The Toronto Biennial of Art and Harbourfront Centre will present Arin Rungjang’s Ravisara as part of Nuit Blanche Toronto 2019. On view at Harbourfront Centre’s Artport Gallery and vitrines the night of October 5, this multi-channel video installation explores stories and strategies of postcolonial resistance among Thai female immigrants in Germany. Ravisara is commissioned by the Biennial and co-presented with Harbourfront Centre.
Lou Sheppard’s audio work Dawn Chorus/Evensong will be also featured at this year’s Nuit Blanche. Installed at Toronto Sculpture Garden, Sheppard’s audio work interrupts the denaturalized landscape with music created through the transportation of spectrograms of birdsong on the shores of Lake Ontario. Played outdoors at the Garden over multiple speakers, the composition harmonizes with the streetcars, cathedral bells, cards, bird, and other melodies of Toronto’s urban soundscape.
Hajra Waheed’s exhibition as part of the Toronto Biennial of Art, Hold Everything Dear, will be on display at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery during Nuit Blanche 2019. Presentations of works by Vincent Meessen, Naeem Mohaiemen, and Rashid Johnson are also on view as part of The Power Plant’s Up All Night project. Waheed’s works take a single visual form—the spiral—as a poetic starting point to reflect on the processes of upheaval in human experience. For Waheed, the spiral visualizes ascent and descent, growth and decay, evoking both vital forms in nature as well as notions of flux inherent in forced displacement and political turmoil. Hold Everything Dear is presented by The Power Plant and on view September 21– January 9.
Bios
Arin Rungjang (born and lives in Bangkok, Thailand) received his BFA from Silpakorn University, Bangkok, and has participated in exchange and artist-in-residency programs in Berlin, Paris, the Philippines, Taipei, London, Antwerp and New York City. Arin represented Thailand at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013) and presented work at documenta 14, Kassel (2017). Rungjang produces site-specific installations and videos to foster various social interactions characterized by inclusiveness and open-heartedness, including cooking lessons and communal meals, taking up residence and hosting guests in galleries, and working with marginalized populations.
Hajra Waheed (born in Calgary, Canada; lives in Montreal, Canada) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work ranges from interactive installations to collage, video, sound and sculpture. Among other issues, she explores the nexus between security, surveillance and the covert networks of power that structure lives while also addressing the traumas and alienation of displaced subjects affected by legacies of colonial and state violence. Hajra has participated in exhibitions worldwide, including at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017); the 11th Gwangju Biennale (2016); and at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2016).
Lou Sheppard (born and lives in unceded Mi’Kmaq territory, Canada) works in interdisciplinary audio, performance and installation. His work pays queer attention to systems of meaning-making and how they construct and order our bodies and environments. His research and phenomenological navigations are presented as scores, often performed with other artists and citizen performers, which notate how these systems mediate our experiences and ask how we might experience differently.