QAF 2023: Queers in Space

June 17 – 28 | Queer Arts Festival | Roundhouse Community Centre, SUM gallery, James Black Gallery, VAG North Plaza

Futurism and fantasy have always been cornerstones of the 2SLGBTQIA+ experience. What better place to manifest ourselves as the free and empowered superbeings we truly are? For many queer people, the Future is a place where dreams are realized; for others, it’s a vital sanctuary from a present-day reality that does not include them. While “Queers in Space” may evoke cosmic camp and otherworldly voyages (and this festival gleefully delivers both), we take these words very seriously as well: this is just as much a call to explore and celebrate the space we occupy, each and every day; to honour our queer elders on whose shoulders we stand; and to celebrate our future, queer trajectories.

ArtParty!  

Sat Jun 17 | 7pm Roundhouse Exhibition Hall – 181 Roundhouse Mews Join us as QAF 2023: Queers in Space officially launches into orbit! This year, ArtParty! returns to the Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre’s Exhibition Hall for the first time since 2019. Party amidst our signature Visual Art…

bumfuzzled monachopsis: innerspace out

Curated Visual Art Exhibition Sat Jun 17 – Wed Jun 28  Mon – Fri 9am – 9pm Sat – Sun 9am – 5pm Roundhouse Exhibition Hall – 181 Roundhouse Mews ———— Zandi Dandizette , Curator bumfuzzled monachopsis: innerspace out Free Guided Curator Tour with Zandi Dandizette Sat Jun 24 ,…

Cosmic Connections: Queer Indigenous Astronomy (A View From Above and Below)

 Preston Buffalo AR works Sat Jun 17 – Wed Jun 2 8 9am to 9pm daily Roundhouse Exhibition Hall – 181 Roundhouse Mews Augmented Reality artist Preston Buffalo secretly brings the Roundhouse to life with Indigiqueer pasts and futures – including a creation story of how the Cree People originated…

Love After the End: Joshua Whitehead & Friends

QAF + Talking Stick Festival: a day in celebration of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Artists Sun Jun 18 | 3pm  Free cinq-à-sept reception to follow at 5pm Roundhouse Performance Centre – 181 Roundhouse Mews Joshua Whitehead, Curator Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction is an…

Virago Nation Burlesque

QAF + Talking Stick Festival: a day in celebration of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Artists Sun Jun 18 | 7pm Roundhouse Performance Centre – 181 Roundhouse Mews Our day-long slate of events centred on Two-Spirit & Indigiqueer art concludes with breathtaking burlesque brought to you by the badass babes of Virago…

Queers in Space: Pride in Art Community Show

Mon Jun 19 – Sat Jul 8 Exhibition open Tue thru Sat, 12 – 6pm The James Black Gallery – 144 E 6th Ave . Opening Reception: Mon Jun 19, 7pm Long regarded as the bedrock of the Queer Arts Festival, the Pride in Art Community Show honours the legacy…

Kiss & Tell Collective: Lesbian Imagery & Sexual Identities

Thu Jun 22 | 5:30pm Or Gallery – 236 E. Pender St. In this community presentation and Q&A, Dr. Kristen Hutchinson discusses the history and impact of the pioneering Vancouver-based Lesbian artist collective Kiss & Tell. Presented in partnership with Or Gallery. Where do you draw the line between censorship…

New Yams Festival

 Odera Igbokwe solo exhibit Thu Jun 22 – Fri Jul 2 8 Exhibition is open Tue-Sat, 12 to 6pm SUM gallery – #425-268 Keefer St. New Yams Festival Opening reception with Odera Igbokwe Thu Jun 22, 7pm SUM gallery – #425-268 Keefer St. Buy Tickets on Eventbrite Register for opening…

Sujit Vaidya: Breathe In The Fragrance

Fri Jun 23 | 7pm Roundhouse Performance Centre – 181 Roundhouse Mews Breathe In The Fragrance is Sujit Vaidya ‘s celebration of erotic ritual — of taste, of smell, of song, of dance, of sensations awakened by Jasmine — to make space for the in-betweenness of things to exist. Combining…

