Past
The 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 moreThis offering is a sci-fi-inspired multi-sensory stim, a personal reflection on the ways our sensitive systems intertwine with surroundings—how they collapse time, reorganize, spin out, and regulate. Apogee is climax at a distance.
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 moreIn Raja Feather Kelly’s HYSTERIA, Kelly continues his study of pop culture and its displacement of queer Black subjectivity. Picking up where his 2018 performance UGLY left off, Kelly re-situates himself as a glamorous, extraterrestrial entity—both alien to the world and wholly consuming its pop-cultural byproducts. HYSTERIA marks the collapse of fiction into fact, tracking the subsequent inner turmoil, confusion, and mania that Kelly sets out to exorcise.
Learn moreAT THE END OF EMPIRE: the glitching of ghosted bodies haunting, collapsing time and space. As the rumble unbounds, dust blows to sleep in the heart of those existing. Veiled figures, both on screen and embodied, perform rituals at the end of empire.
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 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.
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 morePortland-based curator and writer Ashley Stull Meyers facilitates a conversation with Garrick Imatani and Travis Stewart (Chinook, Kalapuya, Rogue River) about The Drift, the culmination of their multi-year project that engages questions of repatriation, healing, and Indigenous futures through virtual reality, publication, digital fabrication, and photography. Imatani and Stewart will be joined by special guest Dr. Brook Colley (Wasco, Warm Springs, Eastern Cherokee; Enrolled: Eastern Band of Cherokee), Assoc. Professor & Chair of the Native American Studies Program at Southern Oregon University.
Learn moreFirst Nations Performing Arts is focused on cultural change, commissioning, touring and presenting Indigenous performance, and capacity building for the Indigenous and non-indigenous performing arts sectors.
Learn moreRich Kids is a play about entitlement and consumption, and how digital technology is complicit in social apartheid and gentrification.
Learn moreTHE BLUE WALK is a spectacle of LOVE. It activates RAGE, TENDERNESS, REST, RHYTHM and THE HOLINESS OF THE BLACK BODY ON THE LIVING PLANET as a healing channel of release and power.
Learn morePICA Artistic Director & Curator of Public Engagement, Roya Amirsoleymani, joins Javaad Alipoor to discuss the many layers of Alipoor’s Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran, a groundbreaking work of live theatre adapted to the digital realm. Structured through interactive multimedia, driven by a compelling narrative, and embracing of internet-aware art and web culture, Rich Kids offers sharply nuanced critical commentary on geopolitics and the social conditions of our time. This conversation will unpack this multifaceted work, its cultural influences, and Alipoor’s broader practice in experimental theatre-making.
Learn moreInstallations on view at PICA during TBA:21
Learn morepdf of festival schedule
Learn moreAs part of a creative residency at PICA, Emily Johnson gathers an extraordinary group of collaborating artists to create an in-process activation and installation as part of her newest work in development, Being Future Being. Along with composer Raven Chacon, visual and tattoo artist Holly Mititquq Nordlum, and artist and mask maker Drew Michael, the group delves into the power of creation to build a visual, aural, and ancestral landscape of Indigenous power.
Learn moreGet a sneak(er wave) peek at next year's follow-up to Anthony Hudson's acclaimed Clown Down: Failed to Mount, in which Portland's premier drag clown, Carla Rossi, finds herself trapped on a rock in the ocean as the water level rises.
Learn more“The Who Cares Clock” is a time-based print project released at random over an undetermined amount of time and available only through the mail. For our second edition, Eileen Isagon Skyers looks at both the spring equinox and summer solstice as original sites for universal human imagination, embedding them with historical reference points, dualities, and personal reflections. In spite of—or perhaps in service to—the reaches of globalization, may we look to the cyclicality of seasons to locate our potential (re)emergence. This issue takes the format of a zine designed by Stephen Lurvey.
Learn moreFellow to Felt is an ongoing, multi-channel video and series that examines various aspects of Filipina/o American identity and tradition. Each short video features original and found footage, archival photographs, and obscure historical events, spliced together with pop culture and internet references.
Learn more