Performance art fest TBA:22 is back

Published 12:00 am Thursday, September 1, 2022

The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s annual Time‐Based Art festival is back to its usual 10-day span for 2022, after experiments in scheduling during the pandemic. The festival runs Sept. 8 to 18.

The format is weekend-heavy as usual, with midweek lectures and installations coming under the banner of Night School.

First thing to know is the 8 p.m. opening night show and party is suggested donation $0 to $20, or pay-what-you-will, which will subsidize others’ tickets. The organizers promise other performers will be there to mingle with the public. Star of that show will be singer-performer-musician San Cha was here for TBA in 2019. She queers traditional Mexican ranchero, mariachi and bolero songs and adopts the look of a telenovela idol.

Also playing is from Latin femme DJ collective Noche Libre Latinx DJ Collective in Portland. She was born in the Andes region of Ecuador, and now mixes African, Latin and Indigenous American sounds.

Other acts to watch out for are Sylvan Oswald, who hails from the unceded land of the Gabrielino and Tongva peoples or Los Angeles, California. Oswald’s “High Winds” adapts his book about a trans man’s search through the desert west for his half-brother.

The multimedia exhibition “Dreams of Unknown Islands” by Sasha Wortzel at Reed College’s Cooley Gallery (through Nov. 10) is a must see, as is her talk at noon on Sept. 10. Also showing is “This is an Address,” which is five of Wortzel’s short films, which examine queer place-making, geographies of resistance, and the systems that marginalize, extract, and erase communities, peoples, and histories.

Ticket prices are a little more equitable this year: A $500 patron pass gets you into everything with preferential treatment, a $300 pass include one pass to give to another person, and a $150 full pass gives admission to all performances, and full access to exhibitions and Night School programs, with reservations are required for all indoor programs. Weekend passes cost $75, and Night School events are on a sliding scale of $10 to $25.

See more info .

The Tribune will also run a more comprehensive preview in its Sept. 7 edition and online.