Witch Prophet

Sun Jun 25 | 5:30pm šxʷƛ̓ənəq Xwtl’e7énḵ Square – Vancouver Art Gallery North Plaza – 750 Hornby St. Queer Arts Festival partners with Vancouver International Jazz Festival for the second year in a row to present Witch Prophet : the evolution of Toronto based singer-songwriter Ayo Leilani . Think Erykah…

Hymnen an die Nacht:

Claude Vivier Retrospective Tue Jun 27 | 7pm Roundhouse Performance Centre – 181 Roundhouse Mews In 1983, Canada’s queerest and most cosmic composer, Claude Vivier, shockingly left this world at the age of 34, murdered by a rent boy in Paris. In this retrospective, we commemorate the 40th anniversary of…

Glitter is Forever

Wed Jun 28 | 7pm   Roundhouse Exhibition Hall — 181 Roundhouse Mews Our 16th Queer Arts Festival comes home to dock in spectacular fashion, featuring drag performances by the “only nationally acclaimed All-Asian drag family,” House of Rice and music by DJ Bella Sie! Take in our curated visual art…

DONATE

QAF 2023: Queers in Space Fundraiser

Donate by June 17th  for a chance to win festival passes and more!

Get entered to win one of three very queer prize packs (including festival passes, limited-edition prints, and more)  when you donate to the Queer Arts Festival 2023 Fundraiser! Every $10 you donate gets your an entry into the prize raffle — enter as many times as you like to increase your chances!  Donations made either using the form on this page or through our Eventbrite ticketing system using the “Donate to enter QAF 2023 prize raffle!” option at checkout will all be entered to win. Winners will be announced via email and in-person at our festival opening ArtParty! on June 17th. 

When you donate, you’re helping us create opportunities for queer artists, preserve and celebrate queer culture, and ensure that our community remains strong and proud, no matter what the world throws at us. In a world that is becoming increasingly hostile to Queer joy – we are committed to creating beautiful, inspiring community spaces where our queerness can shine. Your donation will ensure we can continue to be one of the world’s leading platforms for Queer art and artists. Help us keep the future Queer!

Can’t attend the 2023 Queer Arts Festival but still want to show your support? Please consider donating here: https://www.canadahelps.org/en/charities/pride-in-art-society/

https://queerartsfestival.com/pride-in-art-community-visual-arts-show/

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Come back soon.

Future programming in the works.

West Coast Curated: Queer Chinese Diasporic Identity Narratives in Vancouver’s Chinatown

West Coast Curated: Queer Chinese Diasporic Identity Narratives in Vancouver’s Chinatown

[In Vancouver’s historic Chinatown, across from markets piled high with dried goods and and a bakery that would be easy to pass by unnoticed (if it wasn’t for out-the-door line-ups) is the equally nondescript entrance to the Sun Wah Centre. The brick building is home to a cultural wealth of artists, and is currently housing Yellow Peril: Celestial Elements, a multi-media one-room immersive art show brought to life by Love Intersections, a media arts collective of queer Vancouver artists of colour.

Inside the centre and up a delightfully vintage looking elevator decorated with printed community notices in multiple languages, the fourth floor is home to the SUM Gallery. (Turn right from the elevator, walk straight through the kitchen, you’ll see the door.)

To stand in the small space with vibrant multi-channel video dominating half the room and pieces to explore, interpret and understand, is an experience to open yourself up to. The room brings together Chinese tradition, text, iconography and spirituality with West Coast North American settings, nature and mythos, that contemplate presences that are Indigenous, colonial and pop.

I connected with Jen Sungshine and David Ng, co-creative directors of Love Intersections to talk a bit more about the experience they created.

Is this the first time Love Intersections has curated an arts exhibit?

