CURRENT: Feminist Electronic Art Symposium is a multidisciplinary, intersectional, music and electronic art symposium working with women and non-binary artists in Vancouver and beyond.
The inaugural event took place in July of 2017 as a 3-day, multi-venue, music and arts showcase featuring events, panels, youth mentorships, and workshops. We expanded our programming in our second year which took place in July 2018 as a 5-day, multi-venue event which included performances, workshops, keynotes, panels, gallery exhibition, film screenings and community focus groups for municipal arts & culture policy recommendations.
This year’s CURRENT Symposium will take the form of a Mentorship Program, in which selected applicants will participate in 3 full day sessions and receive a stipend. In these sessions, we wish to impart the skills necessary for our participants to continue making culture, from the embodied point of view of underrepresented communities. By following a localized curriculum, the Mentorship Program will prepare its participants in the areas of grant writing, curatorial vision development, community building, project planning, budgeting, networking, and multi-day event programming. All participants will be offered future cultural production opportunities where they can apply their skills through our future programming with our partners at New Forms Festival, FUSE at the Vancouver Art Gallery, James Black Gallery, Western Front, The Pace and VIVO Media Arts Centre in Vancouver.
The purpose of this structured mentorship program is so local emerging and aspiring cultural producers have an opportunity to learn from CURRENT’s team and network on how to produce events and arts programming similar to CURRENT. We hope to nurture more BIPOC cultural producers in this city and contribute to BC’s electronic art and cultural production pedagogy.
We were inspired by the quality and variety of the applications we received, and excited to learn about the different self-initiated + community based practices in Vancouver and beyond. Thank you to all applicants for their time and dedication to our community.
Alexandra Chen was born in the suburbs of Paris and moved to Vancouver in 2012, quickly immersing herself in the underground electronic music community. This new world soon became home and she has since been organizing diverse events, hosting artists and working with several partners to help cultivate and advance both the profile of the city and the tastes of the community in a global context. She hopes to facilitate events that are exciting and ambitious, and to amplify the voices of minorities that are underrepresented in the industry.
Alex’s music business-related roles currently include a having a seat on the New Forms Media Society’s Board of Directors, co-producing for CURRENT: Feminist Electronic Art Symposium; and working as a booking agent for Discwoman.
Nancy Lee is an interdisciplinary media artist, filmmaker and electronic music curator. Her work stimulates and enlivens space, making a provocative statement about how inescapably interconnected we are with our surroundings. The notion of staging is a constant in Nancy’s work and underpins her projects from a more traditional filmmaker, through her conception and planning of music events, and into the realms of VR and new media performance and installation, where her art practices continue to coalesce and evolve. Nancy recently directed a VR 360 video dance film Tidal Traces” produced by the National Film Board of Canada which has been screened at Mutek, SXSW, and Cannes Film Festival.
Nancy is a co-founder of electronic music and art collective Chapel Sound – a collective that has supporting emerging artists in Vancouver for the last 6 years. This year, Nancy co-produced CURRENT: Feminist Electronic Art Symposium, a 5-day multidisciplinary and intersectional music and electronic art symposium working with women and non-binary artists. Supported by BC Arts Council and Canada Council of the Arts, Nancy has performed and presented her work at Vancouver International Jazz Festival, New Forms Festival, International Symposium for Electronic Art (Vancouver & Durban), International Electroacoustic Music Festival, the conference New Interfaces for Musical Expression (Australia), and The International Conference on Live Coding. Nancy is a 2018 YWCA Women of Distinction Nominee for Art, Cultural & Design and is named one of BC’s Most Influential Women in STEM for 2018.
Ashlee Luk is a musician, curator and graphic artist. They make up part of electronic duo Minimal Violence and punk trio Lié. Luk has been working as an event curator in the city for over five years both as a founder of queer techno initiative Bodyheat and as part of Sacred Sound Club collective. Luk is drawn towards electronic music because of its ability to bridge the intersections of culture. Electronic music is focused around community gathering and embodies the shift away from the ego and towards collective experience. It is because of this that they believe in music as a dominant force in restructuring the cultural narrative.
Soledad Fatima Muñoz is an interdisciplinary artist born in Toronto, Canada and raised in Rancagua, Chile. Her work explores the analogy between the ever-changing social spaces we inhabit, and an embodied experience of sound. She is the founder of Genero, a label and audio project which focuses in the greater representation of women and non-binary people working in the sound realm.
