French curator Ami Barak turns the area around City Hall and Nathan Phillips Square into a celebration of the centenary of Marcel Duchamp’s first “readymade,” a bike wheel mounted on a stool. Barak reverses the current dynamic, taking found objects out of the museums and bringing them back into the streets.
Melik Ohanian hangs a huge hammock
Artist’s experience changing focUs proves that the creative process is never predictable
MELIK OHANIAN: EL AGUA DE NIEBLA Bay and Queen
Sometimes the original concept for a project changes – you just have to adapt to the circumstance.
The idea for El Agua De Niebla (“water of mist” in Spanish) began when French-Armenian artist Melik Ohanian heard about hammock workshops in Mexican prisons. He wanted a hammock to fit a large room in an abbey near Paris as part of his multi-site 08-09 project, From The Voice To The Hand.
Eventually he decided not to attempt a dangerous collaboration with the Mexican penal system and instead followed some weavers he met in Yucatán to Mayapán, a village where everyone makes hammocks.
“I told the family that my dad was a giant and I would like to make him a gift of a gigantic hammock,” he says on the phone from Paris. They laughed and agreed to participate, working for two months on the 40-metre-long object.
“At no time did they know about the site. For them it was just a present for my dad. I like producing a kind of language between the request and the production. The deep meaning is that this collective production came from a kind of legend.”
People can’t actually get in it, but he says the hammock still symbolizes the idea of collective rest. From a distance it reads as an abstract curved line, but as you get closer you see it’s handmade.
Ohanian also hung it outdoors in the Tuileries, but he’s excited by the urban context. “This giant looked so big in a room or in nature, but it will be a small sign compared to the buildings of Toronto. Now it’s a sign that has to travel and carry its story with it.”
Enlarging a human-scale object seems like a simple concept but is actually part of a complex practice involving philosophical inquiries into time, space and politics.
“The important thing is that it’s a work of production, an old tradition from Maya times. It’s really an ancestral gesture.” His work is about “travelling and bringing something from one culture to another, producing something that links two territories.
“Maybe if I was working with the prisoners I would never have said that my dad was a giant. It’s something instinctive that came to me at the time. After that, the politics of this work specifically was a sort of allegory.
“When you stretch it – we can’t do that in Toronto but did at other shows – you discover that it’s something other than a hammock. It’s a cartography, a cartography of production. All these hands came together in a kind of continuation, a way of production that’s really fascinating to me.”
FRAN SCHECHTER
Crash Cars
Who Alain Declercq
Where Nathan Phillips Square
Why No machine is as deeply and problematically rooted in the North American psyche as the car. In this piece, two driverless luxury sedans circle each other in an endless figure eight, teetering on the verge of collision but never quite doing so. Drawing on the sleek ambience of car commercials, the spectacle evokes the thrills and dangers surrounding our difficult love affair with the car.
DAVID JAGER
Forever Bicycles
Who Ai Weiwei
Where Nathan Phillips Square
Why Yong jiu pai, which means “Forever,” is China’s prevalent bicycle brand, and most Chinese rely on two wheels to get around. Art superstar and dissident extraordinaire Ai pays tribute to bikes in his signature sculptural assemblage. This incarnation will be the biggest yet: 3,144 bicycles bolted and stacked together in an endless, elegant loop.
DAVID JAGER
1-855-IS IT ART (1-855-474-8278)
Who VSVSVS
Where Phone line, live video feed at City Hall, 100 Queen West
Why The local art collective, who like to take up residence at galleries and festivals, operate a call centre at their port lands HQ to answer the titular question, the one Marina Abramovic said in a recent interview that she misses the most. So far, the accompanying website, 1855isitart.com, has a one-word response: “Yes.” If you dial while drunk (we know some of you will), a collective member promises you’ll have “a hazy memory of talking to another intoxicated caller.”
FRAN SCHECHTER
