Summer 2019 June – September 2019 OVERVIEW
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exhibitions / programs / events Summer 2019 June – September 2019 OVERVIEW As we enter The Power Plant’s second collaborative video installations of Mario Pfeifer, all year, exhibition season of 2019, we pause Summer 2019 at which investigate and interject in the conventions to acknowledge the importance of of film, from viral music videos to anthropological all free the aLL YEAR, aLL FREE program. The Power Plant documentaries. Together, Summer’s exhibiting artists reinforce Thanks to the support of BMO Financial Group, the the crucial role that artists have to play in helping gallery is able to eliminate admission fees, enabling us make sense of the world around us. PREsEntEd By Share some of your Summer with us all visitors, young and old, to access our exhibitions. We are pleased to present a superb schedule Join us all year long at The Power Plant, where as we present three captivating of free public programming, enabling visitors to admission is always FREE. exhibitions by thought-provoking experience the works on view through artist talks, international artists. exhibition tours and film screenings. We welcome you to one (or all!) of our many opportunities to Each of our exhibiting artists this Summer shares a engage more deeply with our exhibitions. commitment to questioning received wisdom Join us as Mario Pfeifer speaks with celebrated and official histories. Working in video, installation Canadian artist Stan Douglas and as Thomas J or sculpture, collaborators Joana Hadjithomas and Price speaks with RBC Curatorial Fellow Justine Khalil Joreige, alongside Mario Pfeifer and Thomas Kohleal as part of our In Conversation series. J Price ask us to think again about often neglected, Experience a lecture performance by Joana yet urgent, social issues. Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige and enjoy two We are witnessing the emergence of a ‘post-truth’ of their films. Artist members are invited to politics that privileges emotional responses over participate in one of three Master Classes with factual accuracy, while the biases of the media and Summer’s exhibiting artists — and let their the rise of internet-based news channels voices be heard during an open public panel increasingly divide publics. At this moment, in which and discussion on Navigating Public Art. the relationship between truth and fiction has During the weekend, take in a Sunday Scene become increasingly blurry, our exhibiting artists as guest speakers from the world of contemporary all ask vital questions of the stories we exchange art and beyond offer responses to our current between each other, both publically and privately. exhibitions, highlighting intriguing connections The work of Hadjithomas and Joreige pursues and broader cultural and intellectual debates. an enduring fascination with what they refer to Parents and guardians are encouraged to bring as ‘stories kept secret’ — the original meaning of the their children to our hugely popular hands-on The Power Plant is very grateful to the following Institutional Supporters: ancient Greek ‘anecdote’. Their acclaimed project Power Kids programs. Each session begins with a On Scams focuses on a form of digital communication brief tour of the gallery, followed by experiential GOVERNMENT FUNDERS Power Kids Funders TD CURATOR OF EDUCATION AND OUTREACH FELLOW SUPPORTED BY that is usually swiftly deleted as ‘junk’: the scam art making inspired by the ideas behind our Tate & Cindy Abols email. Their works ask us what these scammers’ exhibitions. Power Kids programs will also take fictions — often grounded in recent geopolitical place at the Toronto Outdoor Art Fair and at the Alexander Singh & events — can tell us about global realities. Toronto Public Library summer camps. S. Dixie Ho RBC Curatorial Fellow supported by Inside and outside the gallery, Thomas J Price’s Power Youth FUNDERS figures interject in traditions of monumental public Visit alone or with family and friends and spend sculpture, representing black bodies in a medium some Summer time with us! We look forward to ALL YEAR, ALL FREE in which they have historically been overlooked. welcoming you very soon. Dasha Shenkman Price’s questioning of who is represented — and how — finds a parallel in the deeply researched and Gaëtane Verna, Director exhibition #TPPOnScams #TPPOnScams 3 this page Joana of actual people, the work’s cacophony of voices Hadjithomas and Joana Hadjithomas Khalil Joreige, The generates a reimagining of recent history in Geometry of Space, and Khalil Joreige which war and unrest are the backdrop to a series 2014. Stretched oxidised steel, of ultimately implausible circumstances. approximate On Scams diameter 80 cm. Considering the scammers’ fictions as Courtesy the artists representative of the geopolitical