Tag: 2016 events

Produced by the frank theatre company.

ASL interpretation has been booked for this event.

What’s it like being a person of colour and being queer in a community where whiteness and queerness are synonymous? Where do you fit when your black hair and brown body mark you out as alone in a sea of fairer limbs and blonde undercuts? What does chosen family look like, when no one in your chosen family looks like you, or can’t speak your language, or cook your food? How do you love when who you love is kinda… racist?

The Pink Line is a funny and probing new performance exploring racism in Vancouver’s queer community, collectively created by Jotika Chaudhary, Jahanzeb Kazi, Dora Ng, Anoushka Ratnarajah and Johnny Wu, guided by Fay Nass and C. E. Gatchalian. We will explore notions of home, feelings of isolation, and delve into our heartfelt and hilarious stories about our families as queer folks of colour. Prepare yourself for honesty, laughter and theatrical magic.

Created and performed by Jotika Chaudhary, Jahanzeb Kazi, Dora Ng, Anoushka Ratnarajah and Johnny Wu
Facilitated by Fay Nass and C. E. Gatchalian
Directed by Fay Nass
Creative Consultant: Jonathan Seinen

Entry to all QAF events requires membership to the Pride in Art Society. Memberships are available for $2 online, or a $1-$5 slide scale at the door. Please allow a few extra minutes at your first event to obtain your new card.   Brown Paper Tickets Ticket Widget Loading… Click Here to visit the Brown Paper Tickets event page.

Dagger Editions, an imprint of Caitlin Press, publishes literary fiction, non-fiction and poetry by and about queer women (those who identify as queer women, including trans women, or include this in their personal history).

We celebrate the launch of Dagger’s first, Oscar of Between: A Memoir of Identity and Ideas, by Betsy Warland and Flight Instructions for the Commitment Impaired, by Nicola Harwood.

Click HERE for more information and to reserve tickets.

It would be our pleasure to see you on April 2nd, from 7 PM until midnight at Lost + Found Cafe, where we will have the following readings:

• Betsy Warland, reading from Oscar of Between Betsy Warland has published 12 books of creative nonfiction, poetry and lyric prose. A creative writing teacher, mentor and editor, her 2010 book of essays on writing, Breathing the Page—Reading the Act of Writing was a bestseller. In 2013, Warland created a new template: an interactive website salon. It features excerpts from her Oscar of Between, Guest Writers’ and artist’s work, and comments from readers. In the spring of 2016, it has become Oscar of Between – A Memoir of Identity and Ideas, making it one of two books launching Caitlin Press’ Dagger Editions.
• Nicola Harwood, reading from Flight Instructions for the Commitment Impaired Nicola Harwood is a writer, theatre and interdisciplinary artist. Her plays and projects have been produced in Canada, the US and Europe and are often concerned with the hidden histories of places, women and queers. She loves to work with communities, other artists and sometimes just her own self to create beauty, oddness and non-sequiturs in the world. Nicola currently lives in Vancouver and teaches Creative Writing at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. For full details see www.nicolaharwood.com
• Jane Eaton Hamilton, reading from Weekend Jane Eaton Hamilton is the author of eight previous books. Her memoir Mondays are Yellow, Sundays are Grey was a Sunday Times bestseller, and her story collection Hunger was a Ferro Grumley Award finalist. Her work has been published in the New York Times andSalon.  Her new novel Weekend is forthcoming from Arsenal Pulp Press in May 2016.
• Shelagh Plunkett, reading from an original short story Shelagh Plunkett is an award-winning writer and journalist. Her work has been published in various Canadian and American journals including The Walrus, enRoute Magazine, Geist, The Vancouver Sun and The Globe and Mail. In 2007 she won the CBC Literary Award for creative non-fiction and her memoir of growing up in Guyana and on Timor, Indonesia, The Water Here is Never Blue, was short listed for the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction and the Concordia University First Book Prize. She has just returned south after three months in Dawson City, Yukon as the Writers’ Trust Berton House writer in residence.
• Ali Blythe, reading from “Twoism” Ali Blythe completed a residency at the Banff Centre and a writing degree at the University of Victoria, receiving a scholarship from the Lambda Foundation for excellence in writing and support of the queer community. Poems from Twoism, a debut collection, have been published in literary journals and anthologies in Canada and Germany. This year, Blythe is the judge and workshop facilitator for the University of Victoria’s Diversity Writing Contests. He is also a featured poet at the Moving Trans History Forward 2016 Conference, and will be co-presented by the English Department’s FYI For Your Ideas Forum. Blythe lives in Vancouver’s West End.

