Featured Artists // Art Crawl // Workshops & Events
HOLD FAST Festival is a celebration of contemporary performance, interdisciplinary art, and community engagement in St. John’s, Ktaqmkuk/NL. This year’s festival takes place August 19-24.
- Facilitating community engagement and meaningful exchange
- Increasing public arts literacy
- Creating opportunities for artists
- Critiquing and subverting structural oppressions & systems of power, with emphasis on:
- queer, feminist, and anti-racist perspectives
- Newfoundland & Labrador regional identity
- and Indigenous resistance to colonialism
HOLD FAST culminates in a Saturday afternoon Art Crawl, a series of performances, installations, and interactive pop-ups staged outdoors and in non-gallery venues across downtown St. John’s. Past programming has included performances, interactive installations, artist talks, workshops, dance, drag, burlesque, film screenings, and free community events for people of all ages.
HOLD FAST respectfully acknowledges that the land we are occupying is the unceded and ancestral homelands of the Beothuk and that Ktaqmkuk, known as the island of Newfoundland, is home to the Mi’kmaq peoples. We would also like to recognize the Inuit of Nunatsiavut and NunatuKavut, and the Innu of Nitassinan as the original peoples of Labrador. We strive to move beyond acknowledgment to active solidarity, by building meaningful relationships in our communities, dismantling structures of white supremacy, and opposing ongoing colonization. We invite our communities to consider their own responsibilities to Indigenous peoples and to the stolen lands where we make our homes.
2024 HOLD FAST Report
Read “Come Around Again: HOLD FAST at 25,” a reflection on the HOLD FAST Festival 2024 by writer-in-residence Chad Feehan, along with images from official festival photographers Ethel Brown and Shireen Merchant.
HOLD FAST 2024: Featured Artists
HOLD FAST 2024: Art Crawl Schedule
HOLD FAST 2024: Workshops & Events Schedule
