Co-presented by Alleyway Gallery and FADO Performance Art Centre

How to find Alleyway Gallery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alleyway Gallery
CONTACT Festival