keefer St.
Visual Art Tour | 3pm
Reception | 5pm
Sun Wah Centre | | Free
Featuring nearly 20 artists from around the world, Vanishing Act is a survey of queer artistic practices from the Global South – South Asia, Africa, the Middle East and their diasporas. Adwait Singh’s curation asks viewers to “behold the hulking vessel of modernity, where the only hope for a future is a ghostly one, the only inheritance a poisoned gift.” Singh and Holman ask us to face our own Frankensteins, in a manner that queers have long been wont, haunted as we are by spectral toxicities.
Our Vanishing Act Curated Visual Art Exhibition becomes fully realized, fully materialized on July 2, when Centre A opens its doors as our festival partner and we unveil the extension to this exhibition. We’re celebrating our complete complement of curated artists with a building-wide tour led by Curator, Adwait Singh, Visual Art Exhibition Creative Director, SD Holman, and visiting guest artists. We then return to Centre A for a 5pm reception – come raise a glass to our most ambitious Curated Visual Art Exhibition ever!
Read the press release for curated visual art show, Vanishing Act.
Adwait Singh is an independent curator and theorist based out of New Delhi. Their works frequently weave in and out of areas of inquiry such as subjectivity formation, gender and sexuality, posthumanism, contemporary technogenesis and ecofeminism. Shortly after completing their Master’s at Goldsmiths, they seized the opportunity to be a part of the Students’ Biennale 2016 and have since facilitated different art projects and workshops for/with young artistic practitioners across the country for various non-profit organisations. Recent curations include ‘Mutarerium’ at the Mumbai Art Room that questions the terminology of the Anthropocene based on three more-than-human evolutionary timelines (Mumbai, 2019) and ‘Caressing History’ — a group show investigating the possibility of a body-based historiography for Prameya Art Foundation (New Delhi, 2018). They have been appointed as the curator of the 5th edition of the Mardin Biennial (2020).
As an art writer Adwait has been devoting his energies documenting and theorising independent exhibitions and alternative art practices.
SD Holman (born 1963, Hollywood, California) is an award-winning artist and curator whose work has toured internationally. An ECUAD graduate in 1990, Holman was picked up by the Vancouver Association for Non-commercial Culture (the NON) right out of art school. Holman was appointed Artistic Director of Pride in Art in 2008 and spearheaded the founding of the Queer Arts Festival, now recognized among the top 2 of its kind worldwide, and SUM, Canada’s only queer-mandated transdisciplinary gallery. Holman has programmed artists notably including Kent Monkman, Cris Derksen, Jeremy Dutcher, Paul Wong, Angela Grossmann and Dana Claxton. A few Curatorial highlights include TRIGGER, the 25th anniversary exhibition for Kiss & Tell notorious Drawing the Line project, Adrian Stimson’s solo show Naked Napi, and Paul Wong’s monumental multi-curator Through the Trapdoor underground storage locker exhibition. Some of SD Holman’s other experience running art spaces included founding and running Studio Q the notorious Art Salon in Vancouver’s DTES Chinatown as noted in Secrets of the City 1st edition.
A laureate of the YWCA Women of Distinction Award, one of Canada’s most prestigious awards, Holman is known for engagement with themes of sex, death and identity. Holman’s work has exhibited at Wellesley College, the Advocate Gallery (Los Angeles), the Soady-Campbell Gallery (New York), the San Francisco Public Library, On Main Gallery, The Helen Pitt International Gallery, Charles H. Scott, Exposure, Gallery Gachet, the Roundhouse, Vancouver East Cultural Centre, Artropolis, and Fotobase Galleries (Vancouver). Holman’s portrait project BUTCH: Not like the other girls toured North America and is in its second print edition, published by Caitlin Press, Dagger Editions.
Featured Artists:
Aryakrishnan Ramakrishnan
Fazal Rizvi
Omer Wasim
Renate Lorenz & Pauline Boudry
Shahana Rajani
Syma Tariq
A partnership with Centre A, On Main Gallery, and Griffin Art Projects.
Sat Jun 18 | 7pm
Sun Wah Centre Rooftop – 268 Keefer St.
