Written by Kaila Johnson, The Ubyssey
Bisexual lighting — saturated beams of blue, pink and purple — coated the stage of the Queer Art Festival(QAF)’s Queerotica: Literary Readings on July 6 at the Sun Wah Centre. Four different writers shared their work on stage surrounding the theme of “the masc & femme we wear.”
Rather than simply reading aloud steamy poetry, Queerotica complicated the erotica genre with questions around how our authentic sexual selves are disguised and warped by colonialism and white supremacy.
One of the featured artists, Aly Laube, was unable to attend in-person and shared her collection of poems via a YouTube video with event attendees. Their collection, titled “Gay and Confused,” mentioned U-Hauling, the common Queer experience of thinking you’re in love with a friend, and R&B artist Teyana Taylor’s ballroom-inspired track “WTP.”
Kyle Shaughnessy spoke of his experiences as a Two-Spirit Trans person of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry. His introduction flowed into a non-fiction work about deciding to go back in the closet for his grandmother’s funeral. Shaughnessy described how he did not want an unfamiliar name to be a barrier to connecting with his family in their mourning. Still, he didn’t sacrifice his transmasc gender presentation to attend her service. Even when dressed up as yourself, there can still be parts of you in hiding.
Janice Esguerra, a recent graduate of the UBC Bachelor’s of Fine Arts creative writing program, shared poems and a piece of nonfiction. In the excerpt of nonfiction, she described her relationship to religion and what it would be like meeting god in a Chinatown bar.
Esguerra made attendees laugh during her final poem, “religion is whatever you do on your knees,” with the stanza, “because sex is just another way/to finish/each other’s sentences/and lord knows i’m tired/of commas.”
Elmer Flores shared a collection of poems which highlighted the frustration that BIPOC Queer people can feel towards white gays with works titled “fuck you, you fucking fuck” and “another poem about a white man.” In the former, he also described how his white classmates have been praised for using “fuck you” in their poetry while Flores was criticized for doing the same.
“I think this is the event where I’ve heard the most f-words in my life,” joked QAF artistic director Mark Takeshi McGregor after Flores’s set. By playing with the multiple meanings of “fuck,” Flores’ collection of poetry grappled with how oppression and animosity can bleed into sexuality.
UBC theatre production and design alum Laura Fukumoto kept this sentiment alive by starting her set with the phrase “fuck Canada day.” Musicality oozed through their collection of poems. She broke out a harp that was found in the alleyway by their apartment to elevate the feeling of haunting — QAF’s 2022 theme.
During their last poem, which was inspired by an AURORA song, Fukumoto had the audience hum two tones throughout the reading.
The warmth of the bi lighting and the hums of the audience provided a blanket of safety for attendees to listen and let the artist’s words wash over them.
Written by Makyla Smith, The Ubyssey
Pride Month 2022 had no shortage of Queer-oriented art; some funky, some flamboyant and some straight from the surreal Salvador Dalí playbook. In Vancouver, the world-renowned Queer Arts Festival (QAF) provided all of the above.
On June 26, QAF put on a showcase of Queer-created horror films called Reel Eerie, curated by CS Fergusson-Vaux and Ben Siegl. Between monster-fucking and more monster-fucking, the showcase was wildly entertaining — despite the fact that most of the shorts could be better described as “lightly-macabre” than “horror.”
Monsterdykë , described to the audience as a “portrait of desire examining trans-lesbian love and longing,” started the showcase off with a bang (pun intended). Directors Kaye Adelaide and Mariel Sharp established from the outset that “there are only two genders: monsterfuckers and cowards.” While that bold claim might lose other crowds, the QAF audience’s reaction was an enthusiastic applause.
What followed was essentially black and white gothic tentacle porn, filmed on 16mm film. Monsterdykë was seemingly a fan favourite, bringing a blush to even the most closeted monster-fucker. Its humour, horror and outrageous sexuality combined the greatest aspects of films like Haxan, Nosferatu and maybe even some Deadpool if you squint.
