Past
Curated 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 moreUwU & Friends is a multidisciplinary event series showcasing underground dance music created by, and for, Portland’s Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, People of Color, and Trans/Gender nonconforming community. With the dancefloor as the center, established and emerging DJs and artists explore a new type of party—a queer utopia.
Learn moreRadio III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ is the first collaboration between Hanako Hoshimi-Caines, Zoë Poluch, and Elisa Harkins. It is an Indigenous futuristic concert, a beautiful and uncomfortable dance performance, and a perverse triangle of shifting power that seeks to be unfaithful to both minimalism and postmodern dance’s claims to so-called “neutrality.” This choreography in the expanded field haunts the recognizable toolbox of abstraction, form, repetition, and pattern by striving to make visible that which has been kept invisible and illegible in colonial systems of aesthetics. Within Radio III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ there are many references to the number 3; there are 3 performers, the piece has 3 sections, and there are 3 duets, one being a triplet. Created and developed on the Muscogee Reservation, Stockholm, Sweden, and Montréal, Quebec, the piece brings together components and concerns that are an interdisciplinary and counter-colonial approaches to performance.
Learn moreUnderstanding extraterrestrials as a product of American mythology requires seeing the multiplicity of fears in the American consciousness. Just like the hydra of conspiracy that shapes America as a nation, the intersections between extraterrestrials and the American nation-state fracture into even more intricate pieces of an unsolvable puzzle. Multimedia artist and scholar Kite performs an experimental lecture, “What‘s on the Earth is in the Stars, and What’s in the Stars is on the Earth,” which probes the real conspiracies through multiple dimensions: Lakota epistemologies and the American paranormal.
Learn moreArab.AMP Live presents the legendary Sir Richard Bishop, guitarist and founding member of the band Sun City Girls, hybrid performance artist Lime Rickey International, and ethno-psych trio Descending Pharaohs. Arab.AMP is a platform for experimental music and live art from the Southwest Asian North African diaspora and allied communities.
Learn moreThe first of a new series, this episode premieres Joseph Keckler’s new musical film about a mysterious and transformative encounter, showcases an in-studio performance by vocalist and composer Holland Andrews, and features a conversation between the two artists.
Learn moreCelebrate the start of TBA:22 at our Opening Night with a headlining performance by renowned Los Angeles-based musician San Cha.
Learn more100 Keyboards is a live music performance/installation featuring as the title implies over 100 keyboards. This performance focuses on the phenomenon of “interference sound," the complex distribution of sound pressure and other parameters as sound waves of the same frequency but with a different direction of transmission overlap. As each keyboard plays a sustained note of a certain pitch, and as the number of notes increases, a “moiré of sound” is created. The auditory experience is akin to weaving an individual “textile pattern" (the original meaning of “moiré") and a sound equivalent to the visual “moiré effect.”
Learn moreThere You Are is a one-on-one, individualized musical performance piece by Holland Andrews which takes place over a phone call and text message conversation. Each participant is called and sung to by Andrews while they listen to a new original composition meant to foster expansion, presence, and self-realization from the comfort of their own sound system.
Learn moreIt is with joy and gratitude that we announce the launch of a new season of programming for Knowledge of Wounds 2021-22, and with it, the kindling of our evolving digital container, www.knowledge of wounds.com. In observance of the 2021 Solstice, we extend an invitation to join us by this virtual fireside for the unveiling of the full KoW 2021-22 program, a series of Indigenous-led events which will continue to unfold in this space over the course of an entire celestial year.
Learn moreThe music, artistry, and personal story of celebrated singer, songwriter, and guitarist Edna Vázquez (Portland, Oregon) fearlessly crosses genres, cultures, and borders. /// La a música, el talento artístico y historia personal de la celebrada cantante, compositora y guitarrista Edna Vázquez (Portland, Oregón) cruzan géneros, culturas y fronteras valientemente.
Learn moreAn immersive evening of ethereal performance, film, and sound, with textures of reflection dipped in impressions of deconstruction and decay. A new project by Liz Harris (Grouper), featuring guests January Hunt and Dicky Bahto.
Learn moreFeeling of Home will reconstruct what home and healing can feel like for local, intergenerational Black and Brown artists and communities. In this space we will focus on home and what it feels like for the individual but also what home feels like when we come together as a community.
