Category: Artist

Canada
https://www.situatedesignbuild.com/
https://scapegoatjournal.org/

Marcin Kedzior is a writer, journal editor, urban thinker, experimental dancer and educator focusing on critical theory and collaborative urban improvisations. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from Queen’s University and a Master of Architecture from the University of Toronto. He teaches interior design at Humber ITAL and architectural studies at the University of Toronto. He was on the winning team of the Nathan Philips Square revitalization and he has exhibited work at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, the Architectural Association, London and in numerous other venues. By considering both the construction and inhabitation of spaces as social performances of people and materials, Kedzior attempts to deal with the necessarily dynamic, improvisatory and contingent aspects of bodies, materials, plans and programs.

He is aided and inspired by warehouses of literary ghosts, tactical board games, scaffolding, shoelaces, John Cage’s experimental musical notation, railings, Simone Forti’s dance constructions, goat pastures, counter monuments, and shadows.

© Agnes-Nedregard, Workshop: Performance As Encounter, 2010. Photo Henry Chan.

Norway

Agnes Nedregård is a Norwegian performance artist based in Scotland and Norway. Her working practice is primarily based in live performance, while exploring a bodily language in other mediums like video drawings and sculptural installations. She holds a Masters of Fine Art from the Glasgow School of Art (2005), and has since showed her work in festivals, galleries and screenings in Europe, USA and Asia. Frequently she engages in  collaborative practice with other artists, among these Scottish visual artist Moray Hillary and Brazilian performer Raquel Nicoletti. She teaches performance art workshops to students of art, film, theatre and architecture in Europe. Nedregård is the editor of Nordic Tantrum, a web magazine for Nordic performance art.

Canada
https://www.nemerofsky.ca/

Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay is a Montréal-born media artist. Since 2000 his video practice has brought together song, self-reflexive performance for the camera and lyrics from pop music as vehicles for examining the singing voice, multiplicity, the untranslatability of emotions into language and the ways in which emotional expression changes shape when mediated by technology and popular culture. His work has been exhibited both in film festivals and gallery contexts across Canada, Europe and East Asia. In 2004, the Plug In ICA organized Neverending Song of Love, a survey exhibition of his video works to date.

Guatemala/Canada
https://francisco-fernando-granados.blogspot.com/

Francisco-Fernando Granados (he/him) was born in Guatemala and lives in Toronto, Dish With One Spoon Territory. Since 2005, his practice has traced his movement from convention refugee to critical citizen, using abstraction performatively, site-specifically, and relationally to create projects that challenge the stability of practices of recognition. His work has developed from the intersection of formal painterly training, working in performance through artist-run spaces, studies in queer and feminist theory, and early activism as a peer support worker with immigrant and refugee communities in unceded Coast Salish territories. This layering of experiences has trained his intuitions to seek site-responsive approaches, alternative forms of distribution, and the weaving of lyrical and critical propositions. His exhibition ‘who claims abstraction?’ is on view at Simon Fraser University Galleries in Vancouver throughout 2023. Recent projects include ‘refugee reconnaissance,’ a bilingual compilation of performance scores spanning 2005-2013 presented by AXENÉO7 in 2021.

Image © Sheri Osden Nault, miina kawapamitin (until we meet again, in Michif), Pi*llOry part four, 2020. Photo by Tina Bararian.

www.sherinault.com

Sheri Osden Nault is an artist of Michif and mixed European descent. Situated within personal and political contexts, their art practice and research are grounded in queer, feminist, and Indigenous world-views. They strive to elicit a sense of social and ecological responsibility and intimacy on a damaged planet, recently focusing on connections between bodies, sexuality, and nature. Recent exhibitions include: Where the Shoreline Meets the Water at the ArQuives, Toronto (2020); Shapeshifters, curated by Amanda Amour-Lynx, Toronto (2019); Off-Centre at the Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina (2019); Fix Your Hearts or Die at the Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton (2019).

Nathan Roy is an Anishnawbe from Wikwemikong located on Manitoulin Island. Nathan was born and raised in Toronto. He has been singing for over 25 years. He is apart of a previously grammy nominated singing/drumming group called Bear Creek. Nathan enjoys traveling across North America sharing his drum teachings and his singing.

Deanne Hupfield is Anishnawbe from Temagami First Nation, Ontario, Canada. A descendant of Indian Residential School survivors, Deanne has dedicated her life to learning and preserving her culture. She learned to dance from a small age and has spent her life passing on related teachings to her community. She has taught dance for the past 15 years, including weekend classes at The Native Canadian Center of Toronto, and currently teaches virtual regalia making courses online through her website. As an educator she actively teaches the history of Canadian policy that affects Indigenous people. Deanne was Ironwoman, Wiki Pow Wow 2015.

John Hupfield Waaseyaabin is Anishinaabe from Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario, Canada. He is a Phd Candidate in Education at York University, living and working in Toronto where he is a recognized dancer and active community member. He attended powwows his entire life but only started grass dancing in his mid-20s. He is a regular invited and head dancer at many First Nations’ and community powwows throughout Ontario. His dancing can be seen in the music video for Indian City, 2016, by A Tribe Called Red; The One Who Keeps on Giving, 2017, double channel video by Maria Hupfield; and Miigis, 2018, a production fusing contemporary Indigenous dance with athleticism by Red Sky Performance, Toronto.

