Early Nuit Blanche announcements: art, lots of it, at night

Early Nuit Blanche announcements: art, lots of it, at night

The program for the sixth annual Nuit Blanche (we prefer to leave out the annoying Scotiabank prefix) was announced today, giving us precisely a month and a half to physically and mentally prepare for the Oct. 1 all-nighter. This year, the nocturnal art fest will feature 134 projects from over 500 local and international artists, spread out all over the city. We’re excited to find out what some of the intriguingly vague descriptions of the pieces actually mean. (If Flightpath Toronto’s invitation to “participate in the possibilities and wonder of urban flight” is referring to anything like this, we’re there.) Check out some of this year’s just-revealed exhibitions after the jump.

Exhibition Zone A (Downtown North)

Curator Candice Hopkins’ exhibition Restaging the Encounter attempts to capture the fleeting moment when the political becomes poetic.

Highlights include:

Erratic, by Germaine Koh, which re-enacts the geological processes that have shaped the region by rolling a section of boulder down Yonge Street;
•  Stepping back 100 years in time at the MaRS building for Richard Purdy’s interactive L’écho-l’eau log run;
•  AES+F’s video installation comprised of 70,000 luxurious still images, which transforms a section of Queen’s Park into The Feast of Trimalchio;
• and the interior of the Victoria Chapel at the University of Toronto, filled with the hum of indigenous and non-indigenous confessions in Postcommodity’s Radiophonic Territory (Nocturne).

Exhibition Zone B (Downtown Core)

Shirley Madill curates The Future of the Present, an exhibition featuring works that embrace new technologies to form non-pictorial art that reflect the philosophies of Marshall McLuhan.

Highlights include:

•  Ascension, by Isabelle Hayeur, which offers viewers a glimpse into infinity through site and sound;
•  Ken Rinaldo’s Paparazzi Bots, which gives passersby their 15 minutes of fame inside the Toronto Eaton Centre;
Intra Muros, by Rose Bond, which tells the story of an artist’s struggle with the creative process through an animated installation;
•  Mischa Kuball’s work Public Preposition No. 3/Swing Stage, which alters a city skyscraper by echoing the act of cleaning a window;
•  and Christine Irving’s interactive fire sculpture Heart Machine, which premiered at Burning Man in 2010 and is making its Canadian debut.

Exhibition Zone C (Downtown South)

Curated by Nicholas Brown, You Had to Go Looking For It invites people to transform and occupy Toronto’s Financial District. Highlights include:

The Tie-break, by Tibi Tibi Neuspiel and Geoffrey Pugen, which recreates the legendary fourth-set tie-breaker in the 1980 Wimbledon final between Björn Borg and John McEnroe;
Barricades, in which Jeremy Jansen and Niall McClelland take objects traditionally used to block off spaces from the public and give them new contexts that undermine their original purposes;
•  Soon, a sight and sound installation in which Jane Pollard and Iain Forsythe invite onlookers to experience an inexplicable encounter;
• and City Mouse, by Julia Hepburn, which encourages viewers to reflect on the displacement, alienation and transformation of our environment.