Kim Tomczak is a multidisciplinary artist primarily known for his work in performance, photography, and video. Born in Victoria, BC in 1952, he graduated with honours from the Vancouver School of Art (now the Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design) in 1975. His work has been shown extensively both nationally and internationally, at venues including the Paris Biennale; the Canadian Cultural Centre (Paris); the Video Biennale (Vienna) – where he received first prize for a tape co-produced with Lisa Steele – as well as the Musée des Beaux Arts de Montréal; Documenta 8 (Kassel, Germany); and the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris). His work is in many collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), and Oakville Galleries.
Since 1983, Tomczak has worked exclusively in collaboration with Lisa Steele, producing videotapes, performances and photo/text works. They have received numerous grants and awards, including the Bell Canada Award in Video Art, administered by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Peter Herndorff Award for Media Arts through the Toronto Arts Awards, and, in 2005, a Governor-General’s Award for lifetime achievement in Visual and Media Arts. They have been awarded two public art commissions, one for an outdoor screen at Toronto’s Dundas Square, and Watertable, a light installation that marks the original shoreline of Lake Ontario.
Recent exhibitions of their video and photo/text works include a major survey at the Wharf Centre d’art Contemporain de Basse-Normandie, and group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto), Le Mois de la Photo (Montréal), and the Toronto International Film Festival’s Future Projections series. An exhibition of their newest installation work, The Long Time: the 21st Century Work of Steele + Tomczak, curated by Paul Wong, was exhibited in Vancouver in 2012 and tours other Canadian centres in 2013-14.
Tomczak is a co-founder of Vtape and taught at the University of Toronto in the Visual Studies program, Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design. Steele and Tomczak were awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of British Columbia (Okanagan) in 2009, and with Lisa Steele received the 2023 Founders Achievement Award from the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts.
Kim Tomczak retired from Vtape in 2023.