Tag: 2021

Piano Burning

Sun Oct 24 | 5pm

Transdisciplinary music performance | Mountain View Cemetery

Rising from the ashes of this summer’s fire ban, QAF and Full Circle: First Nations Performance will reignite our Piano Burning event on Sunday, October 24 at Mountain View Cemetery. Curated by SD Holman and Margo Kane, Annea Lockwood’s infamous work — where QAF veteran Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa performs a piano as it burns to ashes — is re-envisioned through the lens of historically banned First Nations fire ceremonies and contemporary global warming of unprecedented levels.

Margo Kane and Full Circle: First Nations Performance ground this event with cultural knowledge and a focus on Two-Spirit artists: Sempúlyan, who will speak about the spiritual role of fire to communicate with ancestors; Russell Wallace, who has composed a new piece for the occasion; designer Evan Ducharme, who created Iwaasa’s fire-proof ball gown; and Squamish Nation councillor Orene Askew (aka DJ O Show), who will set the piano alight.

Bring a chair, bring a blanket, and dress for the weather!

Watch artists Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa & Evan Ducharme talk about their collaboration in Piano Burning, from our QAF 2021 interview series Studio (ob)Sessions:

Featured artists:

Russell Wallace
Orene Askew
Evan Ducharme
Sempúlyan
Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa
Eowynn Enquist

This event was postponed from its original date of Aug 8, 2021.
View Statement from the
Artistic Director here

Photos from the Oct 24 event. Photo credit: Chris Randle

ArtParty!

Sat July 24 | 7- 10 pm

Festival Opening | SUM & Sun Wah 268 Keefer

ArtParty! returns in-person for the first time since 2019! Regarded as one of Vancouver’s best-attended visual art events, ArtParty! marks the opening night of QAF’s signature Curated Visual Art Exhibition and kicks off it’s not easy being green’s impressive suite of exhibitions, performances and Satellite Academy outreach initiatives.

This year, we’re animating the Sun Wah Centre—from the basement to the SUM gallery, to the rooftop overlooking historic Chinatown and beyond! With DJ O Show spinning, this is one party you won’t want to miss!

QAF’s gala opening party: With music, dazzling views, and art on multiple levels of the Sun Wah Centre to explore, we’re launching the Dispersed QAF in champagne style (have a glass or two or a nibble or three on us)

This event is ASL Interpreted.

DJ O Show

Orene Askew, aka DJ O Show, brings energy and expertise to every event she hosts and DJ’s. She brings professionalism and passion and remains true to her love for hip hop and R&B, incorporating beats to ensure you never want to leave the dance floor! With an outgoing personality and friendly demeanor, O Show is one of the easiest DJ’s to work with.

From Vancouver to Toronto, Las Vegas to Texas, DJ O Show keeps the dance floor packed, working with clients to to put together unique packages and customized playlists for weddings, birthdays, holiday parties, corporate events, restaurant and club openings, charity fundraisers, youth conferences and pride events in her city!

DJ O Show has experience teaching with an inspired approach. She is an inspirational speaker, having traveled across the country to bring ambition and drive to all generations, and is an elected member of the Squamish Nation Council.

Coming from a diverse background, O Show is driven by her passion. She is Afro-Indigenous a proud member of the Squamish Nation. Feeling as though she stood out in a unique way, she has embraced both her cultural backgrounds and incorporates the teachings she has learned into everything she does.

DJ O Show!

This event is ASL Interpreted.

QAF 2021 dispersed:

it’s not easy being green

Jul 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, but when were the queered privy to life outside the apocalypse? 

Green is the complex terrain of extended kinship ties of Indigiqueer/two-spirit and queer settlers. Green spectrals haunt the hyphened margins of the subaltern; 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 relentlessly into the ongoing colonial.

QAF shows artists cast as see-ers/oracles/alchemists upcycling/rebranding/reclaiming/transgressing/transforming apocalyptic visions towards queer utopic landscapes, transmuting fear, dread and a collective broken heart of forced disslocations with departures and arrivals, using art as transformative praxis and practice towards social and spiritual metamorphoses.

QAF 2021 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. 

When green is all there is to be
It could make you wonder why,
but why wonder?
– Kermit the Frog
Buy festival PASS here:

2021 EVENTS AT A GLANCE

ArtParty!

