Presented by Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation Queer Arts Festival TGD2S Inclusion Committee
Hone your poetry, prose and essay skills with workshops facilitated by jaye simpson. These workshops strive to engage in the power of developing one’s voice and narrative while rejecting the assigned script we are given in society. While focusing on tone, rhythm and pace, jaye hopes to guide writers with prompts, editing exercises and practice readings. This series asks you to investigate the stories that inspire you and the people behind them while also asking what.
Community show with SWUAV December 7-21 at SUM Gallery, #425-268 Keefer St. Opening reception Dec 7, 2 -4pm
Presented by We Have A Voice: Indigenous Women Who Do Sex Work Speak Out, a project of Sex Workers United Against Violence, the Daxgyet Hanak art show displays pieces by indigenous women who do sex work using culture and creativity to speak to their experiences. Embedded in each piece is a recommendation for positive futurisms for indigenous women doing sex work, including wishes for their future and ways their lives can be made safer. This two-year project by SWUAV has been providing healing opportunities for women in the community to speak about their experiences in a destigmatized and safe environment, use art to express themselves, connect with cultural and spiritual teachings and support, and make recommendations to law and policymakers for improving their lives. They have represented our community at BC Parliamentary Sub-Committee Hearings on Human Trafficking, the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls Inquiry, marches and rallies. They have provided art-based cultural learning activities at women’s drop-in spaces. They have employed decolonized harm reduction teachings and provided medicine support at funerals and community events. Come support the project’s culmination in a final art show hosted at QAF’s SUM Gallery.
Sex Workers United Against Violence (SWUAV) is a small grassroots, peer-led non-profit working on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish people to improve the lives and safety of people who do sex work on the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver and across Canada through harm reduction activities and advocacy. We Have a Voice: Indigenous Women Who Do Sex Work Speak Out is a SWUAV project funded through Status of Women Canada that provides indigenous women who do sex work an opportunity to speak to their experiences through art and culturally-based activities in a safe, destigmatized space. Recommendations provided by the women on how to make their lives better and safer through the course of these activities will be circulated to policy and lawmakers to instigate change.
Glitter Technics is a sparkling night showcasing the work of emerging multidisciplinary LGBTQ2SI+ artists from a 13-week experiential creative empowerment workshop led by Mutya Macatumpag at the Pride in Arts Society’s SUM Gallery. Mediums that glitter at our December 4th gallery show include visual art, installation, movement performance, music, poetry, light/shadow art, video , silkscreen prints, and a zine. It’s going to be a magical potion of glittering identities. Who are you? Thank you.
Featuring participation from Zainab Alwarid, Red Fawkes, Jackson Tse, Laura Fukumoto, Emily Tsang, Shahdi, Hampton G, Thuja Quickstad, Sasha Cerino, and Mutya Macatumpag.
Volunteering can be an exciting, fun, educational experience. You are what makes this festival happen.This year’s festival will be different. It will be held online.
Festival attendees will be able to enjoy all the events and performances from their own homes. Do we still need volunteers? Sure we do! This new festival format presents new challenges and we are counting on you to help.
We may need very few volunteers to help with the staging of some performances, but mostly we are looking for online volunteers. We want this to be the best attended festival ever and we need you to spread the word. Are you on social media? Facebook or Instagram or Twitter – even TikToK? We need volunteers to like and share and comment on the QAF social media posts. It will be simple and take less than 5 mins a day in the weeks before and during the festival. Full instructions will be given.
Need another reason to volunteer? All volunteers will receive an all-access virtual pass to link to all QAF online events and performances! In addition, we promise to invite you to our closing party NEXT year so we get to say thank you in person.
Liking is great. Liking and sharing is better. Liking, commenting and sharing is the best, as is retweeting with your own positive comments.
If you are particularly interested in an event, how about asking your social media friends to join you? Information about QAF 2020 program of events is on our website at www.queerartsfestival.com
From now until the end of QAF 2020 we will be posting on multiple channels about the festival, events, performers and participants.
We may have to post important updates about tickets or the venue or platform for individual events. Your efforts could help greatly.