Abigail Lim is a Criminology graduate from the University of Toronto. She competed for Team Canada in the 2018 World Naginata Championships. She is currently a member of the University of Toronto Naginata Club.

Lutan Lui a PhD student at University of Toronto. She has been practicing naginata at the University of Toronto Naginata Club for seven years. In 2019 Lui (along with on Abigail Lim) competed as a pair in Engi division of World’s Naginata Championship in Wiesbaden, Germany.

b. 1950, Taiwan / USA
https://www.tehchinghsieh.net/

Renowned former performance artist, and currently self-declared non-artist, Tehching Hsieh, is most recognized for his One Year performances. He has lived in a cage, he has lived by the clock, he has lived outside, and he has lived tied by a six-foot rope to a fellow performance artist, Linda Montano. Each performance lasted for one year. His fifth and final performance, Earth, the content of which remained a secret for thirteen years, was disclosed to the public with a simple statement “I kept myself alive. I passed the December 31st, 1999.” Hsieh believes that with the completion of his thirteen year piece that there is nothing left for him to accomplish in this world.

“My idea is that time becomes the main thing, how I pass the time is my main concern. It doesn’t matter what I do, I pass time.” ~Tehching Hsieh

Kristine Stiles is an associate professor at Duke University. She is a prolific writer on contemporary art theories, a multi-disciplinary artist and an academic. Her performances have been widely celebrated with such fellow artists as Yoko Ono, Francesco Conz and Sherman Flemming. Stiles co-edited Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings (1996). Currently, she is working on five books.

b. 1945, Germany

www.blackkit.org
www.performanceartarchive.com

Boris Nieslony has worked intensively as a performance artist, curator, archivist and independent scholar, staging various installations, interventions and artist projects since the 1970s. He is the founder of Black Market International, a performance group that meets regularly in various configurations to realize group performance projects, and ASA, a foundation for a self-organizing rhizomatic network of performance artists and theorists. Today, Boris Nieslony is recognized as one of the most prolific and significant contributors to performance art, presenting his work around the world.

Japan
www.niwa-staff.org

Yoshinori Niwa is a physical performance artist who often incorporates animals, plants, and the environment into his work. Niwa’s aim is to explore how to live with others, especially those with different life experience (ethno-cultural, economic, etc). Some of his performances are site-specific, however is especially interested in how performances change from venue to venue and between audiences, so he is well attuned to responding to that which is around him. Niwa is a graduate of the Tama Art University Department of Moving Images and Performing Arts (Tokyo) and he has performed in Britain, Canada, China, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Serbia, and Slovakia. He has also undertaken artistic residences through VENT Live Art (Oxford, UK), The Asahi Shimbun Foundation (Japan), and Tou Scene (Norway). In addition to his performance work, Niwa is active as a cultural producer in Japan and he has collaborated on a range of events and projects including the 2006 Tokyo-San Francisco Arts Festival. In 2007, he coordinated an international art festival titled “Artist as Activist,” which took place in Tokyo.

© Yoshinori Niwa, Nonsense Group Photo of 111 Toronto Citizens, 2009. Photo Shannon Cochrane.

b. 1976, Canada
www.christianmessier.ninja

Christian Messier was born in 1976, currently living and working in Québec City where he completed his Masters degree at Laval University. Messier’s work has been presented in exhibitions and events in Québec (Rencontre Internationale dʼart performance de Québec, Manif dʼart 3, DSM -V+) as well as internationally in Poland, Ireland, Argentina, Cuba and France.

© Hope Thompson, 2023. Photo Janet Kimber.

Canada
www.hopethompson.net

Hope Thompson is a playwright, filmmaker and writer. She is obsessed with mystery, film noir, camp and comedy and has written and directed several award-winning short films (It Happened In The Stacks, Switch) and one-act plays (She Walks The Line, Stiff, Trapped!) in these genres. Her film, Switch, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and her recent play, Trapped! was published in the anthology, Queer/Play (2017), edited by Moynan King. Hope is currently at work on her first novel and on a play based on a night in the life of crime writer, Cornell Woolrich. Hope co-hosts the popular crime fiction reading series, Noir At The Bar, in Toronto.

© Things Change Anyway, artist book by MC Coble and Louise Wolthers, 2023.

USA / Sweden
https://www.mccoble.com/

Embracing unpredictability, messiness and failure MC Coble has worked with performance art for over 20 years, through this time aiming to manifest problems of bodily, societal and symbolic navigation particularly focusing on issues of injustice and normative boundaries. Recurrent themes in Coble’s work revolve around queer politics evolve around the intersection of queer politics and activism.

Coble’s work, which has been included in exhibitions such as Queer Objectivity at The Stamp Gallery, University of Maryland (Baltimore, USA); The Great Refusal: Taking on New Queer Aesthetics at theSchool of the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, USA); Lost and Found: Queerying the Archive at the Nikolaj Center of Contemporary Art (Copenhagen, Denmark); and in the internationally traveling archive re.act.feminism #2–a performing archive.

Coble has performed live as part of 13 Festivalen, Festival of Performance Art (Gothenburg, Sweden), Rapid Pulse Performance Festival (Chicago, USA), MADE Festival (Umea, Sweden); in Commitment Issues presented by FADO Performance Art Centre (Toronto, Canada), Global Feminisms, Brooklyn Museum of Art (NY, USA) and in Performa 05 at Artists Space (NYC, USA).