Sat Jul 24, 7-10pm
Festival Opening | SUM & Sun Wah 268 Keefer

QAF’s Gala opening party: With music, dazzling views, and art on multiple levels of the Sun Wah Centre to explore, we’re launching the Dispersed QAF in champagne style (have a glass or two or a nibble or three on us) with DJ O Show!

it’s not easy being green: Curated Visual Art Exhibition and Tour


Sat Jul 24 – Fri Aug 13, from 12 – 6pm
Visual Art | SUM  & Sun Wah 268 Keefer Lower Ground

Jeffrey McNeil-Seymour and SD Holman curate artists who transmute our collective broken heart of forced dislocations with departures and arrivals, using art as transformative praxis and practice towards social and spiritual metamorphoses.

Tue Jul 27, 5pm
Visual Art Tour | SUM & Sun Wah 268 Keefer

Come together for our Visual Art Tour with the curators Jeffrey McNeil-Seymour and SD Holman, guest artists, and a gallery of intimate friends old and new.

Language as a Virus: Queer Isolation Stories

Sat Jul 24 – Fri Aug 13
Sonic Installation | around False Creek & Online

An interactive audio/radio/networked soundwork from Bobbi Kozinuk that invites the user to explore themes around the COVID-19 pandemic and its effect on queer and diverse communities. Featuring Jae Lew. 

Language as a Virus: The Tour

Mon Jul 26, 5pm  
Audio Art Tour | Creek Side CC (TBC) False Creek

Take a stroll or a bike ride along False Creek and tune in to WENR 88.9FM Isolation Radio with your host Bobbi Kozinuk and explore her multi-layered work, Language as a Virus: Queer Isolation Stories.

Studio (ob)Sessions

Mon July 26 – throughout festival
Digital Discourse | Online

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.

Screen Greenery

Sat Jul 31, 9pm
Media Art Screening | SUM & Sun Wah 268 Keefer Rooftop

Curated by Fergie and Ben!  Rooftop screening of very queer and rather green short films.

Queerotica

Mon Aug 2, 8pm | Literary Readings | SUM & Sun Wah 268 Keefer Rooftop & Online

Curated by Josie Boyce, slip into something a little more comfortable and enjoy readings by Vancouverite writers.

Attend in person or at home via streaming.

Ceremony for Rebel Spirits – Onibana Taiko and Alvin Erasga Tolentino

Sat Aug 7, 8pm 
Dance and Musical Performance | Mountain View Cemetery
*NEW* ONLINE | Tue Aug 10 | 24 hours

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.

Piano Burning

*POSTPONED* Sun Aug 8, 8pm
Performance Art | Mountain View Cemetery & Online

With Full Circle First Nations Performance, we build on Annea Lockwood’s conceptual classic music composition with a new commission by Lil’wat composer Russell Wallace, a fireproof ball gown created by Métis designer Evan Ducharme, and a piano on fire played by Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa.

Attend in person or at home via streaming.

Glitter is Forever

Fri Aug 13, 7-10pm  
Closing | SUM & Sun Wah 268 Keefer Rooftop  

Join us for the festival closing with DJ O Show and your last chance to see all the art @ QAF 2021 with us at the Sun Wah Centre, from the basement, to the SUM gallery, to the rooftop (take it all in!! the art, the views!!). 

SATELLITE ACADEMY : Workshops, Community,  Discourse + 

Multidisciplinary outreach and community programming rooted in the  premise that 2SLGBTQ+ lives are relevant and universal as artistic inspirations. Title inspired by writer Sarah Schulman’s Satellite Academy

Kindred Spirits

Sat Jul 24 – Fri Aug 13
Community Visual Art | Online

The digital culmination of the Kindred Spirits digital artist residency run by and for 2Spirit and Indigiqueer artists. Guided by Faculty members Dayna Danger, DJ O Show, Raven Davis and Art Auntie Shane Sable, this digital exhibition focuses on re-storying 2Spirit identities and futures through community connection and self-portraiture beyond colonial constructs.