Learn moreMusician, composer, writer, and comedian Ahamefule J. Oluo shares insights into his interdisciplinary artistic practice and the development and stories behind SUSAN, his TBA work-in-progress performance that explores “the failings of men, and the endurance of women.” * This conversation will be ASL interpreted
Learn more‘JUDY' is a queer party that materializes every last Saturday night of the month at a dive bar in Portland, Oregon. Run by queer women and exclusively featuring female identified, trans, and non-binary DJs, JUDY was started in 2014. Each month, JUDY features hand-drawn flyers of community members, party people, and over-the-top queens, with the ritual of crowning of a new “Judy” at every party.
Learn moreSUSAN, the follow-up to Ahamefule J. Oluo’s acclaimed musical Now I’m Fine, is a story about the failings of men and the endurance of women. The performance on Sept 14 will be ASL interpreted.
Learn moreSUSAN, Ahamefule J. Oluo’s darkly comic musical portrait of his mother, builds one story out of many, a journey from Section 8 housing in 1980s Seattle, to the mangrove swamps of the Niger Delta, to the Clallam Bay Correctional Facility. With stunning new compositions performed by some of Seattle's best musicians, combined with soul-baring stand-up interludes, Oluo explores two intertwining narratives: his mother’s life as the white, Midwestern wife of a Nigerian chief, and later a destitute single mother; and his own journey to Nigeria as an adult, to visit his late father’s village and discover a family on the other side of the world. SUSAN, the follow-up to Oluo’s acclaimed musical Now I’m Fine, is a story about the failings of men and the endurance of women. It is a crystalline slice of American life; a collision of class, race, bodies, love, and men with bad intentions; a tragedy about the most comically optimistic person on earth. Through decades of chaos and catastrophe, one thing was always consistent. Susan loved her children. She loved them so much. SUSAN is a story about doing what it takes.
Learn moreThis event will have ASL interpreters and open captioning. Leading Deaf musician, artist, and advocate Myles de Bastion and their CymaSpace collaborative curate a night of experimental music and sound that centers Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing artists and audiences. Through visual, vibrational, light-based, and other immersive and multi-sensory interpretations and displays of sound, this night of performances will create multiple modes and nodes of access for Deaf and Hearing audiences alike, expanding our notions and perceptions of artistic and experiential possibilities for music and sound art. ASL interpretation, captioning, and other forms of accessibility and accommodation will be provided.
Learn moreExperimental composer and improvisor Kara-Lis Coverdale plays an acoustic solo concert on the pipe organ at First Presbyterian Church, co-presented with Variform Gallery.
Learn morePDXBall presents The Back to School Kiki Ball, a thrilling competition that shows a glimpse of Portland's dynamic Kiki ballroom community. The Kiki ballroom scene is a subculture of the mainstream ballroom world and was created to practice walking or competing in the many ‘categories’ of the international ballroom arena. The theme "Back to School" will influence the decor, competitive categories, and attire of the participants. Spectators and first-time ball attendees are welcome to join in the fun by dressing to the theme. If it is your first time at a ball, you are highly encouraged to attend and cheer on the competitors who have trained for each category. Join us in celebrating a powerful and inspiring community that uplifts and centers queer and trans black, indigenous land, people of color.
Learn moreIn conversation with Reuben Tomás Roqueñi (Yaqui, Mayo, Chicanx), experimental musician, composer, and visual artist Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) shares more about her practice, including TBA performance collaborations with Marcus Fischer and Raven Chacon.
Learn moreWith varied natural and urban instrumentation, including violin, Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, keyboards, and pedal steel guitar, Laura Ortman showcases the wide range of her practice as a composer and visual artist.
Learn moreWith varied natural and urban instrumentation, including violin, Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, keyboards, and pedal steel guitar, Laura Ortman showcases the wide range of her practice as a composer and visual artist.
Learn moreHolocene presents Fin de Cinema, a new live score of Marcel Camus’ 1959 film Black Orpheus, composed and performed by local musicians. “Winner of both the Academy Award for best foreign-language film and the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus (Orfeu negro) brings the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the twentieth-century madness of Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. With its eye-popping photography and ravishing, epochal soundtrack, Black Orpheus was an international cultural event, and it kicked off the bossa nova craze that set hi-fis across America spinning.” - Criterion
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