Coble is a Senior Lecturer in the Fine Art Unit, MFA Programs at Valand Academy of Art, Gothenburg University, Sweden.

Canada

Dr. Jeanne Randolph is a psychoanalyst, cultural critic, writer, and performance artist. One of Canada’s foremost cultural theorists, she is the author of the influential book Psychoanalysis & Synchronized Swimming (1991), as well as Symbolization and Its Discontents (1997), Why Stoics Box (2003), Ethics of Luxury (2007), Shopping Cart Pantheism (2015) and My Claustrophobic Happiness (2020). Randolph’s most recent exhibition, Prairie Modernist Noir: The Disappearance of the Manitoba Telephone Booth, happened in May 2020 at Paul Petro Contemporary Art in conjunction with the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival. She is also known for her curation and as an engaging lecturer, performance artist, and musician. Randolph has spoken on topics ranging from the aesthetics of Barbie to the philosophy of Wittgenstein in universities and galleries across Canada, England, Australia, and Spain. Parking Lot Pandemic (2021) is Randolph’s second exhibition at Paul Petro Contemporary Art, where she has also given readings and launched her last two books.

© Ieke Trinks, Sing, Sync, Sink, 2013. Photo Henry Chan.

b. 1977, Netherlands
www.ieketrinks.nl

Ieke Trinks lives and works in Rotterdam. She holds a Masters of Fine Art at AVK St Joost in the Netherlands (2008). Her performance work is often a created using instructions, observations, and live actions made with every day objects and materials (such as cups, chairs, paper, shoes, doors, wood, shirts, nails, bananas, plastic bags), combined and deconstructed, often resulting in absurd situations that play with interpretations and expectations in response to a particular written text. Ieke’s work has presented in various venues in Europe and South America. She is part of a performance collective called TRICKSTER that works with “emergent-form composition’”, and since 2009 she has co-produced PAE (Performance Art Event) in Rotterdam.

Canada

Chy Ryan Spain is a multi-disciplinary artist, performer, activist, organizer, writer, and educator originally from Philadelphia. Spain is a graduate of Swarthmore College with a degree in Education and English Literature. Since moving to Toronto in 2005, he has held positions at Parkdale Project Read as an Adult Literacy Worker, and as Youth Program Coordinator at both the Art Gallery of Ontario and Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. He regularly performs with Toronto’s premiere women of colour burlesque troupe, Les Femmes Fatales, as an acrobatic pole dancer and burlesque artist under the moniker Axel Blows, and holds the inaugural title of Toronto’s Bent Beauty Supreme. In 2013, Spain was nominated for a Dora Mavor Moore award along with his fellow ensemble members for their work in Of a Monstrous Child: A Gaga Musical (EcceHomo). Other select theatre credits include: pool (water) (Cue6 Productions); Small Axe (Project Humanity); The Queer Bathroom Stories (Libido Productions); The Pastor Phelps Project: A Fundamentalist Cabaret (Ecce Homo); and his original, one-man performance piece The Price of Bleach (Rhubarb, 2007).

© UNDO, Disclosure, 2001. Photo Paul Couillard.

Canada

UNDO is a Canadian duo featuring Christof Migone (Toronto) and Alexandre St-Onge (Montréal). Their partnership began as a sound art collaboration in 1997. Since its inception and in its various appearances in Montréal, New York City, London (Ontario) and Québec City, UNDO has explored the barely perceptible. The duo combines its reduction of aural space produced by reduced actions with a complementary reductive lighting. In 2000, undo released a CD on its own label, squint fucker press, and will soon release a remix of Vito Acconci’s Waterways: Four Saliva Studies (along with the audio from the original video).

© Rebecca Belmore & Bently Spang, Tongue River, 2003. Photo Miklos Legrady.

Northern Cheyenne Nation / USA
https://www.bentlyspang.com/

Bently Spang is a Northern Cheyenne multi-media artist residing in Billings, Montana. He obtained his Master of Fine Arts-Sculpture from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1996 and has since exhibited across the US and in Canada, Japan, Italy, Columbia, Mexico and Germany. Recent exhibitions include Americas Remixed hosted by La Fabbrica Del Vapore Arts/Openspace in Milan, Italy (2002); and Staging The Indian: The Politics of Representation for the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Syracuse, NY (2002).

Canada / Scotland
www.claraursitti.com

A Canadian artist based in Glasgow, Clara Ursitti has worked with organic and synthesized fragrances for the past ten years. Collaborating with Dr. George Dodd, an olfactory scientist and aromatherapist, her series of olfactory portraits, sniffing videos, a dating service based on body odour, Pheromone Link, a performance utilizing smell-tracking police bloodhounds, as well as a number of pungent installations have delved into the psychological and social aspects of scent. Exhibiting throughout Europe and the British Isles, and in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the USA, her work has been featured at the ICA in London and in the Venice Biennale.

