Upcoming
The Walks is an app with a collection of audio walks by Rimini Protokoll. Each walk is a short audio experience that covers specific locations in your city and invites you to rediscover and interact with your environment.
Learn moreA downloadable day-by-day schedule for TBA:26.
Learn moreAn unknown cataclysm has caused all manner of surplus data and unassigned variables to leak into The Alembic Hotel. Explore the dilapidated brutalist monolith and meet the denizens as they gather packets, create cults, and invent a language to talk to God.
Learn moreIf telecommunications defined the 20th century, the phone booth was its most iconic structure. Which brings us to the hole at hand: TELBOW. How did it arrive, and where does it lead?
Learn moreOur Bar Garden is back—and this time, it’s a block party! We are closing down Hancock Street and bringing back your favorite hangout spot. Join us every day and night of the festival in the TBA:26 Bar Garden for shared beverages and meals that bring artists, crew, and community together.
Learn moreLearn more about accessibility at TBA:26. PICA is committed to accessibility as a value, ethic, and opportunity for learning, growth, and change. As we strive to create greater access to all of our programs and events, including the TBA Festival, we welcome feedback and dialogue from audiences and artists about their experiences and suggestions for improvement. To submit feedback, please contact us at boxoffice@pica.org or call (503) 224-PICA (7422).
Learn moreJoin us for the opening night of TBA at Elbow Room’s GOOD DANG WEEKNIGHT!—a bingo night and live music show/fundraiser to benefit Elbow Room, a nonprofit community art studio and gallery space focused on providing artistic mentorship, material support, and meaningful exhibition opportunities to artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities in Portland, OR.
Learn moreJoin PICA’s fall Creative Exchange Lab artists Sahar al-Sawaf, Melanie Flood, Kole Galbraith, Lalo Perez, Jess Perlitz, and Isabella Saavedra as they discuss their work, ideas, processes, and more. PICA’s Creative Exchange Lab, known as CXL, is an artist residency that brings together a cohort of artists working in varying disciplines.
Learn moreMemento Mori in the Dreamatorium is a 55-minute demonstration of Michelle Ellsworth’s best thinking on how to prepare for death, including one’s own and one’s dear one’s.
Learn moreThis final installment in Allie Hankins’ performance series, By My Own Hand, queers autobiography through examinations of manipulation, featuring dancers Linda Austin, claire barrera, keyon gaskin, Takahiro Yamamoto, and Lu Yim. Through strategies of deconstruction, distillation, resurrection, and re-membering, INVISIBLE TOUCH invites audiences into an architecture of alteration—a shifting field of entanglement and transformation—to confront notions of finality, authorship, and perception of self.
Learn moreThis is a work in progress of an interdisciplinary performance project that examines Sarai’s experiences of love as they are formed through risk, trust, memory, and cultural inheritance. Drawing from lived encounters and personal histories, this piece considers how intimacy can manifest in unconventional, high-stakes, and spiritually resonant forms. Situated at the intersection of dance, live action, and visual documentation, the project reflects on love as a series of embodied negotiations shaped by vulnerability, autonomy, and relational exchange.
Learn moreTBA artist Symara Sarai and Portland-based artist keyon gaskin will discuss Sarai’s work-in-progress performance. Both artists share an interest in interdisciplinary performance, unconventional forms, risk, and relational exchange.
Learn moreJoin us for a screening and conversation with Bebe Miller and Zoe Scofield. See work from their archives, hear about their processes, how their work was made, and what they think about it now. This is an opportunity to experience their pieces not otherwise available!
Learn moreCreated by the artist Ant Hampton, who is also co-director of the Time Based Editions series. Shifting back and forth along a line between Lausanne, Switzerland and Izmir, Turkey, this 77 min experience pieces together value and meaning from the very human ruins of aspiration, history, and language.
Learn moreUsing an improvised language of disintegration, How does it feel to look at nothing is an opera of the elemental, of pre-deities, of illusions of containment, and of transitional states. Visionary composer-performers, multi-instrumentalists, vocalists, and life partners Holland Andrews and yuniya edi kwon co-create this work of composition, improvisation, dance, ritual, and stunning sculptural and visual imagery to explore the forces and conditions that compel life’s emergence, and the spiritual act of meaning-making during epochs of decay.
