Category: Artist

© Rita Camacho Lomeli, 2022. Deep in the Streets. Photo Henry Chan.

Mexico / Canada

Rita Camacho Lomeli is a multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto. Moving across visual art forms such as paintings, print works, performances, installations, and everyday events like walking and conversing, her work focuses on revealing the contemporary condition of objects and spaces. She has exhibited her work in artist-run centres, festivals, and on the streets.

Moving across visual art forms and everyday events such as walking and conversing, my work focuses on revealing the formal, the material and the contemporary condition of objects and spaces, making them visible and tangible in a different way. I create paintings, print works, performances and installations. One of my main concerns is to examine one of the most critical issues in traditional aesthetics, “the frame.”  I consider the frame an open process of interaction with the environment. Therefore, in my practice, I contest to what extent nondescript objects, quotidian events, and the randomness of the every day are part of the meaning of my work. Consequently, I am in the continuous exploration in which the boundaries of art and the environment are no longer clear, searching to create works that interrelate art and life.

www.essaysmythe.com

SA Smythe is a transmedia artist, critical theorist, and educator. Their art practice integrates (visual and text-based) poetry, soundscape composition, light sculptures, and archival ephemera to choreograph cartographies of black (un)belonging. They have exhibited their work internationally at Scuderie del Quirinale (Rome), Kampnagel (Germany), Centro nazionale di produzione Virgilio Sieni (CANGO, Florence), GXRLSCHOOL (Los Angeles), Polo del ‘900 (Turin), Berkeley Arts Centre (Berkeley), as a member of the Dark Matter Cypher under the direction of Sage Ni’Ja Whitson (Fathomers/CAAM), Mattatoio Museum (Rome), as a Africa Writes Literary Festival (London) headliner, and elsewhere in collaborative and solo projects, installations, and festivals. Recipient of the 2022 Rome Prize, Smythe is based between Tkaronto, Italy, and unceded Tongva land (Los Angeles).

© Sinead O’Donnell, Violence is in Me, 2010. Photo Henry Chan.

N. Ireland
https://sineadodonnell.com/

Sinéad O’Donnell has been creating performance, installation, site and time-based art since 1998. Encountering a place’s territoriality, and frequently referencing Ireland, Sinéad chooses actions or situations that demonstrate complexity, setting up confrontations between matter and memory, timing and spontaneity, site and space, and intuition and methodology. Sinéad O’Donnell is based in Belfast, N. Ireland and her performance work has been presented in Ireland, South America, Middle East and Eastern Europe. She is highly active in the local Belfast performance art scene, working with Bbeyond and other local organizations to foster performance art activity and mentor emerging artists in her community. This will be Sinead’s first performance in Toronto.

© Hugh O’Donnell, Invert Two, 2010. Photo Henry Chan.

1978 – 2022

Belfast, N. Ireland
https://flaxartstudios.org/flax-art-artists/Hugh-odonnell

Hugh O’Donnell’s has been creating installation, video and performance works since receiving his MFA in Fine Art from the University of Ulster. His performance practice is informed by drawing, found and made objects. Often of an auto-personal nature, O’Donnell’s work is material-based and conceptual, and is concerned with notions of gender and sexuality.  Hugh O’Donnell is based in Belfast, N. Ireland and his performance work has been exhibited in Ireland and internationally in Switzerland, Serbia, Romania and Quebec City. Currently he works with Bbeyond, a Belfast based performance organization established to preserve and promote performance art exchanges within Ireland/N. Ireland and abroad. This will be Hugh’s first performance in Toronto.

