Alegría Gobeil lives/works through practices often deemed self-destructive, unproductive, unlivable, contagious, or unsurvivable. Their indisciplinary approach—grounded in performance art methodologies—unfolds within the material, bodily, and contextual constraints of its own production. Alegría has created protocols, exhibitions, actions, installations, altered objects, and written or spoken forms.

Their work, in these various forms, has been presented by Slip House and Sara’s (New York), Centre CLARK + GNO (Sudbury/Montréal), Espace Maurice, OFFTA, Centre Skol, Calliope, Festival de poésie de Montréal, Le Port de tête la nuit, La nuit de la poésie DARE DARE X La Centrale (Montréal), L’Œil de poisson, Le Lieu, Folie/Culture, La Charpente des fauves (Québec), Verticale (Laval), L’Imagier (Aylmer), Caravansérail (Rimouski), and Gruentaler9 (Berlin).

Alegría’s participation is supported by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.

“Ayana Evans’ multidisciplinary oeuvre focuses on triggering and interrupting the ways that the American public is historically socialized to regard, judge, and interact with women’s bodies with a particular focus on misogynoir.” —Jessica Lanay Moore

Ayana Evans is a NYC-based performance artist whose guerrilla-style work has been staged at El Museo del Barrio, The Barnes Foundation, The Bronx Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum, Newark Museum, Queens Museum, and various public spaces. Her performances have been reviewed in The New York Times, Bomb Magazine, ArtNet, Hyperallergic, and New York Magazine’s The Cut. She received the Franklin Furnace Fund (2017–2018), NYFA Fellowship (2018), Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship (2021–2022), was Professor of the Practice at Brown University (2021–2022), and won the Chamberlain Award at Headlands Art Center (2022). Residencies include Yaddo, Skowhegan, Vermont Studio Center, and Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. Her current solo projects include exhibitions at Loyola University (Spring 2025) and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2026), and an annual arts career fair serving 200+ formerly incarcerated individuals. Evans is currently a professor at Fordham University, Brooklyn College, and NYU.

Caroline St-Laurent is a queer visual artist specializing in the intersection of arts and sports with a feminist perspective. In a multidisciplinary practice based on performance and video, she collaborates with athletes, amateur sportswomen and artists, to investigate the cult of performance and reflect on equity, accessibility and social justice. A former gymnast, she sees movement as a direct way to engage her body—semi-athletic and that just turned 40—in an experiment and to claim a space where the effort and fun of training are acts of resistance. In recent years, she has created contexts for marginalized athletes to make their voices heard (e.g., Tandem – Portrait of paracyclists Shawna Ryan and Joanie Caron, 2024). With dance artist Liliane Moussa, she presents an evolving performance-conference that questions the place of women and minority groups in sports (PHI, 2025; Montréal public parks, 2022; CAFKA, 2021).

Chuyia works across painting, installation, digital representation and performance art. Her practice explores global issues, especially those concerning the living environment and nature, food, identity and culture. She expresses meaning through action, seeking perspectives on how body language and gestures function in different contexts and how they are able to communicate with the viewer. She combines performance art, handcraft, drawing, moving and still images, and continues to explore different art forms with an open mind. 

Her artistic participation includes the 2016 Singapore Biennale at the Singapore Art Museum, The Supermarket of Images at Jeu de Paume Paris and the Red Brick Museum Beijing in 2020, The Body Politic and the Body at the Ilham Gallery in Malaysia in 2019 and Earth at Havremagasinet in Sweden in 2021. She has had solo exhibitions at Trollhättan Konsthall in 2018 and Skövde Konstmuseet in 2020. Her artistic involvements, spanning over 35 countries across Asia, Southeast Asia, Europe, the Americas, and Africa, resonate with diverse cultural contexts. 

Chuyia’s participation is made possible via an exchange with Live Action Gothenburg. 

Claudia Edwards is a Toronto-based performance artist of Indo-Guyanese and British descent. Conceptually driven, their work explores colonialism, identity and grief, often through the vocabularies of embodiment, absurdism and the queer trickster tradition. Edwards’ practice spans relational performance, experimental dance, photography, video, text and object-making. They have created works for FADO Performance Art Centre, Rhubarb Festival, BUZZCUT (Glasgow), Flux Factory (NYC) and more, and have presented performances and workshops in festivals and galleries across Canada, the US, the UK, and online. Edwards holds a BFA from Concordia University (2016).

Claudia’s participation is supported by CLARK.

David Khang’s art practice is shaped by his varied education and professions. He selectively integrates disciplinary codes into his work, composing interdisciplinary languages in visual, textual, and spoken forms. Khang performs these languages—thereby embodying them—to interrogate socially constructed and intersecting categories of gender, race, class, species, and geopolitics. By deploying non-native languages and incongruous pairings, Khang evokes dissonant readings, with aims of re-imagining poetics and politics.

