MOCCA Launches Fall with Three Toronto Premiers!!!
TORONTO, Ontario, August 22, 2012 – The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art is pleased to announce the launch of our Fall 2012 programming season with the Toronto premiere of Jamelie Hassan’s nationally touring exhibition At the Far Edge of Words and Guy Ben-Ner’s Stealing Beauty from August 24 – October 14; and the international premiere of Jeroen Eisinga’s Springtime, from August 24 – September 16. The opening reception will take place on September 7, from 8-10 p.m.
Jamelie Hassan’s multi-media installations, photo-based and video work have been important features of the Canadian visual art milieu since the early 1970s. Her work has focused on issues of cultural and personal identity, exclusion, displacement, language and communication, and is strongly influenced by her activist politics, cultural heritage as a Canadian born to Arab parents, as well as her significant and extensive travels. At the Far Edge of Words is a survey exhibition that includes a series of works tracing the past 30 years of Hassan’s practice, with specific emphasis on key pieces that intertwine her works as an artist with her enduring interest in text, language, memory and identity. Jamelie Hassan/ At the Far Edge of Words is curated by Melanie Townsend and organized by Museum London. The exhibition at MOCCA is generously supported by Salah Bachir and Jacob Yerex.
In the MOCCA project space Dutch artist Jeroen Eisinga transforms himself into a living shroud of buzzing bees in his spellbinding, monumental film performance, Springtime. The unstable, flickering image draws to mind a host of rich and varied art-historical references, from medieval portraiture and 19th-century freak show catalogues to Andy Warhol and Richard Avedon. Springtime will be shown alongside a suite of rare, never-before exhibited photographs. Jeroen Eisinga/ Springtime is curated by Andréa Picard, and presented in collaboration with the Toronto International Film Festival’s Future Projections program with the generous support of the Mondriaan Fund, Amsterdam, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Hal Jackman Foundation.
For our widely acclaimed National Gallery of Canada at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art program, MOCCA presents Tel Aviv-based Guy Ben-Ner‘s film Stealing Beauty in our Media/Retail space. Ben-Ner has received international acclaim over the past decade for his narrative-based videos that feature the artist and real members of his family as actors. Stealing Beauty, 2007, is a wry and poignant tale filmed in IKEA store showrooms during business hours in which a father attempts to teach lessons to his children on the virtues of private property. Guy Ben-Ner/Stealing Beauty is organized by MOCCA and the National Gallery of Canada, and curated by National Gallery Associate Curator, Contemporary Art Jonathan Shaughnessy and MOCCA Artistic Director and Curator David Liss.
Links / URLs
· Learn more about At the Far Edge of Words
· Learn more about Springtime
· Learn more about Stealing Beauty
· Learn more about the NGC@MOCCA program
Quotes
· David Liss, Artistic Director and Curator, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art
“MOCCA is pleased to be launching our Fall season with three solo exhibitions by artists from three different countries, bringing together diverse and unique perspectives on personal and social identity; points of view that are by turns engaging, provocative and entertaining.”
· Melanie Townsend, Curator, At the Far Edge of Words
“Jamelie Hassan’s pioneering work has steadfastly asserted that artists have a responsibility to address the critical issues of our time while her geographical location in the “regions” of Southwestern Ontario grounds her practice.”
· Andréa Picard, Curator, Springtime
“It’s refreshing to see an artist who mixes enfant terrible antics with formal rigour and unabashed Romanticism.”
Tags / Keywords
Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, MOCCA, National Gallery of Canada, NGC, NGC@MOCCA Jamelie Hassan, At the Far Edge of Words, Guy Ben-Ner, Stealing Beauty, Jeroen Eisinga, Springtime, Museum London, Toronto International Film Festival, TIFF, Future Projections.
About the National Gallery of Canada at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art
The National Gallery of Canada at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art is a three-year program that will see the two institutions co-organize and co-present a series of exclusive exhibitions in MOCCA’s newly-renovated project space, drawn from the NGC’s exceptional contemporary art collection. These will include the presentation of single works, new acquisitions or full-scale exhibitions designed to complement MOCCA’s existing programming.
Learn more about the NGC@MOCCA program.
About the NGC http://www.gallery.ca/
About MOCCA
The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art was founded from the former Art Gallery of North York in 1999, with the mandate to exhibit, research, collect, and promote innovative art by Canadian and non-Canadian artists whose works engage and reflect the relevant stories of our times. In 2005, MOCCA relocated to the West Queen West Art + Design District in downtown Toronto, in the heart of one of North America’s most dynamic arts communities and functions effectively as a nucleus of energies for cultural production and exchange. Since 2006, MOCCA draws 40,000 visitors annually.
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Supporters
The National Gallery of Canada at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art is generously supported by AXA Art Canada, Cineplex Media, World MasterCard® and The Ouellette Family Foundation. The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art is grateful for the patronage of THE ART DEPT., a leadership circle of MOCCA patrons.
All programs and activities of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art are supported by Toronto Culture, the Ontario Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, BMO Financial Group, Cisco Canada, Hal Jackman Foundation, individual memberships and private donations.