USA
1954–2016

https://www.thewire.co.uk/news/41182/sound-artist-and-acoustic-ecologist-jed-speare-has-died

Jed Speare was an artist from Boston working in variety of media. Initially trained in music composition, he created works in time-based media such as video, sound, and performance art, and conceptual and community-based works for over twenty-five years. His work has been presented in festivals and exhibitions in such places as San Francisco, New York, Boston and the New England region, and abroad in Holland, Belgium, France, Italy, Poland, Croatia, Bulgaria, and Taiwan. He was a member of the Mobius Artists Group of Mobius, Boston’s artist-run organization for experimental work in all media, and served as its Director from 1996 to 2004.

A QUIET ZONE II is a part of body of work by Speare that deals with the sound environment. Other works in this vein include CABLE CAR SOUNDSCAPES, an album on Smithsonian Folkways Records; PEACEFUL – AN PING, a project on the soundscape of a waterfront village of Tainan, Taiwan that used sound walks of the village’s oldest streets and aural histories of the residents’ sonic memories to suggest that sound could be used as an element in the future restoration and urban planning of the city; AUDIOGRAMS, a text and image work which explores his experience as an industrial hearing conservationist and the effects of hearing loss; A QUIET ZONE, a photographic, text and multimedia work about a neighborhood in Fitchburg, Massachusetts by that designation; and the artists books Crushed Buckets and I Call You.

Hungary
https://agora8.org/KennethMcBride_UtoGustav/

Gusztav Uto is a performance artist who has been making performance actions for many years, presenting his work throughout Europe, Asia and North America. He appeared in Toronto in 1996 as part of FADO’s Rencontre Performance Festival (in collaboration with Le Lieu). An artist of Hungarian background, he lives in Transylvania, Romania. Uto also worked throughout the 1990s as the organizer of the ANNART festival, an international outdoor performance art festival around a volcanic lake, considered one of the most important performance meeting places in Eastern Europe, until lack of funds has made it impossible to continue to produce the festival.

Canada
https://cargocollective.com/staceysproule/

Stacey Sproule is an emerging performance/installation artist.  She has exhibited locally for the last couple of years. Trained as a painter she works with a concern for the formal elements essential in the execution of 2-dimensional work, but working in 3-dimensions. Her work focuses on memory, fictions, and the point where one becomes indistinguishable from the other. Working from a deep pool of somewhat arcane skills, Stacey’s work encompasses her many areas of expertise at once. Past works have put to use her seamstress skills, her cooking skills, and even her musical talents.

USA

Jenny Strauss has a Masters degree in Interdisciplinary Art from San Francisco State University. She is best known for her work Idio Passage: Private Vernacular, Public Catharsis, a 24-hour performance that mined the psychic arena of obsession, madness and mysticism.

Canada

Stefan St-Laurent, multidisciplinary artist and curator, was born in Moncton, New-Brunswick and lives and works in Gatineau. He was the invited curator for the Biennale d’art performatif de Rouyn-Noranda in 2008, and for the 28th and 29th Symposium international d’art contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul in 2010 and 2011. From 2002 to 2011, he worked as curator of Galerie SAW Gallery, and has been an adjunct professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa since 2010. His performance and video work has been presented in numerous galleries and institutions, including the Centre national de la photographie in Paris, Edsvik Konst och Kultur in Sollentuna in Sweden, YYZ in Toronto, Western Front in Vancouver and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax. He has been a curator and programmer for a number of artistic organizations and festivals, including the Lux Centre in London, the Cinémathèque Québécoise in Montréal, the Festival international du cinéma francophone in Acadie, the Rencontres internationales Vidéo Arts Plastiques in Basse-Normandie, France, the Festival international du cinema francophone en Acadie in Moncton, as well as Pleasure Dome, Images Festival of Independent Film and Video and Vtape in Toronto. He is currently director of the artist-run centre AXENÉO7 in Gatineau.

Source: https://www.artseverywhere.ca/author/stefanstlaurent/

Canada
www.zanettesingh.tumblr.com

Zanette Singh is a Toronto based sculpture and drawing artist. Her work, often humorously, explores the intricate interiors of the psyche, from existential death anxiety to the most absurd and sacred dream worlds and locates this within the queer racialized body. She is a Creative Director at CUE, an award-winning arts initiative dedicated to providing high-access arts funding and support to new generation artists living and working on the margins.   

b. 1958, N.Ireland
https://www.andrestitt.com/

André Stitt was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1958. He studied at Ulster Polytechnic and Belfast College of Art & Design, Ulster University 1976–1980. From 1980–1999 he lived and worked in London increasingly travelling and making work internationally throughout the 80s. In 1999 he moved to Wales to take up position as Subject Leader and Senior lecturer of Time Based Art at Cardiff School of Art & Design, Cardiff Metropolitan University (UWIC). He is currently Professor of Performance & Interdisciplinary Art at Cardiff School of Art & Design, Cardiff Metropolitan University, chair of CFAR [the Centre for Fine Art Research], a fellow of the Royal Society of Art and the Higher Education Academy.

Working almost exclusively as a performance and interdisciplinary artist from 1976–2008, Stitt gained an international reputation for cutting edge, provocative and politically challenging work. A predominate theme in his artistic output is that of communities and their dissolution often relating to trauma, conflict and art as a redemptive proposition. His ‘live’ performance and installation works have been presented at major museums, galleries and sites specific throughout the world.

