This website uses cookies in order to optimize your browsing experience and for promotional purposes. To learn more, please see our policy on the protection of personal information.

Thanks to your generosity, your support, at any level, helps keep The Power Plant running. Our successes are powered by you.

Thank you for your donation!

Thanks to your generous support, at any level. It keeps The Power Plant running. Our success is powered by you.

Make a Donation

The Power Plant is currently closed for installation. The gallery will reopen with its Fall 2023 exhibitions on October 13. 

Thank you for signing up!

Subscribe to our newsletter to stay updated about the latest activities and events at the Power Plant!

Subscribe to the Newsletter

thumbnail_Alicia Henry, Witnessing

Alicia Henry, Witnessing

Missed the exhibition at The Power Plant? Visit our Touring Exhibitions at other galleries across Canada and the world!


Touring Exhibitions

Experience international and Canadian art by leading contemporary artists of our time.

Exhibitions

Envisioned as a geological epic of our universe, _Solastalgia: Archaeologies of Loss_ is a solo exhibition by French artist Abdelkader Benchamma that conjures enigmatic worlds and elemental forces at the precipice of transformation, evoking a yearning for worlds yet to be. Like an archaeologist, Benchamma unearths symbols–found in ancient mythologies and legends–that humanity has from its earliest moments inscribed onto the land, sky, and celestial bodies. In doing so, he creates an elusive topography of dreams that centres our spiritual ties with nature, reclaiming our interconnectedness with the world.
  
Gestural and lyrical, his primarily monochrome murals, drawings, and installations, depict undulating terrains, tectonic movements, and gravitational forces that harness the dynamism of the universe. Indebted to the language of physics, his linework is an embodiment of the arrow of time, marking a fateful trajectory of perpetual motion. Immersed in the themes of natural philosophy, geology, astronomy, alchemy, art history, and existential literature, his works reflect an encyclopedic repertoire of interests. At times an architect of unruly universes, and an archaeologist of dormant memories, his elusive works unravel the relationships between humanity and the cosmos, both equally endowed with the generative powers of creation, change, and destruction.  
  
_Solastalgia: Archaeologies of Loss_ will be Benchamma’s first major solo exhibition in Canada, and the most comprehensive to date in North America, featuring existing and newly created works, as well as an immersive, site-specific mural for The Power Plant’s Fleck Clerestory Commissioning Program.  

Abdelkader Benchamma. Solastalgia: Archaeologies of Loss 

Abdelkader Benchamma, Cosma, 2023. Exhibition view: Templon, Paris, 2023. Photo: Tanguy Beurdeley. Courtesy the artist and Templon, Paris – Brussels – New York. 

thumbnail_Abdelkader Benchamma, Cosma, 2023. Exhibition view: Templon, Paris, 2023. Photo: Tanguy Beurdeley. Courtesy of the artist and Templon, Paris – Brussels – New York. 

![Untitled design (14).png](https://strapi-uploads-the-power-plant-live.s3.ca-central-1.amazonaws.com/Untitled_design_14_11bde471de.png)

ART PARTNERS

![Embassy of France in Canada.png](https://strapi-uploads-the-power-plant-live.s3.ca-central-1.amazonaws.com/Embassy_of_France_in_Canada_16d172e488.png)  

![Institut Francais.png](https://strapi-uploads-the-power-plant-live.s3.ca-central-1.amazonaws.com/Institut_Francais_6ef57579c2.png)
  


GOVERNMENT PARTNERS

CURATOR

Solastalgia: Archaeologies of Loss

_Time of Change_ maps Egyptian-Canadian artist of Armenian origins Anna Boghiguian’s interest in revolutionary upheavals spurred by political, social, and cultural ideas in the Americas, Europe, and North Africa. Drawing inspiration from her vast travels throughout Canada and the globe, Boghiguian, examines the impact individuals have on history and how history impacts individuals. This exhibition presents installations and drawings—some newly commissioned for this exhibition—that reference historical characters and events that have played a role in shaping our modern world. Presented are works that chronicle seismic geopolitical shifts, and their aftermaths in our world order. Collectively, these works respond to overlapping histories of power relations, societal transformations, and the birth of political ideologies.  
  
Conceived as a world stage, _The Chess Game_ (2022) is an oversized chess board with cutouts of historical figures from opposing and correlating schools of thought who quarrel for power. The rise of revolutions and falls of oppressive regimes is depicted in _Time of Change_ (2022), a suite of ninety-six densely layered drawings. Notions of democratic ideals, and independence movements that galvanised upheavals across centuries is at the heart of these drawings that inspired the exhibition’s title.  A small mobile, _The Uprising_ (2022), features contemporary inventors and intellectuals whose ideas transformed society. A rare selection of early artist books of Boghiguian’s life in various Canadian cities illuminates the artist’s nomadic life and artistic processes. While the exhibition primarily addresses societal upheavals, it also draws attention to the contemporary artworld evolving in response to these revolutions, and the role of artists in safeguarding our delicate democracy.  
  
