7A*11D

Welcome to 7a*mgr8 [migrate], curated by Paul Couillard for the Toronto Performance Art Collective (TPAC). For this "online" creative residency project, TPAC invites artists to create new digital projects for our website that are inspired by our public web archive, searchable by artist or by event.

TPAC has been organizing events since 1997, anchored by our signature project, the biennial 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art.  In recent years, we have been steadily making our vast accumulation of documentation from past performance art projects accessible through our website. The result is an unparalleled free resource of performance art documents: recordings of performances, contextualizing panels, artist interviews, eyewitness accounts and critical writing.

Performances live by animating bodies, and by the way a work's gestures and images get taken up in daily life, evolving and adapting to new situations and contexts. 7a*mgr8 invites selected creative residents to enter into dialogue with the documents and performances in our archive: to call attention to key and still relevant ideas and approaches; to intervene in and enrich the works' ongoing histories; to make space for new perspectives; and, in essence, to explore how performance impulses can migrate through different media and expanding communities.

This second phase of the project, made possible with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Toronto Arts Council. Works will begin launching approximately every two weeks on the website beginning in October 2025. Stay tuned for details. This year's program features a diverse group of artists from across Canada, including Ronnie Clarke, Claudia Edwards, k.g. Guttman, Pam Hall, SF Ho, Bridget Moser, and Santiago Tamayo Soler.

The first iteration of this project in 2024 was funded through the Ontario Arts Council, and featured works by three Ontario-based artists: Sean Lee, Tanya Lukin Linklater, and Abedar Kamgari.