Author: Fado Admin

Co-presented by Alleyway Gallery and FADO Performance Art Centre

How to find Alleyway Gallery

Friday, May 22 | 6:30pm
Dermot Wilson
Fan Wu
Gwen MacGregor
Quan Steele
Marilyn Yogarajah

Saturday, May 23 | 3:00pm
Christopher Petersen
Isaak Fong
Johannes Zits
lo bil
lwrds duniam

Prism of Fire performance series, curated by Johannes Zits, features 10 artists offering distinct responses to this fractured landscape against the backdrop of the city.

Positioned in a downtown laneway, the billboard Through the Prism of a Fire pulls a distant, damaged landscape into sharp focus. This large-scale image of a wildfire’s aftermath, clear-cut terrain swept into devastation, becomes the anchor for a series of performances in the final stretch of the CONTACT Festival in May.

Through forms such as spoken word, sound, fleeting installations, and subtle gestures, the artists stage live conversations between the scorched forest and the urban space that holds it. Working with the laneway’s acoustics, interruptions, and constraints, each artist initiates their own brief bridge between altered forest and public life. Together, these actions reimagine the billboard as a site of exchange where memory, place, and embodied presence meet in the tense space between destruction and renewal.

© Johannes Zits, Through the Prism of a Fire, 2024. Billboard.

Through the Prism of a Fire reflects on the growing intensity of wildfires across Canada, capturing the aftermath of a 2024 blaze in the Cariboo region of British Columbia, on Lhtako Dene Nation territory. While fire is a natural part of the forest’s life cycle, increased and sustained human activity has disrupted this balance. Industrial logging, monocultures, and conventional forestry practices have stripped away the diversity and resilience that once allowed ecosystems to recover.

Alleyway Gallery
CONTACT Festival

Christopher Petersen is a dancer and performance artist. Their work focuses on the physical body in space and attempts to allow an audience to stare into bones and flesh, the exertion of bodies, and the bodies of stillness. Christopher is unsure of most things but cannot stop.

© Gwen MacGregor. Photo Johannes Zits.

Gwen MacGregor is a Tkaronto based artist, geographic scholar, teacher and community organizer who identifies as an “unsettler.” They work in installation, video, photography and drawing. MacGregor has received awards such as the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Artist of the Year and the Canada Council International Studio in New York. Her work is in a number of collections including the Nickle Galleries in Calgary, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Oakville Galleries, Artbank, and the Royal Bank Collection.  MacGregor has a PhD in Cultural Geography from The University of Toronto and an Honours BA in Art Hsitory from York University. 

© Fan Wu. Photo Hamish Ballantyne.

Fan Wu is a poet, performer, and pedagogue. His current research revolves around Daoist sound and spiritual practice and its concepts of subtlety and effortlessness. His performance work has been shown at Art Metropole, Buddies in Bad Times, the plumb, and SummerWorks. He collaborates with artists of many disciplines, including Thom Gill, Evan Webber, Phil Hamilton, and Kieran Adams.

© Quan Steele. Photo Bob Steele.

Quan Steele is a multidisciplinary Vietnamese artist based in Toronto whose practice spans painting, sculpture, performance, ephemeral land art, and site-specific installations. Over the past two decades, she has presented her work in solo, group, collective, and juried exhibitions across Canada and has participated in residencies in White Bear (Temagami, 2022 and 2024); Sooke, Vancouver Island (2024); and Mountain Island Arts in Wells, BC (2025). A member of the Ontario Society of Artists, Broken Forests Collective and Etobicoke Art Group, her work explores environmentalism, the human–nature relationship, and the passage of time, using art as a catalyst for curiosity, awareness, and meaningful change. is a Toronto based dancer and performance artist. Their work focuses on the physical body in space and attempts to allow an audience to stare into bones and flesh, the exertion of bodies, and the bodies of stillness.

