Discipline: interdisciplinary arts

michael martini

© connie tsang

Michael Martini is a queer playwright and performer who uses techniques of theatre to create performances for various contexts, from the theatre to the gallery to the cabaret. He has presented several projects in Montreal and Toronto since obtaining a BFA in Playwriting from Concordia University in 2017, often collaborating with artists from other disciplines.

Notably, his co-creation Ça a l’air synthétique bonjour hi has appeared at festivals Summerworks and OFFTA, where it won the OFFTA Hybridity Award. He has also presented works at Rhubarb Festival, RIPA, Phénomena, Xpace Cultural Centre, and he was nominated as Outstanding Emerging Artist by the Montreal English Theatre Awards in 2018. His performances shift between the banal and the eccentric, layering text installation with video, theatrical lecture, make-believe, dry humour, and pop.

He is currently at work on bringing to life a full-length performance text entitled Landscape Grindr, reflecting on nature, gender, and violence. Drawing parallels between #metoo and environmental justice as the writer questions his own gender and sexuality, the text proposes an immersive play where video, sound, and performance are on equal footing.

hoda adra

Hoda Adra is a spoken word poet and filmmaker with a practice rooted in writing as resistance and self-inscription. Born in Lebanon, raised in Saudi Arabia and adopted by Montreal, this triangle inspired her first album “La liberté des sens”, a rhythmical account of an Arab female body crossing worlds way too fast. Using performance as a pledge against erasure, Hoda examines notions of planetarity versus self-censorship through storytelling, somatic inquiry and the voice. Her writings explore gender apartheid, oral history abortion and politics of marginalization and their links to feminine motricity. Poetically drawing on phenomena from childhood, psychogenealogy and quantum physics, Hoda seeks to transmit that our hearts – when constellated – can become spaces of collective reimagining.

Alumna of the Banff Centre’s Spoken Word Program and New Media Institute, Hoda’s writing and video work has been supported by the Canada Council for the arts and the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec. Performances and screenings include the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word, Nuit Blanche, FQD, Place-des-Arts, FIFEQ, RIDM, Montreal Stop-Motion Festival, les Halles de Bruxelles, and she once brought home the silver medal at the Quebec Grand Slam. As an antidote to words, Hoda can be found spilling paint.

Listen to her spoken word album here: https://www.h-o-d-a.bandcamp.com

daniela ortiz

Daniela Ortiz is a Mexican-born visual artist, currently leaving and working in Montreal. She explores issues of cultural identity, assimilation and dislocation through portraiture in a variety of mediums such as photography, drawing, embroidery and more recently animation.

She has an undergraduate degree in visual arts from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico (UNAM), a certificate in photography from the International Centre of Photography and  she is a recent graduate from the MFA program in studio arts-Intermedia at Concordia University.

flavia hevia

Flavia Hevia is a visual artist, puppeteer and a set and lighting designer for theatre.

Originally from Mexico, Flavia strives to become a visual storyteller combining her skills and experience in the visual arts, theatre and puppetry to create animated films that approach stories in a non-linear way, more through the senses than the intellect.

Our Tales – Exploring the memories of immigrant women, her current project, aims to capture the vital stories that immigrant women carry from their homelands and recreate them in an artistic form that both reinforces and validates the memories for the women themselves while also facilitating the sharing of these stories so that they are better understood and appreciated by everyone.

farha najah

Farha Najah is an anti-racist feminist artist-activist currently based in Tiohtia:ke, unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory.  Since a young age, she has been interested in the artistic traditions of her South Asian and Muslim background, including Urdu/Arabic-Persian Script (U/APS) calligraphy, while being surrounded by, and engaging in, social justice activism.  This experience informed her to launch an art practice in 2016. More specifically, her own intersecting experiences of queerness, gender, and racialization, and solidarity with others facing systemic oppressions inspired her to develop an art practice that engages with self and collective empowerment, particularly as part of Queer/Trans People of Colour communities. Her art practice has primarily focused on U/APS calligraphy through acrylic paint and tattoo design.  More recently, she has been focusing on U/APS calligraphy while experimenting with body paint, dance, clay, and film. She is currently interested in artistically embracing the intersections of Queer and Muslim identities and imaginations via interdisciplinary artistic processes.

mich cota

Mich is a two-spirit Algonquin-mixed woman who lived her childhood in Maberly, Ontario. Mich was born to a native father and a white mother and raised with a mix of indigenous and settler perspectives. She began to explore her identity through writing stories that encapsulated her world as an Algonquin child immersed in the rigid limitations of fundamentalist Christianity. Music became a place to reflect as well as escape inner conflict as she entered adolescence, questioning her natural desires to identify as female and queer. She currently lives independently in Montreal, writing and performing through song and dance as a way to share her story. Mich seeks through her artistic work to provide an unfamiliar but safe area where people across community lines can begin to digest the intensity of differing, specifically the emotional weight contained in the voices of people in conflict.

 

Image : Sadie Mallon

kama la mackerel

Kama La Mackerel is a performance poet, storyteller and multi-disciplinary artist whose work explores performative and poetic practices as resilience, resistance and healing for marginalized communities. Her artistic practice spans across textile, visual, digital, poetic and performative work; at once narratological and theoretical, at once personal and political, her work articulates an anti-colonial praxis through cultural production.

Her projects are community-informed and community-driven: she is an artist mentor with the Artists Mentoring Youth (AMY) Project, as well as the Artistic Director of AMY’s Performance Poetry Program for Trans Women and Femmes. She is the creator and Artistic Director of GENDER B(L)ENDER, The Self-Love Cabaret, Contemporary Poetics of Trans Women of Colour Artists, and Our Bodies, Our Stories: a creation & performance mentorship program for QTBIPOC youth. Kama has performed locally and internationally at venues in Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Halifax, Vancouver, Burlington, New York City, London, Amsterdam, Paris and beyond. Kama was born and raised in Mauritius, immigrated to India as a young adult, and then immigrated to Canada in 2008. She she has been living in tio’tia:ke (Montreal) since 2011.

 

Image: Pascha Marrow

azalia kaviani

Azalia Kaviani is a multidisciplinary artist working mainly in painting and dance. As a child she contracted a disease that damaged her brain cells which resulted in physical and speech impairment. However she did not let this stop her and managed to pursue regular schooling even though it took her a year to be able to hold a pencil in her hand. With her mother’s support she struggled to be as independent as possible and decided not to let her limitation curb her ambitions. She started to take yoga and painting classes and discovered how art helped her to open up and to discover other parts of herself. She graduated from Concordia University and started dancing. She hopes, though her art and presence, to assist people with disabilities. Her first exhibition was held in 2018 at Mekic gallery in Montréal.