The Power Plant

View Mercer Union's current exhibition with artist Erdem Taşdelen, followed by a Q&A with co-curators Julia Paoli, Director & Curator at Mercer Union, and Toleen Touq, Artistic Director at SAVAC.

A Minaret for the General’s Wife revolves around the story of the Kėdainiai Minaret, an architectural folly located in a small town in Lithuania. In Taşdelen’s project, the minaret is taken up as a metaphor for the experience of being corporeally out of place, for structures built in locations where they seemingly don’t belong, and for objects brought out of context—in other words; displacement, appropriation, and extractivism. The installation comprises archival documents, replicas of artefacts, audiovisual material, a curious selection of objects and a book of 12 vignettes from undisclosed origins, all assembled in a web of relational and spatial collage that suggests reconfigurable performative possibilities. In presenting primary sources, translations and fabulations referencing the Kėdainiai Minaret in equal measure, the exhibition compels the viewer to consider the confounding dichotomy between the authenticity of a material record and the myriad truths spoken by subjective experience, thereby complicating how we consider our own narratives and memories.

Erdem Taşdelen is a Turkish-Canadian artist who lives and works in Toronto. His work has been shown in numerous exhibitions internationally and across Canada, most recently at venues including Blackwood Gallery, Mississauga; AKA artist-run, Saskatoon (2020); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen (2019); VOX Centre de l’image contemporaine, Montreal (2018); Pera Museum, Istanbul; Or Gallery, Vancouver (2017); Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg (2016). Taşdelen has been awarded the Joseph S. Stauffer Prize in Visual Arts by the Canada Council for the Arts (2016), the Charles Pachter Prize for Emerging Artists by the Hnatyshyn Foundation (2014), and was long-listed for the Sobey Art Award in 2019.

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