His exhibition work has been included in group shows at PS1, New York 2000, Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo, New York 2001, Crawford Municipal Gallery, Cork 2001, Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast 2001, Venice Biennale 2005, Baltic Contemporary Art Centre, England 2005, The Drawing Centre, New York, 2006, Bangkok Art & Culture Centre, 2008, NRLA, Glasgow 2008 & 2009, Galerie Lehtinen, Berlin 2011, St. Paul St. Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand 2011, and Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney, Australia 2011, The National Eisteddfod of Wales 2012, John Moores Painting Prize, , Walker Gallery, Liverpool 2012, Oriel Davies Open, Newtown, Wales, 2014, Art of the Eastside, Billboard project, Eastside Arts, Belfast 2014, BEEP Painting Biennale, Swansea, 2014, New Welsh Art, gallery ten, Cardiff, 2014, Experimentica, Chapter, Cardiff 2014, Art of the Troubles, Ulster Museum, Belfast, 2014, Art of the Troubles, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, England 2015.

His recent solo exhibitions include Chapter, Cardiff 2005, Artspace, Sydney, Australia 2007, Spacex Gallery, England 2008, The Lab, New York, 2009, MCAC, Portadown, Northern Ireland 2009, GTgallery, Belfast, N. Ireland 2010, Howard Gardens Gallery, Cardiff 2010, ‘in the WEST’, Oriel Myrddin, Carmarthen, Wales, ‘in the WEST’, Leeds College of Art Gallery 2013, ‘Dark Matter’ gallery ten, Cardiff 2014.

Stitt also has a long history of organising artist-initiated projects and collaborations; curating exhibitions, and producing large scale international performance art festivals and exchanges. In 2000 he opened trace: Installaction Artspace in Cardiff, and latterly Trace Collective (since 2008), initiating a robust programme of international time based work.

Source: www.cardiffmet.ac.uk/artanddesign/staff/Pages/andrestitt.aspx

b. 1962, Switzerland
www.performancesaga.ch

Andrea Saemann lives and works as artist and curator in Basel, Switzerland. She loves to work within artists initiatives and plattforms. From 1997–2000 she was the coordinator of Kaskadenkondensator, a space for contemporary art and performance in Basel. In 2001, in collaboration with art historian and art producer Annina Zimmermann, she curated in the outdoor project Helle Nächte. With artist Lena Eriksson, Saemann initiated the project space lodypop in Basel. From 2002–2011 she worked with art historian Katrin Grögel on Performance Saga, a project that transmits and updates the history of Performance Art on many different levels and promotes a dialogue between the generations. It includes the conception and realization of performance pieces, the publication of video interviews and the planning of events.

Canada
www.armandvaillancourt.ca

Armand Vaillancourt is best known as one of the towering figures in modern sculpture in Canada. He has created some 3,000 small-scale and monumental sculptures, including the famous fountain sculpture in Embarcadero Plaza in San Francisco. In 1993, he received the Prix Paul-Émile-Borduas. In addition to his sculptural projects, Vaillancourt is a Canadian pioneer in the field of art actions and performance maneuvers, creating various happenings in urban and rural environments since 1953.

© Elvira Santamaría-Torres, Salt Cartographies, 2018. 7a11d International Festival of Performance Art. Photo Henry Chan.

b. 1967, Mexico/ Ireland
elvirasantamariatorres.co.uk

Elvira Santamaría-Torres completed a Masters’s degree in Visual Arts at the University of Ulster in Belfast. Her work focuses on public actions, process art, installation and performance. She is currently based in both Northern Ireland and Mexico.

In 1994, Santamaría-Torres obtained the First award of the 3rd X-Teresa, The Month of Performance Art and in the same year was invited to participate in the Rencontre Internationale d’art performance de Québec. Since then, she has presented her work in festivals, art centres, galleries, museums and public spaces in Mexico, Europe, North America, Asia and Latin America. Her most recent public projects include Parábolas de Desalojo y Procesos de Regeneración, 2013-2016 (Mexico and various Latin American countries); Salt Cartographies in MACO (Oaxaca, Mexico, 2015), Sur Gallery (Toronto, 2018) and Golden Thread Gallery (Belfast, 2022).

In 2013, Santamaría-Torres was postulated to the Artraker, Awarding Creativity in Art and Conflict in London and was part of the juror for the 2014 award. She is a member of Black Market International, a performance art group. She has organised several events such as the annual International Performance Art Encounter in Yucatán, 2002-2006; InterSER0 I |& II, International Action Art Encounter at the Carrillo Gil Art Museum, 2009, and Humanism in process: Female Performance Artist at Work 1 & 2, 2019.

Santamaría-Torres conducts workshops and conferences in art centres, universities and museums in Mexico and abroad. She is an actual Member of the National System of Art Creators FONCA–Secretaria de Cultura and Flax Art Studios in Belfast.

Canada
www.henryadamsvec.ca

Henry Adam Svec is a songwriter, actor, and folklorist. His interdisciplinary work has also spanned performance, music, theatre, criticism, and game design. He was raised on a cherry farm near Blenheim, Ontario, and has lived in New Brunswick and Mississippi. He has traveled extensively across Canada and the United States on his many song-catching expeditions, trips on which he has documented authentic folk music and rituals. From 2006-2008 he was the resident folklorist at The National Archives of Canada; it was while working in Ottawa that he famously discovered The CFL Sessions, songs written and recorded by Canadian football players in the 1970s. He has also recorded music from the other side of the microphone, in the bands Peter Mansbridge and the CBCs and The Boy from ET. He is the author of American Folk Music as Tactical Media, a scholarly monograph, and Life Is Like Canadian Football and Other Authentic Folk Songs, a novel. He currently teaches at the University of Waterloo.