Pride in Art Community Show

Sat Jul 24 – Fri Aug 13, from 12 – 6pm
Visual Art | SUM & Sun Wah 268 Keefer

The community show honours Pride in Art founder, activist, and Two-Spirit artist Robbie Hong’s legacy with an open community exhibition. This year, we’re throwing what was once refused up on our walls. Join community artists in a Salon des Refusés (or perhaps Recyclés) celebrating works that were previously censored or rejected.

Pillows for the Pandemic

Wed Jul 28, 7:30pm 
Workshop | SUM gallery or Online                                                             

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 controllable comforts.

Gathering of Wishes and 1000 Paper Butterflies

Wed Aug 4, 6pm | Workshop | SUM gallery or Online

Naoko Fukumaru and Eva Wong in Phase 1 of Mass Reincarnation of Wish Fragments 願片大量転生 (Ganhen Tairyou Tensei), where participants create origami and utilize the ink bleeding process to create a butterfly with their own unique patterns and colours. 

Queerer than Queer: Lessons from Nonduality for Deep Planetary Healing

Thu Aug 5 & Fri Aug 6, 7pm | Workshop | SUM gallery or Online 

Is the universe queerer than we can suppose? From the foot of the Himalayas in Himachal Pradesh, Tejal Shah will guide us through this two-part interactive workshop that explores the fine line between illusions and reality. We will explore the possible impact an embodied understanding of nonduality can have on our affective world and on our relationships with ‘others’.

Curated Visual Art Exhibition

Sat Jul 24 – Fri Aug 13, from 12 – 6pm

Visual Art Exhibition | Sun Wah 268 Keefer, Lower Ground Floor

Beric Manywounds
Blake Angeconeb
Chad Baba
Duane Isaac
Falak Vasa

Grace House
Ho Tam
Isaac Murdoch
Jay Pahre
Kali Spitzer

Katherine Atkins
Kathleen Ross
Manuel Axel Strain
Oluseye
pablo muñoz

Preston Buffalo
Tejal Shah
Tsohil Bhatia

The exhibition is open to the public and free to view on the Lower Ground Floor of the Sun Wah Centre for the duration of the festival, open Tue – Sat from 12 – 6pm.

Green. Ascribed with multiplicities such as spring’s cyclical lush green rematriation: growth, hope, vitality, balance – health … to spectrums of radioactive and toxic neons … to pestilent dark greens symbolizing mutation, jealousy, greed and wealth. Green inhabits interconnectedness, relationship with the Other, the seen and unseen, as well as the very lands and waters the West — WE — continue to occupy. Green maturates deviance, neuro-divergence, epoch and paranormality. 

Strange pop-cultural oddities/underdog/anti-heroes emerge from fantastically unconventional, metaphorical trappings of the colour green: Elphaba the Wicked Witch of the West; Rainbow Connection Kermit the Frog; Joaquin Phoenix’s invocation of Arthur Fleck’s becomings into The Joker; The Mandalorian’s Grogu (Baby Yoda) taking the visual lexicon by storm — It’s not easy being Green. 

Was there a time of Utopic Queer being and doing? What are the implications of being privy to pre-apocalypto hauntings? Post-apocalyptic expectations with an evidence base indicating we already have arrived in the end-time — we all have diverse ancestries of forced migration and forced dislocation/relocations along linear entry points, we remain and WE are/can/could still be vanished at any given moment.  

Green is linked to power. The currency of Green has the power to legally mark action and activism(s) as terrorism. Settler Environmental ally/accomplices are marked deviant not only for their vote, but akin to Canadian News media’s necropolitical castings of Indigenous land and water protectors as violent. As protester. 

We witness the world grappling with end-time realities, seemingly surreal and relentlessly coming into view, as we fight for a world yet to be realized, waiting to be seen — and by one that consistently rejects WE. Green, in its final transformation, exists as representing the supernatural, the great mystery ­— time and power intertwined. An apocalyptic green glows lasciviously as it courts both eschatological time (Philosopher Byung-Chul Hans’ naming of an apocalyptic/temporal end point) and the status quo’s living in romantic despair that the end of the world in which the existing exalted beings are not free subjects of apocalypticism(s).

Green is the complex terrain of extended kinship ties between Indigiqueer/two-spirit and queer settlers. Green spectrals haunt the hyphenated margins of the subaltern; enduring perpetually frequent gaslighting 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.