© Dermot Wilson. Photo Lisa Murzin.

b. Dublin, Eire

Artist and curator Dermot Wilson lives in northern Ontario. He works in various media including video, audio, time-based installation, digital imaging and performance to create works that include meditations upon his relationships with the community and the environment. Dermot has performed in galleries, bars, artist-run centres and on various outdoor sites in many communities across Canada, South America, Asia, USA and Europe. His noise/spoken word performances challenge institutional conventions and promotes dialogues about ownership and environmental abuses.

Recent installations include: Escarpment Erasure Mega-horn (Escarpment Corridor Alliance); Iterations/Emanations (KINO Gallery and Wroclaw University Gallery, Wroclaw, Poland); and Random Acts of Joy (TOTE Gallery, Campinas, Brazil). Hyperboreal is his ambient sound/spoken word performance collective. He has performed spoken word rants in urban sites across Canada since 1996 and is currently performing site-specific sound art works in clearcut or endangered forest sites.

© Marilyn Yogarajah. Photo Alex Herrera.

Marilyn Yogarajah (they/any) is an artist whose practice centers on rhythm, specifically sound and poetry. They have a background in teaching music, and an education in sociology and gender studies. Marilyn plays in multiple bands across the city, including but not limited to not a band, martian crisis unit, output 1:1:1, and teething. They also founded spectrum soundbath in 2020 which is a collaborative community based sound meditation practice. They write poetry under the moniker queertamil and can be found on bandcamp under threesixmarilyn. Land back always and death to empire.

Join us for another instalment in FADO’s Walk-And-Talk performance series.

Free, all welcome.

Clint Enns takes us on a cinematic Walk-And-Talk through the work of Karl Grune’s 1923 film, Die Strasse, narrating the film as a performative-intervention.

Enns’ Die Strasse [Back Alley Edit] re-imagines Karl Grune’s 1923 Die Strasse as a walking film. The film follows movements of a man who leaves his home and drifts through the city at night, each step carrying him deeper into the dangers of the street. Cinema as walk, narrative as restless wandering.

The artist’s reworking intervenes in this walk by adding a textual element and voice, shifting the film from “silent walkie” to “talkie.” A detour[nement] where new stories emerge in motion.

Clint Enns is a visual artist, writer, and curator living in Tiohtià:ke / Montréal. His post-cinematic practice consists of reworking existing films, disrupting their conventional narratives and forms. His interventions destabilize the cinematic image, turning familiar works into sites of critical play and reinterpretation. By appropriating and manipulating filmic material, Enns challenges the permanence of cinema as a fixed cultural object, presenting it as malleable, thinking though the ways moving images persist, mutate, and circulate in a post-cinematic landscape shaped by digital technologies and remix culture.

© Karl Grune, Die Strasse, 1923. Film still.

Join us for a joyful day of video-art BINGE WATCHING. Two different screenings sandwich a guided movement practice for artists. Wear your jammies, drink ginger ale and eat popcorn ALL DAY!!!

FADO Performance Art Centre and V tape are thrilled to present Your New Normal: An Afternoon With Margaret Dragu, part of FADO’s on-going Walk-And-Talk performance series.

2:00PM: screening, NEW NORMAL: an embodied novel
3:00PM: supportTHEsupport (movement practice) with snacks & chats & PAJAMAS!
4:00PM: screening, TICK AND TALK OF COMMON TIME

PROGRAMME

2:00PM: NEW NORMAL: an embodied novel (video, 45:00)

“An embodied novel is a 13-part multi-modal project documenting Dragu’s experiences on public transit while waiting for/recovering from two hip replacement surgeries. This series of poetic-prose stories are articulated in the body as short videos produced by Dragu alongside her collaborators, Justine A. Chambers (choreography) and E. Kage (score), as well as in text in her publication by the same name.” (Yasmine Whaley-Kalaora, C.L.A.M.)