June 18, 1941 – July 31, 2020

Switzerland

Ruedi Schill was born 1941 in Luzern, Switzerland. He attended the Art School F+F in Zürich. He has been making Performances and Actions since 1975. Currently he resides and works in Luzern (Switzerland) and Essen (Germany). Monika Günther and Ruedi Schill have been working together in Performance Art since 1995. Their performances have been presented in Germany, Switzerland, Hungary, Poland, Mexico, Canada, Belgium, Belarus, Vietnam, Singapore, Italy, Spain, Chile, Bali, Java and Greece. Since 1995, they have been teaching performance art at several art academies and schools. In 2004, they received the Art Price of the town of Luzern (Switzerland). And since 1998, they shared the artistic direction of the annual International Performance Art Turbine Giswil, Switzerland.

WIKIPEDIA: Monika Günther & Ruedi Schill

© Tomasz Szrama, Give Me Heroes And I Will Unleash A Revolution, 2022. Photo Katarína Kováčová.

b. 1970, Poland / Finland
www.tomaszszrama.com

Tomasz Szrama graduated in 1998 from the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw, Poland. Currently he lives in Helsinki, Finland. Szrama shifts between multiple disciplines, including photography, video, action and other time-based works. Regardless of the medium, a dominant thread, common in his work is the use of his own body and methods of performance art, which he has practiced since 1993. Characteristic features of his actions are the use of spectators, active participation of the audience and improvisation. Such a strategy embeds his presentations into the tradition of understanding performance art as a process art, where the very moment of creation is essential. His work touches on themes of travel, trust in interpersonal relationships, and the ever present potential for personal failure.

Szrama has been regularly performing internationally in numerous events and festivals across Europe, Asia, Africa, North and South America. He works both in institutional contexts, venues such as the Museum Reina Sofia, Göteborgs Konsthall, Scandinavia House NYC, Bangkok Art Centre, and in unique locations such as the deck of an aircraft, a ferry boat, a village in the Mexican desert, a yurt in the Mongolian steppe. 

Further, over the past 16 years, he has been an active performance art event organizer. In 2008–2016 he worked as a producer, technical manager and was responsible for organizing live art events at HIAP – Helsinki International Artist Programme.  

He is a working grant recipient from the Arts Promotion Centre Finland for the year 2016, the years 2018–2020 and the year 2022, from the Kone Foundation for 2017 and the Finnish Cultural Foundation for 2021. Currently gives lectures and offers workshops (i.e UNIARTS, SAMK, Art School MAA).

Canada
https://joshuaschwebel.com

Is it still legitimate to question forms such as artists’ bios that contextualize illegitimate actions within a constellation of reputable organizations, international affiliations and other legitimized attempts to escape? Inappropriate entries such as this one invite overlooking, dismissive glances, but does one really care that the artist’s work has been shown or not shown elsewhere? There is text entered under the heading of bio, which provides information that is relevant or irrelevant to the career of the artist and/or the reader’s interest in said career. More useful yet would be a list of influences for the project. This network would show that I, the artist, have no original ideas, and could provide a list of contacts/connections that inform but support the singularity of the work in response to its particular site, time and coincidental trajectory.

Canada

Julie Andrée T.’s installations and performance works have been shown in Canada, USA, South America, Asia and Europe. She was part of Compagnie PME for several years, an experimental theatre company directed by Jacob Wren. She has collaborated with numerous artists, choreographers and directors including Benoit Lachambre, Xavier Le Roy, Dominique Porte, Martin Bélanger and the filmmaker Dominic Gagnon, as well as working with the PONI collective from Brussels as co-artistic-director in 2007. Since 2003 Julie has worked with and performed internationally with the renowned performance group Black Market International.

For Julie Andrée T., practicing art should be a reflection of daily life and the dark ages we are presently in. Body and space are the center of her research. She uses the body as a space and vehicle for metaphors and poetry. She tries to reach a place where personal identity is lost. Although this is a utopia, it might be the only way to find a common abstract language to understand what we do and who we are.

Julie Andrée T. was from 2008 to 20011 guest artist Faculty at the School of museum of Fine Arts in Boston (USA) where she was teaching performance art. An occasional curator, she is part of the programming comity of Inter/Lieu (Québec city) an artist-run centre dedicated to performance and Installation.

Japan
https://www.asa.de/magazine/iss2/27seiji.htm

Seiji Shimoda is one of Japan’s most active, well-known and respected performance artists. He is a performer, a poet, an arts advocate, organizer, curator and lecturer at the Musashino Art University in Tokyo. Since graduating Osaka City University in 1977, Shimoda’s work has been presented at over 100 international festivals, conferences and galleries, in more than 30 countries across western and central Europe, North and Central America and throughout Asia. Shimoda is the Director of NIPAF (Nippon International Performance Art Festival, established in 1993) and has presented the work of over 300 international and Asian performance artists from 45 countries around the world in two annual festivals that take place in several cities in Japan. Under Shimoda’s direction, NIPAF has become one of the most influential festivals in the global performance art community and is a sought after destination for performance artists from around the world. Shimoda also organizes tours under the umbrella of NIPAF to promote art exchange and dialogue about performance art to the US, Poland, Philippines, Germany and Spain. In 2000, Shimoda was the first Asian artist to receive a prized Bessie Award (New York Dance and Performance). Shimoda’s own performance work is a combination of action poetry, performance and movement, and employing simple objects like chopsticks, a chair, a table and his physical body in unique ways. 

