Topique returns with artist-led conversations on care, resistance, and cultural futures

This summer, Topique returns on June 12–13, 2026 as Pique’s knowledge forum, enriching the festival’s 20th edition with a focused program of panels, artist talks, screenings, and demonstrations. Taking place at the Arts Court, the two-day gathering brings together artists, cultural workers, and makers from Uganda, Hong Kong, the United States, and across Canada to engage in timely conversations around equity, sustainability, and collective futures in the arts.

Rooted in artist-led knowledge sharing and critical exchange, this year’s program centres the conditions shaping how art is made, shared, and sustained today—from navigating borders and institutional barriers to building community-led infrastructure and reclaiming creative tools.

Across disciplines and perspectives, these six sessions explore care, resistance, and collaboration as essential practices, inviting participants to imagine more just, connected, and responsive cultural ecosystems.

Navigating international touring
Sustaining artist-led ecosystems
Sonic resistance and solidarity
Decolonial instrument building and sound design
Global sound system cultures

Admission to all Topique sessions is pay-what-you-can online or at the door. Each session is subject to the capacity of the venue it is held in, and a pass does not guarantee admission or a seat in all sessions. Please plan to arrive early to ensure admission.

REGISTER

Touring Across Borders: Artist Mobility in the Current Geopolitical Climate

In today’s geopolitical climate, evolving travel restrictions, visa processes, and immigration regulations continue to make international touring more complex, especially for queer artists of colour.

Despite these challenges, artists and organizers are still finding ways to move, connect, and share their work with audiences around the world. This panel brings together artists, agents, festival programmers, and community organizers from Canada and beyond to unpack the realities of touring across borders in 2026. Together, they will discuss common obstacles, from navigating visa processes, changing government regulations, and unexpected logistical hurdles to managing the emotional weight of traveling under heightened scrutiny.

Through practical solutions, lived experiences, and collective knowledge-sharing, the conversation will offer guidance on best practices and strategies for adapting when plans shift or fall through. At its core, this session creates space for honest reflections on what it means to move through the world as an artist today, and how resilience, care, and community continue to shape the journey.

Speakers: Bells Larsen, Justin Sweeting, Mira Silvers, MNSA, Rana Ghose

Sonic Resistance

Music has long served as a tool for resistance, bringing people together in protest through songs, chants, and collective action. Even beyond traditional forms of protest music, engaged artists use sound and noise to reflect their values, demonstrate resistance, and respond to the world around them.

At its core, this conversation asks what it means to listen politically, to create under pressure, and to use sound not only as expression, but as a way of gathering, resisting, and transforming the conditions we move through. Participating artists explore the many ways they are using sound, noise, and sonic experimentation as forms of resistance in times of political unrest.

Through different practices and perspectives, speakers will consider how listening, making, and sharing sound can become acts of resistance and solidarity.

Speakers: Charlotte Qamaniq

Eekwol

Doing It Together: Care and Community

In an era shaped by DIY culture, competition, and increasing individualism, this panel highlights the importance of collective approaches to sustaining artistic communities. Bringing together venue owners, organizers, and community builders, the conversation centres on co-creation, peer learning, and creating artist-led spaces where work can be cultivated together. Through shared experiences and practical insights, speakers will explore how collective care, resource-sharing, and mutual support can act as forms of resistance, and how working together can build more sustainable and connected ecosystems for artists.

Speakers: apé (Venus Fest), Rosina Kazi (Unit 2)
Winta Hagos (It’s OK Studios)
Moderated by: skulK!d (Produced By Youth Inc.) and
PC (Plantains & Caviar)

Decolonial Devices and Community Sound Design: Seizing the Means of Production

This session brings together artists, engineers, and community organizers working at the intersections of sound, technology, and community. Together, they reflect on the environments they shape and the communities they are accountable to, spanning mentorship, boundary-pushing performance, and experimental invention.

This dialogue explores decolonial and community-led sound design practices through a series of presentations, demonstrations, and a panel discussion.

Grounded in knowledge-sharing, access, and collective care, the conversation considers how sound systems, instruments, and creative tools can be reimagined outside extractive and exclusionary frameworks, and can instead, centre practices that are locally rooted, collectively and cooperatively owned, and responsive to the communities they emerge from.

Speakers: MORPH Sound System (Tiana McLaughlan and Rian Adamian), Sonic Liberation Devices (LITA and alsoknownasrox)
Moderated by: Elsa Mirzaei

Global Sound System Cultures

A curated program of short films exploring sound system cultures across Mexico, West Bengal, and Toronto, highlighting sonic practices as forms of resistance, identity, and community building.

Rewind/Forward offers audiences a fuller view of local bass music culture across eras, genres, and communities. Featuring five local selectors (DJs) and sound system owners: Witness Ace Dillinger, Bambii, Heather “Live Wire” Bubb-Clarke, Nino Brown, and Tasha Rozez.

Sonografía is an experimental audiovisual documentary by Ollin Miranda (Dub Jam High Collective) that talks about sound system culture and the music as a medium of resistance around the world.

BASS BOSS investigates Dek Bass, a sound system style unique to West Bengal and sets out to meet its elusive leading light, DJ Khobir. Overwhelming, aggressive, and prone to virulent fandom in his region, this form of sonic expression and assertion is of its own genesis. There is no reference to Jamaican sound system culture within. It was rendered pure and unadulterated from the mind of one person: DJ Khobir.

Films: Sonografía, Rewind/Forward, BASS BOSS
Presented by: MUTEK

Registration: pay-what-you-can

Admission to Topique is pay-what-you-can online or at the door. Sessions are open to all ages and skill-levels.

Menu