Christian Messier (Québec City, Québec, Canada)
“The material in my performance work is the possibility of body. I create poetic structures of actions with this unstable language. Sometime I eat an onion to cry, drink beer and later vomit, use endurance, force or flexibility of my body, make sound with my voice, light fire on myself, etc. This proximity of my own body helps me to communicate the powerful flame that I feel when I create. But behind that raw love for art appears a logical structure. There is a continuous strife between rigid sense and unstable sensation. What I am searching for in art is this moment, when in it becomes impossible to mix or separate sense and sensation.http://www.christianmessier.com / http://www.punctum-qc.com

Him Lo (Hong Kong)
Him Lo is a Hong Kong-born artist. His work is mainly a quest of the form of existence in the city. He focuses in the relations between the ego and physical. Through violent and dark expression, he expressed time with a sense of emergency. Him’s performances include Invisible Mark, Running Project, Leave Me Build Me, Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Running West Kowloon. Him Lo has also published three books, Two swallows (2004), My beloved (2006) and White (2008). He uses different media to express his thought and feeling. Mainly he focuses on painting, performance and book illustration. http://www.himlo.com

Presented with the generous support of the Hong Kong Arts Development Council.

Warren Arcan (Galiano Island, British Columbia, Canada)
The performance I am calling “Why I am So Beautiful” is about you and me. Yes, you and me. Me and you. The special ways we make each other. The special ways we make each other feel. In committing to beauty I attract the best of friends and the worst of friends. In my beauty I hide in plain sight. Perhaps you will come with knives and roses. Perhaps. I don’t need to convince anyone why I am so beautiful. It is not an argument. It’s a performance. It will be a composition. It will have a musicality. I am not an argument. I am a performance. Sans soleil. Sans utilité. Avec beauté. Warren lives and works on Galiano Island, BC. He likes writing and performing. Sometimes he makes pictures. He’s interested in making books, too.

September 18 7:30pm $10

Rodolphe-Yves Lapointe (Quebec)
Rodolphe-Yves Lapointe has worked successively as a journalist, actor, screenwriter, international aid worker, translator, communication consultant, university searcher and curator. Based in Eastern Quebec since 2002, he has explored various aspects of “art actuel”, such as install-action, sound poetry, geo-poetical action and performance. The intensive use of the spoken word, nonverbal languages and the ingenuous manipulation of props is what typically characterizes Lapointe’s Performance Art work, “textActions” in his own words. Highly physical, his latest series (2010-2011) addresses personal risk-taking and responsibility of the audience. His works have been presented in different artist-run centers, events or festivals, in Quebec, Canada, United States, Mexico, Germany and Poland.

Pancho Lopez (Mexico City, Mexico)
Pancho López is a Mexican performance artist interested in every day life and how it connects with performance. He works at Museo Universitario del Chopo where he organizes the Performagia performance art festival. He is also director of Eject international videoperformance art festival presented since 2006 at Ex Teresa arte Actual. He has presented his work in China, Uruguay, Chile, Venezuela, Dominican Republic, Colombia, Spain and Portugal.

Vasan Sitthiket (Bangkok, Thailand)
Born at Nakhon Sawan Province,Thailand. Artist-activist for Justice/Peace and Democracy Vasan has been performing since the 80s, demonstrating with the poor while asking for justice and a shared economy. “Art is weapon for destroy all idiot-greed power to sacrifice our life is the meaning to be an artist”. Vasan has been invited to join local and international Performance Art Festivals in Asia -Europe-America and Latin America. Active since the 1970s, Vasan’s works are often provocative and political in nature. One of his works was a performance art piece, involving fake rubber breasts and buttocks and a simulated rape of the entire nation of Thailand. In 2000, an exhibition of a new collection that included 50 paintings featuring Thai politicians and military officers in sexually compromising poses was cancelled by Chulalongkorn University, five days before it was to open. In 2005, he set up the Artist Party, a political art project that mocked the then-ruling Thai Rak Thai party and prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. At the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003, he displayed some large-scale portraits of George W. Bush and other world leaders, created on canvas by using custom-made rubber stamps. Vasan’s media has also included drawings, woodcut prints, ceramic sculpture, installations and performances.http://www.thavibu.com/thailand/vasan_sitthiket/THA600.htm /http://www.thavibu.com/thailand/vasan_sitthiket/THA600.htm

September 23 7:30pm $10

Anne Sophie Turion (France)
“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.http://www.annesophieturion.com

Presented with the generous support of the Consulat général de France à Vancouver and Institut Français, Paris

