The Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA) announced details of its exhibition programme for fall 2020, featuring work by Fatma Bucak, Yazan Khalili, Mika Rottenberg and Krista Belle Stewart plus a new commission by Michael Lin. Alongside this roster of major works by Canadian and international artists, MOCA continues its highly regarded online platform Shift Key, profiling timely video works by a range of significant artists selected by independent curator and interdisciplinary art historian Daisy Desrosiers.
Medusa: Yazan Khalili – September 3 – November 15, 2020
Medusa (2020) by Ramallah-based Yazan Khalili builds on his long-standing engagement with digital archiving in times of political unrest and engages with the rise of facial recognition technologies. While the human face is an everyday mode of personal identification, the COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented historical transition in how we perceive one another. Despite the fact that Khalili produced this work prior to the pandemic, the current requirement to wear a mask in public spaces has introduced a new, universal layer of facial concealment from which to engage with the ideas of Medusa and the mythology it references.
Acts of Erasure: Fatma Bucak / Krista Belle Stewart – October 1, 2020 – January 3, 2021
Acts of Erasure brings the two distinct artistic practices of Fatma Bucak and Krista Belle Stewart into dialogue. This pairing opens space for conversations around political identity concerning land and heritage, methodologies of historical repression and interpretation and the act and effects of erasure.
Michael Lin – October 2020 – February 2021
Michael Lin is a leading Taiwanese contemporary painter and conceptual artist whose work has been exhibited internationally in major institutions and Biennials around the world, including The Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; The Vancouver Art Gallery; Towanda Art Center, Japan; Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing and in the Lyon and Singapore Biennials.
Spaghetti Blockchain: Mika Rottenberg – November 12, 2020 – March 21, 2021
MOCA is working with Argentina-born, New York-based artist Mika Rottenberg to present three of her most recent film installations along with other key works from her practice. This will be the first time that Rottenberg’s work is exhibited in Toronto. MOCA partnered with the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York in 2017, to co-commission Rottenberg’s latest work, Spaghetti Blockchain (2019). The exhibition at MOCA will feature this incredible work alongside installations No Nose Knows (2015) and Cosmic Generator (2017).
Shift Key
MOCA’s rotating online platform of video artworks will be curated from September through to the end of 2020 by independent curator and interdisciplinary art historian Daisy Desrosiers. The selection made by Desrosiers looks at the poetics of slowness and the complex relationships between collective narratives and memory as modes of becoming.
Desrosiers’ programme will premiere with the work SULLAE 술래 (2020) by New York-based artist Jesse Chun.
More information: https://moca.ca/
