Moe Satt is an internationally celebrated visual and performance artist from Yangon, Myanmar. Satt uses his body as a medium to explore identity, embodiment, and political resistance. Part of a generation of Burmese artists who worked to overcome government censorship and oppression, Satt actively engages with history through a conceptual artistic perspective. Often drawing from recent events in Burmese political history, Satt primarily investigates the period between 1983-2015, the year of his birth to when he began seriously practicing as a performance artist. In 2008, Satt founded and began organizing Beyond Pressure, an international festival of performance art, and the first ‘official’ contemporary art festival in the history of Burma. Satt has performed internationally across Europe, Asia, the United Kingdom, and North America.

Participation

2011

Second Front is the first performance art group in the online virtual world of Second Life. Founded in 2006, Second Front rapidly grew to its current seven-member troupe that includes Gazira Babeli (Italy), Yael Gilks (London), Bibbe Hansen (New York), Doug Jarvis (Victoria), Scott Kildall (San Francisco), Patrick Lichty (Chicago), and Liz Solo (St. Johns). Past collaborators have included Penny Leong Browne, Tanya Skuce, and Jeremy Owen Turner. Second Front takes inspiration from various movements, including Dada, Fluxus, Futurist Syntesi, and the Situationist International, as well as contemporary performance artists such as Laurie Anderson and Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Over the years, Second Front has performed extensively both in-world (online) and in galleries and museums. Although the artists perform remotely their score-based performances have been shown in real time in places such as New York, Los Angeles, Moscow, Brussels, Berlin, and Vancouver. The group has been written about in various publications, including ArtForum, Art in America, Realtime Arts (Australia), Exibart (Italy), and Digital Art Second Edition (by Christiane Paul).

Website

Participation

2007

Sinag Bayan is a cultural arts collective that combines performance theatre, song, spoken word, and visual arts. Sinag Bayan is dedicated to bringing to light the stories and experiences of the migrant Filipino, while promoting community development, empowerment, and solidarity with the Filipino people.

Participation

2007

Vasan Sitthiket is a visual and performance artist, a poet, and an activist from Nakhon Sawan, Thailand. Sitthiket studied at the College of Fine Art in Bangkok, and has been performing since the 1980s. Vasan’s work commonly addresses problems within contemporary Thai and international societies, such as the exploitation of the poor by the rich, and corruption among politicians and bureaucrats. He uses several media to express his opinions on these subjects, including paintings, drawings, woodcut prints, installations, and performances. In addition to numerous shows in Thailand, Vasan has participated in exhibitions and festivals abroad, including the Venice Biennale (2003). Sitthiket has staged a number of plays and is the author of more than ten books ranging from poetry to children’s books and political writings.

Participation

2011

See Second Front

Participation

2007

Alexa Solveig Mardon is a dancer, performance maker and facilitator co-creating and seeking spaces for imperfect ritual, queer fantastical myth-making, and multi-sensorial solidarity across difference. Alexa is a first generation settler of Finnish and British Isles descent living as an uninvited guest on the illegally occupied, unceded Coast Salish territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. Alexa’s work takes forms including stage performance, poetry, movement workshops for frontline support workers, dreamwork + prophecy practices, and teaching professional and non-professional level dance classes. Studying inherited and learned practices of divination through carromancy, dousing, and dream opening, Alexa practices listening and receiving with the other side.

Website

Participation

2025

Jonas Stampe is an art historian, theoretician, critic, and curator. Stampe has been active as a curator since 2000 and is the co-founder and curator of an international network of festivals including Infr’Action Festival International d’Art Performance in Sète, France (2005-2014), Infr’Action Paris (2007-2010), Live Action New York (2009-2010), Infr’Action Venezia (2011-2017), and Guangzhou Live (2010-2014), and Beijing Live (2016). Since 2017, Stampe has worked as the Senior Curator and Senior Researcher at the Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing, China.

Participation

2009

Adrian Stimson is a member of the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation in southern Alberta. He is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and educator with a BFA with distinction from the Alberta College of Art & Design and MFA from the University of Saskatchewan. Exhibited both nationally and internationally, Adrian’s work includes paintings, installations, sculpture and performance. In his performance practice, Stimson looks at identity construction. Often through reoccurring personas such as Buffalo Boy and The Shaman Exterminator, he explores the hybridization of the Indian, the cowboy, the shaman and Two Spirit beings. Stimson has been awarded the Governor General Award for Visual and Media Arts (2018), the REVEAL Indigenous Arts Award – Hnatyshyn Foundation (2017), the Blackfoot Visual Arts Award (2009), the Alberta Centennial Medal (2005), and the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal (2003).

Website

Participation

2015

Founded in 1995, SUKA OFF is made up of Piotr Wegrzynski and Sylvia Lajbig. Based out of Poland, their work explores themes of carnality, blurs notions of gender, and seeks radical modes of communication and aesthetics in the meeting between the human body and post-industrial technology. Their practice encompasses theatre, performance art, club actions, installation, photography, video, and music. SUKA OFF have presented their work across Europe, as well as in the United States, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Japan.

