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TBA
Posted inTBA

The Time-Based Art Festival Is Still Alive

With virtual landscapes, textile talismans, and sonic architecture, TBA 2025 centered artists who reshape space.
Avatar photo Lindsay Costello

If this year’s Time-Based Art Festival (TBA) had a goal, it might’ve been to twist our perceptions of the everyday. Angelo Scott’s Omni Rail turned the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) into an echoing instrument; Freddie Robins’ Apotropaic elevated cardboard and wool into high-concept reflections on folk ritual. San Cha’s Inebria me made religious […]

Posted inTBA

In Horizon, Nothing Stays Still For Long

Tahni Holt and Emma Lutz-Higgins delivered a relational dance of boulders, breath, and light.
Avatar photo Lindsay Costello

Toward the end of Tahni Holt and Emma Lutz-Higgins’ Time-Based Art Festival performance Horizon, something clicked. Eurythmics’ “Love is a Stranger” swelled from the warehouse speakers at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art as Holt scooted across the stage, hidden beneath a hollow sculpture of a boulder. (Imagine a rock crawling across the ground in slow-motion.) […]

Posted inTBA

San Cha’s Inebria Me Reimagines Religious Ecstasy

The queer opera draws from mystic saints and ’90s telenovelas to tell a rare and radical love story.
Avatar photo Lindsay Costello

At the pinnacle of San Cha’s opera Inebria me, an apparition in white emerged: Esperanza (Kyle Kidd), angelic and blood-smeared, clutching a red rose. Dolores (San Cha, the show’s librettist and composer) gazed at the spirit, her expression a blend of awe and longing, the unraveling newlywed finally alight with something beyond grief. Her encounter […]

Posted inTBA

At the 2025 Time-Based Art Festival, West Coast Is Best Coast

After losing federal grant funding, TBA pushes forward with queer opera, Native storytelling, and radical soundscapes.
Avatar photo Lindsay Costello

Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) turned 30 this year, making it both a millennial and the creator of the city’s shiniest experimental performance jewel, the Time-Based Art Festival (TBA). Returning September 4-14, this year’s fest brings a full-force two-weekend lineup packed with multimodal poetry, queer opera, and shape-shifting dance. You’ll find programming at four […]

Posted inTBA

TBA Review: Goner Contains Some of the Best Booty-Shaking You’ll Ever See

Is Malik Nashad Sharpe’s choreography a means of torture, escape, or memory?
Avatar photo Suzette Smith

Every 2024 Time Based Art Festival preview—including ours—gravitated towards the image of choreographer Malik Nashad Sharpe (AKA Marikiscrycrycry) shirtless, sweating, and dripping blood from his mouth, mid-laugh. To say Sharpe stood out is something of an understatement, especially since it’s a long-practiced tradition for contemporary performance and concept artists to make their work look as […]

Posted inTBA

TBA Review: If You Want Solitude, Stay Far Away From Club Alive

Kye Grant’s monthly, genre-fluid event blends participatory art and dance parties.
Avatar photo Lindsay Costello

“The apparel is quite special,” my friend Rose mused. She was right. While awaiting entry into Club Alive, my field of vision swam with humans sporting face gems, organza, velvet bell bottoms, pink pleats, and patent leather. The monthly, genre-fluid performance party helmed by artist-experimenter Kye Grant [who—full disclosure—has written for this publication -eds] has […]

Posted inTheater & Performance

TBA Review: Te Moana Meridian Proposes Moving the Prime Meridian

Sam Hamilton makes a solid proposal; Mere Tokorahi Boynton sings it in te reo Māori.
Avatar photo Suzette Smith

Upon reading that Sam Hamilton’s Te Moana Meridian delivers a speculative UN policy proposal to move the prime meridian from Greenwich, England to its completely opposite coordinates in the South Pacific Ocean, I wondered if the audience might be asked to participate in an experimental model UN. Part of the fun of the Time Based […]

Posted inVisual Art

The Mercury’s Time-Based Art Festival Picks

Don’t miss the dance parties, itty bitty music collages, and complete cacophonies—planning your TBA 2024 itinerary is an art form in itself.
Avatar photo Martha Daghlian

In keeping with its perma-tentative title, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA)’s annual experimental performance fete has regularly seen major shifts with each year’s iteration. But one thing we can always count on is the Time Based Art (TBA) festival’s massive lineup of cutting edge work. Which makes planning your TBA itinerary an art form […]

Posted inTBA

Portland’s Favorite Experimental, Time Based Art Festival Bounces Back

On the TBA 2024 schedule: weird music, Black horror, and an opera about the prime meridian.
Avatar photo Martha Daghlian

The schedule for Portland’s favorite experimental art festival, TBA, dropped this week. After last year’s slow roll out, the fest returns with three weekends of weird music, Black horror, and an opera about the prime meridian.

Is the schedule for PICA’s Time Based Art festival part of the fest? (*°ω°) And other mental gymnastics associated with Portland’s favorite experimental art fete.

Posted inTheater & Performance

Portland’s Time-Based Art Festival (TBA) Goes Time-Released

Avatar photo Martha Daghlian

The more things change, the more they stay the same—especially for a contemporary arts festival founded to highlight the most cutting-edge innovations in art. The Time-Based Art Festival—PICA’s flagship event for the past 20 years, known to most of us as TBA—is going through some changes this year.  As an experiment, Portland Institute for Contemporary […]

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TBA Review: They Can Never Burn the Stars Is TBA at Its Best

Standing in certain locations turned viewers’ bodies into conduits for deep vibrating bass lines.
Avatar photo Martha Daghlian

I must have missed something at the start of They Can Never Burn the Stars. A few minutes into the collaborative audiovisual performance by Pacific Islander interdisciplinary artist D.B. Amorin and Cree sound artist Chloe Alexandra Thompson, a few people stood up and started walking out. “Wow, rude! The show just started,” I naively thought. […]

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