This event will be both an intimate reading with the authors as well as a social gathering to mingle with likeminded folks. Books and subscriptions to Room will be available for purchase and authors will be available for signing.

Tickets to the Queer Arts Festival will also be available for purchase.

Due to limited capacity, we will hold your reserved spot until 7:30pm, after which, we will accept all attendance on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Caitlin Press and the Queer Arts Festival present the Launch of Dagger Editions in association with Room Magazine, Plenitude, the Vancouver Queer Film Festival, QMUNITY, and the Hastings Crossing Business Improvement Association. We thank them for their support in our shared mandate for inclusiveness and expression for queer women voices.

Visual art exhibition curated by Jonathan D. Katz and Conor Moynihan.

At the centre of this year’s festival is Drama Queer: seducing social change, a visual art exhibition curated by Jonathan D. Katz. This exhibition explores the role of emotion in contemporary queer art as a form of political practice. As a mechanism to coalesce feelings and direct them with activist intent, emotion is increasingly central to much contemporary work. This exhibition places the queer use of emotion into a historical frame, arguing that the solicitation of an emotional response has been of central import at least since the 1960s, as underscored by critics from Frank O’Hara to Jill Johnston to Gene Swenson.

While much of the art world foregrounded formal innovation, leaving the nakedly emotional unacknowledged, even unseen, queers have long championed the emotional in contradistinction to the formal. A means to challenge the dominant formal values so often elevated by critics, while undercutting anti-expressive postmodernist tenets, emotion had the added value of returning the field of art-making to the socio-political present. With the advent of AIDS, this emotional undercurrent grew in force and power, challenging the equanimity of dominant culture in the face of holocaust. Nakedly manipulative, this earlier queer art sought to move the viewer into action.

Drama Queer solicits a range of contemporary work towards understanding how feelings function in our political present, and the different facets of art and emotion — political emotion, erotic emotion etc. Centred around three never before exhibited monumental paintings by Attila Richard Lukacs, this exhibition will explore art that seeks to engender social change through making the viewer an accomplice, queering their perspective or seducing them into seeing the world from a dissident vantage point.

Visual artists: Del LaGrace Volcano, Angela Grossmann,Monica Majoli, Attila Richard Lukacs, Kent Monkman, Andreas Fuchs, Vika Kirchenbauer, Zanele Muholi, Zackary Drucker, Laura Aguilar,Cassils, Andrew Holmquist, Keijaun Thomas, Shan Kelley, Joey Terrill, Carl Pope, Vincent Tiley, Sean Fader, 2Fik, Laura Aguilar, Bill Jacobson, Rudy Lemcke, Jesse Finley Reed, George Steeves.

QAF is delighted to welcome Jonathan D. Katz and Conor Moynihan as curators for 2016’s visual art exhibition Drama Queer: seducing social change. Katz was the first full-time American academic to be tenured in the field of gay and lesbian studies, and his work as curator, scholar, and activist has had a profound impact on the understanding of queer art and artists in both academia and the larger world. He is best known for co-curating Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in 2010, the first openly queer exhibition at a major US museum. He also founded the Harvey Milk Institute, the largest queer studies institute in the world. Katz currently directs the doctoral program in Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo and serves as the president of the Leslie Lohman Museum in New York City.