Yvonne Rainer, a co-founding member of the Judson Dance Theater in 1962, made a transition to filmmaking following a fifteen-year career as a choreographer/dancer (1960-1975). After making seven experimental feature films  — Lives of Performers (1972), Privilege (1990), MURDER and murder (1996), among others — she returned to dance in 2000 via a commission from the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation for the White Oak Dance Project (After Many a Summer Dies the Swan). Her dances since then include AG Indexical, with a little help from H.M., RoS Indexical, a Performa07 commission, Spiraling Down, Assisted Living: Good Sports 2, and Assisted Living: Do You Have Any Money? Her dances and films have been shown world wide, and her work has been rewarded with museum exhibitions, fellowships, and grants, most notably two Guggenheim Fellowships, two Rockefeller grants, a Wexner Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, and retrospective exhibitions at Kunsthaus Bregenz and Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2012), the Getty Research Institute, L.A. and Raven Row, London (2014). A memoir — Feelings Are Facts: a Life — was published by MIT Press in 2006. A selection of her poetry was published in 2011 by Paul Chan’s Badlands Unlimited.

Somalia / Canada

Idil Mussa is a Toronto based, Somali-Canadian artist. She is most fascinated with how social and political movements inspire people to action and the ways in which those movements shape art and culture.

Canada
www.loveless.ca

Natalie S. Loveless received her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She also holds a PhD (History of Consciousness, UCSC) and an MA (Art History, Theory and Criticism, Tufts University). Previous curatorial projects include Participatory Dissent at Vancouver’s Western Front Society (2007) and Intervene! Interrupt! Rethinking Art as Social Practice at the University of California, Santa Cruz (2008). Also an interdisciplinary artist, her wall-drawing installations, performance actions and video works have been presented in festivals, galleries and artist-run centres in North America, South America, Europe and Asia. Her son, Orion, is almost two.

Canada
www.ginamiller.ca

Gina Miller is a visual artist who lives in Vancouver, Canada. Her recent work focuses on narratives surrounding growth: psychological, spiritual and physical. Family Tissues is Miller’s first foray into performance. Gina has a Fine Arts diploma from Capilano University (2003) and will graduate in the Spring of 2012 from Emily Carr University with her B.F.A. She is mother to thirteen-year old Hewitt, seven-year old Rupert, and six-year old Harper.

© Yumi Onose, they perform on friday and on saturday they respond to friday, 2011. Photo Henry Chan.

Japan / Canada

Yumi Onose was born in Japan. Yumi’s passion in traveling and learning lead to her study of visual arts and performance. She was invited to be artist-in-residence and exhibited in Poland in 2003, created art for contemporary dance piece Red Dream directed by Keiko Ninomiya in 2006, and exhibited Evolving Forms with Harvey Chan in 2007. She has performed in Something about Gender (2009), we see their work on friday and on saturday they respond to it” (2010) and 24h of butoh and it is not butoh (2010), all directed by claude wittmann in Toronto.

Bulgaria / Canada

Vassya Vassileva, performer and lecturer, is cuurrently working on her PhD in Visual Semiotics at New Bulgarian University, Sofia. Her previous studies include MA in Philosophy and Intercultural Studies, BA in Art Pedagogy at St. Kliment Ohridski University, Sofia. Since October 2004 she has been searching for the artist Friedrich Nichtmargen. Areas of interest: visual discourse and culture, contextual analysis, empathic reason, discourse ethics, mental mapping, geography of time-space formations, friedrichology, gargarisma, art as experience…

Canada
www.devoraneumark.com

Devora Neumark’s interdisciplinary artistic practice includes live-art, durational performative interventions, sound and photography installations, public commissions and storytellings. In 1995, she initiated and co-organised (with Regine Basha) the international symposium “Visual Art and Jewish Identity: A Contemporary Experience” at the Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts, Montreal. More recently she initiated and co-organized (with Loren Lerner and pk langshaw) Public Art as Social Intervention…, a Montreal-based project held at Concordia University in November 1999, which included a symposium, artistic interventions and an extensive website. From 1995 to 1999 Neumark served as Vice President of Auberge Shalom…pour femmes, Canada’s first Kosher crisis intervention centre and shelter for women victims of conjugal violence. As a frequent lecturer, she has addressed a wide variety of audiences, speaking about engaged artistic practice, the authority of memory, formations of identity, and inter-generational violence and healing.