Moe Satt (Yangon, Myanmar)
Moe Satt is a Visual Performance Artist as well as the founder & organizer of Beyond Pressure international festival of performance art in Yangon, Myanmar where he lives and works. He is quickly becoming an international art personae, as an artist and a curator and organizer in Burma, representative of the new performance art surge throughout South East Asia. His organization, Beyond Pressure is the hub of performance activity in Burma and produces the first ‘official’ contemporary art festival in the history of Burma. To engineer this is a complex and delicate negotiation with the current regime. The Beyond Pressure collective has achieved this milestone through support and recognition of the Prince Claus foundation in Amsterdam and through networking with international artists and groups to support their cause. Still in his early 20’s, Moe Satt is already in demand on the international circuit of galleries, festivals and symposia in Asia and Europe. In Burma and South East Asia, he is vital to the new politicized performance art community that has developed over the last decade. This will be his first trip to Canada.

Anna Syczewska (Krakow, Poland)
Anna Syczewska is an intermedia artist engaged in performance art, video, installation, absurd design and lately fashion design; she creates films, objects, fashion performance and actions. Her works have been presented at many festivals and exhibitions in Europe and all over the world. http://www.annasyczewska.asp.krakow.pl

Pancho Lopez (Mexico City, Mexico)
Pancho López is a Mexican performance artist interested in every day life and how it connects with performance. He works at Museo Universitario del Chopo where he organizes the Performagia performance art festival. He is also director of Eject international videoperformance art festival presented since 2006 at Ex Teresa arte Actual. He has presented his work in China, Uruguay, Chile, Venezuela, Dominican Republic, Colombia, Spain and Portugal.

September 24 7:30pm $10

Kurt Johannessen (Bergen, Norway)
Kurt Johannessen works with performance and installation art. Today he is one of Scandinavia’s major performance artists and is prominent on the international scene. Since the beginning of the 1980s he has produced approximately 160 different works and has had more than 300 presentations all over the world. His work is characterized by a minimalist and poetic presence. Kurt Johannessen has also worked within performance artist’s books video and installations since the early eighties. His work is minimalist and poetic, and at times with a touch of humour. He is his own publisher and has produced more than 60 books, many of them translated into English. The books vary from just one sentence to short stories or just pictures. http://www.zeth.no

Presented in collaboration with Open Space, Victoria and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria with the generous support of the Office of Contemporary Art Norway.

Suvi (Helsinki, Finland)
Suvi is exploring in her artistic practice cultural identities, social status and fetishism in them and as it is. Identity is indefinable to her, it is created over and over again. She is working mainly with performance and video art, combining different medias. In her latest work she has performed as fluxuscourtesan who is sharing free artistic fetishes as well as Finnish luchadora, female wrestler, called Perra del Norte creating an interaction her wasted life. Her work has seen internationally in Finland, Spain, Sweden, Germany, Great Britain, Mexico, Turkey and Russia.http://www.suviparrilla.com

Presented with the generous support of FRAME (Finish Fund for Art Exchange)

Arti Grabowski (Krakow, Poland)
Son of a forester and a nurse, molded from two opposite traits. He was a boxer, sculptor, actor, painter, played drums, founded the first local councils and youth parliaments in Poland and Ukraine, co-organized the first concerts of Wielka Orkiestra Swiatecznej Pomocy Foundation, was president of the Academic Sports Club at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. As well he has ceased to be a patriot, a Catholic and an artist. In addition, people have discouraged him, so he has ceased to be a man; he is simply a performative animal immunized by the vaccine of absurd, distance, and enthusiasm. His work is a shaky idiom. It exudes a dose of emotions. It entertains, scares, surprises but is never boring. http://www.arti.art.pl

Presented with the generous support of The National Science Centre, Poland

September 25 7:30pm Free

Re-LIVE Vancouver
Re-LIVE Vancouver takes an experimental approach to investigating performance art history by considering the act of re-performance in a particularly local way. Six emerging Vancouver-based artists have been commissioned to creatively respond to significant performance works created in this city over the later half of the twentieth century.

The majority of the works created for Re-LIVE will be presented through an evening of performative gestures and installations. Drawing inspiration from influential local precursors, Raymond Boisjoly, Curtis Grahauer, Francisco-Fernando Granados, Elizabeth Milton, and Ron Tran present works that trouble understandings of authorship and acknowledge the impossibilities of re-creation, through varied approaches including performative outsourcing and playful gestures working across media. The artists in Re-LIVE take inspiration from works by Kate Craig, Margaret Dragu, Rodney Graham, Glenn Lewis, UJ3RK5, and others.

Re-LIVE is presented by LIVE Biennale of Performance Art Society in partnership with VIVO and the Satellite Gallery. Re-LIVE is curated by Jesse Birch.