Next came Tj Cuthand’s You Are A Lesbian Vampire: a short which was essentially Dracula, reimagined as a satirical commentary on the insularity of the lesbian community. However small Vancouver’s lesbian community can feel when you run into three exes in one awkward night out, it stands to reason that the immortal lesbian community would be even smaller.
Similarly, U-Haul lesbians are infamous for going in hard on commitment, but for vampires “forever” really means… forever. It really makes you think: instead of turning your girlfriend into a vampire, you might want to turn your cat into one instead to save yourself hundreds of years of drama.
Audience roars of applause followed Joshua Lam’s Monkey See, Monkey Do, a suspenseful whirlwind of Queer Asian longing — featuring a boogeyman, a hilarious fictional magazine called “Hunks of Vancouver” and all the campy horror thrills of a Wes Craven classic.
A personal favorite was Monika Estrella Negra’s Bitten, A Tragedy, which explored racism in the Queer community. The film follows Black vampire Lydia’s mission to eradicate racism within the bloodlines and legacies that intertwined with her own. Lydia’s long memory as an immortal served as a creative allegory for intergenerational trauma.
When she comes across a micro-agressive rave-goer, Lydia is taken back to a moment of violence and murder between her ancestor and a white woman. A macabre and enthralling depiction of human sacrifice ensues. Murder, deceit and witchcraft come into play, as does a strict callout to those who believe that their Queerness negates their white privilege.
Bitten, A Tragedy‘s creative and poignant integration of horror tropes with social commentary made it one of the more captivating films of the evening.
Representation in Queer media has and always will be a battle, with white and cis men monopolizing mainstream narratives. When Queer media chooses assimilation over pride, non-binary, lesbian and POC narratives lose out. Showcasing diverse, weird and freaky Queer art in such a well-known outlet as QAF gave me hope for a new era of Queer films as creative explorations into rich experiences of our broad community.
Reel Eerie’s journey of almost-horror and monster porn showcased the importance of Queerness in media and reminded all of us that, much like lesbian vampires, Pride Month never really ends.
New Delhi’s Adwait Singh curates the fest’s signature art exhibition under creative direction of QAF founding artistic director emeritus, SD Holman
BY GAIL JOHNSON, STIR VANCOUVER
Queer Arts Festival presents Vanishing Act in partnership with Centre A: International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, On Main Gallery, and Griffin Art Projects to July 8 at the Sun Wah Centre
AS THE 2022 Queer Arts Festival pulls into its final week, its flagship curated visual-arts exhibition has expanded into its fully realized installation.
Vanishing Act first opened at the start of this year’s fest in June, but the multi-floor exhibition has just expanded onto yet another level of the Sun Wah Centre within Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, giving people the chance to experience the show in its entirety before the fest wraps up.
New Delhi-based curator Adwait Singh worked under creative direction of QAF founding artistic director emeritus, SD Holman, for Vanishing Act. The exhibition features nearly 20 artists spanning South Asia and its diaspora.
Vanishing Act brings people face-to-face with their own Frankensteins. 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.”
“Through a survey of queer artistic practices from South Asia and beyond, the exhibition will bring forth apocalyptic-revelations about radical forms of hospitality, sociality and empathy that are fed by the consciousness of a catastrophic co-becoming,” Singh says in a release.
Featured artists include Andrew McPhail, Aryakrishnan Ramakrishnan, Areez Katki, Bassem Saad, Charan Singh & Sunil Gupta, Elektra KB, Fazal Rizvi, Hank Yan Agassi, Hiba Ali, Imaad Majeed, Omer Wasim, Renate Lorenz & Pauline Boudry, Renuka Rajiv, Shahana Rajani, Sharlene Bamboat, Syma Tariq & Sita Balani, Syrus Marcus Ware, and Vishal Jugedo.
More information is at QAF.
