Category: Past Festivals

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.

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.

June 17 – 29, 2017

UnSettled is curated by Two-Spirit and queer-identified Indigenous artists, and developed in collaboration with Indigenous arts organizations. The term “Two-Spirit” is used by many Indigenous people to describe their gender, sexual and spiritual identity—often inclusive of all Indigenous LGBTQ+—in reclaiming and restoring traditional concepts suppressed by colonial heteronormativity.

June 21 – 30, 2016

Drama Queer is about queer politics, but not in the usual sense. It doesn’t ask you to assume a position and endorse a belief, for that would only meet you in known, familiar territory.

July 23 – August 7, 2015

QAF celebrates the 25th anniversary of a landmark work of queer heritage with this year’s theme Trigger: Drawing the Line in 2015.

We draw our lines today very differently than in 1990. As “trigger warnings” placed before art to alert viewers about potentially traumatizing material become increasingly common, QAF 2015 questions what we are sacrificing for safety’s sake. As Jeannette Winterson wrote: “Art has deep and difficult eyes and for many the gaze is too insistent… We avoid painful encounters with art by trivializing it, or by familiarizing it… Every day, in countless ways, you and I convince ourselves about ourselves. True art, when it happens to us, challenges the “I” that we are… Art objects. The nouns become an active force not a collector’s item. Art objects.”

July 23 – August 9, 2014

QAF’s 2014 theme, Regenerations, is a defiant reframing of the Nazi term “Degenerate Art”, the moniker under which they banned work by the avant-garde, Jews, Communists and queers.

Tyrants throughout history have censored artists on the grounds that their work posed an imminent danger to society. QAF embraces the premise of art as dangerous, even revolutionary. For it is in the intimate act of sharing as artists and audiences we find meaning and transformation. And from that place of vulnerable connection, we find the strength and inspiration to change the world.

July 24 – August 9, 2013

Since the days of the Stonewall Riots in 1969, queers have prided themselves on the notion of being at odds with straight culture. Indeed the whole Gay Pride movement is predicated on the right to be different than society at large.

TransgressionNow looks at where Queer artists still transgress social, gender, and political boundaries and what that looks like now.

July 31 – August 18, 2012

The 2012 Queer Arts Festival brings you “Random Acts of Queerness”, to commemorate the centenary of the experimental multidisciplinary queer artist John Cage. A pioneer of experimental music, Cage is best known for championing Indeterminacy: a philosophy that opens up artistic practice to include the random as a way of radically breaking with tradition, convention and habit.

July 26 – August 13, 2011

Queer cultures often emphasize elements of game-play: from camp to butch/femme to strictures of “straight looking/straight acting”, we play around with identity and its shadows of artifice, passing and trespassing. The curators are encouraging artists to queer the idea of games and play: board games, bored games, war games, mind games, drinking games, parlor games, gender games, games theory, game shows, word play, gun play, foreplay, BDSM play, playing the fool, playing by ear, playing along, playing around, playing for the team, playback, playmates, team sports, blood sport, water sports… With this exuberance of possibilities we will build a show of divergent investigations; a game for viewers to trace commonalities and conflicts along the through-line of gaming.