Website

Participation

2013

Preach R Sun is a U.S. based conjurer and ‘fugitivist’ working at the interface of art and activism. Consolidating protest/resistance tactics with performance art strategies, Sun interrogates the nature and limits of freedom and humanity. Sun most often works on the street with guerilla actions, but also performs in festivals and galleries, at times using video and other media as tools for social change. His work reflects his background of growing up as the son of a minister, and his training in dance, theater and the fine arts.

Website

Participation

2019

Born in Yokohama, Japan, Norico Sunayama is a dancer and a performer known for her characteristic mix of humour and provocation in her work which lies at the intersection of contemporary art, subculture, cabaret, visual art, and performance. Sunayama has participated in festivals and contemporary art exhibitions in Japan and overseas since late 1980s. In 1990, she joined the internationally-acclaimed multi-media Performance group Dumb Type, performing with them until 2020. Independently, Sunayama has pursued solo projects and founded several artist units, such as THE OK GIRLS, THE BITERS and THE BEST ADULT. With fashion designer Ito Junko, Norico founded the unit un:ten+, integrating her performance into fashion shows geared towards empowering women. She has also collaborated with musicians including THE TETORAPOTZ and Umezu Kazutoki Cabaret Band. For LIVE 2009, Sunayama performed both as herself, and as her performance persona C. Snatch Z. for the LIVE Gala.

Participation

2009

Aerial Sunday-Cardinal is a Cree multidisciplinary artist from a small reservation in Northern Alberta. She creates conceptual art with a focus on philosophy, spirituality, the human experience, and her experience as a First Nations being. Her work often questions and resists socio-political colonial structures and their role in self-hood.

Participation

2021

See National Bitter Melon Council

Participation

2007

SWINTAK is a multidisciplinary artist and educator. Her large-scale site-generated projects have included moving almost an entire house by hand without the aid of machinery, creating the most banal rollercoaster ever made in the head office of an energy drink corporation, building a full-size ship through collective improvisation, running an election party campaign for the Irish underworld, transforming a city dumpster into a luxury boutique hotel, attempting to give a shed consciousness, and producing a series of impossible project proposals. SWINTAK has exhibited at galleries, festivals and museums nationally, and internationally in Taipei, Poland, the United States, and Ireland. She is the Co-Founder of Don Blanche, an experimental off-grid artist residency in rural Ontario and an Assistant Professor at the School of the Arts at McMaster University (Ontario).

Participation

2015

Anna Syczewska is an intermedia artist engaged in performance art, video, installation, absurd design, and fashion design. She creates films, objects, fashion performance, and art actions. Her works have been presented at many festivals and exhibitions across Europe and beyond.

Participation

2011

Michelle Sylliboy is a two-spirit L’nu/Mi’kmaq artist and three time Award-winning author born in Boston, MA, USA, and raised on her traditional L’nuk territory in We’koqmaq, Cape Breton, NS. Her published collection of photographs and L’nuk hieroglyphic poetry, Kiskajeyi—I Am Ready won the 2020 Indigenous Voices Award. In 2021, she received the Indigenous Artist Recognition Award from Arts Nova Scotia. In 2022, she was long-listed for the Sobey Art Award. As a PhD candidate in Simon Fraser University’s Philosophy of Education program, she focuses on the artistic promotion of her original written komqwej’wikasikl language. She is currently working on a new project bringing the arts to the seven districts.

Website

Participation

2023

Pegah Tabassinejad is an Interdisciplinary artist, educator and wanderer living and working as an uninvited guest on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓ əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. Her interest is in creating intermedial and interactive performances, cyberformances, digital theatre, multi-channel video installations, and city projects. She holds MFA in Interdisciplinary Art at Simon Fraser University and BA in Stage Directing from the Art University in Tehran. She has taught various studio and seminar courses at the University of Art in Tehran, and other international Institutions, and has lead workshops in Paris, Tehran and Vancouver. Currently, she is teaching at Kwantlen Polytechnic University and holds the Phil Lind Multicultural Artist residency at UBC Theatre and Film.

Website

Participation

2021

Artur Tajber is an intermedia and performance artist, art theorist, curator, and organizer based in Kraków, Poland. Tajber has been involved in the international performance art movement since the mid-1970s. Unrestricted by disciplinary divisions, Tajber’s work reflects an interest in conceptual design and theories of art. His distinguished exhibition and teaching careers have taken him to galleries, festivals, and colleges across Europe, Asia, and North America. Artur is a co-founder and the long-time President of the Association of Fort Sztuki (since 1996), as well as being the instigator and director of the Inter-Faculty Studio for Intermedia, Academy of Fine Arts, Krakow (since 2001).

Website

Participation

2007

See Le Brothers

Participation

2015

Founded in 2004 by James Long and Maiko Bae Yamamoto, Theatre Replacement is dedicated to continuing the evolution of collaborative theatre making and ensemble training drawing upon a love of formal inventiveness and exploration, conceptual play, creative research, artist-centred processes, and experimental and multidisciplinary practice. After meeting at Simon Fraser University, Long and Yamamoto began collaborating on works in the Vancouver art scene; they were involved in various local initiatives such as the founding Boca del Lupo Theatre. The pair co-lead Theatre Replacement until 2022, when Yamamoto became the sole Artistic Director of the Vancouver-based company.

