The Power Plant

We are inviting you for a Sunday Scene with Noor Alé, The Power Plant’s Associate Curator who will examine Meriem Bennani’s viral video piece ‘2 Lizards’. Narrated by two animated lizards living in New York City during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the film unpacks the unsettling, mundane, and humorous realities of living in confinement, a time marked by global protests and community organizing in response to economic, racial, and social inequities.

Alé will speak about activist movements that gained momentum through social networks during the pandemic. Although these acts of solidarity predated this moment, their emergence in this age of precarity strengthened a resolve toward a more just society, resonating from cultural institutions and their reckoning with systemic racism to homeless encampments and their violent removal from the parks of Toronto.

Noor Alé is a curator, writer, and art historian. Her curatorial practice examines the intersections of contemporary art with geopolitics, decolonization, and social justice in the Global South. She has contributed to curatorial research, exhibition management, and public programmes at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; and Art Dubai.

Meriem Bennani was born in Rabat, Morocco. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Biennial, New York; MoMA PS1, New York; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery is excited to present two moving image works by Bennani as part of the Toronto International Film Festival’s Wavelengths. On view daily between September 9 and 18, The Power Plant invites the public to experience the Canadian premiere of Bennani’s works!