Please also join us for a panel on May 30, at 6PM: “The SUM and remains of 69” – a salon with co-curator Kaschelle Thiessen, MediaQueer’s Thomas Waugh, video artist Paul Wong, and other Vancouver luminaries
May 12 – August 18, 2018 I Opening May 12, 2018 2 – 4pm I
Curated by Paul Wong and SD Holman Presentation Partner: On Main Gallery
Karin Lee: QueerSUM 心
Queer-sum a “Chinglish” translation and play on the words Queer Love, alludes to queer attraction that people experience, even though they believe themselves to be straight identified – or queer-sum (sum=heart=love).
QueerSUM心 presents three of Karin Lee’s media works: a 2-channel remix of her classic 16mm film My Sweet Peony Remix, a fantastical drama shot in the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Gardens; Portrait of a Girl, a documentary shot in Beijing; and Small Pleasures, a period drama set in Barkerville BC.
The works not only investigate sentiments of being “Queer-sum,” but pay tribute to Vancouver’s Chinatown—where Lee spent her childhood—and examine the underlying racism which contributed to the very creation of “Chinatowns” amidst the colonization of Indigenous peoples.
My Sweet Peony Remix, shot in 16mm film in 1994, is a short fantastical drama that spins a tale of sexuality, gender and desire featuring Zamma – a Chinese Canadian garden guide (played by Sook-Yin Lee) who is stalked by a white feminist outreach worker and a Caucasian Maoist student, but is awakened by her attraction to an Asian-Canadian dyke, all the while perplexed by an other-world cross-dressing Taoist monk. My Sweet Peony Remix plays with the notion of cultural identity (or identity politics of the 90s) and race: then and now—what remains the same and what has changed in the 25 years since the film was made.
Portrait of a Girl is a peek into the life of Han Dong Qing, a cage dancer who works in the Beijing club scene. She speaks about her life, her story of adoption and her sexuality. Candid and defiant, she is always searching for love, acceptance and family.
Small Pleasures tells the story of three women from very different worlds trying to convey complex ideas about feminist resistance to each other through a common language: Chinook Jargon—an intercultural trade language used throughout the Pacific Coast until the early 1900s. Set in the late 1800s in Barkerville, this film explores how marginalized women in late nineteenth century rural Canada create individual identities in a world prescribed to fit the needs of men.
About the artist:
Karin Lee, photo: Chick Rice
“Karin Lee is a Canadian Screen Award-winning, trailblazing filmmaker who has focused on telling stories about women and Chinese-Canadians for more than three decades.” Sabrina Furminger / Westender June 7, 2017
Born and raised in Vancouver, Karin is a unique storyteller whose critical voice and perspective touches on the past and the present, both local and international. An artist who constantly traverses new territory, Lee challenges film and media forms and addresses new audiences.
Themes of trans-Pacific migration, gender, identity and intercultural contact surface in her documentaries such as Made in China, which portrayed Chinese adoptees in Canada searching for their identity; Cedar and Bamboo, which highlighted intermarriage between Chinese immigrants and First Nations people; and Canadian Steel, Chinese Grit, which depicted the outcome of migration for the Chinese who came to Canada to work on the Canadian Pacific Railway. Her early influences and links to China grew from her exposure to the ideology and the political movement of Chinese socialism in Canada through Lee’s father, who ran a fledgling communist bookstore in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside in the 1960s – the 2005 film Comrade Dad.
Lee’s art has been heavily influenced by her own family history. For example, her great-grandmother Tsang Ho Shee, who herself had bound feet when she arrived in Barkerville in 1901, is the inspiration for Small Pleasures. Now, three generations after Tsang Ho Shee arrived in Canada, Lee’s realization that she benefited from her great-grandmother’s acts of feminist resistance, has driven her to expand representations of the history of marginalized women in the Chinese diaspora and, most importantly, to contribute to the minimal coverage of women’s stories in the arts and Canadian media.
In 2001, Karin received a Gemini: The Canada Award for her groundbreaking documentary Made in China, about Chinese children adopted in Canada. In 2005 she received a BC Leo Diversity in Cultures Award and 2015 –diversity award from Women in Film for Cedar and Bamboo.
