24-hour-party people
Get out your party shoes, load up on No-Doze (or whatever it you kids take nowadays) and get ready for an all night gallery crawl and party this fall.
The City of Toronto , with funding from Scotiabank, is planning a free, citywide, all-night event to celebrate contemporary art. From sunset on Saturday, September 30 to sunrise on Sunday, October 1 the public “will be invited to rediscover Toronto through public art commissions, all night exhibitions, performances, installations and unique programs.” The city is calling the event Nuit Blanche.
“It will be a wonderful night,” said independent curator and cultural consultant Clara Hargittay. Clara is one of five people chosen to oversee three special event areas. Her area is West Queen West from Dufferin Street to Trinity Bellwoods Park (Yay! The No Fly Zone).
The Nuit Blanche idea started in Paris a few years ago and has become a regular and popular event. Other cities in Italy and Belgium and elsewhere followed.
Hundreds of museums, galleries and other institutions across the city will open their doors to present free art programs. Residents and tourists will also be invited to explore unusual spaces not normally open after dark and not normally tied to an art event.
Everything from swimming pools and car washes to churches and libraries will be transformed by contemporary art projects.
“We're in the process of selecting the sites that might be available. We're looking for unusual site that might accommodate artwork like billboards, even the grounds of the mental health centre or carwashes.”
Clara said she would like to do something a little different than “all the wonderful stuff that usually goes on” along that stretch of Queen West. “The street will be hopping that night. But the challenge is to do something different, to bring attention to areas and issues in the neighbourhood that you normally don't see, that are not on the surface.”
“This part of the city in the late nineteenth century was a very elegant and very posh neighbourhood, similar to Rosedale . Then it went downhill and now is rediscovering its glamour, but there are still many underlying problems and issues with housing in the neighbourhood and social issues.”
She said some of the problems stem from the presence of the mental health facility on the corner of Queen West and Shaw Streets. “There are many interesting things we can focus on and, in a kind of ambient way, bring to the surface. Artists are really great at doing that. People can then take with them these issues and think about them.”
The other Nuit Blanche curators and their exhibition sites are: McCaul Street/University Avenue from Queen Street to College Street curated by Kim Simon, an independent curator and writer and the director of programming at Gallery TPW in Toronto and Bloor Street West/Yorkville curated by Fern Bayer, Peggy Gale, both independent curators, and Chrysanne Stathacos, a multi-media artist and educator.
Nuit Blanche is of course the other official language's expression for "white night" a term used to describe a natural phenomenon that occurs at high latitudes where the dusk meets the dawn for a night without darkness. Colloquially, Nuit Blanche refers to a "sleepless night." While Toronto embraces this celebration of art planned to run from sunset to sunrise, a sleepless night is exactly what we have to look forward to this fall.
Clara said the idea of an all night art party has romance and although it's been a long time since she's pulled an all-night she says she's up to the challenge.
The Toronto version of Nuit Blanche will be an adaptation of the successful Paris event created by the City of Paris in 2002. Nuit Blanche is such an enormous success in Paris , that similar celebrations are now held in Rome , Brussels , Madrid , Montreal and Riga. Toronto is the newest addition to this international list.
Nuit Blanche is a Live With Culture signature event and is part of the city's 16-month Live With Culture campaign.