We’re back! What better way to kick off QAF 2022 than from the rooftop of our Chinatown digs? Stunning views, phenomenal performances, delicious food and drink, and the launch of Vanishing Act, our curated visual art exhibition curated by Adwait Singh and directed by SD Holman. Check out the exhibition on the 3rd and 4th floors of the Sun Wah Centre, then head up to the rooftop for beats provided by DJ KOTA and special performances curated by Full Circle: First Nations Performance! It’s art. It’s conviviality. And it’s damned queer.
This event is ASL Interpreted.
DJ KOTA is a trans/2s Kanyen’kehá:ka DJ and event coordinator currently living in so-called Vancouver. They’ve been co-producing events and DJing since 2018, with a focus on creating safer night life spaces for QTBIPOC event goers. Driven by their passion for music and community, they hope to contribute to the production of nightlife events that centres and gives platform to Indigiqueer brilliance and joy.
Sun Oct 24 | 5pm
Transdisciplinary music performance | Mountain View Cemetery
Rising from the ashes of this summer’s fire ban, QAF and Full Circle: First Nations Performance will reignite our Piano Burning event on Sunday, October 24 at Mountain View Cemetery. Curated by SD Holman and Margo Kane, Annea Lockwood’s infamous work — where QAF veteran Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa performs a piano as it burns to ashes — is re-envisioned through the lens of historically banned First Nations fire ceremonies and contemporary global warming of unprecedented levels.
Margo Kane and Full Circle: First Nations Performance ground this event with cultural knowledge and a focus on Two-Spirit artists: Sempúlyan, who will speak about the spiritual role of fire to communicate with ancestors; Russell Wallace, who has composed a new piece for the occasion; designer Evan Ducharme, who created Iwaasa’s fire-proof ball gown; and Squamish Nation councillor Orene Askew (aka DJ O Show), who will set the piano alight.
Bring a chair, bring a blanket, and dress for the weather!
Watch artists Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa & Evan Ducharme talk about their collaboration in Piano Burning, from our QAF 2021 interview series Studio (ob)Sessions:
Featured artists:
Russell Wallace
Orene Askew
Evan Ducharme
Sempúlyan
Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa
Eowynn Enquist
This event was postponed from its original date of Aug 8, 2021.
View Statement from theArtistic Director here
it’s not easy being green
Jul 24 – Aug 13, 2021
QAF shows artists upcycling & recycling apocalyptic fear & dread into art & social change. Green symbolizes not only our relationship to each other & the lands we occupy, but also difference & marginalization, exemplified by popular culture green underdogs Elphaba the Wicked Witch of the West & Rainbow Connection, Kermit the Frog. It’s not easy being green, fighting for a world that consistently rejects us. With imminent climate catastrophe upon us, we witness the world grappling with the end times, but when were the queered privy to life outside the apocalypse?
Green is the complex terrain of extended kinship ties of Indigiqueer/two-spirit and queer settlers. Green spectrals haunt the hyphened margins of the subaltern; enduring perpetually frequent gaslighting(s) of post-traumatic settler-colonial and concurrent disorders. Together/apart WE endure our own private apocalyptics. Cataclysmic temporal end-points that exist as seemingly fixed and an unavoidable global terminus – from which Indigiqueer/queer resurgence erupts relentlessly into the ongoing colonial.
QAF shows artists cast as see-ers/oracles/alchemists upcycling/rebranding/reclaiming/transgressing/transforming apocalyptic visions towards queer utopic landscapes, transmuting fear, dread and a collective broken heart of forced disslocations with departures and arrivals, using art as transformative praxis and practice towards social and spiritual metamorphoses.
QAF 2021 Dispersed: it’s not easy being green runs 3 weeks from your computer, our home base, the Sun Wah Centre in Vancouver’s historic Chinatown, and Vancouver’s only cemetery, Mountain View Cemetery.
When green is all there is to be
It could make you wonder why,
but why wonder?
– Kermit the Frog
Buy festival PASS here:
2021 EVENTS AT A GLANCE
ArtParty!
Sat Jul 24, 7-10pm
Festival Opening | SUM & Sun Wah 268 Keefer
QAF’s Gala opening party: With music, dazzling views, and art on multiple levels of the Sun Wah Centre to explore, we’re launching the Dispersed QAF in champagne style (have a glass or two or a nibble or three on us) with DJ O Show!
it’s not easy being green: Curated Visual Art Exhibition and Tour
Sat Jul 24 – Fri Aug 13, from 12 – 6pm
Visual Art | SUM & Sun Wah 268 Keefer Lower Ground
Jeffrey McNeil-Seymour and SD Holman curate artists who transmute our collective broken heart of forced dislocations with departures and arrivals, using art as transformative praxis and practice towards social and spiritual metamorphoses.
