Nuit Blanche a bit leaner without Scotiabank
After losing title sponsor, this year’s event will include 90 projects in four zones
Toronto’s Nuit Blanche organizers announced the program for the 2016 version of the annual overnight contemporary art spectacle this week.
While the event is a little leaner than last year — 90 versus 110 projects over its four zones — it’s also a few syllables lighter.
Scotiabank, the title sponsor of the event for the last decade — over that time, it insisted the festival be referred to as “Scotiabank Nuit Blanche” — dropped its support just days after the 2015 instalment, saying in a statement that it “no longer aligns with our sponsorship strategy.”
It declined to elaborate, though it’s a safe bet to suggest that it’s not the cultural content with which it failed to find accord — Scotia is an aggressive sponsor of such things as the Giller Prize — leaving many to speculate whether it was the unruly latenight behaviour for which the event has become known that prompted the withdrawal. (For the record, the bank has denied this.)
Whatever the case, a leaner-looking Nuit Blanche website, minus the bank’s corporate red, debuted Tuesday morning — the city has said that Scotia made up 50 per cent of the festival’s revenue — detailing this year’s event in four zones.
While the absence of a title sponsor is notable — the event is simply called “Nuit Blanche” for the first time in almost a decade — the city, vaguely, said this year’s funding model “remains the same, including significant contributions from corporate sponsors,” according to city programming manager Kristine Germann.
However, an overall contraction in the budget appears due at least in part to Scotia’s absence. In 2015, 72 per cent of the $2.9-million budget came from government grants and sponsors, including Scotia, with $1.1 million from the city’s net funding budget making up the balance.
This year, despite adding sponsors Shiseido and Crystal Fountains, the budget, to be calculated post-event, is estimated at $2.6 million, with 68 per cent coming from grants and sponsors, and the city contributing the balance of $1.2 million. It amounts to $400,000 less in total revenue generated, with the city throwing in $100,000 more.
That being the case, Tuesday morning at the studio of architect Philip Beesley, the city unveiled one of the signature projects of this year’s event: Beesley’s Ocean, a thicket of tiny, high-powered LED lights dangling from long strips of fabric. It will hang in the rotunda of Toronto City Hall, stretching around two-thirds of cavernous space.
Janine Marchessault, a professor at York University and co-curator, with Michael Prokopow, of Oblivion, the Nuit Blanche zone of which Ocean will be part, called Beesley’s installation an immersive experience.
In the full light of a summer morning, the small sampling of Oceandangling from the soaring ceiling of Beesley’s Sterling Rd. studio provided only the slightest glimpse, but Beesley’s more than capable of filling in the blanks. The thousands of dangling lights, intermittently flashing and swept into patterns by highpowered fans providing erratic breezes, “will build out of a chorus of whispers into this overwhelming sense of oblivion,” Beesley said.
He likened the experience to being amid a forest of sea kelp, ominous but organic, that might provide some common ground. “I like to think of it as a collective chant,” he said. “A profoundly simple thing built up into something overwhelming.”
For the quick over-and-done that Nuit Blanche’s12 or so hours offer, it’s awell-tailored goal. A few more speculative highlights from the city’s four official zones:
Oblivion
Made up of just three monumental projects ( Ocean being one of them), curators Marchessault and Prokopow revisit their city hall location from 2012 (their program that year, The Museum at the End of the World, featured such artists as Douglas Coupland and An Te Liu) with both optimism and unrest.
One of the projects, Director X’s Death of the Sun, presents viewers with a changing multimedia sculpture that tracks the sun’s cycle from birth to death, while Floria Sigismondi’s Pneuma, a video installation in the water between the Freedom Arches in Nathan Phillips Square, looks to portray the connection, as imagined by the ancient Greeks, between the head and the heart; a sometimes-futile reconciliation, as most of us know all too well.
All three works will remain after the sun comes up. They’re part of the now annual extended program, which keeps some pieces in place until Oct. 10.
Militant Nostalgia
Curated by Madrid-based Paco Barragan, Militant Nostalgia is as disillusioned as it sounds — works with titles like Scenes of Failure (Enrique Marty) or 100 Plastic Containers for Human Corpses ( Santiago Sierra) are as bleak as they appear — but with purpose.
Amid the disconnects of the information era, Barragan says, he’s steering toward a more hopeful future.
Let us know when you find it but, in the meantime, performances by Anishinaabe legend Rebecca Belmore at the Art Gallery of Ontario and Colombia’s Maria José Arjona look to provide some dynamic experience, however dour. Projects are clustered along John St., between Dundas and Front.
And the Transformation Reveals
New York-based curator Camille Hong Xin riffs on the classical notion of metamorphosis in her program, centred around Bay St. between Dundas and Front Sts., and her projects hew close to it.
Lisa Park’s Eunoia uses commercial brainwave headsets, a real thing, to transform electrical impulses produced by thought into sound waves that move pools of water to shudder, while Vertigo Sea, by virtuosic British filmmaker John Akomfrah and a hit at last year’s Venice Biennale, conflates over three screens the majesty of enormous migrating whales with the terrifying voyages of African migrants braving oceanic crossings in a quest for freedom.
Akomfrah’s inclusion of the whaling industry — hunting, butchering and disposing of their majestic quarry — suggest a point of view not to be ignored in this era of refugees.
Facing the Sky
Louise Dery, a legendary Montreal curator, offers a thoughtful frame through which to view the heavens, both figuratively and literally: an enormous video installation by Montreal’s Pascal Grandmaison and Marie-Claire Blais that alternately portrays the twinkle of Toronto’s skyline and the darkness of Lake Ontario.
Or the Academy of the Distrustful, from Joan Fontcuberta, which casts conspiracy-theory doubt on man’s ascent — whether Sputnik or Apollo — to the heavens.
The works are gathered along the waterfront near York St.