The 11th annual Nuit Blanche returns to the city for a night of exploring and art. Vv Magazine’s Lisa Lagace rounds up all the installations worth losing sleep over.
Nuit Blanche returns to the city on Saturday, October 1st for 12 hours of interdisciplinary art featured all around downtown Toronto. But this time, it returns to its roots – meaning the huge corporate sponsorship of Scotiabank is gone – making for a smaller selection of exhibits to choose from.
With that said, there will still be plenty of projects to explore all night, and it will be interesting to see how the all-night art event changes with less funding behind it.
Here are the five projects I’m most excited to check out this year:
Death of the Sun
Nathan Phillips Square, 100 Queen St. West
Director X is famous for his music video work, directing for artists like Drake and Rihanna, but here we get a chance to experience his artistic vision as we watch a massive sculpture of the sun progress through its life cycle.
Ocean
Toronto City Hall (Rotunda), 100 Queen St. West
The projects that take place at City Hall are usually worth the effort to see as money has been spent to back big name artist creations. With Ocean, a turbulent environment will be created in the Rotunda, using a canopy of recycled textiles, lighting and sound effects.
The Museum
Artscape Youngplace, 180 Shaw St. (Studio 108)
With traumatic events being streamed all over television and the internet, bearing witness to them has become a standard part of our day. Here, artist Novka Ćosović uses swimming pool tile as the background of violent livestreamed images to represent how trauma has become something so expected we no longer flinch when seeing it.
Literature vs. Traffic
Old City Hall, 60 Queen St. West
A normally busy street will be shut down and covered in donated books, showing the power of the written word, and ideally, allowing us to replace our Kindles and smartphones with a real live book. In the last few hours of the night, patrons are invited to take a book home, so that by the end of the evening, normal vehicle traffic can resume.
Girl Talk
401 Richmond St. West
This photography exhibit features photos of graffiti drawn in women’s bathrooms across Toronto, Montreal, and New York City. Each piece of graffiti has been printed on semi-translucent paper and installed on the walls and ceilings of a greenhouse – allowing viewers to literally walk inside the fantasies of bathroom artists.
RELATED LINK: 5 Questions with Famed Artist, Mister E
What other installations are you excited to see at Nuit Blanche 2016? Let Vv Magazine know in the comments below, or tweet us @ViewtheVibe.
