Past
DB Amorin's "long shadow" is a 45-minute soundwalk composition inspired by the desire to return to that which may no longer be familiar to us. The layered audio experience, drawing on the artist’s memories of the Ko’olau mountain range, the transition of season, and the longing for vanishing eras, is designed to trace the path of the MAX Red Line from the urban center of Portland to the Portland International Airport as a soundtrack for the movement towards unreachable places.
Learn moreTHE ACHE is the third installment of Allie Hankins’ five-part performance series of projects entitled, By My Own Hand. Developed in collaboration with Hannah Krafcik, THE ACHE calls attention to the myriad of ways selfhood can be constituted and remixed through creative acts of self-determination; it takes shape as 1) a video exhibition 2) a publication release and 3) a series of free intergenerational art-making workshops facilitated by local artists dee bustos, Muffie Delgado-Connelly, Midori Hirose, and Ralph Pugay.
Learn moreWill Rawls presents a new interdisciplinary work, [siccer], that addresses the relationship between blackness and image-making through a live performance accompanied by a video installation. Encompassing dance, photography, and sound, [siccer] experiments with stop-motion, a filmmaking technique in which subjects incrementally shift positions between photographs to produce the illusion of movement.
Learn moreIn conjunction with the video installation Alka domo and performance Flowing Like Waterfalls, join us on August 29 at 6:00 pm for a panel discussion with Seba Calfuqueo, artist Malcolm Peacock, and radical educator Vo Vo. Moderated by Converge 45's Derek Franklin.
Learn moreSeba Calfuqueo (b. 1991, Santiago, Chile) is an internationally celebrated artist of Indigenous Mapuche origin. Their work appeals to their Indigenous inheritance to propose critical reflections on the social, cultural, and political status of the Mapuche subject in contemporary Chilean society, in Latin America and the world. Calfuqueo’s work marshals, among other elements, installation, ceramic, performance, and video art to explore the cultural similarities, differences, and stereotypes produced by the melding of Indigenous and Western ways of thinking. Their work often starts from the broad field of performance art, but also extends into videos that are often exhibited later and sometimes together with elements used in the action itself.
Learn moreIn addition to major video installation, Alka domo — on view at PICA August 24 through September 24, 2023 — Seba Calfuqueo will present Flowing Like Waterfalls (2022-2023) in PICA's Annex on August 26 at 3:30 pm. Flowing Like Waterfalls is a 20-minute performance that approaches the power of water's fluidity as a means to explore the body, gender, sexuality, and the relationship of water with life, forests, and ecosystems.
Learn moreHow can art be transformative—for individuals, groups, and society? Prem Krishnamurthy explores these and other questions by sharing recent projects across design, writing, and experimental pedagogy. Taking each project as a rehearsal for the next—and as a way to explore different scales of transformation—his approach prototypes forms of connection and collaboration embedded within contemporary artistic practice. Using writing, music, movement, and conversation (+ karaoke!), this participatory event opens up polyvocal ways of working in and on the world.
Learn moreCurated by Roya Amirsoleymani and Felisha Ledesma, Remembering to Remember: Experiments in Sound is a multifaceted program of 15+ international, national, and local artists spanning six live performances; five newly commissioned multichannel compositions; four film/video works at the intersection of sound and moving image; and one month of artist residencies, community workshops, and public engagements. The container for this breadth of programming is an exhibition that will be on view at PICA from February 17 to March 19, 2023, with an opening reception on Friday, February 17, 2023, 6:00 - 8:000 pm. Artists include Adee Roberson, Alison O’Daniel, bone lattice, Crystal Quartez, Hiro Kone, Kite & Robbie Wing, Lucy Liyou, Nivhek, Nyokabi Kariũki, Reese Bowes, Saint Abdullah, Sholeh Asgary, Synth Library Portland, Takashi Makino, and Tomoko Sauvage.
Learn moreBioscope is a traveling sculpture that peers into the atoms of shame. Centering the matriarch as the keeper of home, where we first experience shame, the project grapples with this feeling through personal interviews, Bollywood movies, and video performance.
Learn morejaamil olawale kosoko’s meditative multi-channel film and installation Syllabus for Black Love serves as the ship inside which the multimedia performance the hold is positioned. Through rhythmic and restorative gestures, the hold creates a perceptive and somatic experience for both performer and audience.
Learn moreSasha Worzel’s Dreams of Unknown Islands transforms the architecture of the museum into an ecological dreamscape in which coastal shores, animal migrations, and the shifting colors of the sky are transmitted through ritual sound, projected film, and a set of functional sculptures housing five listening islands that urge us to pause, rest, and contemplate.