Curators Jeffrey McNeil-Seymour and SD Holman

Visual Art Tour
Tue Jul 27 | 5pm

Come together for our Visual Art Tour with the curators Jeffrey McNeil-Seymour and SD Holman and guest artists

Language as a Virus: The Tour

Mon Jul 26 | 5 pm

Audio Art Tour | Roundhouse Community Arts Centre Roundabout

Join artist Bobbi Kozinuk in an exploration of her work, Language as a Virus: Queer Isolation Stories. Language as a Virus: Queer Isolation Stories is an interactive multi-platform sonic-art installation from artist Bobbi Kozinuk, featuring publicly broadcasted radio programming around the False Creek area as well as online. **Please bring a personal device that can access FM radioand/or scan QR codes.

Bobbi Kozinuk is a Vancouver-based media artist, curator, and technician. Former Media Director at Western Front, she has also worked on a board level with the Independent Media Arts Alliance (Montreal), Co-op Radio, grunt Gallery, Video In and Pride In Art Society (Vancouver), and has travelled extensively producing workshops on low-powered FM transmission at schools, universities and artist-run centres across Canada. Bobbi is published in Radio Rethink (produced by the Banff Centre for the Arts), Echo Locations (audio art CD produced by Co-op Radio) and Islands of Resistance (New Star Books, Vancouver). Currently, as the Wearables, Interactivity, Prototyping Lab Technician at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, she teaches electronics and programming. Bobbi has exhibited media installation works in local, national and international contexts including In-Ex ISEA (San Jose), Diffractions, Galleria di Nuova Icona (Venice), and Folly Gallery (Lancaster, UK)

Curator Tour with Guest Artists

Tue Jul 27, 5pm

Visual Art Tour | Sun Wah 268 Keefer, Lower Ground Floor

Come together for our Visual Art Tour of our exhibition it’s not easy being green, with the curators Jeffrey McNeil-Seymour and SD Holman + guest artists.

Studio (ob)Sessions

Mon Jul 26 – throughout festival

Digital Discourse | Online

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

Participating artists:

Carrie Hawks – Jul 26, 7:30pm (ASL)

Falak Vasa – Jul 27, 7:30pm

Alvin Erasga Tolentino – Jul 29, 7:30pm

Lili Robinson – Jul 30, 7:30pm (ASL)

Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa & Evan Ducharme – Aug 1, 7:30pm (ASL)

Eva Wong & Naoko Fukumaru – Aug 3, 7:30pm

Tejal Shah – Aug 3, 8:30pm

Zachery Longboy – Aug 9, 7pm

Ho Tam – Aug 11, 7pm

Screen Greenery

Sat Jul 31 | 9 pm

Media Art Screening | SUM & Sun Wah 268 Keefer Rooftop

Curated by QAF Associate Artistic Director Fergie and Programs Coordinator Ben!  Rooftop screening of edutainment for the pandemic — very queer and rather green short films.

Animation and environmentalism share a more than passing connection for many of us. From celebrated ecocentric blockbusters like Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke and Pixar’s WALL-E to popular children’s programming such as Captain Planet and The Lorax, environmental protection is a memorable recurring theme within the medium for multiple generations. As a message, environmentalism presents an approachable moral framework for education and entertainment; the earth is beautiful and sacred and those who wish it harm must be challenged because hurting the planet hurts us all. These programs told us to hold ‘eco-villains’ responsible, and fight for the planet and the little guy. They taught us that we were ‘the little guy’. Both timeless and timely, it is a vital concern to implant in the minds of future generations, and the fact this message is frequently brought to life through the medium of animation feels incidental yet brimming with significance.

Recently animation and queerness have been dancing a similar dance, repeating motions inherited from their environmentalist predecessors. Likewise brought together by radical movements—both figurative and literal—queer animation garners the attention of an accepting audience with a timely message rooted in progressivism and compassion. Viewing such lessons through the lens of queerness, our generation saw that queerness was a fight against the same cruel forces that sought to destroy the earth. That we too could thrive and flower if we removed poisonous villains from the equation. After all, queers are beautiful and sacred and those who wish us harm must be challenged because hurting queers hurts us all. 