Choreographer: Justine A. Chambers
Composer & Musician: E. Kage
Novelist: Margaret Dragu
Dancers: Rob Abubo, Justine A. Chambers, Stephanie Cyr, Alison Denham, Kate Franklin, Bynh Ho, Mikiki, Claudia Moore

3:00PM: supportTHEsupport (TORONTO VERSION)

supportTHEsupport is an art experiment that began September 2019 during the LIVE! Biennale in Vancouver. supportTHEsupport appears to be dance/fitness classes (live-in-person and live-on-ZOOM ) with members in Vancouver, Montréal, Toronto, Berlin, Hanover and Copenhagen. But it is actually a living studio of amazing and creative artists who help each other make art happen.
***Feel free to bring your own yoga mat, towel, blocks.***

4:00PM: TICK AND TALK OF COMMON TIME (video, 33 min)

“An opus of five variations and five entr’actes. Playing with the idea of TikTok dance trends, the variations feature fifteen live Vancouver-based dancers, three Toronto-based performers and many more [of whom are] dancing over Zoom, as well as several TikTok dance videos. Each variation presents a new choreography set to compositions from five different Canadian composers. The videos of the dancers are often in split screen or overlapping one another in the mainframe. The entr’actes feature improvisational dance by Dragu and Justine A. Chambers set to the sounds of live improvised vocal transcription.” (Nathaniel Marchand, Western Front)

Composers: Mark Haney, Nikita Carter, E. Kage, Sarah Sheard, Brady Marks
Dancers: Justine A. Chambers, Kate Franklin, Vanessa (VK) Kwan, Johanna Householder, Francisco-Fernando Granados, Angelo Pedari, Stephanie Bokenfohr, Margaret Dragu

SILT: FRESHWATER
In Collaboration with FADO Performance Art Centre!
Saturday, November 29, 2025

The Commons @ 401 Richmond Street West, Toronto
3:00PM start time
FREE | All welcome

ARTISTS
Jen Hum
public-universal-friends
Emily Duckett
Abbey Richens (of Spiral Eyedd & Meaningful Movement)

SILT: FRESHWATER is an evening of performance. Through a public open call, four artists are each provided with 15 minutes to present an action, event, performance. Silt was originally started for dance, movement, and performance artists; however, it is open to everyone regardless of artistic or personal identifications. The aim of SILT: FRESHWATER is to provide participants with an accessible low stakes stage for experimentation and expression.

Please RSVP at the link below.

MORE INFORMATION

Canada
https://clintenns.ca/

Clint Enns is a visual artist, writer, and curator living in Tiohtià:ke / Montréal.. His post-cinematic practice consists of reworking existing films, disrupting their conventional narratives and forms. His interventions destabilize the cinematic image, turning familiar works into sites of critical play and reinterpretation. By appropriating and manipulating filmic material, Enns challenges the permanence of cinema as a fixed cultural object, presenting it as malleable, thinking though the ways moving images persist, mutate, and circulate in a post-cinematic landscape shaped by digital technologies and remix culture.

His work has been exhibited and screened internationally, including solo shows such as Lo-fi Visions: The Selected Work of Clint Enns (Keiller Centre, Scotland, 2023), Internet Vernacular // Conspiracies in Isolation (PAVED Arts, Saskatoon 2021), Internet Vernacular (VU Photo, Québec, 2019), and The Lo-Fi Mixtape: A Selection of Works by Clint Enns (la lumière collective, Montréal, 2017). Earlier solo presentations include Visual Errata + Other Bent Forms (Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn, New York, 2013) and Prepare to Qualify (Gallery 1C03, Winnipeg, 2010). His films nationally and internationally including: Anthology Film Archives (New York), Image Forum (Tokyo), Collectif Jeune Cinéma (Paris), International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (Oberhausen), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Other Cinema (San Francisco), and Images Festival (Toronto). Enns is the editor of several volumes, including Scrapbook: From the Archives of Dave Barber (Winnipeg Film Group, 2025), Mike Hoolboom: Work (CONVERsalón / Canadian Film Institute, 2025), Imprints: The Films of Louise Bourque (Canadian Film Institute, 2021), and Shock, Fear, and Belief: The Films and Videos of Madi Piller (Pleasure Dome, 2016) and John Porter’s CineScenes: Documentary Portraits of Film Scenes, Toronto and Beyond, 1978–2015 (the8fest, 2015).