The Power Plant

Colourful Parachutes: Imagining Alternative Futures Through the Power of Play brings together leading artists from Canada and abroad to examine the politics of the exhibition space through the radical power of play. Imagining children as the exhibition’s primary audience, it puts into question how we make, present, and experience contemporary art—often with unexpected and uniquely engaging results. Influenced by exhibitions like Palle Nielsen’s The Model (1968), which turned Stockholm’s Moderna Museet into a giant adventure playground, Colourful Parachutes views the gallery as a microcosm of society. If we allow children to 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.

The title is 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?”

Including several participatory, interactive works, Colourful Parachutes transforms the gallery into a space where things can be made, moved, played with, tried out, tested, and touched. By disrupting the formal conventions that we are accustomed to in the gallery, it encourages people of all ages to become active participants in the shaping of their environment by giving them the power to envision a different world for us all.