By Steve Newton, Georgia Straight
THE IMITATION GAME: VISUAL CULTURE IN THE AGE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Exhibition surveys the extraordinary uses (and abuses) of AI in the production of modern and contemporary visual culture around the world. To Oct 23, Vancouver Art Gallery.
KINKY BOOTS Tony Award–winning musical that celebrates compassion and acceptance. To Jul 31, Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage. From $43.
XICANX: DREAMERS + CHANGEMAKERS / SOÑADORES + CREADORES DEL CAMBIO Exhibition showcases, for the first time in Canada, the rich traditions of 33 Xicanx artists. To Jan 1, Museum of Anthropology at UBC.
BEADED NOSTALGIA Exhibition exploring the use of contemporary beadwork as a way of honouring the past. To Oct 23, Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art.
GHOSTS OF THE MACHINE An exhibition about humans, technology, and ecology, curated by Elliott Ramsey. To Aug 14, Polygon Gallery. By donation.
YEOMANS TRILOGY: ENDURING SPIRITS EXHIBITION Multi-media collection of works by Haida artist Don Yeomans, wife Trace (Haida + Ukrainian), and their son Kyran. To Jul 15, Coastal Peoples Gallery. Free.
WE WERE SO FAR AWAY: THE INUIT EXPERIENCE OF RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS Travelling exhibition uses first-person narratives and archival images to tell stories of the Inuit residential school experience. To Nov 27, Vancouver Maritime Museum. $13.50 adult/$11 senior.
TAPESTRY OF CHANGE: INUIT ART IN CONTEXT An exhibition of Inuit textiles, prints, and flat artwork from the collections. To Oct 2, Vancouver Maritime Museum. $13.50 adults/$11 seniors.
COMMON GROUND EXHIBITION Artists Sara-Jeanne Bourget, Robin Gleason, and Mark Johnsen explore the built-up boundary between body and earth in the urban environment. To Jul 30, Cityscape Community Art Space. Free.
THEATRESPORTS Two teams of improv comedians compete for the laughs and support of audience judges. To Aug 27, The Improv Centre. $24.50-$31.50.
UNINVITED: CANADIAN WOMEN ARTISTS IN THE MODERN MOMENT Major exhibition gathering more than 200 works of art by a generation of painters, photographers, weavers, bead workers, and sculptors. To Jan 8, Vancouver Art Gallery.
TRUE TO PLACE: STÍMETSTEXW TEL XÉLTEL Exhibition curated by artist and muralist Xémontalót Carrielynn Victor (Stó:lō) examines the artistic practice of 10 Northwest Coast Indigenous artists. To Mar 19, Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art.
LOVE YOUR MOTHER: JENNIE THWING Jennie Thwing uses animation, sculpture and installation to create imaginary narratives that reference the confusing world we live in. To Jul 21, Port Moody Arts Centre. Free.
START SOMEWHERE ELSE: WORKS FROM THE COLLECTION Collection exhibition centring around Krista Belle Stewart‘s video installation Seraphine, Seraphine also includes works by Rebecca Belmore, Brian Jungen, and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun. To Aug 14, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery.
QUEER ARTS FESTIVAL 2022: HAUNTINGS Three weeks of dynamic performance, music, theatre and literary events. To Jul 8, various Vancouver venues. Free-$30, festival passes $69.
ByPeak Web
By: Yasmin Vejs Simsek, Staff Writer
The Vancouver Queer Arts Festival (QAF) is in the top three list of LGBTQ2S+ arts festivals world-wide and features multimedia exhibitions, music, rooftop parties, and more. This year it returns to an in-person programme from June 18–July 8 with the theme “Hauntings.” Artistic director Mark Takeshi McGregor defines the theme as an exploration of “what frightens us, with liberal doses of profundity, humor, and camp.” The festival takes place in different arts spaces around Vancouver, with most of its events hosted at the Sun Wah Centre in Chinatown.
