QCC PERFORMANCE: Holding Multiplicity - Lichen Bouboushian

Description

Queer City Cinema Inc. (based in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada) was initiated in 1996 as a biennial film and video festival and has, over the years, come to the program's film and performance art.

Additional Information

The organization now presents one festival annually - a combination of Performatorium: Festival of Queer Performance and Queer City Cinema: Film Festival.

2025 - IdentiFIRE, PERFORMATORIUM FESTIVAL OF QUEER PERFORMANCE 12 / QUEER CITY CINEMA FILM FESTIVAL 21 SEPTEMBER 10-13, 2025

Multiplicity is a ritual for healing in a body that carries too many unseen valences to feel understood. It is a stand-up comedy routine drenched in performance art. It is the keening, ululating voice and seething, stretching body working with and against each other. This work holds many levels of experience at once, as it traces the contours of my white, 1st generation Lebanese, Diaspora Armenian, rural Texas, working class, educated selfhood. It illuminates the stories that comprise my experience through humor, open-heartedness, and a resilience borne of refusal. As I share, I pour Karo syrup – a key ingredient in Texan and Lebanese desserts – over my body. As it slowly drips in pitter-patters onto the drop cloth below, it functions as a reminder of the ways in which I layer myself with palatability to negotiate this complex existence. It calls me back toward the sticky, difficult-to-escape reality of holding many experiences simultaneously, in one body. Rather than seek legibility, I applaud and uplift the ways my forebears taught me to evade it, and instead insist on our broader community’s happiness and well-being.
This event will happen in-person at Central Library, Dunlop Art Gallery (2311 12th Avenue).

Lichen Bouboushian is a non-binary performance artist based in central Texas, with a history of practice in Chicago and New York City. They build a rhizomatic practice through visible forays into performance, curating, and teaching, and less visible forays into writing, dialogue, mutual aid, and resource sharing.

As a solo performer, they create emotionally jarring juxtapositions of text, experimental voice work, and somatics-based movement practices. They dive into their family history—a blend of heritage from Germany, East Texas, Armenia, and Lebanon—to ask critical questions about ancestry, migration, and social privilege. Their sense of self is carved out by multiplicities that do not synthesize: they are the descendant of both refugees and conquerors, blue-collar criminals and community educators; they experience white privilege as well as the challenges of being first-generation and working-class. This social positioning fuels the personal and collective scrutiny and healing that are central to their work.

They have shared work in New York City at Dixon Place, JACK, Danspace Project, Issue Project Room, Center for Performance Research, and the Queens Museum. They have also presented at Elastic Arts, Constellation, and Co-Prosperity Sphere in Chicago. They have held residencies at New York Live Arts (Fresh Tracks) and Chez Bushwick, Movement Research, Mount Tremper, Santa Fe Art Institute, and Stove Works.

They have also performed in Athens and Beirut, and in festivals including the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, New Genre Festival (Tulsa), Miami Performance International Festival, QueerNY and Queer Zagreb, Inverse Performance Art Festival (Fayetteville, AR), and Month of Performance Art-Berlin.