Curator: Agustin Pérez Rubio
Exhibition: HTUOS/HTRON - The New Coordinates of the Americas

Curatorial statement

The conceptual reference for this exhibition starts with a 1943-drawing by the Uruguayan constructivist painter, professor and writer Joaquin Torres Garcia, one of the great masters of Latin-American Avant-Garde. In his drawing, Inverted America, he inverts the entire pan-American peninsula, removing the existing boundaries and introducing a new value system that subverts the hegemonic geo-political ideology of his time.

For one night, over the 12 hours of Toronto's Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, this new geopolitical order will dominate. South will be North and vice-versa.

With geography inverted, time will change in relation to the places, the cities and the countries. Time will run from West to East.

The exhibition's title is a graphic interpretation of Torres-Garcias' map, where the words South and North, one up and the other down, are read backwards, inverted not only in space but also in time. Projects will therefore have varying starting points throughout the event.

Projects by artists from diverse countries in the Americas, from Canada and the USA to Brazil and Argentina, are represented in order to invert and subvert the established spatial and temporal reigning hegemony order.

This exhibition features 12 projects located around the University of Toronto and College Street over to Carlton and Jarvis Streets.

Projects include Alfredo Jaar (Santiago) with Music (Everything I know I learned the day my son was born) and Tania Brugera (Havana) with Tatlin's Whisper.

Curator: Christine Shaw
Exhibition: The Work of Wind

Curatorial statement

In The Work of Wind, the Beaufort Scale of Wind Force becomes a diagram of prediction and premonition of the 21st century. Created by the British sea admiral Sir Francis Beaufort in 1807, the scale is a 13-part index capturing wind's potential to compose at sea and decompose on land. Less than one km/h is Beaufort 0, "Calm," with the description, "sea like a mirror; smoke rises vertically." By force 4, "Moderate Breeze," with a velocity of 20-30 km/h the wind creates "small waves; raises dust and loose paper." By force 10, "Storm," the wind moves between 88-102 km/h, and "the tumbling of the sea becomes heavy; trees uprooted, structural damage occurs." The scale was used for the practical navigation of 19th century ocean space. Drawing on the language of the scale – drifting, tumbling, scattering, swaying, impeding, damaging, breaking, uprooting – The Work of Wind unfurls the 13 forces from 0 (Calm) to 12 (Hurricane) along Toronto's shoreline. From works of manifest tangibility and poetic materiality to more activist, conceptual approaches, the combined effects of this exhibition offers an operatic experience of the elemental forces, compositional forms, and geopolitical processes of our contemporary times.

This exhibition features 13 projects unfurling the 13 forces of wind along the Waterfront between York Street and Parliament Street.

Projects include Mary Mattingly (New York) with Torus and Los Carpinteros (Havana and Madrid) with Frio Estudio del Desastre (Frozen Study of Disaster).