7A*11D

Toronto Performance Art Collective (TPAC) is pleased to announce the 14th edition of the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art, with events taking place October 5 – 13, 2024 at various venues, including our mainstage space at 630 Queen Street East, the 401 Richmond Street West arts complex, and Hart House. This year’s festival will feature performance works and talks by more than 20 artists from Japan, Germany, Sweden, Pindorama/Abya Yala (colonially known as Latin America, more specifically in this case, Brazil), the United States, The Tsuut’ina Nation and various other Canadian locations.

As always, this year’s festival attempts to nurture an appreciation for the breadth, depth and diversity of performance art practices, offering a plurality of voices, a range of approaches, and artists at varying career stages, from emerging talents to senior practitioners. This year’s two “Éminences Grises”—Tanya Mars and Andrew James Paterson, whose performance-related video work will be featured in a multi-week exhibition at Vtape—are both past recipients of the Governor General Award in Visual and Media Arts, and have made extraordinary contributions to Toronto’s cultural ecosystem.

While there is no one theme that dictates this year’s curatorial selections, the projects featured reflect and address the deep anxieties that pervade human society a quarter of the way through the 21^st Century. In these apparently post-pandemic but undeniably precarious times we inhabit, this year’s featured artists invite us to grapple with the vast and systemic issues that influence our daily existence—including the ongoing effects of colonialism, the continual crush of globalization, the effects of climate change, the exploitation of natural resources, the ongoing housing crisis, social differences that foster violence, addiction and a sense of isolation, questions of identity and representation, and the challenges of aging. It’s a daunting and potentially depressing list, but audiences should not be discouraged. Quite the contrary.

This year’s panoply of performances and art actions is both engaged and engaging. These are works that offer audiences possibilities for hope, joy, humour, and a renewed sense of meaningfulness. They do this by tackling big issues at an intimate scale that privileges the personal and the intimate. They offer opportunities to celebrate human bodies in their myriad glorious potentials. They seek a sense of connection where individuals can feel seen, and differences can be acknowledged and respected. They craft experiences that can surprise and perhaps delight our senses even as they challenge our intellects and our established worldviews. They offer us ways to see our immediate surroundings anew.

7a*11d, which began in 1997, is English Canada’s oldest continuing performance art festival. As the festival’s organizers, the Toronto Performance Art Collective (TPAC) remains a volunteer group of artists, dedicated to fostering the medium’s development and to providing an exceptional artist-driven platform for highlighting performance art. We firmly believe that our collective structure, which has resisted the “professionalizing” model of relentless expansion and the hiring of permanent staff, represents our greatest strength, allowing us to maintain a vital peer relationship with the community we serve (we try to treat our artists and audiences the way we would want to be treated ourselves) and to provide a deep mentoring relationship for newer collective members. In many ways, this year’s festival marks a return to our roots, with three new collective members who have joined us since our last festival in 2022, and with a mainstage venue that is a raw, commercial space.

This year, the collective would like to particularly acknowledge the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which has provided us with a sense of stability despite our lack of ongoing operational support, as well as this year’s presenting partners, who include Vtape, Hemispheric Encounters, Hart House at the University of Toronto, and Tangled Art + Disability.

Noun (pl.) persons who exercise great power or influence, secretly or unofficially

Inaugurated in 2002, the festival’s Éminence Grise designation highlights our commitment to bringing forward a lived history of performance art by presenting the work of key Canadian artists. We celebrate artists who have helped to establish, shape, and embody performance art in Canada.

This year we are honoured to feature Tanya MARS and Andrew James PATERSON, two artists known not only for their groundbreaking art practices, for which they have each been awarded a Governor General’s Award for Media and Visual Arts, but also for their enormous contributions to developing Canada’s unique artist-run infrastructure. Both have worked for and served on the boards of numerous artist-run organizations. They also have impressive publishing and curatorial credits, contributing to the critical discourse and framing of art practice from artist perspectives. And through their work, they have pioneered possibilities for feminist and queer expression in contemporary Canadian art.

previous Éminences
2002 Bruce BARBER (NS)
2004 Cheryl L’HIRONDELLE (SK)
2006 Rita MCKEOUGH (NS)
2008 Robin POITRAS (SK) and Glenn LEWIS (BC)
2010 Michael FERNANDES (NS) and Sylvie TOURANGEAU (QC)
2012 Margaret DRAGU (BC) and Nobuo KUBOTA (ON)
2014 Berenicci HERSHORN (ON) and Clive ROBERTSON (ON
2016 Elizabeth CHITTY (ON) and DOYON/DEMERS (QC)
2018 Hank BULL (BC) and Sandra VIDA (AB)
2022 Alain-Martin RICHARD (QC)

We are honoured to once again have Henry Chan as our festival photographer. Henry Chan has been taking photographs for over 30 years. For the past 17 years, he has been documenting performance art in Toronto, including the activities of FADO Performance Art Centre, the 7a*11d International Performance Art Festival and the work of various performance artists. In 2018, Henry was invited to document the Performance Art Oslo festival in Norway. Henry has also documented events and exhibitions for various arts venues and organizations such as The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, The Gardiner Museum, The Blackwood, The Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Nuit Blanche (City of Toronto), SummerWorks and The Images Festival, among others. Henry’s photographs have appeared in various artist publications and print media, including Canadian Art, The Globe and Mail and The New York Times.

Peppercorn Imagine, a Toronto-based production studio focused on telling stories spearheaded by Alan Peng and Jeff Zhao, will be providing video documentation. Originating from studio arts backgrounds, Peng and Zhao focus on collaboration with others to create content and share unique stories and perspectives. Peppercorn Imagine produces video and photography content for web streaming, education and exhibition. Peng and Zhao have been a part of the 7a*11d’s documentation team for 6 years. Check out Peppercorn’s portfolio here: https://peppercornimagine.com/. Thanks to our ongoing archival efforts, video documentation of this year’s performances will be available online soon after the festival ends.

This year we have commissioned Toronto-based writer Daniella Sanader to produce a review of the festival which, when completed, will be available on our website. For over ten years, she has been writing about (or, alongside) artists’ practices, contributing texts to a number of arts publications, galleries, and artist-run spaces across Canada and internationally. Currently, Daniella is a PhD candidate in Art History and Visual Culture at York University, where her doctoral research on artists’ writing is supported by a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship and she is part of research networks through Archive/Counter-Archive and the Sensorium Centre for Digital Arts & Technology. desanader.com