Canada
https://kristyndunnion.com/

Kristyn Dunnion‘s dystopic Tarry This Night made CBC’s top 20 fall fiction list and Bitch’s November must reads. The Dirt Chronicles (also with Arsenal Pulp Press) was a 2012 Lambda Literary Award finalist and ALA Over the Rainbow selection. Recent fiction appears in The New Guard, Cosmonauts Avenue, and The Tahoma Literary Review. A performance artist and local musician, Dunnion’s provocative work incites critical questions about identity, justice, and power.

© Kristyn Dunnion, Valley of the Dolls Graduation, 2018. Photo Henry Chan.

b. 1948, USA
www.adrianpiper.com

Adrian Piper is a first-generation Conceptual artist and analytic philosopher. She began exhibiting her artwork internationally at the age of twenty, and graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 1969. While continuing to produce and exhibit her artwork, she received a B.A. in Philosophy with a minor in Medieval and Renaissance Musicology from the City College of New York in 1974 and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University in 1981. Adrian Piper produces artwork in a variety of traditional and nontraditional media, including photo-text collage, drawing on pre- printed paper, video installation, site-specific sculptural installation, digital imagery, performance and sound works.

b. 1985, Canada
www.nadege-grebmeier-forget.com

Nadège Grebmeier Forget’s interdisciplinary practice unfolds via durational, live, live-streamed and private performances, which sometimes result in drawing, photography or installation works. In these performances, she models and hybridizes herself to defuse expectations of beauty and explore the effects (and affects) of the concerned gaze on the unfolding identity as it is observed and analyzed by others, including oneself. Seeking to confront desires and ideals (aesthetic, commercial, sexual, etc.) through an empowered and performative manipulation of her own image, she intrinsically questions the labour of making and becoming; including the ways in which performance (of self or art) can be documented, shown, disseminated or exhibited.

Engaged within both of Montreal’s visual and live arts communities—as an artist, freelance project coordinator, creative consultant or artistic director. She has participated in numerous events, festivals, panels, residencies, and exhibitions across Canada, the US, and Europe, and is the first performance artist to receive the City of Montreal’s Prix Pierre-Ayot (2019), awarded in partnership with the Contemporary Art Galleries Association (AGAC).

Canada
https://genevieveetmatthieu.bandcamp.com/

The duo Geneviève & Matthieu, from Rouyn-Noranda in Abitibi-Témiscamingue, started working in the late 1990s, blending visual art, performance, music and everyday life. Geneviève & Matthieu play on interdisciplinarity—happening, musical composition, performance art and installation—to create group performances and productions of social tableaux that are at times festive but always human.

Beginning in 2001, their discography includes five titles. Between the baroque, abstract expressionism and arte povera, their works have been presented over forty times in Québec, across Canada, the United States, France, Belgium and Spain. Actively involved in their community, Geneviève & Mathieu have been developing the artist-run centre Écart and the Biennale d’art performatif de Rouyn-Noranda for over 20 years.

The duo takes a critical look at past and current artistic movements: DIY culture, conceptual art and performance art. Through residencies, public dissemination and the experience of a body that bounces, transforms and blends into art, their works are constantly evolving. Propelled by the human spirit, their creative approach favours a living art that challenges usual modes of presentation through the change of the place, duration, and manner of exhibiting and performing.

Image: Jehan Roberson. Photo © Jay Bendett.

USA
https://www.jehanroberson.com/

Jehan Roberson is a queer writer, scholar, artist, and memory worker using text as the basis for her interdisciplinary practice. Born and raised in Memphis, TN, Jehan’s work explores text as a site of liberation, place making, and historical intervention for Black peoples in the Americas. Her art and research have informed her previous work in archives and cultural sites such as the National Civil Rights Museum and the Center for Southern Folklore in Memphis, Kismet Productions in Chicago, and the Borges Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Jehan is a PhD student in English Language and Literatures at Cornell University. She holds a MA from NYU’s John W. Draper School of Humanities and Social Thought and a BA in English Literature with a double minor in Spanish and Journalism from the University of Missouri.

