Past
Unique' has generally come to mean 'slightly out of the ordinary,' but Samita Sinha's voice warrants the true meaning of the hackneyed accolade... mesmerizing. This is fusion… in the best sense: she effortlessly, seamlessly weaves [sounds] yet keeps their distinct flavors intact. —Time Out
Learn moreLos Angeles-based visual artist Jennifer West discusses her newest TBA:14 project, Flashlight Filmstrip Projections, and experimentation with the synesthetic, performative, and material qualities of film with Kristan Kennedy, Visual Art Curator at PICA
Learn moreHere was a deeply intellectual experience of consciousness conveyed through physicality. Across the synapses between sensation and thought, the animal and the human, the ecological and illogical, the participants in Super Nature roared, howled, tingled, and leapt, flinging themselves over to feel out the distance and, for a moment, close the gap between the animal spirits and what it means to act naturally. — jkramer.net
Learn moreMSHR presents a cybernetic system made up of hand-built analog synthesizers and digitally fabricated hieroglyphic sculptures. Light, sound, and shape are pulled through nested feedback eddies as the system unfolds. Visitors become part of the feedback cycle, steering its course through their intentional engagement and ambient presence.
Learn moreAs round as an apple, as deep as a cup is a group of projects, perhaps an exhibition, maybe a poem. The presentations are not odes to something… the artists may or may not be poets, but all of it is OF poetry. For sure the installations, performances, and publications produced will rely on poetics… the study of how different parts come together, contributing to the never-ending search for “subject.” I hope that the endeavor feels like this. Like a thing broken apart and then put together again in the mouth—made real by reading it out loud. The projects are meant to behave like the carefully chosen discordant words in a certain kind of poem. The kind of poem that is a problem to ponder.” —Kristan Kennedy
Learn more2014 Time-Based Art Festival
Learn moreCULTURE-HEALING. In this commissioned project, celebrated queer feminist artist Wynne Greenwood transforms the Cooley Gallery into a studio and performance space in order to re-engage her groundbreaking art band—Tracy + the Plastics—in relationship to her most recent experimental video, installation, and object-based works.
Learn moreTexting is tacky. Calling is awkward. Email is old. PICA and TBA are "hotspots" for Miranda July's Somebody project.
Learn moreFor the better part of a century 16mm was the medium of choice for a coterie of artists dedicated to expanding the parameters of what was then called "film art." This medium and its project are now historical. The works that remain are the dwindling trace of a once practicing Secret Society. That society was Cinema.
Learn morePICA’s new Field Guide program will take off during TBA, offering up new avenues for you to explore, experience, and discuss concepts and forms in contemporary dance. Join guest Field Guide faculty Tonya Lockyer (dance artist/educator and Artistic Director of Velocity Dance Center in Seattle) for a casual, guided workshop and conversation about Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People's performance of And lose the name of action.
Learn moreA show performed by its audience. Taking the form of a theatrical “read-through,” attendees will pick up their scripts and navigate a text collectively, to create and perform a community. In the temporary microcosmic society that’s established over the course of the reading, everybody slowly but surely gets his or her role. WE ARE STILL WATCHING is a play in which the idea of “spectacle” slowly shifts to where we least expect it.
Learn moreAt this year’s Festival, Karen Sherman (Minneapolis) performs with set pieces she designs and builds herself, drawing on her skills in construction, while Linda Austin (Portland) performs with sculptural objects by artist David Eckard. Here, they talk about designing and constructing set pieces and choreographing with and for sculptural objects and visual artists.
Learn moreChoreographer Miguel Gutierrez will lead a unique walk through the world, guiding participants to awaken, explore, and illuminate their senses of the world around them.
Learn moreDance, words, and scrap lumber are the raw materials for One with Others, an examination of who we become due to the choices we—or others—make.
Learn morePICA’s new Field Guide program will take off during TBA, offering up new avenues for you to explore, experience, and discuss concepts and forms in contemporary dance. Join guest Field Guide faculty Keith Hennessy (choreographer and TBA alum) for a casual, guided workshop and conversation about Bouchra Ouizguen's Ha!.
Learn moreTrue to PICA’s interdisciplinary, artist-driven focus, TBA visual artist Emily Roysdon—whose practice spans independent and collaborative work in performance, installation, printmaking, text, video, and curating—interviews visiting choreographers Bouchra Ouizguen (Morocco) and Nacera Belaza (France/Algeria) on their newest works.
Learn moreTools and tactics for dancing and performance, which may or may not include: doing movements, imagining doing movements, rolling on the floor, touching each other, talking, screaming, seeing, and being seen. Participants will access and build a sense of awareness, presence, decision making, quality, and imagination.
Learn moreMoroccan choreographer Bouchra Ouizguen draws inspiration from the writings of the famed Persian poet and Sufi mystic Rumi to probe the obsessions lurking in each of us. In Ha!, she shares this exploration with her collaborators Fatima El Hanna, Fatima Aït Ben Hmad, and Naïma Sahmoud—a trio of Moroccan aïtas, traditional cabaret singers who are both celebrated and scorned for their performing tradition on the margins of society.
Learn more“Nacera Belaza practices the detail drawing, the imperceptible nuance, the painting of a slow-moving body with a play of light and shade. She is to the dance what Bresson is to the cinema...” —RTBF
Learn more“The professional insights of Erdal, who at times operates the lighting from the stage [...] illuminate his story, becoming a metaphor for his experiences and for life’s big questions... he uses the medium he knows so intimately [...] to present theatre with universal resonance.” —The Globe and Mail
Learn moreJamie Isenstein: Will Return is an exhibition, an occasion, and a publication. For the past fifteen years, Portland native and Reed College alumna Jamie Isenstein has created objects, drawings, mixed-media sculptures, and installations that engage the artist’s body as an artistic medium—a subject of humor, theatricality, and historical representation.
Learn moreDisjecta Curator-in-Residence Summer Guthery and artist Ieva Miseviciute will discuss comedy, problems, mimes, audience members as captives, undescribing performance, and fugues, all while sitting in very tall chairs.
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