Past
In 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 moreA creation of Black narrative, an offering to Black lineage, Black Feast is a culinary event celebrating Black artists and writers through food. Black Feast: Black Imagerial, envisioned by artists Intisar Abioto, Akela Jaffi, and Salimatu Amabebe with creative support from Annika Hansteen-Izora, is a culinary creation and site-specific performance on Black-stewarded land inspired by the legacies of Black movement artists in Portland and the Pacific Northwest.
Learn moreCelebrated New York and Florida filmmaker Sasha Wortzel debuts her films on the West Coast in this one-night screening. Blending the archival and the imaginary, Wortzel uses film to examine queer place-making, geographies of resistance, and the systems that marginalize, extract, and erase communities, peoples, and histories. The films will be followed by a Q & A with Wortzel.
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 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 moreFor the second celestial season of K.o.W 2021, we consider S/Kin as the means through which we connect and ground into our kinstillatory relationships. For TBA, we will be offering a praxis session related to kin-making and corporeal-celestial relations.
Learn moreHow do we relate to images of the self when the self is in a state of breakdown? This question is one of the concerns at the heart of the Cooley Gallery exhibition No Face, No Case: Portraiture’s Breaking.
Learn morechekhovOS /an experimental game/ is a performance experiment in development by Arlekin Players Theatre’s founder and director Igor Golyak, who has been a leading innovator of virtual theater since the start of the pandemic.
Learn morePARTICIPANT AFTER DARK and PICA present DOOMSCROLLING, a livestream video premiere of Michelle Handelman’s THE PANDEMIC SERIES (2020-2021), with a live collaborative reading and performance between Handelman and musician/performer Shannon Funchess, co-founder of the band Light Asylum.
Learn moreOn Sept. 14, Yale Union will premier The Dope Elf, a comedic play and performance environment about housing, power, and magic. Commissioned by LA-based playwright Asher Hartman, the project will transform YU into a makeshift mobile home park inhabited for five weeks by Hartman’s company, Gawdafful National Theater. In the play, an aging transman psychopomp fears losing his power as his life and the lives of his community teeter against the demands of urban life, which are increasingly stark. The play’s structure includes a meta-play (the actors living in the gallery space performing as townspeople); a fourteen-part scripted play to be performed during the run of the exhibition; and a live-streamed variety show populated by the Elf and the townspeople. Through online and IRL involvement in performances and live-streams, the program will catalyze individual and collective agency by creating interactive opportunities for audiences to change the theater piece during the course of its production.
Learn moreMemento Stella is an original phrase I coined to remind me to "remember the stars" and "never forget that we too reside among the stars", as well as the title of a project I started from winter of 2016. Screening of Memento Stella, with original soundtrack by Reinier van Houdt, Sept. 14 and screening of Memento Stella, with live music of Takashi Makino, Sept. 15.
Learn moreSan Cha is a singer-songwriter, based in the City of Angels, increasingly known for her visceral and explosive live performances. Her name, derived from the Spanish word sancha, which translates to ‘mistress’, is a mischievous reference to the title of ‘San’, given to male saints in the Catholic tradition. Fans of cumbia and punk, bolero and electro, flock to see San Cha’s emotional renditions of traditional Mexican rancheras and original songs that queer conventions of identity, power and love. Her striking stage presence is accompanied by the one-of-a-kind garments she adorns, aesthetic reflections of the years spent performing in drag and club scenes in the Bay. San Cha was most recently the headlining act at the kickoff of the 2019 Red Bull Music Festival, with upcoming performances at the Levitt Pavilion, Getty Museum and Santa Monica Pier. Partner Program Presented by lumber room Curated by Libby Werbel In conjunction with their exhibition Kate Newby A puzzling light and moving. Limited seating, no reservations, doors at 6:30
Learn morePartner Program Co-presented with Northwest Film Center and JUDY SHAKEDOWN is the story of Los Angeles’ black lesbian strip club scene and its genesis. Owned and operated by women, underground and illegal in nature, the club Shakedown is the darker, faster, younger iteration of this dance culture. The film is a window into this world. Shakedown emerged from a post-RIOTS, post-OJ, post-integration but still very racially divided Los Angeles. In this divided city Shakedown is an independent, all black and all female cash economy. SHAKEDOWN chronicles the explicit performances and personal relationships of the party’s dancers and organizers including Ronnie-Ron, Shakedown Productions’ creator and emcee; Mahogany, the legendary “mother” of the community; Egypt, their star performer; and Jazmine, the “Queen” of Shakedown.
Learn moreTBA:19 Roland Dahwen THE OVERSEAS BANQUET
Learn moreCurators Stephanie Snyder and Lisa Dent discuss the interdisciplinary exhibition and performance project, The Autopoets, with featured artists Roland Dahwen (Portland, OR) and Tuesday Smillie (NYC). A partnership between Reed College’s Cooley Gallery, Converge 45, and the TBA Festival, The Autopoets is on view at the Cooley Gallery through October 6, 2019.
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 moreCo-Presented with c3:initiative Cannupa Hanska Luger site specific performance at c3:initiative. AFRAID NOT performative action by artist Cannupa Hanska Luger will tie a physical line from the tools of ar-ti-fa-ct to their task.
Learn morePortland-based curatorial initiative Nat Turner Project presents The Black Condition, Live!, the materializing of a multimedia lyric essay by Los Angeles-based artist jayy dodd. This audio-visual performance retells an account of fetishization, technology & obsession. Spectators, acclimate at your own risk.
Learn moreUtopian Visions Art Fair (UVAF) is a platform for artists, gallerists, and curators to present projects that are speculative and working towards possible futures.
Learn moreLoosely based on the original turn-of-the-century play by Maurice Maeterlinck, Pelléas et Mélisande is about love, silence, and the ineffable nature of human emotion. It bears the fluctuating trait of tragicomedy (funny/sad), and involves timekeeping, constant weeping, and the symbolism that epitomized the original play. As Pelléas et Mélisande engages a mystery it does not understand, the writers hope their audience might slip into this mystery, to find a new and surprising way to commune.
Learn moreIn this three-part performance-lecture series, titled Some Styles of Masculinity (2017) and presented as part of the exhibition “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon,” Gregg Bordowitz explores tropes of masculinity that have been formative to his own coming-of-age. Each evening, Bordowitz considers a different seminal figure: the rock star, the rabbi, or the comedian. Key Yiddish words for all three are farbissener, rakhmones, and schpilkes. Some Styles of Masculinity extends Bordowitz’s understanding of gender as “bound up, entangled, with ethnic, religious, and national identities as well as sexuality, race, and class.”
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