Here are four events to look forward to at this year’s Queer Arts Festival:
HAUNTINGS: Pride in Art Community Show
For the first time ever, this community arts show is teaming up with the queer-led James Black Gallery to showcase art from local LGBTQIA2S+ artists. The Pride in Art Community Show is a staple at the QAF, and every year its name honours two-spirit artist and co-founder of Pride in Art Society, Robbie Hong. HAUNTINGS will feature works from artists such as stunning digital artist Avery Chace, and multi-medium, macabre inspired artist Braden Scheck.
When: June 20–July 8, Wednesday–Saturday from 12:00 p.m.–6:00 p.m.
Where: The James Black Gallery (144 E 6th Avenue)
Vanishing Act is a curated visual art exhibition featuring almost 20 artists from the global queer community! It’s mainly focused on the Global South and its diasporas. The exhibition fits extremely well with the theme of Hauntings, as the curators ask the audience to “face our own Frankensteins.” It also fits well with Vancouver, our very diverse and talented city. Plan your visit for July 2 if you want to tag along on a guided tour by the exhibit’s curator, Adwait Singh, and creative director, SD Holman.
When: June 18–July 8, Wednesday–Saturday 12:00 p.m.–6:00 p.m.
Where: Sun Wah Centre (268 Keefer Street, third and fourth floors)
Curator Tour: July 2, 3:00 p.m. and reception at 5:00 p.m.
Queerotica brings you a night of literacy and is the perfect event for you bookish types out there. You’ll be enjoying readings from local writers who will challenge how BIPOC queer bodies are fetishized, projected, and eroticized. It will also explore the effects of masking or revealing one’s true self under colonialist supremacy. This event is sure to stand out with its focus on harrowing realities felt throughout the BIPOC queer community.
When: July 6, 7:00 p.m. (door opens at 6:30 p.m.)
Where: Sun Wah Centre (268 Keefer Street, Rooftop)
This rooftop party is the festival’s closing event, and not one to miss! I imagine there will be loads of glitter — and what better way to end the QAF. You’ll be able to see the art that’s been displayed throughout the festival as you make your way up to the party that will be featuring music and drag performances. Members of the Vancouver-based Asian drag family, House of Rice, will be performing, including the drag mother herself, Shay Dior. See you there!
When: July 8, 7:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m. (doors at 6:30 p.m.)
Where: Sun Wah Centre (268 Keefer Street, Rooftop)
Tickets are purchased for each individual event with the ones mentioned being by donation or included in the festival all-access pass (priced at $69). You can find the link to their Eventbrite page for tickets on their website.
Quebec-born interdisciplinary artist Gabriel Dharmoo unveils a joy-filled full-length drag show
BY ALEXANDER VARTY, STIR VANCOUVER
The Queer Arts Festival presents Bijuriya at the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre on June 28 at 7 pm.
UNLESS YOU’RE FLUENT in Hindi, you’re not going to grasp the full import of Bijuriya’s name and ambition on first meeting—even if the Montreal-based drag artist’s moniker can be parsed in both of Canada’s official languages. One could, for instance, read the name as a Desi-fication of the bilingual term “bijou”, which the online Oxford dictionary tells us means “small but attractive and fashionable”.
Bijuriya’s stage presence is anything but small, although her creator, Quebec-born interdisciplinary artist Gabriel Dharmoo, is of medium height and preternaturally slim. She’s certainly fashionable, if one’s taste in couture runs towards sequins, latex, and lamé. And her attractiveness is unquestionable, based as it is on a combination of razor-edged cheekbones, exuberant self-confidence, and a sense of humour that can pivot from the beautifully surreal to the elegantly cutting.
But what viewers who don’t share Dharmoo’s South Asian heritage are missing is that Bijuriya’s Hindi name means “thunderbolt”. The seeming incongruity between “unsettling blast from heaven” and “intricately worked trinket” is an integral part of Dharmoo’s stagecraft, as are the various ways in which different audiences will perceive his first full-length drag show.
