TORONTO.- Visitors to The Power Plant’s Fall 2016 Exhibition Season will view works that employ elements of our natural world, highlighting cracks or uncertainties in what appear to be concrete absolutes in contemporary society.

In the exhibition Faux Guide, Yto Barrada uses her recent work around fossil evidence, museology and natural history in Morocco to examine the authenticity and forgery of artifacts; and by means of their collection and distribution, the construction of historical and national narratives. In the second iteration of The Power Plant’s Fleck Clerestory Commission Program, Latifa Echakhch creates an environment in which visitors are confronted by a sky that is literally falling. Titled Cross Fade, Echakhch’s sky takes on the state of a ruin that underscores the uncertainty of the present, placing us somewhere between the memory of the past and speculation on a future that might have been. Maria Loboda references ancient philosophical texts and belief systems in her exhibition Some weep, some blow flutes. Her installation touches upon these texts’ approaches to healing and rejuvenation, drawing connections between the part and the whole, human hopes and transitions, and restoration and the passage of time.

The Fall 2016 Exhibition Season will be on view through Monday, 2 January 2017, with Latifa Echakhch’s Clerestory Commission on view until 15 May 2017. The Power Plant is dedicated to welcoming a diverse public to engage with the artworks and has planned a series of public programs this season to further the dialogue around contemporary art.

Yto Barrada
Faux Guide
Curator: Carolin Köchling, Curator of Exhibitions, The Power Plant
Yto Barrada’s solo exhibition at The Power Plant continues the artist’s recent work around fossil evidence, paleontology, museology and natural history in Morocco. At the centre of the exhibition is Faux départ (2015), a film that pays homage to the fossil "preparators" in the arid region between the Atlas Mountains and the Sahara Desert, whose intrepid work is fuelling a thriving trade in artifacts real, faux and hybrid. A rebuke to the fetishistic thirst for foreign objects, Faux départ is a sly meditation on authenticity and a paean to creativity. The exhibition presents a comprehensive selection of works from Barrada’s new series Faux Guide, including photographs of children’s toys from North Africa (North African Toys Series, 2015), which are part of the collection of the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, assembled by French ethnographers in the 1930s.

Structured like a personal museum, Barrada takes viewers through these artifacts, real and fake, to consider the act of collecting as a means of crafting national narratives. These conceptual strategies are also dealt with in Geological Time Scale (2015), a collection of Berber carpets that point to our shared roots in Pangaea, and A Guide to Trees for Governors and Gardeners (2014), a film that explores fictional notions of the idealised urban life.

Faux Guide is accompanied by the artist’s book A Guide to Fossils for Forgers and Foreigners, available in three languages and published by Walther König, Cologne and co-produced by Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto; Carré d'art – Musée d'art contemporain, Nîmes; and The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto.

Latifa Echakhch
Cross Fade
Curator: Carolin Köchling, Curator of Exhibitions, The Power Plant
Developed for the second iteration of the Fleck Clerestory Commission Program in a space characterized by its openness in all directions — to the sky, the waterfront and the surrounding galleries — Latifa Echakhch’s work Cross Fade confronts viewers with a sky that is literally falling. Fragments of Echakhch’s wall painting of the sky still exist intact but out of reach on the upper Fleck Clerestory walls, though large parts of the sky lie on the ground, in ruin. The technique used in the installation references the classical fresco, a second skin that usually leads viewers into another painted world. Here, however, Echakhch shatters this illusion, rooting viewers in the present which, like a cross fade, is caught between the past and the future.

The sky has previously appeared in Echakhch’s work La depossession (2014). Printed across a collapsing theatre canvas and suspended from the ceiling, the sky in La depossession is used as a motif to deconstruct the spectacle and intrigue of the theatre. For her installation at The Power Plant, Echakhch gives the sky material form. Rendered in cement and applied to the walls, it is no longer just a motif but also an object, capable of being destroyed. Here, an element we usually associate with permanence loses its stability, taking on a state of a ruin that underscores the uncertainty of the present and speaks to the loss of a common space. Echakhch’s work navigates poetics and politics as well as transcendental and actual space, referencing historical and social issues by pointing to the material’s original function and symbolic meaning. Having exhibited extensively in museums and exhibitions worldwide, Cross Fade is the first presentation of Echakhch’s work in Canada.

Maria Loboda
Some weep, some blow flutes
Curator: Clara Halpern, 2014-16 RBC Curatorial Fellow, The Power Plant
Some weep, some blow flutes, Maria Loboda’s first solo exhibition in Canada, presents an installation of recent and newly commissioned works that emerge from the artist’s ongoing research on archaeology, healing processes, anthropomorphism and the predynastic era.

The title of the exhibition is a reference to the influential Confucian and Taoist philosophical text by Laozi, Tao Te Ching, the poetic structure of which has elicited many interpretations, beginning from the perspective that a defined path is not the enduring way forward, but rather the importance of remaining attuned to connections. Similarly, the photographs, sculptures and wall drawings presented in the exhibition explore multiple ancient belief systems, connectivity and relationships between the part and the whole. In addition to Tao Te Ching, the Roman-era doctrine of Tetrapharmakos (τετραφάρμακος), a set of recommended remedies to avoid anxiety and heal the soul, is alluded to in You and I are earth (2016), The Long Yawn (2016) and The unattainable original connection (2016); installations that examine attempts to support or heal bodies, minds and objects. Approaches to healing and rejuvenation are further explored in Loboda’s two-sided photographic installation Early Dynastic Period I II III IV V etc. (2016), which highlights perception, human hopes and transitions.