With the global rise of dictatorial regimes and conservative governments that infringe upon freedom, Boghiguian’s works bring to light the issue of historical amnesia, and the shared efforts needed to unseat power. _Time of Change_ resonates powerfully in our Canadian context, as emigration strains to Canada are prompted by warfare, military occupation, and economic instability—consequences of the abuse of power. Far beyond our immediate borders, _Time of Change_ has a universal appeal, as it reframes events in the history of humanity—from the birth of the French Revolution to the Suez Crisis—evincing similarities with current struggles for liberation around the world.  

Anna Boghiguian: Time of Change

Anna Boghiguian, The Chess Game, 2022. Installation view first floor, Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2022. Photo: Markus Tretter. Courtesy of the artist ©Anna Boghiguian, Kunsthaus Bregenz. 

thumbnail_Anna Boghiguian.jpeg

![Untitled design (15).png](https://strapi-uploads-the-power-plant-live.s3.ca-central-1.amazonaws.com/Untitled_design_15_c359b75f81.png)

SUPPORTING DONORS

Adelina Vlas, Head of Curatorial Affairs  
Noor Alé, Associate Curator


CURATORS

Time of Change

Aria Dean is an artist and writer who has created a multi-platform body of work based in trenchant critiques of representational systems. Confounding binaries such as abstraction and figuration, individual and collective, Dean’s sculptures, installations, videos, and essays trouble received ideas of race, power, and form. Concerned with what art objects can do, and have done, for their producers and receivers, Dean tracks artistic innovations against an array of theoretical positions, from poststructuralism to Afropessimism, not just to parse the social and material bases of art but also to grasp its impact on the ontology of Blackness.  
  
In her newest film _Abattoir, U.S.A.!,_ Dean draws on her long-term research on agricultural and industrial architecture, surveying the interior of an empty slaughterhouse. The slaughterhouse in _Abattoir, U.S.A.!,_ is animated using Unreal Engine, a 3D computer graphics tool used to create real-time environments for a wide range of platforms. The work considers the importance of these structures in the development of modernist architecture and urban design that influenced the work of a generation of European architects such as Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier. The omission of the slaughterhouse, or abattoir, from this narrative leads to questions about the relationships between modernism and death, as Dean engages with one such site and its entanglements with fundamental questions of humanity.  
  
Dean was initially inspired by philosophers Georges Bataille and Frank Wilderson, each of whom address the slaughterhouse in their writings—whether as a metaphor or paradigm—as crucial to the constitution of civil society. _Abattoir, U.S.A.!,_ also builds on Dean’s own research into the slaughterhouse and industrial architecture, and the ways they reveal modernism’s intimacy with death on conceptual, political, and material levels. The film ruminates on this through the slaughterhouse’s presence as both an allegorical structure and a literal place where the boundary between human, animal, and machine is produced and reproduced.  
  
Installed at The Power Plant, the work has particular potency set against the backdrop of Toronto’s industrial history along the waterfront. The Power Plant was originally constructed in 1926 as a powerhouse, to hold the heating and refrigeration equipment for the massive cold storage warehouse facility next door. Not far from The Power Plant’s location were once corporate and municipal abattoirs, which gave some truth to the city’s old nickname “hogtown” for its large-scale industrial landscape that was once common to Toronto. Dean takes the slaughterhouse as its subject and projects its forms into a virtual space, _Abattoir, U.S.A.!_ ultimately explores how meaning is produced through moving images, working across material, symbolic, and technological registers.  
  
Crucial to these considerations is the film’s immersive 8-channel score by composer Evan Zierk, which weaves together field recordings, samples, pop melodies, and algorithmically generated sequences. Influenced by Romantic-era classical composition and Hollywood melodrama, this multidimensional score plays a vital role in developing the film’s landscape, and its experimentation with the construction and limitations of narrative.  
  
_Abattoir, U.S.A.!_ was commissioned by the [Renaissance Society](https://renaissancesociety.org/) at the University of Chicago, where it was curated by Myriam Ben Salah with Karsten Lund and Michael Harrison and presented in February 2023. The film was co-produced with [The Vega Foundation](https://thevegafoundation.com/).  
  
The exhibition at The Power Plant is organized and developed in partnership with The Vega Foundation. Founded in 2021, The Vega Foundation is dedicated to supporting and promoting artists through the production and acquisition of new moving image works and to facilitating their presentation through institutional collaborations. 

Aria Dean: Abattoir, U.S.A.!

Aria Dean, Abattoir, U.S.A.!, 2023. Single-channel video, sound, colour. 10:50 minutes. Courtesy the artist, Greene Naftali, New York. 

thumbnail_Aria Dean, Abattoir, U.S.A.!, 2023. Single-channel video, sound, colour. 10:50 minutes. Courtesy the artist, Greene Naftali, New York. 

[![[Vega_C_color-01.png]](https://strapi-uploads-the-power-plant-live.s3.ca-central-1.amazonaws.com/Vega_C_color_01_78864b0cda.png)](https://thevegafoundation.com/)

ORGANIZED AND DEVELOPED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE VEGA FOUNDATION

Julia Paoli, Executive Director at The Vega Foundation

The Power Plant

Exhibitions

Upcoming Exhibitions

Abdelkader Benchamma. Solastalgia: Archaeologies of Loss

Anna Boghiguian: Time of Change

Aria Dean: Abattoir, U.S.A.!

Touring Exhibitions

Commissioning program