Past
TBA artist Okwui Okpokwasili reflects on her TBA solo performance, Bronx Gothic, and its personal inflections. With Angela Mattox, PICA Artistic Director.
Learn moreThe Bay Area’s legendary boundary-breaker Fauxnique (the drag queen alter-ego of artist/choreographer/dancer Monique Jenkinson) leads an expedition through layers of femme artifice and authenticity. We will rigorously honor practices of drag tradition and boldly expand definitions of drag performance. Be prepared to move and WERQ! Performance; All Levels.
Learn moreMusicians rooted in punk feminism will perform a selection of songs expanding the notion of Riot Grrrl "hits," ranging from Canadian indie pop Cub to S.F. queercore Tribe 8. The audience can sing along to karaoke style videos made for this occasion by Dana Bishop-Root & Ginger Brooks Takahashi of General Sisters and Deirdre Logue & Allyson Mitchell of FAG Feminist Art Gallery. Live Riot pulls into focus the politics that arise when revisiting the lyrics and spirit of these fearless and danceable songs. Following the show Ginger will DJ the night away as you dance it out. Singing, we must rage!
Learn morekeyon gaskin it's not a thing
Learn moreLauded Italian choreographer and theatre director Alessandro Sciarroni is known for his stagings that marvel and works that straddle dance, performance art, and ritual anthropology. In FOLK-S, the Schuhplatter, a Bavarian folk dance, meaning “shoe batter”, is refined to its most essential form invoking a sense of playful experimentation and ritualized trance.
Learn moreLeading curators discuss the festival format as a uniquely relevant platform for global contemporary art, performance, and public engagement. With Angela Mattox, PICA's TBA Festival (Portland, OR); Jeff Khan, Performance Space (Sydney, Australia); Norman Armour (PuSh Festival, Vancouver, BC); and Vallejo Gantner (PS122 / COIL Festival, New York City). Moderated by Sara Krajewski, Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art, Portland Art Museum. Note: We regret that Seunghyo Lee (Festival Bo:m, Seoul) and Helen Cole (In Between Time Festival, Bristol, UK), both listed in the TBA Festival print catalog, are unable to join us.
Learn moreKarl Larsson and Pascal Prosek (Sweden) with Morgan Ritter and Gary Robbins (Portland) discuss their TBA project, Commonplace, the genesis of their collaborations, and attempts to create a book that defies its own form. With Kristan Kennedy, Visual Art Curator, PICA.
Learn moreJoin PDX stand out performer Isaiah "Esquire" Tillman and Vogue dancer David (Dee) Yu as they teach a vogue and dance class to get you ready to serve and twirl on the runway. This class is for any level, but come ready to sweat, prance and LIVE! Performance; All Levels
Learn moreOPENING NIGHT: The influential and relentlessly relevant rock band of mythical standing Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks kick off TBA:15 with a free concert for all! Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks are veteran Portland-based musicians Joanna Bolme, Mike Clark, Jake Morris, and frontman Stephen Malkmus.
Learn morePICA and Pacific Northwest College of Art's MFA in Visual Studies present a public lecture by Jibade-Khalil Huffman, an artist and the author of three books of poems: 19 Names For Our Band (2008), James Brown is Dead (2011), and Sleeper Hold (2015). Huffman's art and writing projects, which span performance, photography, poetry, and video, have been presented at MoMA/PS1; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Poetry Project; and the Hammer Museum, among others. He is a 2015-16 Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem though otherwise lives and works in Los Angeles.
Learn morePictures of the moon, is the holy spirit, is the tongue of fire, is the ghost body, is host body, is the formless thing, is anxiety, is ecstasy, is seeing through the mirror, is energy, is neither here nor there, is god, is G–D, is godS, is NO GOD ever was, is inside you, is clay, is crystal, is vapor, is hair, is sound, is gold, is light, is words, is wave, is lump, is desert dot, is geometry, is concrete, is floating, is memory, is trickery, is hawk overhead, is notion, is nature, is knowing, is never knowing, is why go on.