Soledad is a recent graduate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she received a New Artist Society Full Merit Scholarship. She is also the recipient of The City of Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award for Emerging Artist in Craft and Design and Emily Carr President's Media Award.
Jen Sungshine speaks for a living, but lives for breathing life into unspoken situations in unusual places. She is a nerdy queer Taiwanese interdisciplinary artist/activist, facilitator, and community mentor based in Vancouver, BC, and the Co-Creative Director and founder of Love Intersections a media arts collective that cultivate a vision of collaborative filmmaking and relational storytelling. Jen’s artistic practice involves learning through unlearning; and instead of calling you out, she wants to call you in, to make artful social change with her. In the audience, she looks for art in your interruption.
www.jensungshine.com
Alexandra Chen was born in the suburbs of Paris and moved to Vancouver in 2012, quickly immersing herself in the underground electronic music community. This new world soon became home and she has since been organizing diverse events, hosting artists and working with several partners to help cultivate and advance both the profile of the city and the tastes of the community in a global context. She hopes to facilitate events that are exciting and ambitious, and to amplify the voices of minorities that are underrepresented in the industry.
Alex’s music business-related roles currently include a having a seat on the New Forms Media Society’s Board of Directors, co-producing for CURRENT: Feminist Electronic Art Symposium; and working as a booking agent for Discwoman.
Nancy Lee is an interdisciplinary media artist, filmmaker and electronic music curator. Her work stimulates and enlivens space, making a provocative statement about how inescapably interconnected we are with our surroundings. The notion of staging is a constant in Nancy’s work and underpins her projects from a more traditional filmmaker, through her conception and planning of music events, and into the realms of VR and new media performance and installation, where her art practices continue to coalesce and evolve. Nancy recently directed a VR 360 video dance film Tidal Traces” produced by the National Film Board of Canada which has been screened at Mutek, SXSW, and Cannes Film Festival.
Nancy is a co-founder of electronic music and art collective Chapel Sound – a collective that has supporting emerging artists in Vancouver for the last 6 years. This year, Nancy co-produced CURRENT: Feminist Electronic Art Symposium, a 5-day multidisciplinary and intersectional music and electronic art symposium working with women and non-binary artists. Supported by BC Arts Council and Canada Council of the Arts, Nancy has performed and presented her work at Vancouver International Jazz Festival, New Forms Festival, International Symposium for Electronic Art (Vancouver & Durban), International Electroacoustic Music Festival, the conference New Interfaces for Musical Expression (Australia), and The International Conference on Live Coding. Nancy is a 2018 YWCA Women of Distinction Nominee for Art, Cultural & Design and is named one of BC’s Most Influential Women in STEM for 2018.
Ashlee Luk is a musician, curator and graphic artist. They make up part of electronic duo Minimal Violence and punk trio Lié. Luk has been working as an event curator in the city for over five years both as a founder of queer techno initiative Bodyheat and as part of Sacred Sound Club collective. Luk is drawn towards electronic music because of its ability to bridge the intersections of culture. Electronic music is focused around community gathering and embodies the shift away from the ego and towards collective experience. It is because of this that they believe in music as a dominant force in restructuring the cultural narrative.
Soledad Fatima Muñoz is an interdisciplinary artist born in Toronto, Canada and raised in Rancagua, Chile. Her work explores the analogy between the ever-changing social spaces we inhabit, and an embodied experience of sound. She is the founder of Genero, a label and audio project which focuses in the greater representation of women and non-binary people working in the sound realm.
Soledad is a recent graduate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she received a New Artist Society Full Merit Scholarship. She is also the recipient of The City of Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award for Emerging Artist in Craft and Design and Emily Carr President's Media Award.
Jen Sungshine speaks for a living, but lives for breathing life into unspoken situations in unusual places. She is a nerdy queer Taiwanese interdisciplinary artist/activist, facilitator, and community mentor based in Vancouver, BC, and the Co-Creative Director and founder of Love Intersections a media arts collective that cultivate a vision of collaborative filmmaking and relational storytelling. Jen’s artistic practice involves learning through unlearning; and instead of calling you out, she wants to call you in, to make artful social change with her. In the audience, she looks for art in your interruption.
www.jensungshine.com