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 first iteration of the project, made possible through the generous support of the Ontario Arts Council, launches in May, 2024 with works by three Ontario-based artists: Sean Lee (May 22), Tanya Lukin Linklater (June 5), and Abedar Kamgari (TBA). A second phase of the project will take place in 2025 featuring a larger group of artists from across Canada.