Further still, queer animation feels different, more synergistic, more compelling, more substantial. Some have argued that animation has always been queer, exhibiting a methodology compounded by the fluidity of a medium capable of unlimited orientation, by the immeasurable joy of saturated pigments in a hypercolour cornucopia, by the unmistakable touch of the human hand embodied within every frame. It expands us and imbuing animation with joyous queer futures is radical self love, a beautiful statement of queer justice. Queer animators ‘imagine, envision, and describe new ontologies and actively depict them in a way that demands participation’; animation becomes a group exercise, trusting in our ability to question and learn, apply learning, and share said learning. When we embrace the cartoonishly queer, we share in queer liberation.

Featuring films by:

Carrie Hawks
Daniel Sterlin-Altman
Sara Koppel
Sonya Reynolds & Lauren Hortie
Deirdre Keough/IQECO
Al MacKay

Queerotica

Mon Aug 2 | 8 pm

Literary Readings | SUM & Sun Wah 268 Keefer Rooftop

Curated by Josie Boyce, slip into a little green something and enjoy readings by Vancouverite writers.

Queerotica is Apocalypterotica, in all the best possible ways. Survival through living your truth amidst the world wishing you wouldn’t. That’s us, singing, dancing and freeing our spirits in the ways we are able to given the apocalyptic death urge of humanity. Poetry, Performance, and spoken word at the end of the world, or is it the end of the word? It’s not easy being green, is it? Green in the punk sense, being as respectful to the stolen land (aka unceded) beneath you, and around you, the hierarchies of people here at the end of the world. But we can and we do scream queerotica at the structures around us creating our own language of performance.  Queerotica need not be sexual or romantic in order to be erotic, and vice versa. Blowing minds since forever, and into never, our desires stoke hopeful fires lighting the Apocalypse of now. – Josie Boyce

This event is ASL Interpreted.

Featuring:

Soo Jeong
Tin Lorica
Lili Robinson
Anjalica Solomon
Sajia Sultana Kabir

Onibana Taiko and Alvin Erasga Tolentino

Sat Aug 7 | 8 pm

Dance and Music Performance | Mountain View Cemetery

*NEW* ONLINE | Tue Aug 10 | 24 hours

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.

Please note: Due to the use of incense, this event cannot be considered scent-reduced.

Onibana Taiko 鬼束太鼓 are three Nikkei veterans of Vancouver’s taiko community, whose performances draw from Japanese traditional arts, festival drumming, and folk music and dance, all with a touch of feminist queer punk aesthetics. Onibana is a type of flower that grows in the grave sites of Japan. Through taiko, the group seeks to transform shadowy elements into beauty, bridging the divide so as to commune with our ancestors with song, dance, shamisen, flute, and kick-ass taiko.

Alvin Erasga Tolentino is a Filipino Canadian choreographer and dance artist, and the founding Artistic Director of Vancouver’s Co.ERASGA. His dance creations are driven from the need to intricately illustrate the human experience of light and dark and the infinitely complex relationship between nature and humanity. His choreography challenges the exploration of hybridity to reveal the private and public territory, identity, gender and the issues within the traditional and contemporary cross-cultural dialogue.

Alvin Erasga Tolentino
Onibana Taiko, photo credit: Toonasa Photography

Glitter is Forever

Fri Aug 13 | 7 – 10pm

Closing Party | SUM & Sun Wah 268 Keefer Rooftop

Join us for the festival closing with DJ O Show and your last chance to see all the art @ QAF 2021with us at the Sun Wah Centre, from the basement, to the SUM gallery, to the rooftop (take it all in!! the art, the views!!).   

This event is ASL Interpreted.

Kindred Spirits

Sat Jul 24 – Fri Aug 13

Community Art Showcase | Online

The digital culmination of the Kindred Spirits digital artist residency run by and for 2Spirit and Indigiqueer artists. Guided by Faculty members Dayna Danger, DJ O Show, Raven Davis and Art Auntie Shane Sable, this digital exhibition focuses on re-storying 2Spirit identities and futures through community connection and self-portraiture beyond colonial constructs. 

Participated artists TBA.