Onstage, the gifted singer, cellist, and composer explains in a telephone interview, Bijuriya articulates “a kind of inner dialogue between what it is to be a drag artist and what it is to be a composer trained in the western classical canon, and the questions that arise from that.
“There are tons of specific references in the piece: Bollywood titles, little bits of lyrics,” Dharmoo continues. ”But it’s all really, really popular and obvious if you know it. If the audience is mixed enough, it reveals how references hit home in a really comedic way or in a touching way with the people who know them: South Asians, or Bollywood fans, or whoever happens to know them. But for those who don’t, it becomes a really interesting position. Sometimes they’re more used to getting the codes of a theatre production, or the references, and there’s something exciting about being confronted with one’s own ignorance—and I mean ‘ignorance’ in a realistic-slash-positive sense. Like, we can’t know everything! That’s the truth, but I don’t think everyone is confronted with that reality equally.”
When Bijuriya made her full-length debut in Montreal earlier this year, one of her four performances had more queer South Asians in the audience than the others. “People were laughing way harder at some stuff, and singing along to things,” Dharmoo reports. But that didn’t alienate others in the crowd: instead, it proved intriguing. “There was something really cool for them about not getting it it,” he notes.
The move into drag has been some time in the making. When I interviewed Dharmoo for Toronto’s Musicworks magazine in 2016, he was just beginning to enjoy the uproarious success of Anthropologies imaginaires, an interdisciplinary solo show which he invented and performed diverse faux-ethnic musics, then hired onscreen actors to impersonate academic talking heads giving sometimes ludicrously off-base commentary. (Somehow this managed to be both hilarious and sobering, at least for those of us taxed with writing about other cultures’ music.)
“The next work will be about brownness,” the South Asian/Trinidadian/French Canadian artist told me at the time. “It will be about mixed race, mixed identity, mixed cultural references. How I would define it now, in a kind of vague and safe way, is that I want to play with very symbolic cult songs, or cult aspects of Indian and nonresident Indian life, like in the South Asian diaspora in the U.K. or the U.S. or Canada. Old film songs that everyone in India would know and Carnatic music and people like M.I.A. or Das Racist—like, really high-art/low-art references.”
In the Montreal drag scene, he found the perfect venue to hone Bijuriya’s look, appeal, and sly social commentary. Through a series of grassroots showcases he found a new way to express a radical vision of race, gender, and what it means to be an artist—a vision that’s laid out in surprisingly succinct form in the online trailer for Bijuriya’s Queer Arts Festival show. “To shock, ignite, empower and delight,” the drag diva sings in her upbeat, anthemic theme song. “Make art, connect, engage and reflect.”
All eight items on Bijuriya’s agenda are inseparable, but of them, “delight” might be the most important. “There’s different reasons why I do drag, and one of them was the lack of delight in what I was doing before,” Dharmoo says. “Composing, as an art form, has never brought me much delight—or anyone delight. You get some sort of validation if a piece is successful, but it never really feels like delight. It’s more like passing a test…. I just felt like I needed more of that idea of sharing joy, and having joy, and having joy not just in the result but the process, also.”
This joyous generosity carries over into other aspects of Bijuriya’s mission. The act of putting a brown, queer drag artist at centre stage offers affirmation to other racialized and gender-nonconforming people, while the sheer abandon—and, at times, strangeness—of the Bijuriya persona asks other audiences to enjoy the spectacle while questioning their prejudices.
“There’s multiple entry points,” Dharmoo confirms. “So, yeah, it’s for South Asian queers and allies, but also for anyone who’s a bit identity-confused these days—mixed-culture, first-gen or second-gen immigrants—and also for people that like art and that like music and that like to see things that aren’t conventional.”
Count us in.
