Expanding the possibilities
of performance
SummerWorks Performance Festival
August 1-11, 2024
Off Site Project / Pita Arreola-Burns & Elliott Burns (UK)
Off Site Project is an online curatorial platform founded by Pita Arreola-Burns and Elliott Burns in 2017. Through a programme of online homepage exhibitions, downloadable ZIP shows, and a residency situated in Google Maps, Off Site Project has created opportunities for emerging new media talent and addressed subjects ranging from techno-colonialism in Latin America, digital haunting, the transgression between IRL and URL environments, and luxury as a response to existential emergency. They have produced IRL exhibitions for Anonymous Gallery in New York, the Austrian Cultural Forum London, and INDUSTRA in the Czech Republic.
On the subject of digital galleries and art communities, Off Site Project have been invited to speak and deliver workshop at: Centro de Cultura Digital, the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image, De:Formal Gallery, Digital Art Observatory, the Digital Research in the Humanities and Arts 2020 conference, Modern Art Oxford, Somerset House Studios, Tate Exchange, the UCL Multimedia Anthropology Lab, the University of Denver and the Whitworth Gallery. They have taught at universities including: Goldsmiths University of Arts London, Plymouth College of Art, the Royal College of Art and the University of Denver.
In addition to running Off Site Project, Pita Arreola-Burns is the Curator of Digital Art at the Victoria & Albert Museum, previous roles include positions with Furtherfield Gallery, London, and Another Company, Mexico City. Elliott Burns is a lecturer at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, and has recently been running a research and development project for the British Council concerning collections online.
Faye Kabali-Kagwa (South Africa)
Faye Kabali-Kagwa is a Ugandan-South African arts coordinator, cultural curator, and arts writer. Faye builds interventions that go beyond artistic output and are interested in audience as engaged contributors to her work. This has allowed her to connect people and audiences across platforms and disciplines which include theatre, literature, film, and emerging technology.
In 2020 she began exploring WhatsApp as a medium for storytelling. She debuted her first WhatsApp production, The Shopping Dead, at the virtual National Arts Festival. Her second WhatsApp project was a digital art exhibition, Dear Us, Matric 2020, that she curated for the Fak’ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival.
Faye facilitates opportunities for children and young people to access theatre and the arts in her arts coordination work with ASSITEJ South Africa. She was also the coordinator and curator of the Open Book Poetry Slam in 2019.
Faye is a trusted cultural observer and critic with several articles being published in the Mail & Guardian, New Frame, Culture Review, and Business Arts South Africa. Faye has also served on the jury for the Dutch arts and technology festival STRP and served on the selection panels for the SHNIT short film festival, and Cape Town Fringe Festival.
Faye is a fellow of the VANSA Cultural Leadership Programme (2022), PACE+ Dramaturgy Lab 2021, and the Salzburg Global Seminar’s Cultural Innovators programme. In 2021 she was recognised as one of the Mail & Guardian’s Top 200 Young South Africans.
Faye holds an honours degree in Sociology, and a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology, and Dramatic Arts, from Rhodes University.
https://www.fayekk.com/
Liu Xiaoyi (Singapore/Hong Kong)
Xiaoyi is considered one of the most promising figures at the forefront of the experimental theatre scene in Asia. He was the recipient of “Young Artist Award” by the National Arts Council of Singapore in 2016.
Xiaoyi has been the artistic director of Emergency Stairs since 2017. A multi-faceted and multi-talented artist, he was involved in over 70 theatre productions as a curator, a director, a playwright, and an actor over the past two decades. Xiaoyi’s work often polarizes, drawing both praise and debate. An example of his much-discussed works, Journey to Nowhere was a creative response to the then-newly unveiled government’s cultural policy paper of Singapore. In 2018, Xiaoyi began to explore the relationship between art and science. He started a new project, No More Theatre, to develop collaboration between digital technology and arts, including AI, AR, VR and More.
A strong proponent of artistic exchanges across art forms, Xiaoyi has been actively promoting dialogues and creation across cultural and geographical lines over the past decade. Since 2017, he curates the annual Southernmost Project, a first-of-its-kind arts festival in Singapore. It seeks to bring prominent and established traditional and contemporary artists from the region together at Singapore for intercultural exchange. Since 2021, Xiaoyi has been invited to be the artist-in-residence at Zuni Icosahedron, a Hong Kong-based international experimental theatre company.
An educator at heart, Xiaoyi keeps a keen eye on the development of art talents in Singapore and the Asia Pacific region. He has started and helmed the Emergency Academy, which is designed as an incubation programme for promising young cultural leaders and has attracted a total of 40 artists from 16 cities in its two editions.
About Artists at Work
Artists at Work offers a digital glimpse into the process and practice of artists working outside of the Canadian performance ecology. Experience global practices of creation, collaboration and new work development via SummerWorks’ social media channels. We’ve invited three curators from across the globe to put forward an artist they feel is essential viewing.