Pride in Art Community Show

Sat July 24 – Fri Aug 13, daily from 12 – 6pm

Visual Art | SUM & Sun Wah 268 Keefer, 4th Floor

The exhibition is open to the public and free to view in the SUM gallery (4th floor) of the Sun Wah Centre for the duration of the festival, open Tue – Sat from 12 – 6pm.

Each year, the Pride in Art Community Show honours Pride in Art founder, activist, and Two-Spirit artist Robbie Hong’s legacy with an open community exhibition.

Paris, 1863: A group of artists whose works had been rejected by the selection committee of the official Salon protested so vigorously the Emperor Napoleon III, ‘wishing to let the public judge the legitimacy of these complaints’, ordered a special exhibition. The resulting exhibition, the Salon des Refusés revolutionized how European art was viewed and consumed.  

Vancouver, 1998: The Pride In Art Society forms as a collective of queer visual artists mounting an annual community art exhibition. PiA works to celebrate the rich heritage of queer artists and art. 

Vancouver, 2021: At this year’s Pride in Art Community Show, we’re celebrating our continued and stubbornly vibrant survival. As part of QAF 2021 Dispersed: it’s not easy being green, we’re throwing what was once refused up on our walls. A Salon des Refusés, works that were not ‘right’ in other exhibitions- too loud, too quiet, too queer, too normative, too much, too little. All those works that we were told couldn’t fit, we’re reclaiming as gold. 

Joyelle Goldbard
Romain Berger
Brian Ball
Edward Bader
Jason Russell Young
El Chenier
Josie Boyce
Ilena Lee
James Lauder
Olivier Salvas
Alex Murphy
Rose Anza-Burgess
Lesha Koop
Holly Steele
&
MORE!

Pillows for the Pandemic

Wed Jul 28 | 7:30 pm

Workshop | SUM gallery or Online

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. 

This event is ASL Interpreted.

Artist Statement

This workshop is about comforts. What makes you comfortable when everything feels harsh? What parts of your body are calling for care? Which sections of the walls in your home are softest? 

Through the pandemic, I have been making pillows for parts of my home and my body that have required some extra tender love and care. Imagining home as an extension of the body, I have been making pillows the shape of my forehead, pillows for my toe, pillows for walls that are a little too hard, pillows with embroidered affirmations.

In this workshop, we will explore these questions of comfort, softness, and more, through writing prompts and conversation. You are also welcome to bring any embroidery materials you’d like to make a pillow of your own during the workshop.

homes are bodies

and pillows 

pimples;

homes are bodies

and fissures

fissures;

suture, stitch, stuff

suture, stitch, stuff

suture, stitch, stuff

Queerer than Queer: Lessons from Nonduality for Deep Planetary Healing

Thu Aug 5 & Fri Aug 6 | 7pm

Workshop | Online

“Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”~ JBS Haldane in his 1927 essay, Possible Worlds

In this two-part interactive workshop we will explore the fine line between what we conventionally consider as illusions (such as a mirage) and that which we consider as ‘reality’. How real is reality? How real are our feelings & emotions? 

If all existence is illusion-like as expounded by various eastern philosophical systems – something that we can infer through reasoning & have an embodied experience of – what impact can this potentially have on our emotional world, our behaviour, our actions and ethics? 

The nondual wisdom of interdependence & the practices available to develop a sense of unconditional friendliness towards all beings (and things) couldn’t be more relevant than now when we are undergoing tectonic shifts in life as we know it. At the heart of these changes, what is at stake are our relationships & our affect. How can we relate & how would we relate if the boundaries between self & other dissolve? How does this impact our work as artists as we touch ‘others’ through every sensory and mental means available to us? What innate kinship do queers share with nonduality as a mode of life?

TEJAL SHAH, currently lives in Himachal Pradesh, India

Tejal’s practice consistently challenges the legible by occupying liminal spaces between fact, fiction and poetry. Working across diverse media such as video, photography, performance, installation and educational projects, Shah positions themself at the intersection of queer ecology, feminism and nondual Buddhist philosophy. Exploring the notions of “trans-”—with regard to gender and sexuality, but also to national or cultural identity—Shah’s work inhabits the position of the in-between as a means to destabilise the complacency of status quos. Theirs is an invitation to examine the relationship between power and knowledge, learned social and political behaviour, and the construction of norms.

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