Khang received his Bachelor of Science (BSc) and Doctor of Dental Surgery (DDS) from the University of Toronto, Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) from Emily Carr Institute of Art+Design, and Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from UC Irvine.  In 2007, he was awarded the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art. Khang has taught at Emily Carr University of Art & Design and Goddard College, and served as President of the Board of Directors for LIVE Performance Biennial, Access Gallery, and grunt gallery. Most recently, he completed his Juris Doctor (JD) with specializations in Aboriginal and Environmental Law from the University of British Columbia. Born in Seoul, Khang now lives as an uninvited guest on Coast Salish Territories (Vancouver).

Irma, who has adopted Optimist as a last name to counterbalance the Finnish melancholy, is a prominent figure in Finnish performance art. She has presented over 301 performances since 1989 across Europe, North America, and Asia. 

Irma Optimist’s work intends to disturb the logic of science. Her performances are influenced by time and space, and by the temporality of presence. As non-linear systems, they lack an absolutely fixed point and exist through the interaction between artist and audience; the relationship is complex. Using optimistic mathematics, she seeks to restore the symbols of food, love and sexuality, as the body has exploded under the pressure of desire, utility and energy. Western culture has sublimated itself through science, but Optimist’s performance returns science to corporality. She restores brilliant visibility or transparency to the politics of identity. What Irma Optimist looks like and what she is doing are just as true as her own self.

Irma’s participation is supported by OBORO. 

Fadwa Bouziane is a performance artist currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Fine Art at Burren College of Art. Born in Quebec with Amazigh and Haitian roots, her work draws deeply from her lived experiences as a racialized woman. Fadwa’s research explores how performance art and storytelling act as transformative tools for processing racial trauma stored within the body. Through her movement-based practice, she investigates the profound connections between identity, the body, and the mind, seeking to release and unpack the long-held tensions that shape us.

Jeff has been performing art for the last 20 years, both nationally and internationally. He enjoys the bicycle, the hammer, the saw, the wood, his wife and son, his family, his friends, his work. (…except sometimes he doesn’t enjoy these things as much; it depends.) He is the son and grandson of far more practical people, which he tries to express in his art. His mother often thought he should stop getting naked in front of people and privately he thinks she is probably right; and something about death.

Jochi Muñoz is a Dominican artist trained in folklore dance, ballet, and modern dance, and has taken various courses and workshops in the performing arts and performance art. Drawing from his dance background, he brings the discipline and rigor of that training to his durational performances, which make up the majority of his body of work. He has participated in numerous international festivals, both in dance and performance art. He has been selected four times for the National Biennial of Visual Arts (2009, 2011, 2013, and 2023, winning an award in his first participation) and twice for the Eduardo León Jimenes Art Contest (2012 and 2014). He currently lives and works in Santo Domingo.

Jochi’s participation is supported by DARE-DARE.

Kelvin Atmadibrata (b.1988, Jakarta, Indonesia) summons superpowers awakened by second puberty and adolescent fantasy. Inspired by shōnen characters, kōhai hierarchy and macho ero-kawaii aesthetic, he often personifies power and strength through semi-canonical and fanfictional antiheroes to contest the masculine metanarrative and erotica.  

He works primarily in performance, often accompanied by and translated into drawings, mixed media collages and objects assembled as installations. Approached as bricolage and remix, Kelvin’s work translates narratives and recreates character personifications based on RPG (role-playing video games) theories, pop mythologies and fanboy psychology.       

His recent works speak the language of minimalist erotica, illustrating his research of the mecha and transhumanist fantasy. Also motivated by the craft of contemporary tattoo, he experiments with the process of marking images onto skin,continuing his fascination with living sculptures, breathing mannequins, and bodies as pedestals.

Przemek Branas is an interdisciplinary visual artist working at the intersection of performance, installation, video, object art, photography, and sculpture. He holds an MFA in performance art from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków and a PhD from the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Studies at the University of the Arts in Poznań.

Branas’ practice explores themes of identity, sexuality, bodily memory, the individual’s relationship with institutions, and the social and cultural mechanisms of exclusion. In recent years, sculptural works and projects involving organic matter—particularly plants—have become central to his practice. He creates installations and objects that weave together queer corporeality with notions of growth, decay, and material transformation, examining the relationships between nature and social constructs.

Branas has participated in numerous international art events, including the Embodied Action festival in Hong Kong (2016), GUYU ACTION Performance Art Festival in Xi’an (2016), and Polish Performance Night at Le Lieu in Québec (2014). He received second prize in the Spojrzenia Deutsche Bank competition (2017) and has held residencies at MeetFactory , SESAMA, and the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Przemek’s participation is supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage Republic of Poland.

