Queer Arts Festival WICKED Online for 2020

The 12th annual Queer Arts Festival (“QAF”), Vancouver’s artist-run, professional, multi-disciplinary roister of queer arts, culture and history, will take place online this year from July 16 to July 26, 2020.

Queer Arts Festival WICKED

Tickets: All online events at the 2020 Queer Arts Festival are by donation to improve accessibility. QAF relies on ticket sales and donations to bring you Vancouver’s only transdisciplinary professional arts festival dedicated to showing the work of 2SLGBTQ+ artists. Now more than ever your donations are critical. Donors who give over $20 will be mailed a charitable tax receipt.

“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.

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.”

Event Highlights

Art Party! | Cinq-à-Sept Festival Opening
Thursday, July 16, 5 -7:00pm
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
Thursday, July 16 – Sunday, July 26, 2020

Pride in Art Community Exhibition
Thursday, July 16 – Sunday, July 26, 2020

Too Spirited | Indigenous Burlesque
Friday, July 17, 7:00pm 
Embrace your too-muchness with bombastic burlesque brought to you by the badass babes of Virago Nation.

Rupture Probe: Queer Inquiries & Remediations | Media Art Screening
Saturday, July 18, 7:00pm 
Recent queer shorts rupture normative notions of gender, pleasure, and activism, curated in partnership with VIVO Media Arts Centre.

Return to Sodom North | VIVO Media Art Screening
Sunday, July 19, 7:00pm
90s Queer Video Out & Uncensored. Time travel with the Vancouver Queer media artists who raged back against the malignment and suppression of queer lived realities and representations of desire.

A Night of Storytelling | Literary Readings
Wednesday, July 22, 7:00pm
Curated by Danny Ramadan, readings by local, national, and international writers.

Underground Absolute Fiction | Speculative Theatre
Thursday, July 23, 7:00pm
An immersive play-meets-punk-concert, inspired by the Polish “home theatre.” Written by Anais West and co-produced by Queer Arts Festival and The Frank Theatre.

The Darlings, Uncensored | Drag Performance
Friday, July 24, 7:00pm
Experience the unexpected with genre-bending non-binary avant-drag collective, the Darlings: Continental Breakfast, PM, Rose Butch and Maiden China.

A Conversation on Queer Mentorship | Lunch Discourse
Saturday, July 25, 12:00pm
Hiromi Goto and Erica Isomura explore the nuances of intergenerational mentorship as queer POC writers.

This Crazy Show  | Dance Performance
Saturday July 25, 7:00pm & Sunday July 26, 2:00pm
In his Swan Song, contemporary dance legend Noam Gagnon sashays the fine line between pain and pleasure in a fetishization of something glamorous and beautifully twisted: a monster beautified.

Glitter is Forever: Pajama Party | Closing Binge
Sunday, July 26, 4:00pm til late
Get your dress jammies on, grab a drink and binge-watch the entire Queer Arts Festival together. Expect surprises!

Art keeps us connected during the age of social distancing. The QAF and SUM Gallery remain steadfast in their commitment to artists amid the COVID-19 pandemic, with staff hard at work (from home) to maintain the integrity of our programming. They’ve reimagined the festival to make sure you get your Queer Art fix on from a distance.

Follow the QAF on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for more info.

Miss604 is a proud media sponsor of QAF 2020