Jen: Yes! We started in 2014 as a media arts collective, making short documentaries of queer people of colour in our community.  This is our first foray into visual arts and curation, and we are very grateful to the Pride in Arts Society/SUM gallery for their faith and generosity!

Your film, Yellow Peril: Queer Destiny debuted at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival in August 2019. A part of this exhibit breaks down some of the visuals from the film into multi-channel video projections. Would you consider this exhibit an extension of the film?

Jen: The exhibit was inspired by our 2019 experimental documentary, Yellow Peril: Queer Destiny, which follows local drag artist, Maiden China in a non-linear, 5-chapter narrative through the use of the Chinese Five Elements as a conduit for examining race, gender, sexuality, art and cultural “authenticity”.

David: Encouraged by the film’s success, we were given an opportunity to expand the film into a visual art exhibit to further explore what it means for us to be queer Asians of the diaspora. One of the main through-lines of both the film and the exhibit is bringing forth our ancestors/ancestry, into our re-imaginations of queer Asian futures.  The four channel format allowed us to expand upon some of what we started with the 5 elements, and explore queerness, time, space, and identity in a different way.

The experience of being in the room, particularly on your own or perhaps in a small group, is very immersive. Can you tell me about the part the sound you chose plays into the exhibit?

David: The soundscape put together by Jamie Abugov is inspired by a mix of contemporary and traditional artists of Asian descent.  We wanted to mix past and present music, to again play with the idea of time and space, queer identity, and cultural identity. 

Tell us about “yellow peril”, turn-of-the-century racist terminology, and about the choice to use it in both the film and the exhibit.

David: Yes, the “Yellow Peril” was a racist narrative in the west in the early 1900s that framed the influx of Asian immigrants – mostly indentured labourers – as “invading” the West.  Literature, film, and media representations would portray Asian people as conniving, drug using criminals, who had sinister agendas to infiltrate and invade the West.  This anti-Asian racism is what drove the anti-Oriental riots, and the Asian exclusion acts in North America, and Europe. 

Jen: We were drawn to the term “Yellow Peril” because we wanted to reclaim the term, and also turn it on it’s head.  We’ve seen a sharp rise in queer Asian cultural organizing recently across Canada, and in a way our reclamation and insistence on enunciating our cultural identities, is “perilous” to white supremacy. 

We also wanted to reference Paul Wong’s touring exhibition Yellow Peril: Reconsidered, as the exhibit (and Paul’s work) has been not only an inspiration for us, but paved the way for queer Asian artists today to express ourselves.

Part of this piece, according to the placards, has to do with dislodging Western linearity. Could you speak more about this?

Jen: In putting together the film and the exhibit, we started realizing that the notion of linear temporality – that is, time moving forward, sequentially – has limitations to our imaginations of queer cultural identity.  The linear framework of “past-present-future”, for example, delimits our ability to think about how our ancestors dreamed us into the future; and that we are the product of our ancestors dreams. 

David: We also wanted to push our ways of thinking about queer Asian identity, time, and space; outside of a Western point of departure.  So we turned to the 5 elements in Chinese tradition, which are used in many facets of life, including medicine, spirituality, health, metaphysics, etc.  In some ways, the 5 elements became the vehicle that we used to explore queer Asian cultural identity.

Please tell me about anything else you would like to add that you feel is integral to understanding this exhibit and your work.

Jen: We feel extremely lucky to have an outpour of support from the various communities we are a part of. Over 300 people showed up to our opening, holy moly! Beyond just coming to see the exhibit, we really want to create a sense of -space- within the confines of SUM Gallery. In working with, and exhibiting at, SUM, we recognize how meaningful it is to showcase in Chinatown’s BC Artscape Sun Wah building at 268 Keefer, home to over 70 artists, galleries, and culture work spaces dedicated to heritage, education, social justice and sustainability. There is a lot of conversation right now around “Vancouver’s changing Chinatown” and what that means for residents navigating an increasingly challenging, and changing, landscape.