© Maryam Taghavi, Variations on Absurdity, 2013. Photo Henry Chan.

Iran / Canada
www.maryamtaghavidotcom.wordpress.com

Born and raised in Iran, Maryam Taghavi is a Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist. She received her BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Her work includes drawing, photography, site-specific installation, and performance. Her practice is spread across social and spatial paradigms (the artist has been traveling between Iran and Canada since her graduation), and investigates the enigmatic relations between then and now, self and other, fiction and non-fiction. Examining the corporeal and psychological exchanges between architecture, domestic objects and the human body, she creates different scenarios for contemplation and forms of reception. She has participated in a number of exhibitions in Canada, Mexico and Iran.

“Fascinated by fleeting realms in social and spatial paradigms, my practice investigates enigmatic realtions between then and now, self and other, and fiction and non-fiction. I examine corporeal and psychological exchange in relation to architectural sites, domestic objects and human body to create a different scenario for contemplation and forms of reception.”

Svar Simpson is a visual artist with a central practice in sculpture, also working in performance, film, new technology and urban art forms. The pervading theme running through the work focuses on transmutation. The human body is acknowledged as an integral contribution to the mechanics of an interdisciplinary production.

Poland
https://totalartjournal.com/2011-2/artur-tajber/

Artur Tajber is an influential artist, curator and organizer based in Krakow, Poland, Tajber’s work reflects an interest in conceptual design and theory of art, unrestricted by disciplinary divisions. His distinguished exhibition and teaching careers have taken him to galleries, festivals and colleges in Europe, Asia and North America. He is a co-founder and the long-time President of the Association of Fort Sztuki (since 1996), as well as being the instigator and director of the Inter-Faculty Studio for Intermedia, Academy of Fine Arts, Krakow (since 2001).

Artur Tajber’s visit to Canada was made possible through the School of the Arts at McMaster University. Supporters of this venture include the Centre for Leadership and Learning through a Teaching and Learning Project Fund, the Senator William McMaster Chair in Globalization and the Human Condition, Hamilton Artists Inc., McMaster Museum of Art, transit gallery, and the International School of Loose Affiliations. Artur Tajber will also be conducting presentations and performance at transit gallery while in Hamilton.

New Zealand

Victoria Singh is an artist and curator based in New Zealand. Singh’s 25-year practice is dedicated almost exclusively to performance and has been widely exhibited. Her recent work focuses on ritualized and ephemeral acts of life as art, with particular attention to conscious and unconscious relations between self and Other. In addition to her artistic practice, she works as a performance art curator, most recently at Vancouver’s Western Front Society, where she wrote, edited and published Ritual in Contemporary Performance. Singh has a Master of Arts in Graduate Liberal Studies. Her son and artistic collaborator for this project, Kurtis, is eight.

Japan

Yoshimichi Takei has developed an original performance style based on his background in Butoh dance and Japanese ‘avant-garde mime’. In his work, Takei engages in a ‘collaboration’ between his body and various electronic instruments, including light bulbs, sensors and everyday appliances. Hailed as being in the forefront of contemporary Japanese dance, Takei’s work is presented regularly in dance and performance festivals throughout Japan and has been seen in Europe and New York. BIG YAWN marks his Canadian debut.

b. 1958, Poland

Ewa Rybska studied at the College of Art and Design in Minsk Mazowiecki, Poland. Since 1994 she has been working as a curator of the artistic programme at the Baltic Gallery of Contemporary Art. She is also a co-organizer of the annual Castle of the Imagination International Performance Art Festival. Following her interest in multi-media visual art, she has been active in the initiation and administration of several international artist-run projects, including exchange exhibitions, festivals and artist residencies. Since 1997 she has been creating performance art works in collaboration with Wladyslaw Kazmierczak, performing in Slovakia, Italy, Germany, Czech Republic, Belarus, Ireland, Slovenia, Mexico, Indonesia and Poland.

Sweden
www.tallblondladies.com

TBL (TallBlondLadies) is a collaborative performance project between Anna Berndtson (Germany) and Irina Runge (Sweden), which started in 2003.

“TBL inverts female stereotypes through the composition of absurd and unexpected performative gestures, often incorporating a range of accoutrement from high-end fashion to sports gear. Their works present diametrically opposed concepts; beauty and grace are juxtaposed and diminished through brute action and athleticism, tacitly disrupting and challenging gender-based categorizations.”

Artists Space, New York, 2007

Canada
www.daintysmith.com

Dainty Smith is a Toronto based Actor, Burlesque Performer, Writer, Producer, and Speaker. Dainty believes that through the art of storytelling and a willingness to be exposed that genuine human connections can be made. Her performances often tell deeply vulnerable stories regarding race, religion, sexuality and challenging social boundaries. Dainty took performing arts at George Brown College and is a powerful self taught storyteller, performer, and orator. She acted in the acclaimed theatre group Les Blues and has starred in two short films: How To Stop A Revolution, and Red Lips (Cages for Black Girls). Her diverse array of stage performances include the Mayworks Festival, Gladstone Hotel, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, the Tranzac, Artscape, and Daniels Spectrum Theatre.

