Past
As part of an installation in PICA’s annex, Sara Magenheimer presents her new video, Best is Man’s Breath Quality, in which an ancient jellyfish suggests how new positions can inform our capabilities to heal. His deep-ocean vantage allows him to comment (through an authoritative voice-over) on a truer spectrum of human behavior seen up above; and his capacity for inflicting pain on human bodies finds parallels in our capacity to embody the more nebulous and unruly forces in life. With performances featuring singing and narration, Magenheimer explores how language mutates and reproduces itself in culture.
Learn moreSarah AbuAbdallah will be in embedded within the festival, producing new work, screening video, reading texts and generating performance work addressing the confines and freedoms of contemporary life in Saudi Arabia, addressing the boundaries of family, friends, and society at large for women, technology, humanity, magic, poetry and language. ZeroZero is a dreamscape created by video projection and live reading and performance. “00” is a name of a cat the artist dreamt of chasing, and using the cat's story as an entry point to speak of loss, dreams, and belonging.
Learn moreUS PREMIERE: Through painting, performance and video, Manuel Solano’s work references pop culture and personal memories to inform on Manuel’s own queer identity and bittersweet experiences. After becoming blind for life in 2014 as a result of an HIV-related infection, Manuel’s practice shifted dramatically. In a series of simple performances, the artist tells stories from his life and attempts to play one good song. Solano has exhibited internationally at Museo Carrillo Gil, Zona MACO and is represented by Galería Karen Huber, Mexico City. In 2016, Solano was in residence at PICA as part of the Creative Exchange Lab Program.
Learn moreWEST COAST PREMIERE: An evening of protest songs to soothe your despair and stoke your outrage, unless Morgan screws it up! Drawing on the tradition of protest albums, stand-up comedy, new age ritual, experimental narrative, and cabaret, Morgan Bassichis Sings Protest Songs is an evening of queer world-making and unmaking accompanied by Senior Energy featuring Elizabeth LoPiccolo (flute, vocals), Kyle Combs (electronics, percussion, vocals), Rhys Ziemba (bass), and Sam Greenleaf Miller (percussion, vocals).
Learn morecvllerjerx (angelica maria millan lozano, maximiliano carlos - raphael francisco martinez) exclaim “nothing is civilized anymore. esta noche the kids get loud! they’re not going to bed early tonight. ART AS BRAT through clothes, poetry, performance and dance.”” As resident artists within the festival the collaborators will interrogate and celebrate the spaces art and audiences inhabit while exploring the value of collective and absurd outbursts en un mundx locx.
Learn moreWEST COAST PREMIERE: Bassichis will present an evening of “new and preexisting” daily meditations alongside musician Kyle Combs. In Morgan’s own words, “Maybe you don’t have time and it’s hard because you’re on Amazon looking for adrenal formulas and you don’t know how to work the podcast app and the MTA is crumbling as a kind of mood ring of everything else and in those cases you could come to this night and we will meditate for you, not in your place but on your behalf, especially if you didn’t have a chance to fully grieve George Michael as if that’s even possible, as if anything is ever fully grieved, as if anything is ever fully over, as if you really want to spend an entire evening of your life in a room with other people, back to back, front to front, side to side, cheek to cheek, and not run, but stay put and meditate to some songs about secret pools and Polish forests and being scared shitless or shitful, being scared shitty. You don’t need to bring anything! Feel free to bring your roommate or come alone, it’s totally fine either way.”
Learn moreUS PREMIERE: a woman under the influence of a woman under the influence of a woman under the influence of a woman under the influence of a woman under the influence until it has no name A live video essay that arrives through a base note, a vanishing point, an other history of orientations.
Learn moreWEST COAST PREMIERE: In Thomas’ most recent project, Distance is Not Separation, she takes us back to what it means to be a femme black person growing up playing on the street corner, waiting till the street lights came on, the street lights being a signal for the darkness coming. Both a symbol and warning sign for ones safety. The last moments before the call and response between mother/parent/queer family and child: “It’s time to come home, I’m coming.” Thomas investigates the black femme body in relation to the athletic body, thinking about value and skills. Thomas rethinks and rebalances how we see and observe sports imagery, the labor and value of craftsmanship, the hairdresser, the janitor, the ‘exotic’ dancer, and how language constructs and transcribes symbols onto the black femme body.
Learn moreWEST COAST PREMIERE: A Smeary Spot, 2015 is a 53 minute 4-channel video installation drawing on theater and documentary methods to rework the genre of science fiction. The title, A Smeary Spot is a references to the sun borrowed from feminist sci-fi writer Johanna Russ. The sun, a dense concentration of heat and light, is an organizing principle of time, place and ego. What potential emerges when we glance away from the source and settle into the blurry residue of the afterimage? This work re-orients the audience within a speculative present. Shot in two locations: on public lands in the deserts of southern Utah and inside a black box theater, where performers deliver recitations of appropriated and altered texts that compose a loose manifesto on being. Inside this cinematic experience is a surreal narrative of bodies in transition (both movement and definition) that act out, delivering curious combinations of language, materiality and gestures. Among these bodies, the land, the water, the refuse pile and the theater are not simply grounds, resources, waste or stages upon which these actions occur, they are sprawling protagonists, like the sun—permeating and persistent.
Learn moreDan Seward, also known as Bunnybrains, is a musician, curator and promoter in Hudson, New York, where he runs the celebrated (and somewhat nomadic) record store, John Doe Records. This exhibition focuses on Bunnybrains thirty plus years as a transgressive, mutable, collaborative, performative project and what it means to illustrate the life of a true muse. From live broadcasts of Bunnybrains radio show Battlefield Earth, participatory workshops, rotating guest exhibitions, spontaneous happenings and performances, the artist shares their space with you in an effort to vivify "Bunnybrains is all".
Learn moreFeaturing Alex Cecchetti, Isabelle Cornaro, Claudia Meza, Morgan Ritter, Van Brummelen & De Haan, and Erika Vogt.
Learn morePatrick Rock talks about male-ness, artist-ness, and fun-ness.
Learn moreHalsey Rodman will discuss his time-based sculptural paintings that exist as copies with no original.
Learn moreJesse Sugarmann’s automotive performances are elegant pile-ups. His vehicular actions engage the car accident as an inadvertent monument, a spectacle of trauma and a point of social exchange.
Learn moreWarning: this is just for laughs. There’s no redeeming social value. We’d apologize, but that’s sort of our goal every time we do what we do—you know, create an empty vessel you can fill with your own nonsense.
Learn moreParis-based artist collective Claire Fontaine will speak about their TBA:11 installation, their practice, and the future of the strike.
Learn morePICA's Visual Art Curator provides a behind-the-scenes look at this year's visual art projects at the TBA Festival.
Learn moreRumored to have been banned by the Catholic Church, a single uninterrupted chord will test both performer and audience endurance.
Learn moreThe artists will dig two holes deep and large enough for each man to lie in, and then tunnel between them to hold hands.
Learn moreA five-channel video installation based on Atlas’ early memories of tornado alerts in his childhood home of St Louis, Missouri.
Learn moreA collection of installations, exhibitions, projections, and gatherings by visual artists.
Learn moreThe demanding nature of a devoted studio art practice yields not only treasured and prideful moments, but also neurotic darkness and an exhausting grind to your body.
Learn moreIn response to the growing exclusivity of the art world, the exhibit will show 25 artists from outside of mainstream art centers.
Learn moreTaking queues from ritual, dance, cinema and video games, these two videos explore architecture and spiritual transcendence.
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