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For over 50 years now, VIVO has been providing access, support, and community for Vancouver artists while playing an essential role in preserving the city’s rich media arts history. However, due to a recent rent affordability crisis, our place in Vancouver’s cultural scene has been thrown into jeopardy.
We asked a number of artists that have previously worked with us three questions on how VIVO has supported them and what we mean to their practice. They come from a wide range of artistic backgrounds and generations, and have graciously responded to our questions below – we are humbled by their thoughtful responses. Their words below remind us why this work matters.
Here are the questions asked:
These stories are a few of thousands. This Giving Tuesday, if you care about cultural preservation, supporting local artists and communities, or advancing experimentation in media arts, please donate to help us reach our $50,000 goal. We couldn’t have raised $21,000 without your support, and any contribution truly makes a difference.
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Thank you for standing with us at this urgent time. With your support, VIVO will continue to be a vital space for creation, preservation, and community for decades to come.
The first and most important support I received from VIVO was access to their space and the opportunity to present my projects through their programming. Without this platform, I might not have been able to share these works with the community. What I love about VIVO is not just the space itself, but the incredible technical equipment and expertise they provide to support ambitious projects. Both my one-channel live digital performance and my eight-channel video installation, projects that were technically ambitious and complex, were installed beautifully.
Through VIVO, I was able to connect with exactly the audience I was hoping to reach: video makers, experimental filmmakers, media and interdisciplinary artists. These are the people who came to see my work because they’re already part of VIVO’s community. That connection was invaluable. It gave me a chance to showcase my projects in the best possible context, and to situate my practice within Vancouver’s media arts scene in a meaningful way.
For me, VIVO has always been the key hub for video art and performance in Vancouver. It holds a rich archive of video and performance work that’s an invaluable resource for artists, and it carries the history of media arts in the city. There’s also something distinct about VIVO’s programming, if you go there, you know you’ll encounter experimental video art installations. There simply aren’t many places like VIVO, which is why its presence is so vital.
I am more than grateful for VIVO who have continuously supported my career over the years. In 2023, VIVO hosted my first significant solo performance How far can a marked body go?, providing curatorial, marketing, space, financial, and technical resources. A year prior, VIVO hosted me as a facilitator and curator for a series of workshops entitled the Artist as Artwork where I led art mentorship sessions to a diverse group of emerging artists, majority of whom from IBPOC, LGBTQ2SIA+, and disabled communities. VIVO created a space for the workshops' participants and allowed me to hire a capacity facilitator to help in navigating difficult content and provide accessibility needs during the sessions. They paid a fair compensation to cover my services and supported me in curating a group exhibition with the work of the participants under the title For a Spell. VIVO also supported the various participants who were paid an honorarium and provided with mentorship, technical, and marketing support. Today, VIVO has offered to be the distributor for my latest short film A Dream Pointing to Aadchit, and will be working diligently on spreading it around the festival circuit worldwide.
My performance at VIVO launched my career in Vancouver and with their help, it attracted a full audience whose support and enthusiasm has created a ripple effect that is felt till today. With the residency that they offered to develop the work, and the impeccable technical expertise that their Technical Director, Arman Paxad, provided, I was able to push the limits, both creative and technological, of the piece that I got invited to show at Htmlles festival at Oboro in Montreal the following year. The Artist as Artwork workshop series connected me to various artists, many of whom became friends who continue to be in a mutually supportive relationship with me as we grow our artistic careers alongside each other. VIVO has been more than an organization, they have been a family, and each one of their staff members has been a great supporter and catalyst to my success.
VIVO is a one-of-a-kind organization in Vancouver as it's the only one with a capacity to exhibit technologically demanding media arts projects, thus supporting media and interdisciplinary artists who are creating innovative and boundary-pushing works. As an artist creating video installations and multimedia performances, VIVO is the ideal space that can host my projects and most often than not, the only one that can accommodate their technical requirements. VIVO's archive has become a legacy for video art from around the globe and an invaluable resource for artists and academics. If VIVO no longer exists, hundreds of artists will be starved from opportunities to showcase their work in Vancouver. Organizations such as VIVO, which supports innovation, diversity, and creativity, are indispensable to amplify the local and national art sectors and their disappearance would be a real loss to the art sector, the economy, and the community at large.
VIVO provided me with financial support to set up a research and creation residency in Vancouver during the Push Festival. This support enabled me, as an African artist, to travel to Canada to work, develop contacts, and broaden my creative vision, thanks in particular to the tools and materials available at a space like VIVO. Beyond this financial and material support, the assistance provided by the entire team (technical, communication, and administrative) was extremely useful, allowing me and my Swedish colleagues to work with complete peace of mind.
