Summer 2014 exhibitions
28 June–1 September 2014
Opening: 27 June 2014, 8–11pm
with the artists Pedro Reyes, Vasco Araújo
and Akram Zaatari
The Power Plant
231 Queens Quay West
Toronto, Ontario
M5J 2G8 Canada
The Power Plant presents three exhibitions that explore the interface between the self and the larger sociopolitical arena.
Pedro Reyes: Sanatorium
Curated by Gaëtane Verna
Making its Canadian premiere at The Power Plant, Sanatorium is an artwork by Mexican artist Pedro Reyes. It is a transient clinic that provides short, unexpected therapy sessions in an effort to cure ills associated with urban living. First presented by the Guggenheim, New York in 2011, Sanatorium has since traveled to venues including Whitechapel Gallery, London (2013) and dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012). For its iteration at The Power Plant, Reyes offers a new therapy titled The Extraction of the Cop in the Head, an exercise devised to curb self-censorship in the face of oppressive situations. The procedures for each session are always prepared by Reyes and carried out by volunteer participants who are trained by the artist. It is through this involvement of non-professionals that Reyes challenges the notion of hierarchy, in the process transforming the gallery into a site for democratized psychological processes.
Vasco Araújo: Under the Influence of Psyche
Curated by Julia Paoli
This exhibition of new and recent work by Portuguese artist Vasco Araújo explores the artist’s ongoing interest in the human condition. Working across media, Araújo draws upon Western traditions in opera, dance, theatre, and literature in order to introduce divergent readings on such cultural histories. In so doing, Araújo wrests and confronts these historical references in order to question both contemporary notions of representation and the writing and canonization of history. He offers instead a body of work that suggests that history, rather than closed or finished narrative, has the ability to be renewed and reread. The exhibition is comprised of six works including the Canadian premiere of Araújo’s newest video, Retrato (2014), a special commission by The Power Plant that appropriates portraits by 20th-century painter and writer Eduardo Malta.
Akram Zaatari: The End of Time
Curated by Valerie Velardo
As a founding member of the Arab Image Foundation, Akram Zaatari has worked to collect more than 600,000 photographs from the Middle East, North Africa and the Arab diaspora. In his own work, Zaatari turns the eye of an artist to recontextualizing archival documents in order to propose new scripts for how we catalogue both individual experience and communicate specific cultural and political histories. For his exhibition at The Power Plant, Zaatari will explore questions of memory, time, and radical preservation through his installation Time Capsule Simulation (2013) and his video The End of Time (2013), an allegory of the birth and disappearance of desire, enacted by three men caught in a successive cycle of beginnings and endings.
The exhibitions are made possible by the Jack Weinbaum Family Foundation. Support for Pedro Reyes: Sanatorium is provided by the Consulate General of Mexico, Toronto and Eleana & Jorge Soni and Marla & Larry Wasser.
About The Power Plant
The Power Plant is Canada’s leading public gallery devoted exclusively to contemporary visual art. It is a vital forum for the advanced artistic culture of our time that offers an exceptional facility and professional support to diverse living artists while engaging equally diverse audiences in their work. The Power Plant pursues its activities though exhibitions, publications and public programming that incorporates other areas of culture when they intersect with visual art.
