After a six-year hiatus, the Queer New York International Arts Festival returns and features works from a diverse group of international artists. The festival questions traditional definitions and the understanding of queerness in artistic practice in concept and/or form. The 2024 festival features artists from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Croatia, Germany and the U.S. whose works explore a range of contemporary issues related to queer identity and marginalization, opening up topics such as sex work, migration, Indigenous rights, political prosecution and the new conservatism. QNYIAF, curated and produced by Zvonimir Dobrovic´ (founder and artistic director of Queer Zagreb and Perforations festivals in Croatia), will include performances, a video installation/exhibition and a series of public talks with artists and curators.
Festival schedule includes:
From 5 to 95 (Croatia - Multimedia)
February 7-February 17
The festival opens with Croatian artist Arijana Lekic Fridrih’s From 5 to 95, a video installation and art web project documenting intergenerational stories and experiences of girls and women living in Croatia. Women’s stories have, throughout history, been either censored or auto censored. In a conservative society such as Croatian, some immanently female experiences are not being shared, and certain life lessons of high value are still being transmitted exclusively by oral traditions from one generation to another. The installation will be available for viewing throughout the Festival.
Yira, yira (Croatia - Theatre)
February 7 & February 8
Co-directors Bruno Isakovic and Nataša Rajkovic spent several months with four Argentinian sex workers, leading to their theater piece, Yira, yira (Cruising, cruising), which reveals aspects of sex work we rarely think about. Performed by the sex workers Leandra, Sofia, Larry and Pichon, and through their stories, we enter the world of sex work defined both by personal choice and circumstances. We also become aware that at the same time we are talking about work conditions in general, demand and supply curves in an open market, margins and centers and social powers that come with those positions. Sex work therefore becomes a complex crossroad of economy, sex, gender, age, power dynamics, class and choice. When we think about the exchange of money for sex, we usually consider only the clients who pay sex workers for their service, but what is the full price in reality and who pays it in the end? Clients with their money or sex workers with their social status, legal insecurities and other risks that come with the job? There will be a post-performance discussion on February 7.
Kill B. (Croatia - Dance)
February 9 & February 10
Croatian choreographers/dancers Mia Zalukar and Bruno Isakovic have collaborated on Kill B., a dance performance inspired by Quentin Tarantino’s 2003 cult movie Kill Bill. Zalukar and Isakovic create a performative analysis of their own long-term professional relationship, questioning the hierarchical structures inside the theatre-making process and the power dynamic between the two, at least in theory, equal partners.
The Goldberg Variations (Canada - Performance)
February 13
In The Goldberg Variations, Canadian performance artist Clayton Lee freely references and entangles queer diasporic sexuality and aesthetics with classical music (Johann Sebastian Bach) and professional wrestling (Bill Goldberg). Using deadpan humor, generosity and a low-vibrating mischievous to facilitate and indulge the “what-ifs” of the live encounter, Clayton guides the audience through his sexual history while conjuring and perhaps manifesting new fantasies at the exact same time. The Goldberg Variations is an unhinged and reckless deep dive into power dynamics, sexual desire, domination/submission, heartbreak, vulnerability, tenderness and the tensions that exist within.
Conference (Argentina - Lecture/Performance)
February 15
Conference, from Argentinian artist Tiziano Cruz, is a lecture-performance created from a selection of autobiographical events. Cruz composes scenic narratives invoking the memory of the body and the power of his Andean ancestors, in a desperate attempt, not only to silence the mourning of his dead sister, but also, as a possibility to reconcile with the world. There will be a discussion following the performance.
La Bête (Brazil - Performance/Lecture)
February 16
Brazilian artist Wagner Schwartz performs an interactive and participatory solo, in which he is reactivating the famous figure of the Bicho (or “Beast”), the adjustable metal sculpture which the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark produced as a series in the early 1960s. The performer begins by manipulating a plastic replica of the original object, and playing with its system of hinges, before inviting the audience to do likewise, this time with a different kind of beast: his own naked body. Schwartz’s performance of La Bête in 2017 at the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo, when a video of the naked artist being touched by a young child was shared online, incited an extensive hate campaign targeting the artist, the museum and cultural workers. Note: Based on his experience with La Bête, Schwartz wrote a book A nudez da cópia imperfeita (The Nakedness of the Imperfect Copy), Editora Nós, which will be discussed, along with the wider context of his artistic practice, on Thursday, February 15 at 5:30 pm in the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts at the Richard Schechner Studio (721 Broadway, 6th Floor) with Professor André Lepecki.
An Evening With Raimund (Germany - Dance)
February 17
Raimund Hoghe Company members Emmanuel Eggermont and Luca Giacomo Schulte have created an evening of works by the late German choreographer Raimund Hoghe in a tribute performed by his dancers. In this ephemeral performance, danced fragments chosen from Hoghe’s repertoire revive the wave of humanity and poetry that Hoghe was able to delicately place on each of his dancers and spectators. This performance gathers seven dancers who perform some of their most memorable parts from almost two decades of dance pieces with which Raimund Hoghe and his company performed all over the world.