Over the past decade Dainty has brought her utterly raw, emotional artistry to her burlesque performances. She co-produced the performance art collective Colour Me Dragg and founded Les Femme Fatales: Women of Colour burlesque troupe, the only burlesque troupe for women of colour in Canada. Her performances have been showcased at Rock. Paper. Sistahz, the Rhubarb Festival, Harbourfront Centre, Killjoy’s Kastle: A Lesbian Haunted House conceived by Allyson Mitchell and countless venues throughout the city of Toronto. Recently, her speaking engagements have included workshops with women and youth on themes of empowerment, glamour, beauty, self love and self care as revolutionary acts. She has taught workshops at Ryerson University, University of Ottawa, and York University on radical body positivity, survival and thriving.Dainty has written for Sway magazine, Lover Magazine, About magazine, Xtra! Newspaper, Sage Blog, Shameless Magazine and The Witness Journal.

b. 1973, Israel
www.meirtati.com

Meir Tati works in video and performance. Recent exhibitions have included the Moscow Biannual for Young Art (2008), and presentations at EPAF (Warsaw), ZAZ Festival (Tel Aviv) and other exhibitions and performances in Italy, Germany and Istanbul. Tati recently finished an artist’s residency in Copenhagen. This will be his first appearance in North America.

Cree / Canada
www.arielsmith.com

Ariel Smith is an urban nēhiyaw iskwew (plains Cree woman), a self-taught filmmaker, video artist, writer and cultural worker currently based on unceded Algonquin territory, Ottawa, Ontario. She has shown at festivals and galleries internationally including: Images Festival (Toronto), Mix Experimental Film Festival (NYC), Urban Shaman (Winnipeg), MAI (Montréal), Gallery Sans Nom (Moncton), Santa Fe Indian Market (Santa Fe, New Mexico), Solid Screens (Cairns, Australia) and Cold Creation Gallery (Barcelona, Spain).

She has written essays and articles on the subjects of Indigenous media arts as self determination and on gendered colonial violence for Concordia University, The Ottawa Art Gallery, The Ottawa International Animation Festival, Bitch Flicks, and the Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society Journal. Ariel is a programmer and arts educator for the imagineNATIVE film and media arts festival and is the director of National Indigenous Media Arts Coalition (NIMAC).

Ariel’s lived experiences with difference and marginalization form the basis for much of her work. Interested in the political and social forces that affect the lives of girls and women, she investigates these themes, resulting in anti-essentialist, tongue-in-cheek commentaries which embody the grotesque feminine, while at the same time challenge the negative patriarchal perception of the feminine-as monstrous.

Canada
www.jocelynrobert.com

Jocelyn Robert is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Québec City. He works in music, audio art, computer art, performance, installation, video and writing. His visual and video work has been shown internationally and his sound works have been published on more than 30 cds. His texts can be found in books at Le Quartanier (Montréal), Ohm Éditions (Québec), Errant Bodies Press (Los Angeles), Semiotext(e) (New York), and in a number of art catalogues. Many texts have been written on his art, and two solo catalogues have been published, one by Galerie de l’UQAM and one by Centre Vox. He is involved in art activism at different levels. Amongst other undertakings, he founded that audio and electronic arts centre Avatar and took part in the foundation of the Meduse co-operative. He taught at Mills College (Oakland, California), at Université du Québec à Montréal and at École d’arts visuels et médiatiques de l’Université Laval, where he was Director from 2012 to 2017.

Canada
https://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=326

Alain-Martin Richard is a performer, artist, editor, and critic. Over the years he has developed a multidisciplinary practice that considers questions of art in society, and of art as poetic action—and as a philosophy enacted. His production has focused on the objective conditions of artistic experimentation, incorporating practices not usually associated with the field of art, the use of unaltered, everyday materials, and the use of ordinary technologies. He has participated in many festival and events, performing in North America, Europe and Japan. His performances focus on space, movement, pacing, identity and individual responsibility in a world marked by postmodernism and the vulgarization of all aspects of society. Currently, Richard’s most important field of investigation is into the concept of the “manœuvre”. He created the global manœuvre “Atopie textual” with the group “les Causes perdues”.

Richard has organized events including Marathon d’écriture in 1983, NeoSon(g) Cabaret in 1984, Symposium d’Amos in 1997, and Symposium de Moncton in 1999. He is co-editor with Clive Robertson of the book Performance in/au Canada 1970-1990, and he has also edited catalogues including Territoires nomades (1996) and 3e Symposium en arts visuels de l’Abitibi-Témiscamingue (1998). He has been a member the collective INTER/Le Lieu in Quebec City, as well as of the now defunct group The Nomads, an international collective involved with major events such as Documenta and the Olympic games. He is a member of the Quebec collective Folie/Culture.

Canada

Marlène Renaud-B is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Montréal, Québec. Renaud-B’s recent work reorients familiar spaces and situations through the use of uncanny juxtaposition and discomfort. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in Brazil, France, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, and the United States. Her son, Armand, is three.