Queer Arts Festival

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.

July 28 – August 14, 2009

With our 2009 theme Faerie Tales, the Pride in Art Festival invited Queer artists to explore the myths and legends that have shaped us, and our community.

Light or dark, strange or powerful, these whimsical and sometimes political fables can have far-reaching effects upon our collective psyche. PiAF challenged artists to look back — into our childhoods, into our histories, into the mists of time — and explore the symbols and archetypes that have helped us to build Queer identities. The juried Visual Art Exhibition features works in many different artistic disciplines, and pairs established and emerging artists from across BC and Canada.

July 24- August 10, 2008

Exhibiting the work of 24 artists including Mary Taylor, Margaret Matsuyama and Piere Gour

The festival performance line-up included PIAF Cabaret, a night of transgressive music and dance; QUEEROTICA, readings of censored literature; Still Breathing Fire, Anna Camilleri’s ground-breaking one woman show; Wilde @ Art, a tribute to Oscar Wilde; Gilding the Lily, 50th birthday retrospective of composer Rodney Sharman; and JODAIKO, the incendiary all woman taiko ensemble. These shows included world premieres of works by Anna Camilleri, Jeffrey Ryan, and Rodney Sharman. Performers included Bill Richardson, Denis Simpson, Amber Dawn, Cris Derksen, Shaira Holman, Karen Lee-Morlang, Tiresias and many others. The festival included for the first time two workshops by featured artists: writer Anna Camilleri and Taiko Drummer Tiffany Tamaribuchi.

July 28 – August 10, 2006

Opening night performances were curated by David Blue of Raving Theatre, with remarks by MP.s Libby Davies and Hedy Fry. Our very first JODAIKO concert in the Performance Center was sold out success. In the Performance Centre, we presented “Queering the Air,” with performances by Joel Klein and Michael Robert Broder, baritones; and Karen Lee-Morlang, piano. Queering the Air also featured the world premiere of Jocelyn Morlock’s flute and piano duo, “I conversed with you in a dream,” performed by Tiresias (Mark McGregor flute, and Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa, piano), the recording of which was subsequently nominated for a 2008 Western Canadian Music Award.