Tue Jul 27, 5pm
Visual Art Tour | SUM & Sun Wah 268 Keefer
Come together for our Visual Art Tour with the curators Jeffrey McNeil-Seymour and SD Holman, guest artists, and a gallery of intimate friends old and new.
Language as a Virus: Queer Isolation Stories
Sat Jul 24 – Fri Aug 13
Sonic Installation | around False Creek & Online
An interactive audio/radio/networked soundwork from Bobbi Kozinuk that invites the user to explore themes around the COVID-19 pandemic and its effect on queer and diverse communities. Featuring Jae Lew.
Language as a Virus: The Tour
Mon Jul 26, 5pm
Audio Art Tour | Creek Side CC (TBC) False Creek
Take a stroll or a bike ride along False Creek and tune in to WENR 88.9FM Isolation Radio with your host Bobbi Kozinuk and explore her multi-layered work, Language as a Virus: Queer Isolation Stories.
Studio (ob)Sessions
Mon July 26 – throughout festival
Digital Discourse | Online
In the connective void that has been this pandemic pause, QAF takes you on a few house calls. We visit with several festival artists in their creation spaces, a digital dialogue to allow a connection from the artist in their corner of space to you and where you call your place.
Screen Greenery
Sat Jul 31, 9pm
Media Art Screening | SUM & Sun Wah 268 Keefer Rooftop
Curated by Fergie and Ben! Rooftop screening of very queer and rather green short films.
Queerotica
Mon Aug 2, 8pm | Literary Readings | SUM & Sun Wah 268 Keefer Rooftop & Online
Curated by Josie Boyce, slip into something a little more comfortable and enjoy readings by Vancouverite writers.
Attend in person or at home via streaming.
Ceremony for Rebel Spirits – Onibana Taiko and Alvin Erasga Tolentino
Sat Aug 7, 8pm
Dance and Musical Performance | Mountain View Cemetery
*NEW* ONLINE | Tue Aug 10 | 24 hours
When Japanese folk tradition meets punk, audience members are invited to commune with the ancestors via Obon dance, song, sensu (fan) cheerleading, fue, shamisen and kick-ass taiko.
Piano Burning
*POSTPONED* Sun Aug 8, 8pm
Performance Art | Mountain View Cemetery & Online
With Full Circle First Nations Performance, we build on Annea Lockwood’s conceptual classic music composition with a new commission by Lil’wat composer Russell Wallace, a fireproof ball gown created by Métis designer Evan Ducharme, and a piano on fire played by Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa.
Attend in person or at home via streaming.
Glitter is Forever
Fri Aug 13, 7-10pm
Closing | SUM & Sun Wah 268 Keefer Rooftop
Join us for the festival closing with DJ O Show and your last chance to see all the art @ QAF 2021 with us at the Sun Wah Centre, from the basement, to the SUM gallery, to the rooftop (take it all in!! the art, the views!!).
SATELLITE ACADEMY : Workshops, Community, Discourse +
Multidisciplinary outreach and community programming rooted in the premise that 2SLGBTQ+ lives are relevant and universal as artistic inspirations. Title inspired by writer Sarah Schulman’s Satellite Academy
Kindred Spirits
Sat Jul 24 – Fri Aug 13
Community Visual Art | Online
The digital culmination of the Kindred Spirits digital artist residency run by and for 2Spirit and Indigiqueer artists. Guided by Faculty members Dayna Danger, DJ O Show, Raven Davis and Art Auntie Shane Sable, this digital exhibition focuses on re-storying 2Spirit identities and futures through community connection and self-portraiture beyond colonial constructs.
Pride in Art Community Show
Sat Jul 24 – Fri Aug 13, from 12 – 6pm
Visual Art | SUM & Sun Wah 268 Keefer
The community show honours Pride in Art founder, activist, and Two-Spirit artist Robbie Hong’s legacy with an open community exhibition. This year, we’re throwing what was once refused up on our walls. Join community artists in a Salon des Refusés (or perhaps Recyclés) celebrating works that were previously censored or rejected.