fault-lines of our and In Situ - fabienne 22 June – 2 September 2019 leclerc. Photo: Jean time, Hadjithomas and Joreige extend this project Brasile. Opening: 21 June 2019, 8 – 11 pm in a series of related works in video, sculpture and CURATOR: lauren Barnes drawing. In the Fleck Clerestory, a group of large-scale oxidized steel sculptures entitled The donoRs InternatIonal aRts PaRtners Geometry of Space (2014) map the geographical trajectories of these stories onto globe-like forms, Barry & Debra Campbell translating fictional narratives into physical space. The video work It’s All Real (2014) explores the life stories of the Beirut-based actors who For over twenty years, artists and filmmakers Joana perform the scammers’ tales in The Rumor of the Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige have collaborated World, conjuring the stories of immigration and across the worlds of art and film to reimagine the refuge-seeking that have shaped their realities. In relationship between fiction and reality. Both The Jerusalem Letter (2014), Hadjithomas and born in Beirut, Lebanon, Hadjithomas and Joreige’s Joreige interrogate historical precedents for scams, collaboration began by exploring histories of reproducing an example of a late-eighteenth their home country. Across diverse media, they have century scam letter sent during the French investigated topics from the Lebanese Civil War to Revolution — a period, like today, when bases of Beirut’s participation in the space race of the 1960s, power and trust were unsettled. Like elements of underpinned by a commitment to questioning the a film in which fiction and reality are blurred, ways that history is written. the exhibition’s works construct a web of stories to This exhibition presents works from the landmark investigate the shifting nature of belief. series On Scams (I must first apologise), a multi-part project exploring notions of trust and faith across Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige (both born geographical and virtual borders. This series takes in Beirut, Lebanon, 1969) studied at the Université as its point of departure an archive of over 4,000 Paris X Nanterre, France and collaborate as artists spam emails Hadjithomas and Joreige have received and filmmakers, working between Beirut and Paris. and collected since 1999. They were intrigued by Recent two-person exhibitions have been held at the emotional appeals of these messages, and the IVAM, Valencia (2017); Haus der Kunst, Munich manner in which these fictions were grounded (2016); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Boston (2016); in political realities: the messages often contain Jeu de Paume, Paris (2016); and Sharjah Art references to real people, places and conflicts Foundation (2016). They have exhibited in group to legitimize their claims. exhibitions at venues including Centre Pompidou, The exhibition presents the immersive multi- Paris; Whitechapel Gallery, London; and the screen installation The Rumor of the World (2014), Guggenheim Museum, New York, as well as in the in which scam emails are brought to life by 56th Venice Biennale (2015), and their work is amateur actors that appear on monitors that encircle included in prominent public collections. They were the viewer. Relocating email texts to the bodies awarded the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2017. exhibition #TPPMarioPfeifer #TPPMarioPfeifer 5 Mario Pfeifer’s work centres on narratives often local men following what they perceived as violent forced out of our frames of vision. In this, his behaviour in a supermarket. Charting his first solo exhibition in Canada, the Berlin-based tragic fate and the polarizing media response that artist presents a trilogy of video installations. followed, Pfeifer’s work uses reconstruction and Demonstrating a profound commitment to the public responses to expose rising xenophobia and stories of individuals and communities, Pfeifer racial division. sees himself as an intermediary to bring uncovered Connecting to each of these works, Pfeifer has stories to broader attention. He immerses himself been commissioned by the Contact Photography in the domains in which he works so as to present Festival and The Power Plant to produce a billboard them in all their complexity and contradiction. outside the gallery depicting the Tierra del Fuego #blacktivist (2015) is a two-channel video landscape. The artist’s overlaid text, reiterating the installation produced in collaboration with exhibition’s title, serves to indicate his open-ended Brooklyn rap group Flatbush ZOMBiES. The work approach, expressing a resistance to preconceived brings together Pfeifer’s music video for the conclusions and his perpetual interest in inviting group’s track Blacktivist with found imagery and us to question our own standpoint in relation to the interviews in a startling