It used to be natural for art audiences to associate the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) with its flagship fall festival, the Time Based Art Festival (TBA). But due to the pandemic and major leadership changes in 2023, Portland hasn’t seen a typical TBA since 2022, and before that in 2019.
Not that a festival whose name is based on the placeholder phrase “to be announced” should ever be predictable.
Now in its 21st year, TBA returns this September with fresh energy and three (!) weekends of performances, dance parties, conceptual stand-up comedy and an exhibition of worn-out debris from ancient mountains that may never have existed – to name just a few of the events planned. PICA has just announced the festival’s full program and by all accounts, it’s going to be a blast!
As in past years, TBA 2024 is scheduled to take place at venues across the city, starting from PICA headquarters in the northeast of the city, moving downtown and finally to Performance Works NorthWest in Foster Powell.
Interactivity—always an element of TBA—is a major element of the festival’s opening night, when music and digital media experimenters Videotones invite audiences to bring their own instruments and create a cacophony in the PNCA’s 511 Gallery. From there, viewers stream on to explore the local galleries participating in the Pearl District’s First Thursday Art Walk, providing an elegant way to put the festival in conversation with the broader arts community.
The following evening, TBA delights with performances such as Sam Hamilton’s experimental opera about the political implications of global cartography, Te Moana Meridian. If that doesn’t appeal to you, how about a dance performance that evokes a new aesthetic tradition of black horror? You should check out Marikiscrycrycrys AwayOn September 14, a conceptual music performance called Granular synthesis will probably strike a chord in the city’s offbeat music niche.
Want to delve deeper? TBA’s free “Institute” sessions, spread throughout the festival, are a great way to learn how contemporary artists come up with these eccentric, sometimes even profound ideas and turn them into brilliant performances. Q&A fans, this is your thing.
But if you’re not ready to go back to school with Institute, that’s OK too—PICA has long considered partying an art. Late-night TBA events have had many different names over the years, and this year’s hottest nighttime program is now called the After Party. Expect plenty of dancing, movies, and drag performances.
So does the return to compressed festival form in 2024 mean that TBA is finally settling into a predictable, standardized framework? Of course not! As artistic directors Erin Boburg Doughton and Kristan Kennedy wrote in this year’s program, the festival’s flexibility is a feature, not a turning point, and it is all the more necessary in these uncertain times: “After 21 years, we know there will be no new normal,” the introduction reads. “We will continue to change.”
The full 2024 TBA schedule can be found here.
The Time Based Art Festival takes place Thursday, September 5th through Sunday, September 22nd at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) and various other venues, schedule and ticket information.
