

Fri, May 13
|Open Space Arts Centre
Exhibit Opening - Queer Futurities: holding area, gathering place
gathering place activates Queer Futurities’ themes of collective knowledge and care through skill-sharing and community gathering outside of the gallery space with workshops and performances.
Time & Location
May 13, 2022, 6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
Open Space Arts Centre, 510 Fort St 2nd floor, Victoria, BC V8W 1E6, Canada
About the event
Opening Reception: Friday, May 13, 6-9pm, music performance by Edzi’u at 7pm
“Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.”
(José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity)
Limited capacity - 40 people, Register for Opening Reception tickets via Eventbrite
How do we want to hold and be held? What do we want our communities to feel like? Using queer polyvocality as a framework for world-building, Queer Futurities aims to create fissures in hegemonic ways of thinking about time, place, archive, and community. Queer Futurities engages the generative possibilities of collective knowledge and care through two parts: holding area and gathering place.
holding area features the works of Kitt Peacock, Edzi’u, Cassia Powell, Florence Yee, Arezu Salamzadeh, Margaret August, Nicole Mandryk, Romi Kim and Kendell Yan. Exploring what José Esteban Muñoz calls the “forward-dawning” potentials of queerness, holding area creates a temporary but affective space which holds collective knowledge. Through a range of mediums, including audio-visual installation, textiles, beading, performance and painting, the artists’ works explore the tenderness and nuance of both ‘holding’ and ‘queerness’ through alternative forms of care, storytelling, commemoration and place/space-making.
gathering place activates Queer Futurities’ themes of collective knowledge and care through skill-sharing and community gathering outside of the gallery space with workshops and performances. Programming will include a weaving workshop by Estraven Lupino-Smith, a “Queer Calisthenics” performance by keiko Hart, and a mutual aid workshop by the Community Fridge.