it’s not easy being green
July 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. When were Queers privy to life outside the apocalypse? Hate crimes in Canada targeting queers are 2 to 3 times more likely to be violent compared to other groups; we live each day with the knowledge that we could be vanished at any time.
Green is the complex terrain of extended kinship ties of Indigiqueer/two-spirit and queer settler elite’s. Green spectrals haunt the hyphened margins of the sub-altern; 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 relentless into the ongoing colonial.
Queer Arts Festival 2021 shows artists as see-ers/oracles/alchemists upcycling/rebranding/reclaiming/transgressing/transforming/visioning apocalyptic visionary towards queer utopic landscapes, tranforming fear, dread, a collective broken heart of forced dislocations with the departures and arrivals with art as transformative praxis and practice towards social and spiritual transformations.
QAF 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. Highlights include Jeffrey McNeil-Seymour and SD Holman’s visual arts curation; Studio (ob)Sessions, a digital discourse with Festival artists, and a Piano Burning where fire becomes a vehicle for reclamation and decolonization.
When green is all there is to be It could make you wonder why, but why wonder?
-Kermit the Frog
EVENT HIGHLIGHTS INCLUDE:
Art Party! | Cinq-à-Sept Festival Opening | Sat July 24
QAF’s opening: Luxuriate in a cinq-à-sept afternoon delight! Come together for our Visual Art Tour with curator Jeffrey McNeil-Seymour, guest artists, and a gallery of intimate friends old and new.
It’s Not Easy Being Green: Curated Visual Art Exhibition
| Sat July 24 – Fri Aug 13 | Visual Art | SUM & Sun Wah 268 Keefer Lower Ground
Pride in Art Community Exhibition
| Sat July 24 – Fri Aug 13 | Visual Art| SUM & Sun Wah 268 Keefer
Media Nights
Sat July 31st | Media Art Screening with Fergie and Ben! | SUM Roof top 268 Keefer
BYOB/Chair ( bring your own blanket and that other B)
Bobbi Kozinuk
| TBA | DISPERSED Sound Performance around town TBD
Curator Youth Tour with Curators
| TBA |
Kindred Spirits
| TBA | Community Art Showcase | Digital
a digital residency program built to connect 2Spirit artists to one another in community and to invest in capacity development for 2Sp
Trauma Clown
| Apr 1-July 16 | Visual Art Exhibition | SUM
Piano Burning
| Sun Aug 8 | Performance Art | Mountain View Cemetery
Building on Annea Lockwood’s classic twentieth-century conceptual music composition, Pride in Art and Full Circle First Nations Performance Society presents Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa performing a newly commissioned piece by Russel Wallace and Jeffrey Ryan’s Fornax Chemica (Chemical Furnace) on the piano (while it burns), in a Kevlar dress made by Métis designer Evan Ducharme.,
Queerotica:
| Mon Aug 2nd | Literary Readings | SUM Roof top 268 Keefer
Curated by Josie Boyce, slip into a little green something and enjoy readings by Vancouverite writers.
BYOB/Chair (bring your own blanket and that other B)
Studio (ob)Sessions
| TBA throughout festival | Digital Discourse
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.
Pillows for the Pandemic
| Wed July 28th | Workshop
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 comforts that are controllable. BYOB(lanket….and maybe that other B?).
Sat Aug 7 |Onibana Taiko & Alvin Erasga Tolentino | Dance and Musical Performance | Mountain View Cemetery
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.
Glitter is Forever:
Fri Aug 13 | Closing Binge | 268 Keefer & SUM Sun Wah
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.
Offerings
| TBA | Musical Performance moving to September in SUM TBD
Offerings – The Music of Leslie Uyeda is a unique concert at the SUM Gallery, featuring the exquisite music of queer Japanese-Canadian composer Leslie Uyeda, one of the Canada’s finest composers for voice and piano. Attendees will be given a “menu” of songs from which they can select their own choices for an intimate 15-minute concert performed by soprano Heather Pawsey and pianist Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa, playing on Uyeda’s very own piano upon which the songs were composed.