Sakiko Yamaoka was born in 1961 in Sapporo, Japan. She began working in performance art in Tokyo in 1991. In 1997, she participated in Castle of Imagination in Poland, and since then has presented work across Europe, the U.S., and Asia. 

In recent years, her focus has been on actions that distill basic human activities, such as ‘exchange,’ ‘coming and going,’ and ‘circulation,’ as a method of exploring human movement and activity. Her performances often take the form of site-specific and durational works. She also examines the social and political conditions that shape or trouble the body, questioning what makes it move the way it does, and what prevents it from doing so.

Born in Douala, Cameroon, Serge Olivier Fokoua lives and works in Canada. His artwork takes the form of installations and performances, and has been shown in Africa, Europe, North America and Japan. A co-founding member of  Les palettes du Kamer collective, he was the artistic director of the Rencontres d’Arts Visuels de Yaoundé: RAVY for ten years. He has also co-organised numerous projects around the world, including several exchanges between Cameroon artists and Canadian presenters such as Axenéo7 (Gatineau), FADO (Toronto), MST (Calgary), le Lieu (Québec) and VIVA! (Montréal).

Tatiana Koroleva (born Surgut, Western Siberia, lives and works in Montréal) is a multi-disciplinary artist, poet, educator, and researcher who works in the mediums of performance art, video art and creative writing. A lecturer at the Department of Studio Arts, Concordia University (Montréal), Tatiana explores intersections of performance art, art therapy and butoh practices. Her work is grounded in the subjects of ancestral memory, immigration, intergenerational trauma and the search for personal and collective healing. Since 2006, Koroleva has performed locally and internationally including her participation in Miami International Festival of Performance Art (Miami), International Biennale of Performance Art DEFORMES (Santiago de Chile), Sofia Underground Performance Art Festival (Sofia), and Nuit Blanche Festival of Contemporary Art (Montréal), among many others. Her most recent performances were presented at Queens Museum (NYC), and Art Souterrain Festival of Contemporary Art (Montréal).

Audrey / 卓涵 is a multidisciplinary practitioner with a passion for exploring diverse perspectives on the world. A renegade neuroscientist, she migrates toward innately unconventional art research: performance (cooking), media, interactivity, and community. Much of her practice is related to food, whether being an eggplant dish hunter in immigrants’ homes and ethnic restaurants in Montréal, serving soups at the screening of soup films, or cooking with friends in the community kitchen in Amsterdam to rebind home through stomachs. She also works with Montréal’s Chinatown on storytelling and placemaking.

Her work has been presented at Image Forum Theatre (Tokyo) and Objectifs (Singapore). Her first authored research publications can be found in journals such as Behavioral Research Methods and Vision Research.

Phorie brings together creative research and curatorial thinking in an indisciplinary practice in which art and theory are shaped by experience, narrative, and fiction. Looking beyond the exhibition space, the collective sets up encounters between works, people and ideas around contemporary concerns. For its first major field of exploration, Phorie aims to create an inventory of the ways in which affect is expressed and the strategies used to convey it in contemporary art. Founded in 2021 by Félix Chartré-Lefebvre and Benoit Jodoin, Phorie joins forces with other voices for each project, opening up its research to new subjectivities.

Living between Paris and Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, Marie Achille is a cultural worker, artist and researcher. She is a master’s candidate in art history at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Interested in the affects, archives and critical studies of disability, her various practices are rooted in a crip perspective. Through communications (École d’été “La Queerness face aux archives”(2023) at the Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre Pompidou in Paris (FR)), publications of scientific articles, and residencies, Marie integrates research and creation, notably through a practice of journaling, correspondence, photography, and performance.

Félix Chartré-Lefebvre is an artist, art historian and cultural mediator. He designs projects that bring together creation, research and the mobilization of knowledge, paying particular attention to forms of knowledge derived from contemporary art, science and lived experience. His creations, which are often installation-based and process-oriented, explore works of art and places in a critical and speculative way. Motivated by collaborative approaches, he is interested in pedagogy, the circulation of knowledge, and the power dynamics associated with social privilege.

Benoit Jodoin is an art historian and essayist. He holds a doctorate from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and the Université du Québec à Montréal, and specializes in the relationship between contemporary art and theory, which he approaches from a queer perspective. After Pourquoi je n’écris pas : réflexions sur la culture de la pauvreté, published in 2024, this autumn he is bringing out Archives de nos amitiés imparfaites, published by Triptyque.

Collectif Phorie’s participation is supported by PERICULUM. FOUNDATION OF CONTEMPORARY ART.