David: We hope to express to visitors the importance of showcasing in such an environment and to ask ourselves, “why am I here? What kind of art, spaces and communities do I want to immerse and spend time in?” and for visitors to consider the meaningfulness of dedicated, artful spaces that we all play a role in curating. For us, it’s sharing and curating with the likes of fellow artists, Paul Wong and Sammy Chien, as well as with organizations we look up to, like Centre AFull Circle: First Nations PerformanceYouth Collaborative for ChinatownMoniker PressThe Frank Theatre – we see ourselves as one small piece of the social puzzle, each of us weaving together a larger, multidimensional narrative of Chinatown. We hope that visitors will confront what it means to stand up for land rights/defenders, anti-racism, and thoughtful cultural spaces as we continue having wholehearted conversations together.

Jen: We have programmed several “activation” events throughout the exhibit run at SUM Gallery. Visitors should come to our Community Food Sharing + Dumpling Making activation on March 7, as well as the Grave Sweeping Activation / Closing Ceremony on April 4. All activation events are from 3:30pm-5:30pm.

From now until April 18th, 2020, Yellow Peril: Celestial Elements is on display at the SUM Gallery, with works by Jen Sungshine, David Ng, Kendell Yan/Maiden China and Jay Cabalu.

UPDATE: This show is now available for viewing by appointment only to encourage social distancing due to COVID-19. Contact info@queerartsfestival.com to arrange.

Written for West Coast Curated by Alexis Baran

WICKED 2020 ON ITS WAY!

Wicked 2020 on its way!. July 2 – July 12, 2020. Check queerartsfestival.com for more info.

Wicked

Wicked |

| Queer Arts Festival 2020: WICKED | Jul 16 – 26, 2o2o |

“Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.”

Oscar Wilde

This past decade has seen the mainstreaming of gay; sexual difference wins approval so long as it is palatable, marketable, and doesn’t stray too far from bourgeois notions of taste and morality. Our 2020 theme Wicked reimagines identity politics, exposing the implications of homonormativity as erasure. The commodification of queer experience is inextricably linked to the pathologization of the queer body, where medical and sociological interventions adjudicate which anatomies and passions are accepted as authentic. What do we lose—who do we lose—if we accept induction into the dominant order, and reframe ourselves as a “moral minority”?

There’s no place like home for the Wicked Witch of the West, green by devilment and through her magical aberrance. QAF 2020 forsakes the yellow brick road that leads only to a man behind a curtain gentrifying our desires. Instead, for 11 days of visual art, performance, theatre, music, dance and literary events, we invite you to revel in the quintessentially queer traditions of scandal and excess. 

Highlights include Jonny Sopotiuk’s visual arts curation; choreographer Noam Gagnon’s raucously vulnerable Swan Song, This Crazy Show; Indigenous Burlesque with Virago Nation’s Too Spirited; and the latest offering from non-binary drag collective The Darlings.

No Performances

There are no performances at this time.

Poly Queer Love Ballad

March 5 – 9 | 8 pm
March 9 & 10
| 2 pm

Co-produced by Queer Arts Festival 
Presented with the Frank Theatre and Zee Zee Theatre

A New Slam Poetry Musical By Anais West and Sara Vickruck 
Directed by Julie McIsaac 

After playing sold-out shows at the Vancouver Fringe Festival and winning multiple awards, Poly Queer Love Ballad returns to Vancouver.

Submissions are open for the 2019 Pride in Art Community Show

** SUBMISSIONS ARE OPEN**

This open visual art exhibition honours our founder, Two-Spirit artist Robbie Hong and 20 years of Pride in Art.

Where: Great Hall of the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre
When: June 18 – June 26, 2019.
Submission deadline: April 25 or until space is filled. Please allow minimum 2 weeks for a response.

Artwork for this show doesn’t need to fit the festival theme.

Hello world!

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