She has just completed the TV pilot for Plan B, a black comedic drama series set in a women’s sexual health clinic. She is currently in pre-production on Girl with Big Feet (Ts’ekoo Cha Ke), a period drama and Incorrigible – a feature documentary about women who were incarcerated in Ontario for being morally “incorrigible”.
She was a Sessional Instructor at SFU’s Asia-Canada program and Adjunct Professor at UBC’s Film Production program. Karin was awarded the Mayor’s Arts Award for Film and New Media Artist in 2014 and was nominated for the 2017 YWCA Women of Distinction Award for Education, Training and Development and received the Spotlight Award from Vancouver Women in Film and Video Society in 2017.
The gallery is open Tuesday-Saturday 12-6pm, closed on Sundays and Mondays, and statutory holidays.
Exhibition: January 8 – February 7, 20119 Tuesday-Saturday, 12-6pm Opening reception: January 8, 6-8pm.
SWAN Vancouver presents, in partnership with SUM Gallery – Queer Arts Festival, Chocolate and Chicken Bones, a photovoice exhibition.
“People think that we are like chocolate. That we are sweet and you can just swallow us and consume us. We are not chocolate. You can’t just swallow us and forget about us. We are like chicken bones. We will stick in your throat.” – Participant
Assumptions and stereotypes construct sex workers as snapshots: without a voice, without dimension, and without control of the perspective.
This exhibition uses photovoice methodology to address misinformation and stigma about im/migrant women who work in massage shops and apartments. This project, provides im/migrant sex workers an opportunity to self-represent their lived experiences and bring forth a dimension, reality and perspective which policy makers and law enforcement have neglected and dismissed.
By using photovoice, migrant sex workers take control of the snapshots that tell stories about their lives. They control the camera and the perspective. They control what comes into the shot and what gets left out. They tell the stories.
This project was funded through a generous grant from the Charity Pot Program through LUSH Cosmetics.
Co-produced by Queer Arts Festival Presented with the Frank TheatreandZee Zee Theatre
A New Slam Poetry Musical By Anais Westand Sara Vickruck Directed by Julie McIsaac
After playing sold-out shows at the Vancouver Fringe Festival and winning multiple awards, Poly Queer Love Ballad returns to Vancouver.
Poly Queer Love Ballad is an intimate, edgy new musical, merging slam poetry with catchy pop-folk tunes. Nina, a polyamorous bisexual poet, meets Gabbie, a monogamous lesbian songwriter at Cafe Deux Soleil. With two microphones, a loop pedal and array of instruments, they struggle to reconcile their fierce mutual attraction with their opposing perspectives on love.
SUM Gallery, Canada’s only queer multidisciplinary gallery, is honored to host Adrian Stimson’s debut of their most recent work for the gallery’s second exhibition of the year, Naked Napi.
“For the Blackfoot, a lot of our stories have sexual content, sex and sexuality was often interwoven within the language…yet the damage has been done and in our time, it is our right and duty to reclaim our sexual histories, i hope through this series of paintings to trigger people, to help them understand and accept our ways of life. To be Napi and create stories for our time and two spirit being.” — Adrian Stimson, Artist of Naked Napi
Napi is a character from traditional stories of the Siksika (Blackfoot) nation. Often referred to as the “Old Man” who came from the sun, Napi alongside the “Old Woman” are known as quasi-creators in these stories.
Naked Napi presents Adrian Stimson’s new site specific Installation.
Through this collection, Naked Napi reimagines the traditional tales of Napi in the present. Where the intersections of indigeneity, sexuality and Two-Spirit identities are drawn to the forefront in this retelling. It is a display of reclamation that challenges the colonial erasure of Indigenous bodies, power and sexual histories.
About the Artist
A member of the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation, Adrian Stimson is a Two-Spirit interdisciplinary artist who has exhibited works both nationally and internationally. Having attended three residential schools in their life, Stimson draws upon their lived experiences to investigate themes of cultural fragility, sexuality, genocide and resilience. Stimson achieves this radical examination of intersecting themes through avenues of performance art, painting and installation work. Stimson was awarded the Governor General’s award in Visual Arts in 2018, the Blackfoot Visual Arts Award in 2009, the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal in 2003, the Alberta Centennial Medal in 2005, and the REVEAL Indigenous Arts Award –Hnatyshyn Foundation in 2017.