Learn moreSad Boys in Harpy Land is a falling-apart coming-of-age tale, a decaying bildungsroman, a semi-autobiographical tour-de-farce. Equal parts sad clown show, demented cabaret, and extended crisis of meaning, Tatarsky collages narratives of art-making and despair into an unhinged solo performance in the hellscape of the mind.
Learn moreIn this workshop, we can explore how we treat drawing, sculpture, sound, video projection, sets, costumes, and beyond as an equal material to dance/bodies moving in space.
Learn moreTBA artist Alex Tatarsky joins theatre historian Kate Bredeson for a conversation about Sad Boys in Harpy Land.
Learn moreSmall Songs (2025) is a 39-minute experimental short film accompanied by an album, also titled Small Songs. This companion piece includes short-form synthesizer recordings that received a limited-edition vinyl release in 2023.
Learn moreJoin us on Sept. 12 for the screening of By My Own Hand, Part 4: MELODY, a solo work that engages the biomechanics of voice and an interweaving of movement, sound, and specter. As if intoning an elegy to her past selves, Allie conjures a space alive with poltergeist activity—dancing and singing within an intricate tapestry of wails, laughter, overtones, and unplaceable sounds. At once methodical and mundane, otherworldly and operatic, the work lives between elegy and manifesto, between haunted house and an architecture of alteration.
Learn moreJoin us for the final morning of the Festival for our beloved Pancake Breakfast.
Learn moreTBA artist Clayton Lee and visiting arts writer and thinker Jason N. Le will discuss Lee’s performance, Goldberg Variations, and issues related to queer desire, performance, and Asian diasporic identity.
Learn moreSubsisting on car-toasted Pop-Tarts, Michelle Ellsworth and Brian Rogers will drive all day, and edit all night, while weeping their way from Boulder, CO to Queens, NY to PICA, and back again.
Learn moreSeattle-based artist Kole Galbraith (Sinixt/Peoria) presents Q'əssápiˀ kəsˁác'əc' snk'əl'íp'. Foraging sounds and textures in the Okanagan and Columbia Basin, Galbraith uncovers latent sonic capabilities and hidden histories. Additionally, Galbraith will be joined by musicians Lori Goldston on the cello and Noel Kennon on viola.
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Past
Get ready to get down at the TBA:25 closing party, Dirty Thirty. This high-energy blowout marks the last official night of the Festival, bringing together artists, audiences, and the entire TBA community for one unforgettable throwdown.
Learn moreDuring TBA:25, come gather in PICA’s Bar Garden for shared meals that bring artists, crew, and community together. PICA’s Bar Garden is home for the TBA:25 Opening Night Dinner, pre-show box meals with artists, and post-show chats over a drink.
Learn morePICA is committed to accessibility as a value, ethic, and opportunity for learning, growth, and change. As we strive to create greater access to all of our programs and events, including the TBA Festival, we welcome feedback and dialogue from audiences and artists about their experiences and suggestions for improvement. To submit feedback, please contact us at boxoffice@pica.org or call 503-224-PICA (7422).
Learn morePICA’s Pavilion—airy, welcoming, and centrally located—becomes the Bar Garden during TBA. Whether you’re a longtime collaborator or first-time attendee, join us for drinks, toasts, and long-table conversations that spill into the night.
Learn moreA day-by-day schedule for TBA:25
Learn moreGood Dang Weekend is a fundraiser, dance party, and bingo event hosted by Kye Alive of Club Alive to benefit Elbow Room, a nonprofit community art studio and gallery space dedicated to supporting artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Learn moreTBA:24 concludes with an epic (FREE) afterparty at PICA, DJ'd by the legendary SHANNON F (Shannon Funchess)—the "beating heart of dark techno." On September 21, we will come together in the spirit of TBA to dance and sing, yell and laugh, and share in how it feels to be alive. Bring a friend. Dress to impress. Come as you are.
Learn moreOsten Cetto : Four Snakes is a new multimedia performance from Mvskoke sisters Olivia and Celeste Camfield alongside collaborator Woodrow Hunt. Through movement as an offering, live music, film, and tattoo’s relationship to body and shape, the performers explore the relations and abstractions between stories of the Alien, Mvskoke stories of beyond the stars, and themselves as family navigating space. The performance is accompanied by a program of short films from Indigenous filmmakers.
Learn morePart freewheeling comic lecture, part podcast, and part play, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World is a thrilling ride down the rabbit hole of Wikipedia and murder mystery podcasts about a case you’ve never heard of.
