Announcing: Topique programming at Pique #20

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.

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.

Touring Across Borders

Artists, agents, and programmers share strategies for navigating international touring amid evolving visa restrictions and geopolitical challenges.

Care, Curation, and Decolonization

Curators reflect on anti-oppressive approaches to artistic presentation and building more accountable cultural spaces.

Doing It Together: Care and Community

Organizers and community builders explore collective models, resource-sharing, and sustaining artist-led ecosystems.

Sonic Resistance

Artists examine how sound and listening practices can function as tools for resistance, solidarity, and political expression.

Decolonial Devices and Community Sound Design

Artists and technologists present community-led approaches to sound design, instrument building, and reclaiming creative tools.

Global Sound System Cultures (Film Screenings)

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.

Rooted in artist-led knowledge sharing and critical exchange, this year’s program centres 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.

Learn more about programming here.

Speakers

This edition welcomes a dynamic lineup of speakers from Uganda, Hong Kong, the United States, and across Canada, including:

• Afrorack - Ugandan artist and engineer pioneering DIY modular synthesizers

• apè - Filipinx-Canadian sound artist and Artistic Director of Venus Fest

• Bells Larsen - Polaris Prize–longlisted songwriter exploring identity and transformation

• Eekwol - award-winning Cree hip-hop artist and community activist

• Jarrett Martineau - Indigenous curator, scholar, and host of CBC’s Reclaimed

• Justin Sweeting - co-founder and Head of Music at Hong Kong’s Clockenflap festival

• Liz Barron - Métis cultural strategist and Director of the Indigenous Curatorial Collective

• Mira Silvers - award-winning live music executive, founder and president of FORT Agency, and co-founder of FEMINAE NOX

• MNSA - Lebanese-Canadian DJ, producer, and co-founder of Laylit

• Tiana McLaughlan and Rian Adamian (MORPH Sound System) - collective empowering women and queer communities through sound system building

• PC - DJ and community organizer spotlighting Pan-African sounds

• Rosina Kazi - artist, co-founder of Unit 2 community space, and member of protest electronic duo LAL

• Skulk!d - artist, producer, youth mentor and co-founder of Produced By Youth

• LITA (Sonic Liberation Devices) - artist and creative technologist building tools for sonic resistance

• Winta Hagos (It’s OK* Studios) - cultural producer and spatial strategist supporting emerging creative spaces

Plus additional artists, activists, and thinkers participating in Pique.

Screenings

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.

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.

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.

Screenings are free to attend with a ticket to Pique, and pay-what-you-can at the door.

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, with accessibility information available on the Pique website.

Register for Topique here.