VIVO is a special place where I would like to return to further explore and exploit the creative possibilities that have been offered to me: since the beginning of the project I developed there, I have been able, for the first time, to work in an environment that offers me a wide range of creative possibilities with the materials available in the VIVO warehouse (whether old screens, cables, or even cameras and sound equipment). The strong connection with the community also allowed us to engage in a process of dialogue, learning from others and growing by using art as a platform for a better life together.
VIVO is an important organization because the environment it provides and the equipment it makes available to artists contribute to a significant material emancipation when one needs to concentrate on creating. Thus, beyond playing a facilitating role, VIVO also positions itself as a key player in the implementation of successful media projects thanks to a team that understands the technical issues and accepts aesthetic deliberations during the creative process.
VIVO is a vital arts organization whose contributions to the production, presentation, and distribution of media arts have profoundly shaped Vancouver’s cultural landscape—and continue to resonate nationally and internationally. The centre has been instrumental in my own growth as an independent curator, arts administrator, and researcher.
In the early 1990s, VIVO—then Video In/Video Out—offered me formative opportunities to develop essential skills in non-profit arts governance through an invitation to join its Board of Directors. I later served as Programming Director, a role that provided both the freedom and the platform to present innovative work by racialized media artists from across Canada and around the world. These experiences were foundational, influencing the direction of my career and deepening my commitment to equity within the arts.
Three decades later, VIVO remains central to my practice. The Crista Dahl Media Library has become a cornerstone of my research at OCAD University on Black Canadian cultural production and exhibition histories. What my research continues to affirm is clear: the arts are essential to the fabric of our society. They require sustained public investment and care if they are to flourish—for current artists and audiences, as well as for the generations who will inherit and build upon this cultural legacy. VIVO is a central part of this legacy!!
In terms of support, VIVO offered not just the facilities, resources, and expertise, but also the artistic and intellectual openness that were necessary for me to experiment and to realize a project that would not have been possible anywhere else in the city.
VIVO was indispensable in the development and production of my most recent project, which continues to reach new audiences and has certainly broadened the breadth of my research focus.
Its values, mandate, and capacity allow it to be a space that cultivates experimentation and research dissemination of contemporary digital and media art practices, which are much needed to ensure Vancouver engages with and contributes to the vibrant international discourse of media arts.
Our project received support in the form of space, technology in the form of various types of functioning old appliances. TV, radio, etc., as well as undisturbed working hours (!). At the same time, VIVO was generous enough to allow us to reach out to participants through their media channels. We were also able to have a work in progress sharing with a talk after. Our program was dutin and in collaboration with PUSH festival.
As the collaboration spans different continents, it was important for us to be able to gather in the same place, build installations, and meet local artists and residents. The residency was crucial for us to be able to make major artistic decisions as we were able to build the installation for the performance.
VIVO is a place where media art can live, grow, be transformed, and live on in formats that extend beyond and within what media art was just 10 years ago. At the same time, its archive is an important part of the history of media art.In my experience, there are not many such places left. This makes VIVO an important bearer of this type of art.
Endless, from the beginning of my art life - I have edited there, rented gear, curated programs, had my work programmed, and VIVO OUT was foundational to my practice in terms of circulating my work both for acquisition and screenings. Forever in my art heart, VIVO has shaped my work, desire to make work, and continues to inspire me.
I was influenced by early video in/n folx, especially Paul Wong and Sara Diamond, who both showed the way to critical and cultural discourses within video art, and multi-channel video installation.
Aside from generating and sustaining a local production, distribution and exhibition space for local video artists, VIVO continues to lead the charge for independent media art production. As well, the archives and library are well-articulated collection for artists and scholars alike.
Pegah Tabassinejad is an Interdisciplinary artist, educator, and wanderer living and working as a stranger—an uninvited guest—on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓ əm, Sḵwx̱ wú7mesh, and Sel̓ íl̓ witulh people.
Tabassinejad's new media practice primarily revolves around the construction of digital and live performances, video installations and city projects.
Her practice acts as an interrogation on themes that include the intersection of digital and surveillance culture on identity, virtual and physical presences and absences, and the forces that structure and shape the movement and perception of marginalized bodies in private and public space.
Tabassinejad holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Simon Fraser University and a BA in Stage Direction from the Art University in Tehran. Her projects have been shown locally and internationally in Europe, North America, and West Asia.
Her notable projects include “Game [3 Berlin/Tehran]” (Volksbühne am Rosa Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin), “Game [2 Vancouver]” (VIVO Media Arts, Vancouver), and showcasing the film at Cineworks Independent FilmMakers Society, “Winter/Interior/A Doll’s House” (Iranshahr Theater Hall – Tehran), “Monitoring [Tehran]” at TADAEX04 (Tehran Annual Digital Art Exhibition).