Website

Participation

2007

Jeremy Todd is an interdisciplinary artist and curator based in Vancouver, BC, on unceded, traditional and ancestral xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territories. Todd is a non-musician making music. His work includes the iterative project, Not Sent Letters which was performed locally in the early 2000s & 2010s.

Participation

2009

Valentin Torrens is an installation and performance artist, theorist and educator based in Barcelona, Spain. Since 2000, Torrens has also annually organized and programmed both the Periferias Festival and Territories Nomades in Spain, showcasing the work of local and international performance artists. Torrens practice includes using visual poetry in unconventional modes and is interested in perception as a source and a limit of our desires. His work has been exhibited throughout Spain and internationally in numerous galleries, in solo and group shows, since the mid-80’s. Since 1990, Torren’s performance work has been presented in festivals and events in over a dozen countries around the world. Torrens is also the editor of How to Teach Performance Art, which gathers together documentation and course material from over 30 educators, theorists, and established programs concerned with the research and teaching of performance art genres.

Website

Participation

2009

Ron Tran is an artist based in Vancouver, BC. His practice encompases sculpture, photography, video, performance, and installation. Through his work, Tran is invested in interruptive strategies and collaborative practices which bring to the fore the social and political nature of space both in public and in the gallery.

Participation

2011

Rocco Trigueros is an interdisciplinary artist who works in the areas of theater, video, and performance art. He has studied at the Universidad Autonoma de Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and Langara College in Vancouver. Trigueros has presented his work in various national and international contexts including on television, and in film festivals, galleries, and nightclubs. He was the host of his own television show for many years before coming to Canada. Important to his work is activism, as exemplified in his documentary, 41 Locas, about the Latin gay community in Canada; Cherry Bomb, a short film exploring humor and gender; A Ballad of a Thief, a film exploring issues affecting youth; Macario, a theater play using Latin American immigrant actors; Sticks and Stones, a performance art piece exploring familial relations and acceptance of homosexuality; and The Killing of Women of Juárez, a campaign and video documenting the government’s neglect of the disappearance of women in Mexico.

Participation

2009

Anne-Sophie Turion is a French artist who commonly works in the form of in-situ interventions, performances, and shows: "The imagination is the breeding ground of each of my projects. It gives me a way to show and build relationships between already existing images, and to tell a story over a multitude of stories already told. I prefer forms of broken narratives which are testing situations, opportunities, and stories rather than finite forms." – Anne-Sophie Turion (2011)

Website

Participation

2011

Turner Prize was an artist collective that operated between 2008-2012. Based in Regina, SK, the entity Turner Prize, made up of artists Jason Cawood, Blair Fornwald, and John G. Hampton, explored the mysterious, social, and translative properties of the "creative act." Their work explored the intangibility of dreams, ideas, and histories through their origin (dreamers, artists, and events) and their destination (images, writings and other representations). It was the interstices, the shifts, and intangible spaces between ideas and representations, which motivated their collective practice. Their investigations into this liminal space utilized the language of dream analysis and interpretation, ritual and magick, and appropriated the aesthetics of mid-century pop psychology and psychedelia. In their four active years, Turner Prize* presented performance, photography, and installation across Canada and the United States.

Website

Participation

2011 2009

Gary Varro is a curator and visual artist based in Regina, SK. He has exhibited installations across Canada, and has appeared in numerous performance artworks over the last few decades. In 1996, he established Queer City Cinema, an organization which now presents two festivals annually: Performatorium: Festival of Queer Performance, and Queer City Cinema Film Festival. Varro’s work encompasses his interests in queer identities; public/private domains; self humiliation, spectacle and transgression; humour and pathos, endurance; and the creative process itself. Through his installations and performances, he proposes critical relationships with architectural and social spaces. Using a process of intervention, accommodation, manipulation, and modification, Varro draws attention to shifts in meaning brought about by spatial alterations, giving precedence to the perspective of the viewer and their representative role in these spaces. Within these parameters, Varro addresses notions of identity as delineated by difference, territory, and cultural histories.

Participation

2013

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

Participation

2007

Velveeta Krisp is an interdisciplinary performance artist based in Kelowna, BC. Velveeta Krisp’s practice include performance art, Super 8 filmmaking, video, sound, environmental design, writing, and curation. As a practicing MD, Dr. Krisp prescribes art on a daily basis to alleviate a variety of conditions and their symptoms.

Participation

2009

Wheat + Krisp are Vancouver-based performance art filmmakers that love hygiene, medical apparatuses, fur, UFO’s and collaborative endeavors.

Tyler Wheatcroft is performance artist, super 8 filmmaker, and the producer of the famed, Madam vs. Snakepit an underground performance art series that has been held in Edmonton, AB, and in BC in Vancouver and Salt Spring Island.

See Velveeta Krisp

Participation

2007