Canada
https://mathieulacroix.jimdofree.com/

Mathieu Lacroix is a Montreal-based artist from Drummondville, Québec. He holds a BFA from UQAM in Montreal. He has recently exhibited at Clark Center in Montréal, Maison de la culture Côte-des-Neiges in Montréal and CIRCA art actuel in Montreal. He has performed in many locations, for example at 7a*11d, the International Festival of Performance in Toronto. His works can be found in the collection of La Ville de Montréal. Mathieu Lacroix has been invited to participate at the Off Biennale of Contemporary African Art in Dakar, Senegal, and he performed in a group exhibition at Dazibao, Montreal.

Mathieu Lacroix’s multidisciplinary practice comprises drawing, sculpture, installation and performance. The notion of the “sketch” is central to his work, employing it as both a conceptual approach and a literal technique across a spectrum of media, helping to subtly unify his wide-ranging intellectual and formal interests. He creates unusual environments borrowing from both the domestic space and the commercial. Lacroix’s interventions question the complex relationship between the individual and his environment, habits, and identity. His work touches lightly but profoundly on issues from many areas such as politics, economics, personal and collective identities, and perceptual experience. 

https://joeculpepper.com/

Joe Culpepper is a magician, consultant and researcher. He is an associate researcher at Montréal’s National Circus School, is a member of London’s Magic Circle, and has adapted magic effects for Cirque du Soleil, Concordia University, and others.

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.

Key projects include who claims abstraction? (2023–2024) a solo exhibition and book produced with SFU Galleries; foreward (2021–2023), a series of site specific installations in dialogue with the permanent collection at The MacLaren Art Centre; and refugee reconnaissance (2021), a bilingual compilation of performance scores spanning 2005–2013 published by AXENÉO7. Performances include actions for the Vancouver Art Gallery, the LIVE Biennial of Performance Art (Vancouver); Darling Foundry, SBC galerie d’art contemporaine, MAI Montréal, arts interculturels (Montréal); Mayworks Festival of Working People & the Arts, Gallery TPW (Toronto); Rapid Pulse International Performance Art Festival, and Northwestern University (USA). Other highlights include participation in international group shows on contemporary queer aesthetics in the USA at the Hessel Museum (2015) and Ramapo College (2016), and Malmö Konstmuseum (2022) in Sweden. 

© Francisco-Fernando Granados, stop pretending this is a child’s adventure, Affections diasporiques, SBC galerie d’art contemporain, Montréal. 2025. Photo James Knott.

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.

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

MC Coble (they/them) seeks to make visible the hidden/ignored histories and contemporary urgencies of marginalized communities, informed in part, by their own experiences as a non-binary trans* artist, activist and educator. Photography, performance art, video and recently drawing form a material foundation for their critical and intersectional approach to thinking along with queer & trans* feminist politics, investigating the power of play and the potential of failure as methods. Often working site-specifically, research-based and collectively are integral to Coble’s ways of working. Coble’s artistic activities not only involve creating performances and other art works, but also leading and engaging in workshops, making publications, and community organizing.

Coble has recently published the book Things Change Anyway (in collaboration with their partner, art historian Louise Wolthers), which won the Swedish Photobook Prize 2024. Through photos, drawing and text, it imagines metamorphosis such as non-binary gender affirmations, menopause and aging as well has non-human connectivity and queer kinship. Coble lives and works in Gothenburg, Sweden and currently has a two year working grant from the Swedish Arts Council.

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.

© 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.

© Andrea Saemann, Untitled Performance, 2012. Photo Henry Chan.

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).