Ghinwa Yassine (Lebanon/Canada) is an anti-disciplinary artist, based on the unceded Territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-waututh people. Her mixed media work includes film, installation, performance, sound, text and drawing. In her art, Yassine confronts the ideological and patriarchal systems that she grew up in while exploring collective feelings and what it means to be a marked body. She seeks a radical historicizing of individual and collective traumas where embodied memories manifest through story, ritual, and gesture. She pursues community-based research around embodied writing and the healing potential of autobiographical art.
Yassine holds an MFA in contemporary art and interdisciplinary studies at Simon Fraser University, an MA in Digital Video Design from the University of the Arts Utrecht, and a BA in Graphic Design from the American University of Science and Technology in Beirut.
Born and based in Lubumbashi since 1995, Joseph K. Kasau Wa Mambwe holds a degree in Information and Communication Sciences with a specialisation in Performing Arts. With a trans-disciplinary practice that questions structures of dispossession and solidarity, Joseph's artistic gesture revolves around the urgent need to produce new narratives. From theatre and film to photography, installation and creative writing, his work addresses the complexity of memory and identity in a post-colonial urban context. Her research and productions pay close attention to social interactions, highlighting power relations and proposing alternatives for change and coming together.
His experience as a researcher and artistic director has enabled him to develop projects that put people at the centre of all her creations, reflecting on more tactile and human ways of making the world, and affirming his commitment to the environmental cause through stage and installation creations that are part of a global conversation in favour of a decolonial ecology.
Andrea Fatona is an assistant professor in the Criticism and Curatorial program at OCAD University in Toronto. She was the former curator of contemporary art at the Ottawa Art Gallery, and has worked as the programme director at Video In, Vancouver, Co-Director of Artspeak Gallery, Vancouver, and Artistic Director of Artspace Gallery, Peterborough. Fatona is equally concerned with the pedagogical possibilities of art works produced by ‘other’ Canadians in articulating broader perspectives of Canadian identities. At its core, her curatorial practice is concerned with creating spaces of engagement – inside and outside of the gallery walls. Some examples of her curatorial projects are: Queer Collaborations (1993), Across Borders (1995/6), Cadboro Bay: Index to an Incomplete History (1999), The Attack of the Sandwich Men (2001), a national touring exhibition entitled, Reading the Image: Poetics of the Black Diaspora (2006-2008), Fibred Optics (2009-10), Will Work for Food (2011), and Land Marks (2013-14).
Kevin Day’s practice and research, encompassing sound, video, graph, web, and interactive media installations, examine contemporary art’s critical capacity in response to the current socio-political issues of digital culture, negating the encoding, extraction, and exploitation by data colonialism and information capitalism. Informed by philosophy of technology, critical theory, media studies, and digital materialism, his research and practice question the ubiquitous logic of framing the world through information, indicative of an information-based way of knowing. The works resist the extraction and abstraction of algorithmic processes through an insistence on the presence of “noise” in the information-capital complex.
Day was born in Taipei, Taiwan. He received his MFA and PhD from the University of British Columbia and is currently based in Vancouver. He has exhibited at venues such as the Vancouver Art Gallery (Vancouver), InterAccess (Toronto), Centre CLARK (Montreal), Creative Media Centre (Hong Kong), University of Hamburg (Hamburg), Qubit (New York), and presented his research through the top international platforms for art and technology such as SIGGRAPH, ISEA, and Leonardo. His work had been generously funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Currently, he teaches digital art in the UBC Bachelor of Media Studies program and the politics of algorithmic and information systems at the UBC School of Information.
Photo by: Ksenia Cheinman
Majula Drammeh (born 1982) is an interdisciplinary dance and performance artist. Her work is shaped by extensive training in dance theatre at the Laban Center in London, where she holds a BA, and the Stockholm University of the Art, where she holds an MA in Performing Arts. Grounded in dance and choreography, Majula's artistic practice explores how the performing arts create spaces for interpersonal relationships, addressing vulnerability and challenging societal norms. Her work offers participants and actors a platform to explore their bodily identities and the political nuances associated with them. Her performances transcend conventional spaces, taking place in art galleries, city streets, abandoned clubs, dark rooms and video installations. Majula also works as dramaturge for dance and performance.
Dana Claxton is a critically acclaimed artist who works with film, video, photography, single/multi- channel video installation, and performance art. Her practice investigates indigenous beauty, the body, the socio-political and the spiritual. Her work has been shown internationally at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC), Walker Art Centre (Minneapolis, MN), Sundance Film Festival, Salt Lake City (UT), and more. Her work is held in public, private and corporate collections. She is Professor and Head of the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory with the University of British Columbia. She is a member of Wood Mountain Lakota First Nations located in SW Saskatchewan and resides in Vancouver.
