Scarborough Town Centre open all night long Saturday for Nuit Blanche | CBC News
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Scarborough Town Centre is being transformed from a shopping mall to an art gallery this weekend.
Starting Saturday evening, it will host a curated exhibition featuring five art installations created by local and international artists. Four other exhibits will be displayed within close walking distance from the mall at the Scarborough Civic Centre and in Albert Campbell Square.
The exhibition is one of several scattered throughout the city for Nuit Blanche — Toronto’s annual celebration of contemporary art. The all-night event starts at 7 p.m. and will last until the sun comes up Sunday morning.
“We’ve always been proud of our ability to be the hub of Scarborough that really connects our community and bring people together,” said Nguyen.
“We’re also focused around food, providing great experiences and connecting people to great places.”
Local artists displaying work for 1st time
It’s the fourth year the mall is hosting programming for Nuit Blanche. This year’s theme, “Breaking Ground,” is meant to invite artists to explore thought-provoking ideas centered around the natural world, change, and innovation, according to the city’s Nuit Blanche website.
The art will be displayed at the mall’s centre court, transit bridge, and main entrance, according to a news release. Some restaurants in the mall will stay open all night, while others will extend their hours to serve visitors.
Par Nair, an Indian-born interdisciplinary artist and researcher who is now based in the Greater Toronto Area, is displaying her work at Nuit Blanche for the first time. She’ll have five pieces at the civic centre, one at the Scarborough Town Centre and another at the Drake Hotel downtown.
“It’s a very proud moment,” said Nair. “I’ve gone to Nuit so many times. So it’s really it’s nice to be finally showing.”
Nair’s installation, called “Letters of Haunting,” is made up of a series of textile installations featuring her mother’s silk saris on which she has hand-embroidered letters to her mother. According to a description of the piece, these are “letters of love, frustration, longing, and reaching letters of impossibility” and the project is inspired by the “diasporic journeys” of the South Asian community.
“The pieces are about memory. It’s about the memory that the saris carry because they belong to my mother and it’s about me, you know, using this very labour-intensive process to hand-embroider my stories into the saris,” Nair said. “So kind of like threading my stories with my mother’s stories.”
Nair’s works at the civic centre will be accompanied by a soundscape composed by Hasheel, a South Asian classical musician and bansuri (Indian flute) player.
Patrick Cruz, a Toronto-based installation artists and assistant professor at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, will also be showing his work at Nuit Blanche for the first time.
His installation is made up of 20 double-sided paintings that will be hung on the skylights with chains, Cruz said.
“The piece is kind of a meditation on things that are happening around the world, the anxieties that are happening around the world, whether that’s kind of political turmoil or capitalism,” he said. “It’s also kind of commenting where the installation is placed, which is the mall, which is basically a site of consumption.”
Toronto-based curator Noa Bronstein put together the Scarborough exhibition, which is called In the Aggregate.
Here are some of the other installations that are also part of the Scarborough exhibition:
- Balangay Starfleet by Leeroy New. Located in centre court. A descending fleet of space vessels made of bamboo and discarded plastics appear frozen in the middle of an aerial encounter. New reimagines Balangay, which are ancient boats of the Philippines, in this retro futuristic piece.
- Take Days by Eleanor King. Located at entrance four, transit bridge. A multi-channel audio/video piece that privileges diverse youth voices, performed by the Bach’s Children’s Choir in protest to climate change.
- Beyond the Soil by Oddside Arts. Located at entrance one. A futurist exhibit exploring African diasporic quilting practices using digital design, 3D printing, and augmented reality (AR).
- Moving Backwards by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz. Located at Albert Campbell Square. A video that explores the feeling of being pushed backwards by recent reactionary backlashes to social and political change. Moving Backwards depicts resistance practices through dance and elements of queer underground culture.
- Find Face by Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader. Located on the Scarborough Civic Centre Facade. A video work by deaf artists Sun Kim and Mader whose work often explores deaf culture in the art world and beyond.
For a full list of art installations and their locations, visit the Nuit Blanche website. You can plot your itinerary using the site’s interactive map.
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