Tag: Karen Finley

A curatorial project by Jess Dobkin
Presented by FADO Performance Art Centre

With collaboration and support from Hemispheric Encounters: Developing Transborder Research-Creation Practices, York University, and the Queer and Trans Research Lab, Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto and OCADU University.

ARTISTS
Germaine Liu (Toronto, CA)
Juma Pariri (Abya Yala/São Paulo, Brazil)
Juru (Fortaleza, Brazil)
Karen Finley (New York, USA)
Leslie Ting (Toronto, CA)
María de Lourdes Santana Arcos (Havana, Cuba)
n:u (melissandre varin) (Benin/Birmingham, UK)
Sara Baron-Goodman (Toronto, CA)
Tamar Carter-King (Toronto, CA)
Twysted Miyake-Mugler (Toronto, CA)

Curatorial Impulse

I’m thinking about our bodies: singular, plural, collective, communal, human, and other-worldly; with abandon and abandoned, in power and empowered, possessed and self-possessed, exalting and exalted. Political, primal, passionate. This program of artists reaches into and beyond conversations of trauma carried in the body to explore embodied scores that run parallel and perpendicular to wounding, and to perform the archives of our physical, personal, political, and transcendental bodies. Bodies on the line, bodies transgressing boundaries, bodies keeping scores.

It is also an opportunity for local and international artists to meet, to encounter each other’s work, and to meet Toronto audiences. You are warmly invited to join us in spaces of gathering, sharing, and experimentation with artists, curators, activists, musicians, dancers, scholars, students, and seekers. Together, in our vessels and vibrations, we take shape and shapes. 

I look forward to welcoming you.

Jess Dobkin

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PROGRAM

Thursday, November 5
Enoch Turner Schoolhouse, 106 Trinity Street (map)
FREE | Wheelchair accessible | ASL interpretation

Doors 6:30PM | Performances 7:00PM

Performances: Juma Pariri, María de Lourdes Santana Arcos, n:u (melissandre varin)
Food Activation: Sara Baron-Goodman
Music-Composition: Germaine Liu

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Friday, November 6
OCADU University, Room 190, 100 McCaul Street (map)
FREE | Wheelchair accessible

Performance: 7:30PM
Followed by talkback with Karen Finley & Jess Dobkin

Performance: Believe by Karen Finley
Music-Composition: Leslie Ting
Food Activation: Sara Baron-Goodman

Finley’s creates a series of artworks illustrating mentors and artists who “believed” in Finley and gave support. These supportive individuals had encounters with Finley–professionally, as friends, as teachers, worked with, met, taught, or collaborated with Finley. There are over a hundred drawings illustrating her story that are projected onto a screen cinematically.  

On stage, Finley sits at a table handling the artwork she created that tells the narrative while a live camera with a bird’s eye view projects Finley’s hands and artwork onto the screen simultaneously in real time. While the images are projected, Finley tells the story of each “believe” encounter. The artworks act as a storyboard creating intimacy, the private made public of supportive relationships. The artwork is projected onto the screen. Some of the artists: Louise Bourgeois, Kathy Acker, Danitra Vance, bell hooks, Sinead O’Connor, Linda Montano, Joan Rivers, David Wojnarowicz, amongst others. 

Finley will end the performance with a dramatic reading. 

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Saturday, November 7
The Commons @ 401, 4th floor, 401 Richmond Street West (map)
FREE | Wheelchair accessible

12:30PM
Screening: This is Ballroom by Juru and Vitã
Followed by conversation with Juru, Twysted Miyake-Mugler, Mother Tamar Miyake-Mugler
Limited capacity | RSVP required

4:00PM
Creatives Anonymous with Karen Finley
Creatives Anonymous is a 13-step program that is part sardonic yet serious that is influenced by 12-step programs except that we are not approved or part of a traditional self help group. Join us and share your creative issues!

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Sunday, November 8
The Commons @ 401, 4th floor, 401 Richmond Street West
FREE | Wheelchair accessible

11:00AM–12:30PM
Grief, Loss and Creative Transformation: Writing Workshop with Karen Finley
Limited capacity | RSVP required

1:00–3:00PM
Closing Reception
Food Activation: Sara Baron-Goodman

FREE | Wheelchair accessible | Limited capacity

Creatives Anonymous is a 13-step program that is part sardonic yet serious that is influenced by 12-step programs except that we are not approved or part of a traditional self help group. 

We invite other creatives of diverse practices, disciplines and cultural backgrounds and career stages to share their creative issues. We have a speaker, we talk in small groups and there are snacks and coffee. Join us.

Presented by FADO Performance Art Centre with collaboration and support from Hemispheric Encounters: Developing Transborder Research-Creation Practices, York University.

FREE | Wheelchair accessible
Limited capacity | RSVP is required

In this creative writing workshop, Karen Finley will create prompts to reflect and process loss, grief and remembrance. Remembering those we loved and lost, reflecting with humour and poetic grace. Sometimes there is a moment of connection, correction, or to be kept at a distance, ambiguity or goodbye to a forgotten self. Ancestors, occasions, and our body embraces emotions and scars of events as fossils.

Writing will be a safe space, a sacred bay to process, transform and reimagine possibility. There can be joy and hope in what we discover to cherish with insight, while awakening our creative practice. This is not a therapeutic model but rather a hallowed tradition, encircling the ancient ways of artists as magicians, consecrating living truths, mysteries, circumstance and celebration. Join our collective. Introverts are encouraged. Ambiguity is fine. New and returning creatives welcome.

Presented by FADO Performance Art Centre with collaboration and support from Hemispheric Encounters: Developing Transborder Research-Creation Practices, York University.

© Photo Midge Wattles.

USA

Karen Finley is an artist, performer, and author. Born in Chicago she received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is an multidisciplinary artist and author. Finley is interested in freedom of expression concerns, visual culture, art education and lectures, and gives workshops widely. A recipient of many awards and grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, she is an arts professor in Art and Public Policy at New York University.

Finley has presented her work at the Barbican (London), Lincoln Center, The Museum of Modern Art (New York City), Bobino (Paris), American Repertory Theater (Cambridge, MA), The Guthrie (Minneapolis), The Steppenwolf (Chicago), Miami Art Basel, Documenta, The Broad (Los Angeles) and Turino (Italy); and in festivals, museums and art galleries worldwide.

Finley is the author of ten books, including her latest Covid Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco (City Lights, 2025), Je n’étais pas censée être talentueuse (Seuile, Paris, 2025), Grabbing Pussy (OR Books, 2018) and the 25th anniversary edition of Shock Treatment by City Lights. Her recent work includes: Grabbing Pussy/Parts Known, a work that considers the oppression of nostalgia revision politics and intertwines personal and social trauma; Mandala: Reimagined Columbus Circle, an interactive walk that examines the symbols and history of Columbus Circle; Creative Anonymous – a self-help, open meeting for those addicted to art – presented at Museum of Art and Design; Unicorn, Gratitude, Mystery, a recent performance that examines the pscho-sexual lust for power in US politics; Open Heart, a Holocaust memorial at Camp Gusen, Austria; and Sext ME if You Can, presented at the New Museum in New York, where she created commissioned portraits inspired by “sexts” received from the public.