VIVO is pleased to host three nights of the LIVE Biennale--featuring local, national, and international performance artists. Doors will be at 7PM each evening. From 7PM, a video-based presentation will feature in our microcinema space, followed by two performances in our main studio space, which will run from 8PM onward.

October 3:

Microcinema 7PM:

‍Jon Sasaki
‍Canada

On July 28, standing in the Fraser River delta, Waist-deep in water and equipped with rudimentary materials, basic hand tools, and negligible skills, Sasaki attempted to build a functioning boat that would allow him to extricate himself and paddle to shore. As boatbuilding in the water presents far more challenges than boatbuilding on dry land, the performance ultimately ended in failure.

Channeling an absurd romantic hero who finds himself nearly engulfed by nature, the artist relies on his ability to problem-solve as complications arise, and improvise solutions in the moment. Attempted in Steveston, this new iteration of a past work takes on added dimensions as Sasaki considers his Japanese-Canadian family’s history of boating and fishing in the region before their internment. The performance will bring into focus all the maritime knowledge that didn’t get passed down to the artist.

Documentation and ephemera from the performance will be presented at Richmond Art Gallery, opening September 28.

Richmond Art  Galley Sat  Sept 28 6:00
VIVO Thurs Oct 3 7:00 Screening

Studio 8PM:

‍Cheyenne Rain Legrande
‍Canada

ᒥᐊᐧᐣ

Cheyenne Rain LeGrande is a Nehiyaw Isko artist. Nanâskotam wikih the territories of the Musquem,Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations. Cheyenne is a part of the Skwachays Lodge artist residency program and has recently graduated from Emily Carr University with her BFA in Visual Arts. She has received the BMO 1st Art Regional Prize and the Moment Factory Award for her piece Nehiyaw Isko. Her work often explores the interconnection between history and the body. She works interdisciplinary; moving through instillation, video, sound, and performance art.

Akam ehew waskowo omamawa ehwin
Omamwa weyawew potatam ehwin
Wapskak mihkwaw mihcapayo wiyaw
Askiy pahkitin
Kota nakatam sipwimohtew

Adriana Disman
‍Canada

“Questions without answers must be asked very slowly.” -Anne Michaels

The most ambitious ambition of my work is to create moments of livability. I understand the world-at-hand (“world” being a description of all matters affecting each other) as one that attempts to eradicate most ways of being that I care about. Survival right now is linked to things like producing, owning, individualism/scarcity thinking, and competition. I do not want to survive through these modes. But dreaming otherwise is challenging since everything I’ve been taught runs so bone deep. I seek liberation – an interdependent and as yet un-imagined state – through refusing to adhere to certain logics of power. Performance is a container for those attempts.

I don’t think we can be “free” but I think we can be “free-er.”

Since 2010 Disman has been making, thinking, and writing about performance art. Her solo works have been presented across so-called Canada, the U.S.A., Europe, and India.

October 4:

Microcinema 7PM:

Fatima Jawdat
‍Iraq

Fatima Jawdat is a young artist living in Diwaniya, Al Qadisiyah, Iraq.  Her education and background is in theatre and fine art. Her performative pictures relay a profound sensitivity through visual metaphores to discuss feminist and political issues. Since it is not permissible for her to travel outside Iraq, her chosen exhibition venue is Facebook through which she is developing an exponentially growing international audience. Her participation in LIVE is an extraordinary portfolio of images she has instructed us to project to the public.

Studio 8PM:

Raven Davis
‍Canada

My practice has no boundaries; I renounce institutional limitations of eurocentric pedagogy and accreditation and honour Indigenous theory, methodology and practice. I am a nomadic creator and maker of art, examining topics through installation, visual, sculpture and performance. I embody fluid, transformative and pivotal intersections of my identity which are reflected in a flock of interdisciplinary works. I aim to create art that speaks to, and challenges viewers to be self reflective in their own journey, in their own ways of understanding histories, untold and undocumented notions of colonial conditioning. My Body. Its Survival. Its Future.

Working in performance and media, Raven Davis will address the loss of cultural knowledge and understanding around gender identity and disability. Using their body as a dancer, and movement artist, Davis will respond to their lived experience as a 2 Spirit person within the context of traditional dance, sound and material by creating a future of acceptance and freedom for Indigenous youth who struggle to find a way to align and be held and seen within traditional and ceremonial spaces.

Thirza Jean Cuthand
‍Canada

The Future Is So Bright

Cuthand’s work often deals with issues related to Indigiqueer/2 Spirit love, communities, and sexuality. She is currently grappling with larger issues of imminent climate change and it’s effects on multiply oppressed people and communities.

The Future Is So Bright is based on a series of love letters written to an assortment of women as the protagonist attempts to form a serious relationship while the planet is running out of time. Using a mix of video and performative actions, Cuthand tries to convince her potential mates that there is a bright future ahead for their relationship, in the face of more dire news reports every day about climate change and the global political swing to the far right. Cuthand imagines alternative futures where Indigiqueer/2 Spirit/Indigenous/Queer love survives and thrives, where the idea of starting a family seems hopeful, where generations stretch out into the future beyond our line of vision.

This work walks the line between hopeless and hopeful, is at turns humourous and depressing, and above all speaks to the unease with which we currently view our futures both as a society and on a personal level.

October 5:

Microcinema 7PM:

Lee Wen Tribute
‍Singapore

Lee Wen went on his last journey… into the stars and into eternity on March 3. In tribute Snežana Golubović has collected one-minute videos dedicated to him.

You profoundly touched so many everywhere
I remember your Saint Sebastien performance
when you cut the Muse’s guitar strings
I cried, everyone cried
some from joy, some from sadness, some from wonder
your vulnerability, comittment, joy
transporting everyone into a new place

Yellow Man changed it all

Zen ripples from your pebble in the pond are a tsunami of peace, justice and empowerment forever

your art is eternal

Thank you

Studio 8PM:

Lukas Avendaño
‍Mexico

In a contingency my mother gave me birth in a land surrounded by mosques in Tehuantepec, the midwife put a machete to heat the fire and when a red reed was already red, I cut my belly button. My navel was buried under an almond tree, so as not to break the tradition they called me as my father, my education was set in the dinner of a family of reluctant Indians, cracked leg Indians and sodomite Indians.

“Lukas Avendaño is an emerging Mexican performance artist whose recent work constitutes a queer performatic intervention of Mexican nationalistic representations, particularly that of Zapotec Tehuana women. Avendaño embodies the complex identity of muxes, or male homosexuals from the Tehuantepec Isthmus where he was born. His cross-dressing performance interweaves ritual dances with autobiographical passages and actions that involve audience members, in order to challenge the widely held view of a gay-friendly indigenous culture and point towards the existence of lives that negotiate pain and loneliness with self-affirming pride”. Antonio Prieto Stambaugh.

Kamikaze Nurse
‍Canada

Kamikaze Nurse is a rock band featuring KC Wei, Ethan Reyes, Sonya Eui, and John Brennan.  Named after Simone Weil’s unfulfilled humanitarian death wish, the band formed in Spring 2018, and have released their debut LP, Bucky Fleur, on AgonyKlub in June 2019.  Their music has been described as “ethereal skronk,” “Deleuzian rock,” and “best of the 90s” by people on the internet and irl.

For more information about the Biennale, please visit their website: http://livebiennale.ca/2019/