Learn morePortland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) proudly presents Enchiridion: aisle, spline, resort, sidony o’neal’s first major solo exhibition in North America. Curated by Kristan Kennedy, Artistic Director and Curator of Visual Art, PICA. Supported by Oregon Community Foundation’s Creative Heights Initiative, The Ford Family Foundation, Stephanie and Jonathan Snyder, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Learn moreWhat does it mean to acknowledge spaces that we could easily dismiss? Are there possibilities for the unity of the self and the other? How do we peel off protective layers as social beings in order to revisit our core selves? How could we unlearn together?
Learn morePlease join PICA + CEC ArtsLink International Fellow and artist in residence Ashot Danielyan (Uzbekistan) with Reese Bowes (Portland) in their presentation of “Lessons of decay.” This is a work in progress created during a CEC Arts Link Residency in Portland. The November 6 virtual event will include introductions from the artists, the premiere of “Lessons of decay,” and a brief Q&A with the audience. This event is free to attend and will include Zoom AI captioning.
Learn moreHong Kong-raised siblings Jennie MaryTai Liu and Simon Liu, in collaboration with Portland-raised artist Andrew Gilbert, share insights into the making of their experimental films force (2020) and Sistern (2021), both shot in Hong Kong in the midst of recent and current political turbulence, and exhibited for TBA in the form of an immersive, multi-channel installation and sound environment. The artists will be in conversation with Kristan Kennedy, PICA’s Artistic Director & Curator of Visual Art.
Learn moreWhat does it mean to have a critically engaged nervous system? How might the practice of following this intuitive and predictive technology cultivate possibilities for meaning-making and self-knowing? In this workshop Hannah and Emily will offer various scores and practices from their collaboration. Participants will be invited to attune to their sensations with attention toward nervous system awareness. This workshop will prioritize personal agency, needs, and boundaries for engagement.
Learn moreThe October conversation would focus on the Let ‘im Move You (L’MY) community (how they've worked with local performers in tour locations and what their experiences have been, what they've learned from location changes, challenges of context that have arisen in J-Sette happening outside of original contexts)
Learn moreIn this featured panel conversation, Elisheba Johnson (curator, Wa Na Wari, Seattle) facilitates a conversation with vanessa german (Pittsburgh) and Mia Imani (Berlin) about their individual TBA performances (The Blue Walk and Mourning Rituals, respectively) and their broader artistic practices. While highly distinct, both german and Imani engage—through iterative processes, movement rituals, place-based research, and public participation—the specificities of space and site, erasure of histories and narratives, and possibilities for gathering and healing in the context of Portland’s Black communities and spatial geographies.
Learn morerise x fall is a collaboration of Portland-based artists rubén garcía marrufo, jaleesa johnston, and maximiliano. Taking the form of live performance, object, and large-scale, multi-channel video installation, their TBA project AT THE END OF EMPIRE is made and presented by marrufo and maximiliano. For this Institute event, they are joined by collaborator johnston for a conversation about the project’s process, ideas, and concerns, as well as rise x fall’s broader collective work.
Learn moreWe are thrilled to announce our Fall 2021 Creative Exchange Lab artists Crystal Cortez (Portland, OR), mario lemafa (Seattle, WA), Sara Siestreem (Portland, OR), Maya Vivas (Portland, OR), and Timothy White Eagle (Seattle, WA).
Learn moreRaja Feather Kelly, a dance and performance artist and choreographer, is joined by artist and educator SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY for a discussion of the digital adaptation of Kelly’s performance HYSTERIA for TBA, a project that builds on Kelly’s previous work and continues his examinations of pop culture, Black queer subjectivity, alienation, and consumption. Kelly and holloway first met and recorded some of their conversations as part of PICA’s Spring 2021 Creative Exchange Lab residency program. Now, they reunite for this virtual TBA Institute event!
Learn moreTBA artist Eileen Isagon Skyers will share a talk covering her multifaceted practice and career in the arts. She will discuss our contemporary framework for viewing, making, and valuing art against a backdrop of rapidly shifting technology, and how that manifests in her own work and criticism about digital art and culture. Co-presented with PNCA’s MA in Critical Studies Program.
Learn moreEmily Johnson and collaborators on her TBA project Being Future Being—including Raven Chacon, Drew Michael, and Holly Mititquq Nordlum—will share insights into their creative and collaborative processes in making a work of performance, installation, sound, and ancestral landscapes that propose new futures and relationalities with each other and our world.
Learn moreMia Imani interrogates the ways that disenfranchised communities can heal individual, communal, and societal trauma by creating works that live in between the worlds of art and science.
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