The Happy Phantoms Collective (founded 2019): a creative team who probe difficult and provocative themes that haunt the human experience.
Founding Members: Natasha Torres-Garner + Ming Hon + Mia van Leeuwen + Tanja Woloshen
In the summer of 2020 – a summer of griefs & ghosts – the Happy Phantoms explored the theme of < death > by dialogue while they moved to the ancient principles of memento mori as a contemporary art praxis; playing in ritual, performance, photography and video art. Initiated by Mia van Leeuwen as an extension of her long-term research-creation project How to Raise a Ghost, this project was marked by each collective member and their personal relationship to death.
Joining forces with photographer Karen Asher, the book How to Raise a Ghost: A Performance in Pictures was created in the Exchange District (July, 2020 Winnipeg, Treaty 1 Territory, Canada).
Spectre and Apparition make a great Noise in the World … Between our Ancestors laying too much stress upon them, and the present Age endeavouring wholly to explode and despise them, the World seems hardly ever to have come to a right Understanding about them.
‘A. Moreton’ (Daniel Defoe), Secrets of the Invisible World (1783)
*With funding support from The Manitoba Arts Council: Create Grant.
Mia Star van Leeuwen 