Tag: 11:45 PM

After a 10-year hiatus, FADO’s emerging Artists Series is back in 2025!

A much-loved staple of FADO’s programming year from 2003 to 2014, FADO’s emerging Artists series was created to provide a platform for younger artists to develop and present a performance piece in a professional context, often for the first time. As the series developed, the opportunity it provided extended to nurturing new performance curators. Each new project in the series has interpreted in its own particular way the central term of its mandate reformulating who/what should be considered ‘emerging’ in the context of performance art practice as presented through the FADO frame.

For the 2025 Emerging Artist Series, ‘emerging’ is discarded as a label that reveals age, defines time spent or as a qualification of perceived depth of experience. Instead, from February through May two curators and three series researcher residents develop performance installations, performance events and research projects that bring the notion of ‘emerging’ into relationship with community and forms of practice.

2025: On View | curated by Jordan King
2025: not knowing is the most intimate | curated by Shalon T. Webber-Heffernan
2025: EAS LABists: Christina Anna Trutiak, James Knott, Vanessa Godden
2014: 11:45 P.M. | curated by Kate Barry
2013: .sight specific. | curated by Francisco-Fernando Granados
2011: Extra-Rational | curated by Gale Allen
2009: Misinformed Informants | curated by Lisa Visser
2008: Vivência Poética | curated by Erika DeFreitas
2007: Enter-gration | curated by Nahed Mansour
2005: Open Airway | curated by Elle McLaughlin
2005: Feats, might | curated by Alissa Firth-Eagland
2004: Home Repair by One Night Only
2004: Game City | curated by Craig Leonard
2003: Gestures | curated by Tanya Mars

FADO’s Emerging Artists series was initiated in 2003 by Canada’s own performance art matriarch and educator Tanya Mars, who recognized that the best way to encourage young artists was by offering them a professional presentation opportunity. Her vision was one of mentorship, targeting an interesting mix of new and emerging artists, many of them former students, whom she commissioned to develop new works responding to a thematic context. The first event, curated by Mars, included ambient, conceptual and cabaret-style performance art gestures. This event later developed into the Emerging Artists Series. FADO’s intention with this on-going series was to nurture new work and ideas, provide direction and mentorship, and showcase the work of the city’s newest perspectives in performance art.

As the series developed, it became clear that this was an opportunity to nurture not only emerging performance artists, but also emerging curators, allowing FADO to encourage new curatorial voices in performance art, and introducing FADO to new communities of artists (and new artists to FADO). The series has continued to develop and change, later including the work of artists not just from Toronto, but regionally as well. This way, the series exposes local audiences to the range of performance work happening in the emerging performance scene across Canada.

© Arkadi Lavoie Lachapelle, 6 hours 6 minutes 6 seconds, 2014. Photo Henry Chan.

Canada
www.arkadilavoielachapelle.com

Arkadi Lavoie Lachapelle holds a Bachelor in Fine Arts from the University of Québec. Her work has been presented in a variety of contexts, including anonymous and clandestine situations, in Québec, Austria, France, Germany, and Spain. Her artistic research is based on the poetic potential of the object and its symbolic and corporal expression of strength and power; as well as on public participation as a collective energy. Through clandestine poetic actions, ephemeral installations in public space and gallery projects, Lachapelle questions and opposes resistance to situations related to productivist ideology.

© Jessica Karuhanga, The trip, and the fall, and the lost heap of longing, 2014. Photo Henry Chan.

Canada
www.jessicakaruhanga.com/home.html

Jessica Karuhanga holds a BFA honors specialization in studio arts from The University of Western Ontario and a MFA from University of Victoria. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at Open Space and Deluge Contemporary (Victoria), Art Mûr (Montréal), and Whippersnapper Gallery (Toronto). She has performed at The Ministry of Casual Living (Victoria), and in Toronto at The Theatre Centre Pop-Up and the OCADU Student Gallery.

I draw on everyday rituals and moments, witnessed and experienced, exploring the emotive and affective propensity and possibility of these sites to evolve into meaningful embodied performances, drawings, and videos. These varied pulses or modes of expression are at once self-reflexive and reflective of one another other and the unfolding and multi-layered cultural locations I inhabit. My role is that of a visual and aural mark-maker, burrowing, borrowing and collaging materials (a sound, an object, a gesture) from the daily refuse I encounter. I envision my current wave of work and its internal performative spine as potential sites of redemption, meditation, and reflection.

Jessica Karuhanga

© Anthea Fitz-James, Unraveling the Daughter’s Disease: Secrets, Knitting and the Body, 2014. Photo Henry Chan.

Canada
www.theafitzjames.wordpress.com

Anthea Fitz-James is one-part academic, one-part journalist, and one-part theatre maker. She holds a masters degree in Theatre Studies from York University (Toronto), a Bachelor of Journalism from the University of King’s College (Halifax), and a Bachelor of Honours English from McGill University (Montréal). Her work and interests usually have something to do with craft, feminism, and explicit body art. She is interested in how textiles and nudity perform on stage. Her performance work explores alternative feminisms, embodiment, and the place where theory and practice meet. Recent performances including Needle Piece (an endurance piece in which she explored the gendered divide between tailors and seamstresses) and NAKED LADIES (a lecture meets dance-of-the-seven-veils) combined personal narrative, history, and performance theory to question why women get naked on stage.

© Kate Barry, Legs, Too, 2015. Photo Henry Chan.

Canada
www.katebarry.ca

Kate Barry is currently based on the the unceded, traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) nations in Vancouver, Canada.

Barry is a performance artist whose work investigates queerness, subjectivity and embodied practice through painting, drawing and video. She has contributed over 20-years to working in artist-run spaces committed to the exhibition of artwork outside the mainstream. She has performed and exhibited in galleries and festivals throughout Canada and internationally, including the National Gallery of Canada, Vancouver Art Gallery, Open Space (Victoria), 7a*11d Festival of Performance Art (Toronto), World Pride Toronto, and the Rider Project (NYC). In addition, she has self-produced work at the Musee d’Orsay (Paris, France) and Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto).

From 2011–2014 Kate Barry was a member of the board of directors for FADO Performance Art Centre (Toronto). She was the project manager for More Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women (edited by Johanna Householder and Tanya Mars) and she worked as the archival and research associate for the book, Wordless: The Performance Art of Rebecca Belmore. She was as the project lead for the MPCAS, an urban screen launched by grunt gallery in 2019. Currently, she is a sessional faculty at Emily Carr University of Art & Design and serves on the board of directors of the Mutual Aid and Reciprocity Fund (MARFEC) at ECU. From 2013 until 2016, she wrote a popular Blog called Performance Art13 that focused on the Toronto performance art scene from a visual art perspective.

Barry has curated several shows including: PLACE for the MPCAS, grunt gallery, Vancouver, 2019–2020; Nature Lover: Performance for the Camera (Fabulous Fringe Film Festival, Durham Region, 2017); 11:45PM, FADO Performance Art Centre’s Emerging Artist Series (Xpace Gallery, Toronto, 2014): and White Wedding to the Snow: Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephen’s performance art wedding (Ottawa, Canada, 2010). Kate Barry’s video work is represented by Vtape in Toronto, Canada.