Prepare to embrace the monster within at ARTIVISM: Monsters and other(ed) bodies. For the 9th edition of this UBC festival, ARTIVISM invites audiences to embrace the monster within, reclaiming monstrosity as a site of solidarity and resistance. Through haunted creative spaces, we dare pose the question: what if the label of monster became a source of power, not shame? Join us in imagining a world where the displaced, the marginal and the queer come together to forge revolutionary futures.
Produced by UBC Arts and Culture District with 2025 Creative Director Carmen Toledo Bores, in partnership with the Exposure UBC student club team, this annual festival brings together queer, racialized and displaced creators whose identities have been framed as unnatural, unreal or dangerous. Through live performances, creative workshops, community-led projects and archival work, ARTIVISM becomes a portal into the future, where uncontainable identities are celebrated and embraced.
Watch this page for a complete list of festival art happenings as they are announced, and follow us on Instagram!
“As part of oppressed and marginalized communities, we have been called monsters: aliens, animals, invaders, we have been portrayed as unnatural and unreal. What happens when we gather in all our unapologetic forms and build limitless communities, where we don’t need to be understood but held and empowered? ARTIVISM: Monsters and other(ed) bodies is an invitation to embrace the claws, wings and horns, to see our corporealities in different ways: deserving, shape-shifting, and unsurveillable–to build realities where non-conforming creativity becomes resistance.”
– 2025 Creative Director Carmen Toledo Bores
Watch this page for a complete list of festival art happenings as they are announced, and follow us on Instagram!
Looking back
In the Spotlight
Learn more about previous ARTIVISM events, highlights, and the creative process:
Producing Partners and Sponsors
The 2024 ARTIVSIM Festival could not have happened without the support of UBC Equity and Inclusion and the Faculty of Arts.
Thank you also to our wonderful Community Partners including Vancouver Playback Theatre, Great Dane Coffee as well as UBC Partners: The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, UBC Museum of Anthropology, Chan Centre for the Performing Arts + Musqueam, AMS Hatch Gallery, UBC Drag, Koerner’s Pub, UBC Film Society, Sprouts and the AUS Equity and Inclusion Department.
