Ami
Barak

Nuit Blanche Toronto / To get off to a flying start

Toronto October 5, 2013-September 26, 2019

Ai Weiwei, Forever Bicycles, 2011

In 2013, we will celebrate the centenary of Armory Show, the International Exhibition of Modern Art organized by the AAPS in the vast spaces of the National Guard Armories, New York, and which is considered a breaking point in the history of modernity. The same year, Duchamp installed a Bicycle Wheel on a chair in his studio considered as the starting point of the intrusion of “Ready-mades” (found objects which Duchamp chose and presented as art) in the art world. The idea was to question the notion of Art and the artistic attitude towards objects. The objects found on the street, chosen by the artist, will take an aura of art object within the frame of the art institution. Since then a multitude of objects exist in the museums and the exhibition spaces. If we take the manufactured objects back to the street in the context of Nuit blanche, while allowing the artists to treat and handle them as referenced works of art, we hope to close the loop and to reconcile the public with the status of the ubiquity of the object. The whole city and its public spaces become for one night an open-air museum.

I would like to take the opportunity to curate projects oriented more toward the object, and ignore, for a while if possible, the moving image and the digital effects.

I would like to invite 4 artists living in France: Boris Achour, Alain Declercq, Melik Ohanian and Frank Scurti to produce or reproduce works specially for the event.

I intend to display in public spaces a series of existing works and presentations of iconic objects, mostly reconstituted by artists such as: Tadashi Kawamata, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Ai Weiwei, Michel de Broin, Ron Arad, Paola Pivi, Brian Jungen. It is through the stack and seriality that the devices are available for most of the proposed installations. And it is deliberately that the objects in question are mostly chairs and bikes.