Tape Condition: degraded is an immersive installation and community digitization station that engages with The ArQuives’s collection of more than 3,000 VHS tapes, about one-third of which are porn.

LGBTQ+ communities and community-based archives have long searched for ‘gay heroes’ to showcase both queer existence and accomplishment across time and space.

For the solo exhibition Traces, Ottawa-based multidisciplinary artist Christos Pantieras brings together five of his existing series, all of which explore, appropriate, and recontextualize the remnants of everyday human practices.

"Dissident Family" brings together artworks that speak to the biological family that the artist grew up in, and to the family she has created and nurtured. It speaks to the central place of dissidence in her spiritual, political and familial life.

Presented by The ArQuives in partnership with Nuit Rose, Queering Space invites celebrated Canadian queer artists to create contemporary multidisciplinary responses to The ArQuives’s historical collection, reigniting its relevance while exploring the evolution of queer sites across space and time.

From the first appearance of subversive same-sex interaction on film, in William K.L. Dickson’s motion picture The Dickson Experimental Sound Film/The Gay Brothers (1895), the representation of LGBTQ characters and themes in popular cinema has been largely stereotypical.

Butch: Not Like the Other Girls is a photographic exploration of the liminal spaces occupied by female masculinity in contemporary communities by photographer SD Holman.

The ArQuives’s 2014 WorldPride exhibition, Imaging Home: Resistance, Migration, and Contradiction, brings together documentary video and photographic work that raises significant questions about the meaning of “home” in a world that keeps refining homophobic and racist oppression.

Taken in tandem with the recent surge in interest, among younger and increasingly diverse generations of queer academic, activist, and artistic communities, in mining queer archives, Gay Premises: Radical Voices in the Archives, 1973-1983, timely in its confluence with The ArQuives’s 40th anniversary, operates at the threshold between Canada’s gay liberation past as a complex and contested foundation for the queer present and its potential futures.

Sex Lives and Videotape is the latest in a series of interactive community events exploring the diverse materiality of artifacts within The ArQuives.

Performance art, cabaret and burlesque are accepted arenas for expression of queer themes through movement; but what about the more conventional world of dance performance?

Ian Phillips is a visual artist and publisher whose small literary and art press, Pas de chance, has been active for over twenty-five years. In a chance pairing, the artists’ unique bodies of work come together not only through a common interest in illustration, but also through the transformative and queer—potential of colour, shape, and form.