The Power Plant

Opening April 25, 2026, Colourful Parachutes: Imagining Alternative Futures Through the Power of Play brings together leading artists from Canada and abroad to reimagine the exhibition space as a site of play, possibility, and collective agency. Curated specifically with young audiences in mind but engaging visitors of all ages, the exhibition challenges conventional hierarchies of spectatorship to produce unexpected encounters with contemporary art.

Influenced by precedents like Palle Nielsen’s The Model – A Model for a Qualitative Society (1968), which turned Stockholm’s Moderna Museet into a giant adventure playground, Colourful Parachutes views the gallery as a microcosm of society. If we reinvent it, what new worlds can we co-create?

A key theme underlying Colourful Parachutes is the relationship young people have to the future. Many of the works in the exhibition touch on the vital importance of fostering a relationship to the natural world during childhood, the increasing sense of eco-anxiety carried by young people, and how to advocate for child-led environmental activism.

For example, Lagos-based artist Temitayo Ogunbiyi’s interactive sculpture invites children to swing off, climb over, and play along its undulating, plant-like structures. The Montreal-based artist duo Leisure (Meredith Carruthers & Susannah Wesley) have created a participatory environment where visitors of all ages can experiment with natural materials. Inspired in part by a co-authored paper by futurist and environmentalist Hazel Henderson and artist Simon Nicholson delivered at the First Global Conference on the Future, held in 1980 in Toronto, their work suggests co-creation and meaningful engagements with nature to remedy climate anxiety.

UK-based artist Harold Offeh’s work The Mothership Collective 2.0 (2025) (co-commissioned by BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK, and Tramway, Glasgow, UK) stems from an ongoing project drawing inspiration from musician Sun Ra, and presents a gathering space for people to come together, play, experiment with sound and text, and consider their version of a speculative future. Next door, dream.lab (2024–25) by Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander, is an interactive shadow booth designed in collaboration with children, which prompts reflection on how the world of dreams might allow us to tap into our hidden hopes and fears.

Connecting the exhibition spaces are two large-scale, site-specific wall drawings. Using dramatically oversized colour crayons, South African artist Robin Rhode has worked closely with a group of children to colour in the waves under a flotilla of sailing ships that have been silk-screened onto the gallery walls. Nearby is Toronto-based artist Claire Greenshaw’s large-scale hand-drawn graphite mural of the Athabasca Glacier, which visitors are invited to erase slowly over the course of the exhibition.

The exhibition also features video works, including two stop motion animations made by the artists Sassa Linklater and Tobias Linklater (Omaskêko Ininiwak and Sugpiaq) when they were children. The videos offer touching reflections on the meaning of treaty relations, and travel across land and through water to enter past and future worlds. Accompanying these works is Ana Mendieta’s 1973 short film titled Parachute, in which the Cuban American artist and educator captured a group of children playing the parachute game in a school playground. The film plays off the exhibition’s title, borrowed from Ailton Krenak’s book Ideas to Postpone the End of the World (2019), in which the Brazilian Indigenous philosopher and environmental activist suggests using creativity and dreaming to create colourful parachutes that might slow our fall. Krenak asks: “What sort of world are you boxing and wrapping for future generations? You keep talking about another world, but have you asked the generations of tomorrow if the world you’re building is the world they want?”

Featuring numerous interactive works that invite the participation of children, Colourful Parachutes transforms the gallery into a space for making, moving, touching, and experimenting. By disrupting the formal conventions of the contemporary art gallery, the exhibition invites audiences of all ages to become active participants in shaping their environment—and to imagine alternative futures together. The exhibition is on view until September 7, 2026.

About The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery

The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery is Canada’s leading public gallery devoted to contemporary art, ideas, and conversations. Located at Harbourfront Centre on Toronto’s waterfront, The Power Plant is a vital forum for the creative culture of our time, sharing inspiring and transformative experiences with audiences through free admission to exhibitions and public programs. The Power Plant is guided by the commitment to provide a platform for artists from diverse backgrounds, drawing attention to pressing issues and connecting communities in Canada and worldwide through contemporary art. For more information, please visit thepowerplant.org.