Summer 2018 June – September 2018 OVERVIEW
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exhibitions / programs / events Summer 2018 June – September 2018 OVERVIEW As we enter The Power Plant’s second Toronto-based Canadian artist, Abbas Akhavan, all year, exhibition season of 2018, we pause Summer 2018 at developed a new site-specific work for the fourth to acknowledge the importance of annual Fleck Clerestory Commission, opening this all free the aLL YEAR, aLL FREE program. The Power Plant Summer and continuing through our Fall 2018 exhibition season. Entitled, variations on a landscape, Thanks to the support of BMO Financial Group, the the artist alters the decentralized space of the gallery is able to eliminate admission fees, enabling gallery’s high and narrow Clerestory. Using a round PREsEntEd By This summer, we welcome you back all visitors, young and old, to access our exhibitions. fountain to create a communal space for contem- Join us all year long at The Power Plant, where to see three major exhibitions, two plation and literary engagement, our experience admission is always FREE. of which are first solo exhibitions in within this installation will be dependent on the Canada, and the third by one of changing seasons and their effect on the exhibition’s our very own Toronto-based artists. entire surrounding environment, which will also Each of these three artists are be punctuated by the literary contributions of some of Canada’s best authors. globally-minded, exploring complex Visiting The Power Plant provides opportunity issues with implications on our to intimately engage with the works on display, but shared day-to-day living. we also present a series of public programs and activities, featuring a diverse group of artists, poets, and scholars who provide varied perspectives Rotterdam and New York-based American artist on specific aspects of each of our Summer 2018 Ellen Gallagher’s exhibition Nu-Nile is organized exhibitions. around interrelated nodes, which consider recurrent Hear from artists Grada Kilomba and Ellen dominant themes in her practice. Gallagher’s Gallagher about how their ideas translate into visual exploration of visual culture covers a wide-ranging forms. Watch moving images recommended by temporal terrain stretching from blackface minstrelsy Kilomba and Gallagher for added context and take to 20th-century abstraction, and involves the part in a walking tour with Guest Curator Inês mining of vernacular forms in order to explore the Grosso. Attend a book discussion about Kilomba’s relationship between figuration and non figuration Plantation Memories. Mirror one element of around narratives of race and representation. The Akhavan’s installation by participating in a writing exhibition, in the Royal LePage, the North Galleries workshop. Create family memories by attending and our south terrace, is comprised of new works one of our many Power Kids programs on-site, at as well as seminal artworks from Gallagher’s wide the Toronto Outdoor Art Fair, or at one of the two The Power Plant is very grateful to the following Institutional Supporters: ranging multi-disciplinary production of painting, Toronto Public Library branches hosting summer works on paper, film and video. GOVERNMENT FUNDERS Power Kids Funders educaTiON & pUblic prograM support camps. And be sure to drop-in for a Power Tour Grada Kilomba, is a Berlin-based Portuguese artist every Thursday evening and Saturday afternoon to with roots in São Tomé and Príncipe and Angola. hear more about the artists from knowledgeable For her first exhibition in North America, we present RBC Curatorial FEllow supported bY and engaging Gallery Attendants. Tate & Cindy Abols Secrets to Tell in which she grapples with the Everyone is always welcome at The Power Plant, intricacies of colonialism and post-colonialism in the Power Youth FUNDERS please come in and experience the work of these early twenty-first century. Often related to textual TD cURaTOR OF EDUCATiON aND unique artists throughout Summer 2018. OUTREACH FELLOW SUPPORTED bY sources by herself or others, her video, installation ALL YEaR, ALL FREE and text-based works investigate gender and race Dasha Shenkman Gaëtane Verna, Director politics, African identity and its diasporas, trauma and memory, and shared collective imaginations. exhibition #TPPNuNile #TPPNuNile 3 Born in the port city of Providence, Rhode Island, Cover Ellen Gallagher, Watery Ellen Gallagher Ellen Gallagher has long been an inspired and Ecstatic, 2018. Watercolor, oil, Nu-Nile imaginative chronicler of the watery ecstatic realm. pencil, varnish and Her large-scale history paintings featuring seascapes, cut paper on paper. © Ellen Gallagher. 