QAF 2020 is going remote in July!

Press release from the festival newsletter

FESTIVAL ANNOUNCEMENT — Art keeps us connected during the age of social distancing. The QAF and SUM Gallery remain steadfast in our commitment to artists amid the COVID-19 pandemic, with staff hard at work (from home) to maintain the integrity of our programming.

The 2020 Queer Arts Festival [in Vancouver, Canada] takes place July 16 to July 26, 2020.

We’ve reimagined the festival to make sure you get your Queer Art Fix on from a distance. Please visit our website to find out how you can experience all of our events! There’s no place like home for the Wicked Witch of the West, green by devilment and through her magical aberrance. QAF 2020 forsakes the yellow brick road that leads only to a man behind a curtain gentrifying our desires. Instead, QAF revels in the quintessentially queer traditions of scandal and excess with visual art, performance, theatre, music, dance and literary events.

QAF’s Wicked reimagines identity politics, exposing the implications of homonormativity as erasure. This past decade has seen the mainstreaming of gay; sexual difference wins approval so long as it is palatable, marketable, and doesn’t stray too far from bourgeois notions of taste and morality. The commodification of queer experience is inextricably linked to the pathologization of the queer body, where medical and sociological interventions adjudicate which anatomies and passions are accepted as authentic.

QAF’s Wicked runs 11 days through our digital hub, coming soon. Highlights include Jonny Sopotiuk’s visual arts curation; choreographer Noam Gagnon’s raucously vulnerable Swan Song, This Crazy Show; Indigenous Burlesque with Virago Nation’s Too Spirited; and the latest offering from non-binary drag collective The Darlings.

Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.
― Oscar Wilde

QAF 2020: WICKED EVENT HIGHLIGHTS

Art Party! | Cinq-à-Sept Festival Opening
— Thu Jul 16, 5 – 7PM PST
QAF’s opening: Luxuriate in a cinq-à-sept afternoon delight! Come together for our Visual Art Tour with curator Jonny Sopotiuk, guest artists, and a gallery of intimate friends old and new. Wonderfully Wicked…

Wicked: Curated Visual Arts Exhibition
— Thu Jul 16 – Sun Jul 26 | Visual Art

Pride in Art Community Exhibition
— Thu Jul 16 – Sun Jul 26 | Visual Art