A Brief History
The LIVE Biennale of Performance Art has been an active part of the local and international performance art scene for over two and a half decades.
In 1999, Glenn Alteen and Brice Canyon of grunt gallery conceived and organized LIVE at the End of the Century, an extensively collaborative festival which aimed to platform and celebrate the widely established yet often peripheralized practice of performance art in Vancouver. After the success of this inaugural iteration, the LIVE Biennale of Performance Art Society became incorporated in 2002, and grunt gallery continued to produce it until 2005. In 2007, LIVE became independent from grunt and Randy Gledhill was hired as the Executive Director/Curator. Gledhill, in tandem with the Board of Directors and many curatorial collaborators, organized LIVE from 2007 until his retirement in 2019. In 2020, the LIVE board led an organizational restructuring and succession planning initiative which included the 2021 LIVE Assembly: Care and Repair, curated by Elham Puriya Mehr. Then in 2022, the society hired Derrick Chang, who currently holds the role of Managing Director.
Mandate
LIVE is committed to supporting and promoting contemporary performance art that includes emerging, established and celebrated artists at local, regional, national and international levels. This work is carried out through live performances, relational activities, workshops, mentorship programs, panel discussions, lectures, critical literature, international networking and social media outreach. LIVE’s programming is designed to adapt to the ever-evolving nature of the practice while also addressing the expressed needs of the local performance and visual arts community. The organization serves as a cohesive international forum for new experiences and experimental approaches to art that explores 21st-century art and culture in diverse and engaging ways. LIVE strives to be an inclusive hub for multicultural exchange and collaboration that promotes art and ideas, stimulating the public’s imagination and encouraging participation both as creators and audience members.
Archival Mandate
LIVE’s archival mandate extends the values the organization holds. As a performance art celebration, LIVE focuses on the transformative gravity of experiencing live artworks first-hand and acknowledges the limitations documentation has in communicating the affective qualities of the original context. With this in mind, the LIVE archive aims to provide the viewer with multiple access points for (re)engagement with its historic documentation. Even though LIVE’s public archival project is still in its early stages, the ongoing goal is to support preservation and activation of performance documentation from past iterations of LIVE and to make publicly accessible a range of material including photographs, video, written responses and archival activations. LIVE hopes that this developing online archive can act as a point of engagement to invite an open dialogue through and around its historic material.
Team
- Staff
- Managing Director: Derrick Chang
- Digital Director: Brady Marks
- Digital Archives Manager: Yasmine Whaley-Kalaora
- Board of Directors
- Nicole Caspillo
- Cissie Fu
- Doug Jarvis
- Lianne Payne
- Ian Prentice
- Pegah Tabassinejad
- Ghinwa Yassine