Learn moreThe first installment of Autumn Knight’s performance series NOTHING#15: a bar, a bed, a bluff, NOTHING#15: a bar enacts a social experiment that transforms PICA’s warehouse space into a host club, where a multitude of performers take on the task of provoking desire and exchanging acts of care with audience members.
Learn moreJoin cultural workers Alexandria Saleem and Sarah Farahat to steep in Teta’s tea. This is an invitation to grieve, nourish, and connect with what has been passed down through love and lineage, while remembering to cultivate new futures.
Learn moreILY2 is thrilled to announce Noise / Grain, an exhibition of new works converging image, sound, and video by the Toronto-based artist Timothy Yanick Hunter. Noise / Grain will open on September 14 with a performance in the PICA Annex, co-presented by ILY2 as part of the 2024 Time-Based Art Festival. The exhibition will remain on view at ILY2 through November 9.
Learn moreOn Sunday, September 15, from 12:00 to 2:00 PM, join us on the lawn in front of the Reed library for music, picnic fare, and a conversation with artists Sarah Gilbert, Jess Perlitz, and exhibition curator Stephanie Snyder, facilitated by Kristan Kennedy, Artistic Director & Curator of Visual Art at PICA. There will also be tours of Perlitz’s Reductions of Mountains, as well as the Cooley exhibition Tender (a collaboration with Ditch Projects, Springfield, OR).
Learn moreIn this performance, artist JJJJJerome Ellis presents portions of their latest project, Aster of Ceremonies. Using piano, saxophone, electronics, and voice, they perform excerpts from Benediction, a devotional song cycle attending to eighteenth and nineteenth century Black runaway slaves who stuttered.
Learn moreYelling Choir is a performance process that reimagines voice, presence, and power. Created by Maxx Katz, the Choir is a vehicle for experimental relational technology, using play, somatic awareness, and vocal practice to reform the psychosocial basis of community relationships.
Learn moreGranular Synthesis converges installation, sound, and video in a nonlinear presentation of digital fragments in reference to diasporic memory. The work integrates experimental sampling, splicing, and rearrangement, as well as conceptual methodologies around collapse and incompletion.
Learn moreMycelium Dreams is an ongoing, durational dance cartography and interview project initiated in 2022 by Portland dance and interdisciplinary artist Linda K. Johnson. Archival in nature, the PASTfuture interview component of the project is intent on creating an inclusive, nonhierarchical oral record of the stories of artists in the Portland community who have committed their life’s work to the field of dance.
Learn moreCurated and hosted by Carla Rossi, Carla Rossi’s Queer Horrors presents short horror films intercut with performances from Portland’s finest ghouls—plus an artist market, psychic readings, and a dance party complete with a Friday the 13th costume contest. It’ll be a scream!
Learn moreSculptor Jess Perlitz has visions of boulders—big ones, large enough to hide behind or stack inside a museum diorama. With wry, anthropological wit, Perlitz offers her sculptures for examination in the context of two large vitrines in an academic reading room.
Learn moreTender is the nature of this immersive, dual-sited exhibition that invites us inward to experience the slow transformation of thought into moments of uncertainty, doubt, and recovery. Tenderness embodies the honesty we can bring to life, like the flow state that pulses throughout this magical collaboration.
Learn moreGoner is a live, suspenseful choreography delving into the depths of psychological horror. Exploring alienation, migration, violence, and more, it crafts radical visual culture from a marginalized perspective and engages a new Black tradition of horror in live performance.
Learn morePAM CUT presents a screening of "The Untold Tales of Tuteremoana" and a discussion with special guest actress Mere Tokorahi Boynton (Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki & Ngāi Tūhoeof Aotearoa New Zealand), who stars in the third episode. Prior to this event, Mere will be performing in Sam Hamilton’s experimental opera Te Moana Meridian as part of TBA:24. Prior to this event, Mere will be performing in Sam Hamilton’s experimental opera "Te Moana Meridian" as part of TBA:24.
Learn moreTe Moana Meridian Conference is the ongoing public program counterpart to the experimental opera Te Moana Meridian, which centers around a speculative United Nations General Assembly Resolution to formally relocate the international prime meridian from the UK to Te Moananui-ā-Kiwa/the South Pacific Ocean.
Learn moreThis new “solo” performance by Morgan Bassichis humbly attempts to ensure that the performer Frank Maya’s legacy is no longer overlooked, while also resolving the bottomless queer search for laughter in times of crisis and for fame and father figures and intense attachment dynamics no matter how fleeting.
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