The musicians perform locally through a Queer Arts Festival and TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival co-presentation
BY EMMA JEFFREY, STIR VANCOUVER
Coastal Jazz and Queer Arts Festival present Adria Kain + Janette King on June 24 at 7:30 pm at Performance Works on Granville Island as part of the 2022 TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival
OFFERING A LUSH exploration of queer love and identity, Toronto-based R&B singer-songwriter Adria Kain and Montreal vocalist, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Janette King will take to the stage in a local first: the musicians’ performance marks the first time that Queer Arts Festival has partnered with the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival.
Both of the artists’ most recent projects—Kain’s debut album, Where Flowers Bloom, and King’s What We Lost, a blend of alternative R&B, house, and pop—dive deep into the nuances of self-exploration, queer relationships, and how we present in the world.
While Kain’s release came out this year, the artist says that creating the work was a process that began in 2016. The pandemic helped her realize the direction the album would take.
“I went through the typical relationship stuff—learning about accountability, about who I am in a relationship, and my expectations,” Kain says in a phone interview with Stir. “During the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, I allowed myself to tap into what all these things mean for me and how I want to show up moving forward.”
Where Flowers Bloom is the first time she has been open about her sexuality in her music.
“For a long time I was writing music in a less literal sense; I would never mention gender in my songs; I wanted it to be something that everyone could relate to,” Kain says. “I never really had the opportunity to say ‘This is who I am, this is me in my queerness.’ I just kind of wrote from whatever I was feeling. This album was the first time where I got into the specifics of queer experiences.”
Being open about her sexuality hasn’t come without challenges, however.
“It has been interesting being a Black queer musician in Canada, because oftentimes people don’t know how to react to me, they don’t know how to perceive what they’re seeing immediately,” Kain says. “As exciting as my music sounds to many people, they don’t know how to market me.”
Kain isn’t the kind of artist who enjoys branding herself or fitting her identity into a box. She enjoys the pureness of self-expression and is at times frustrated by the superficiality of the music industry.
“Being a musician can be exhausting for me, especially the performative aspects of it,” Kain says. “I had an epiphany recently that made me realize that music has always been something that’s embedded in me. The thing I love most about my singing voice is that it feels more like my language than my speaking voice does. The way my emotions come through in my songs when I perform live is the thing that allows others to understand who I am as a person.”
Similarly, King tries to genuinely represent herself through her music.
“My music centres around themes of self-reflection, especially in my song ‘Mirror’,” the alt-RnB artist says of a track off her 2021 album, What We Lost. “As a queer person, I’m always looking at my internal world, my internal self, because there’s always a magnifying glass on me. There’s a lot of stereotypes about queer people in the media, and I’m left to question where I fit into that. In my music, I’m always going internally, I’m always questioning if I’m portraying the person I am honestly and whether I can show up as my authentic self.”
What We Lost delves into King’s inner world and sense of identity. Consider the song “Mars”, a self-proclaimed celebration of queer Black sexuality, for instance.
“The whole album is a homage to love and the different forms of love,” says King, who started out in Vancouver. “Like how you can feel so enamoured by someone when you first meet them, how you feel when you lose somebody, how you feel in the centre of a relationship when everything feels so good, or when you start to feel someone pulling away. It’s an album exploring everything it means to be in love.”
King made her debut in 2019 with her album EP 143, which was followed by a North American tour and several performances in the UK that same year. She says that the album was well-received by the public despite the challenges the pandemic presented. This summer, she’s kicking off a nationwide tour, playing at a multitude of festivals across the country.
King’s journey as a solo artist initially made her feel vulnerable, she says, but after the release of EP 143, she was able to gain greater confidence in her artistry and sense of self.
“It’s so important to be proud of who you are,” King says. “I wish I had that advice as a younger person more. It was something I had to learn by myself over time.”
By pursuing authenticity and self-exploration through music, both Kain and King are making space for queer people to exist and thrive, both in the music industry and the world at large.
“The advice I would give to someone who looks like me is to do what you can to figure out what you want,” Kain says. “Don’t worry too much about what other people think. As long as you know who you are and how you want to be represented, then that’s the most important thing.”