Queer West Arts Festival 2010!

It is that time of year again: the sun is shining and queers want to come out and play! Why not see some amazing and provocative art along the way?

This year I will be the Media & Public Relations person for Queer West Arts Festival.

Come to The House of Provocation for the latest updates and also visit Queer in the City for the latest!

Here is the official media release for what we have in store for this year!

(Sunday May 23, 2010. By Parul Pandya, Queer West Media Spokesperson and Casey Reid, Program Director of Queer West Film Festival.)

August 2010 will mark the 5th annual QUEER WEST ARTS FESTIVAL - this year QUEERING BOUNDARIES will be the vision to initialize a wide-scale community reinvention. Though it is certainly important that gay, lesbian, bi & trans individuals express individualities, uniqueness and differences, this year’s festival will promote a central platform to create inclusiveness and communication between these groupings. Limits typically placed on a queer identity will be explored and re-explored in an effort to move away from "Queer" as a singular, often fixed, and essential identity.

The Queer West Toronto community is committed to ushering in a necessary and more contemporary attitude in reaction to the ever-changing threads of fiber that fashion the notion of “queer” in its entirety. The festival will view the complexity of queer identity beyond set places, spaces and community settings and bring diversity to the forefront of all programming. Art and performance will be utilized as the vehicle to show queer identity as a contested space. Though the theme is Queer Boundaries, where and how those boundaries are formed is subjective. The Queer West community emphasizes a sharing of space and the exchanging of ideas as a political act, within and outside of the Queer West Village.

Though queers may converge and diverge on particular spaces to create a community, the heart of the festival is to emphasize however different our identities, we all share our humanity. To mark this historic event, Toronto's "West End" will be (re)claimed, (re)presented and (re)named as "queer" over the course of 8 days (Saturday August 7 to Sunday August 15, 2010). Artists and performers will convey genuine and relative ideas across multi-disciplinary forms to entertain, educate and enlighten.


Festival Contact Information:
Festival Program Coordinator & Volunteers - Jaclyn Isen - queerwestfest@gmail.com
Film Festival Program Director - Casey Reid - qwfilmfest@gmail.com
Sponsorships - Michel Paré - queerwestinfo@gmail.com
Literary Events - Philip Cairns - fullmoon@auracom.com
Media & Public Relations - Parul Pandya - queerwestfestmedia@gmail.com
Visual Arts Curator - Brian McCurdy - qwfingerpaint@gmail.com