Pillows for the Pandemic
Wed Jul 28, 7:30pm
Workshop | SUM gallery or Online
Falak Vasa leads us in a pillow-making workshop, based off of their own series of pillows created during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic offering small controllable comforts.
Gathering of Wishes and 1000 Paper Butterflies
Wed Aug 4, 6pm | Workshop | SUM gallery or Online
Naoko Fukumaru and Eva Wong in Phase 1 of Mass Reincarnation of Wish Fragments 願片大量転生 (Ganhen Tairyou Tensei), where participants create origami and utilize the ink bleeding process to create a butterfly with their own unique patterns and colours.
Queerer than Queer: Lessons from Nonduality for Deep Planetary Healing
Thu Aug 5 & Fri Aug 6, 7pm | Workshop | SUM gallery or Online
Is the universe queerer than we can suppose? From the foot of the Himalayas in Himachal Pradesh, Tejal Shah will guide us through this two-part interactive workshop that explores the fine line between illusions and reality. We will explore the possible impact an embodied understanding of nonduality can have on our affective world and on our relationships with ‘others’.
Sat Jul 24 – Fri Aug 13, from 12 – 6pm
Visual Art Exhibition | Sun Wah 268 Keefer, Lower Ground Floor
Featured Artists:
Beric Manywounds
Blake Angeconeb
Chad Baba
Duane Isaac
Falak Vasa
Grace House
Ho Tam
Isaac Murdoch
Jay Pahre
Kali Spitzer
Katherine Atkins
Kathleen Ross
Manuel Axel Strain
Oluseye
pablo muñoz
The exhibition is open to the public and free to view on the Lower Ground Floor of the Sun Wah Centre for the duration of the festival, open Tue – Sat from 12 – 6pm.
Green. Ascribed with multiplicities such as spring’s cyclical lush green rematriation: growth, hope, vitality, balance – health … to spectrums of radioactive and toxic neons … to pestilent dark greens symbolizing mutation, jealousy, greed and wealth. Green inhabits interconnectedness, relationship with the Other, the seen and unseen, as well as the very lands and waters the West — WE — continue to occupy. Green maturates deviance, neuro-divergence, epoch and paranormality.
Strange pop-cultural oddities/underdog/anti-heroes emerge from fantastically unconventional, metaphorical trappings of the colour green: Elphaba the Wicked Witch of the West; Rainbow Connection Kermit the Frog; Joaquin Phoenix’s invocation of Arthur Fleck’s becomings into The Joker; The Mandalorian’s Grogu (Baby Yoda) taking the visual lexicon by storm — It’s not easy being Green.
Was there a time of Utopic Queer being and doing? What are the implications of being privy to pre-apocalypto hauntings? Post-apocalyptic expectations with an evidence base indicating we already have arrived in the end-time — we all have diverse ancestries of forced migration and forced dislocation/relocations along linear entry points, we remain and WE are/can/could still be vanished at any given moment.
Green is linked to power. The currency of Green has the power to legally mark action and activism(s) as terrorism. Settler Environmental ally/accomplices are marked deviant not only for their vote, but akin to Canadian News media’s necropolitical castings of Indigenous land and water protectors as violent. As protester.
We witness the world grappling with end-time realities, seemingly surreal and relentlessly coming into view, as we fight for a world yet to be realized, waiting to be seen — and by one that consistently rejects WE. Green, in its final transformation, exists as representing the supernatural, the great mystery — time and power intertwined. An apocalyptic green glows lasciviously as it courts both eschatological time (Philosopher Byung-Chul Hans’ naming of an apocalyptic/temporal end point) and the status quo’s living in romantic despair that the end of the world in which the existing exalted beings are not free subjects of apocalypticism(s).
Green is the complex terrain of extended kinship ties between Indigiqueer/two-spirit and queer settlers. Green spectrals haunt the hyphenated margins of the subaltern; enduring perpetually frequent gaslighting of post-traumatic settler-colonial and concurrent disorders. Together/apart WE endure our own private apocalyptics. Cataclysmic temporal end-points that exist as seemingly fixed and an unavoidable global terminus, from which Indigiqueer/queer resurgence erupts relentless into the ongoing colonial.
Curators Jeffrey McNeil-Seymour and SD Holman
