TOWERING AMBITION
Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art rebrands itself and unveils expansion plans before it even moves into its new building,
It’s been a little less than 10 months since the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art announced its move to a new home in the Tower Automotive building on Sterling Rd., a derelict architectural icon on an industrial slice of land in the city’s west end.
It has been just as long since the museum has been able to offer any firm plans for what it might do once it gets inside (the new entity is slated to open in May 2017). Much of that wondering ended Tuesday when MOCCA became MOCA Toronto Canada, a new name to go along with a new look, mission and program filling the building’s old bones with some substantial meat.
In a news conference held across the street from the tower on Sterling, CEO and director Chantal Pontbriand spoke of a new museum model geared toward a globalized world, with Toronto, the most diverse city on the planet, at its core.
“This is what the post-2000 world is about: how to live together,” Pontbriand told an audience that included Councillor Ana Bailao and Mayor John Tory. “The role of the 21st-century museum is to be a place to work out democracy and that is what this museum will be about.”
If that’s an ambitious goal, MOCA is making sure it has the square footage to realize it. The museum revealed Tuesday that it had expanded its initial footprint from three floors of the tower to five to include such things as “The Squat” on the fourth floor, a collaborative study and workshop space open to the public, and a dedicated rehearsal space on the fifth to help realize Pontbriand’s vision of live performance in the museum’s program.
Pontbriand also announced that eventually MOCA would expand to a secondary building on the east side of Sterling Rd., directly across from the tower. MOCA — the new name reflecting a move away from the former MOCCA’s purely Canadian content and agenda toward a global engagement — has been polished to a slick sheen for its coming-out party, with an international agenda at the forefront.
Its inaugural exhibition, curated by Pontbriand, says as much. Called Odyssey 2040, it is slated to open the museum with works and performances drawn from across the country and the world.
The year 2040 is when the GTA is expected to crest the 10-million population mark and the exhibition is partly a meditation on both that future city and the museum it will help to create.
For Sterling Rd., though, the future is now. In MOCA’s immediate neighbourhood, the area’s prospective redevelopment has spurred rising rents and much movement among its long-time residents.
Mostly derelict for decades, Ster- ling was until very recently home to dozens of artists, many of whom have moved out in the wake of rapidly rising rents. Earlier this month, Istvan Kantor, a Governor General’s Award-winning artist, was evicted from a building across the street from Tower Automotive, forcing him to relocate his entire archive on short notice.
Development pressure on the realestate market brought on by creative enterprise is nothing new to MOCA or MOCCA, which was forced to vacate its Queen St. W. location last year when its building was sold to a condominium developer.
Here, MOCA has a 40-year lease, armouring it against another such move for some time. What the neigh- bourhood around it might look like is another question.
Pontbriand sees it as “a journey we’ll take together,” she says. “We’ll be learning, together, how to steer a new kind of museum.”
Highlights of the inaugural program include:
You Are Here, Sept.-Dec. 2017: Imagined as a survey of Toronto artistic production curated by longtime MOCCA creative director David Liss, You Are Here will re-establish the connections Liss laboured long to build with the Toronto art world. But it is also expected to examine the conditions — economic, social, other — that have scattered artists to far corners of both the city and the world, making the notion of “here” a slippery one indeed.
China: Body to Body, Jan.-April 2018: Curated by Catherine David from the Pompidou Centre in Paris, Body to Body signals an ambition on the part of the museum to connect with the major players of the contemporary art world. It’s also a canny play toward winning over a significant local population here, the Chinese community.
Special Project 2017: Mark Lewis: Collaborating with the Art Gallery of Ontario — building alliances with crosstown institutions is another smart move in a city where museums have largely functioned as silos — MOCA plans to mount a survey of Canadian film and video artist Mark Lewis.