23 June – 3 September 2018 science experiments, portraiture, abstraction and Courtesy of Gagosian and Hauser & Wirth. Opening: 22 June 2018, 8 – 11 pm minstrelsy are mutinous assertions of blackness Photo: Ernst Moritz this page Ellen in a medium in which the African body has habitually Gallagher, CURATOR: carolin köchling been concealed. Her exploration of visual culture Aquajujidsu, 2017. Oil, ink and paper on assistant curator: Justine kohleal, covers a wide ranging temporal terrain stretching canvas. © Ellen 2018-19 rBc curatorial fellow Gallagher. Courtesy from blackface minstrelsy to 20th-century the artist, Hauser & abstraction, and includes mining of vernacular forms Wirth and Gagosian. co-presEnting sPonsoRs presEnting donoR Photo: Ernst Moritz as diverse as science fiction, advertising, mid- opposite Edgar Diana Billes Cleijne and Ellen century race magazines, travelogues and scrimshaw Gallagher, Highway Gothic, 2017. 16 mm in order to address and release the concealed film installation with lEad sPonsoR lEad donoR majoR donoR threads which bind the visible. 70 mm film and Rosamond Ivey textile cyanotype banners. © Edgar Nadir & Shabin Encompassing paintings, drawings and films, Cleijne and Ellen Mohamed Gallagher’s first exhibition in Canada takes its Gallagher. Courtesy starting point from her and Edgar Cleijne’s most the artists, Hauser & Wirth and Gagosian suppoRt donoR international aRts PaRtner recent film installation Highway Gothic (2017), Sheldon Inwentash an examination of the impact Interstate Highway 10 & Lynn Factor had on humans and nature. Running through New Orleans and the Atchafalaya Swamp, the Highway was part of a period of mass construction Ellen Gallagher (born 1965 in Providence, Rhode during the mid-20th century which segregated Island) lives and works in Rotterdam and New York. working class, especially immigrant communities, Recent solo exhibitions of her work have been from new urban centres. The exhibition draws organized at Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2018); connections between this North American history Haus der Kunst, Munich (2014); Sara Hildén Art and Gallagher’s recent sea bed paintings that Museum, Tampere, Finland (2013); SCAD Museum extend her annotation of the Drexciya mythos of Art, Savannah, USA (2013); New Museum, New laterally, towards an in utero Atlantis conceived York (2013); and Tate Modern, London, UK (2013). in the wake of the Middle Passage. The artist’s Recent group exhibitions include Columbia series of black paintings, Negroes Battling in a University Wallach Art Gallery, New York (2018); Cave (2016), was prompted by the discovery that Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2017); Malevich’s Black Square (1915) had been painted Contemporary Arts Centre, New Orleans (2017); on top of a proto-cubistic painting. Its title makes Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid (2017); reference to a handwritten note at the edge Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2017); The of Malevich’s canvas, recently unearthed during Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2017); WIELS, restoration. Brussels (2017); Museum of Modern Art Warsaw Nu-Nile reveals Gallagher’s practice of synthe- (2017); and Mrac – Musée régional d’art contemporain, sizing a wide range of pictorial traditions in Sérignan, France (2017). In 2015 her work was order to counter static representations of black featured in the Venice Biennial. people in culture, and critically examines and reimagines the figure-ground protocols circulating within the canon of Western painting. exhibition #TPPSecretstoTell #TPPSecretstoTell 5 Grada Kilomba’s work addresses issues of gender exchange of goods within our global capitalist and race, trauma and memory, in the context of system is inextricably linked to our colonial past current debates on colonialism and post-colonialism and present. and as research into the ambiguous relationship The exhibition Secrets to Tell is accompanied between remembering, forgetting, and the collective by a fully illustrated book with texts by Inês Grosso memory and identity of Africans living in Diaspora. and Alfredo Jaar, and a conversation between Evoking African oral traditions and their power to Theresa Sigmund and Grada Kilomba. carry on the spoken word, the artist’s work gives The exhibition is a production of the MAAT — voice to silenced narratives with the aim of rewriting Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology/ and retelling a history that has been suppressed EDP Foundation, Lisbon, in partnership with The or disregarded. Power Plant, Toronto. Showing her work for the first time in North America, the exhibition Secrets to Tell presents Grada Kilomba (1968, Lisbon, Portugal) lives and The Desire Project (2015 – 2016). Divided into three works in Berlin. Solo exhibitions of Kilomba’s acts, like a theatre play — “While I Walk”, “While work have been organized at Avenida da Índia I Speak” and “While I Write” — this three-channel Gallery at the Municipal