Learn moreSimensky’s multi-part Surface Contents 1 & 2 employs gold in a series of actions, prints, and architectural interventions. The resulting work will form a dialogue that sees gold as a literal index of locatable value and something ever-shifting in meaning and immense influence.
Learn more2015 Time-Based Art Festival
Learn moreA charged site. Ways and means. “...various little ways of changing things.”
Learn moreThis is a story about mosquitos and how much I hate them. It all started with arguments of criminality based on a reading of the French Playwright, Jean Genet. I will deprecate the achievements of the mosquitos in my immediate world. In my work, I often ask, can I physically experience hypothetical graphs? This time, I will plot lines in skewed positions and will track them with the intent to judge the things that make my life so skewed. Reps of boot camp exercises help dissect emotional discomforts that are so little that I could otherwise ignore them, but should not. This is a story about petty crimes vs. noble crimes.
Learn moreHYPNOSIS DISPLAY is an original live sound and 16mm film collaboration between experimental vocalist and musician Grouper (Liz Harris) and filmmaker Paul Clipson.
Learn moreJoël Barraquiel Tan (Director of Community Engagement, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco) and Catherine Ming T’ien Duffly (Assistant Professor, Theatre & Performance Studies, Reed College) will make prepared remarks that address the theme of this year’s symposium, Seniors, Sexuality & Spirituality: Art and Social Change. Remarks will be followed by a Q&A and broader.
Learn moreMammalian Diving Reflex's Artistic Director, Darren O’Donnell, provides a glimpse into the company's research and creative process; their numerous socially engaged art and performance projects (including TBA:14 performance All the Sex I’ve Ever Had); and the broader landscape and politics of art and civic engagement with Ariana Jacob, a Portland-based social practice artist.
Learn moreThe first of two TBA Festival Flights, Gender, Culture, & Experiments with Tradition reflects a range of work by artists from diverse disciplines who rigorously examine the intersections of history, culture, language, gender, and aesthetic form, while experimenting with musical, vocal, and choreographic concepts and traditions that both exude and transcend particularities of time and place.
Learn moreJoin artists, activists, and thinkers from Portland and beyond for a participation-oriented community forum exploring ideas, practices, and possibilities within the shifting terrain of art and social change. Using a small-group format, eclectic teams--including performing and visual artists, scholars of multiple disciplines, activists working within a range of sectors, LGBT Requiem Mass Think Tank participants, TBA Festival audiences, and members of the public--will gather to tackle burning issues, discuss specific projects, and devise arts-based scenarios to address local problems. Open to the public. Refreshments will be served.
Learn morePICA makes transparent the creative process of a new commission and future TBA Festival project, Holcombe Waller’s LGBT Requiem Mass. Requiring extensive cross-cultural engagement across LGBT, faith-based, and contemporary art communities, PICA and Waller have convened a think tank of national and local specialists in various areas of queer and LGBT activism and advocacy; progressive, inclusive, and affirming churches; queer spirituality studies; and socially engaged art and performance. For this public roundtable, Waller will introduce LGBT Requiem Mass's broader artistic vision and political aspiration at this stage of development, while members of the think tank will share highlights from their previous day's convening. Together, the Roundtable conversation will launch a more expansive, day-long symposium that draws on and builds from some of its key questions, ideas, and critical concerns.
Learn moreIn GERMINAL, French artists Halory Goerger and Antoine Defoort create one of the most talked-about recent works of contemporary international theater. Both whimsical and deeply philosophical in approach, GERMINAL asks: if we had the opportunity to start the world from scratch, how would we do it?
Learn moreOne of PICA's most popular year-round programs gets TBA treatment with five festival Field Guides facilitated by visiting and local artists and scholars. Each small-group session creates context around contemporary performance and a particular artist's social, political, cultural, and aesthetic influences through a pre-show workshop with lecture and discussion; group viewing of a performance; and post-show conversation over food and drink. Online artist interviews and other media supplement learning and engagement. Anyone curious about contemporary art is welcome.
Learn moreHalory Goerger and Antoine Defoort dissect GERMINAL’s philosophical investigations into a staging of the construction and deconstruction of society, civilization, and the world. Moderated by Kate Bredeson, Assistant Professor of Theater, Reed College.
Learn more