Revisiting Cynthia Ozick’s writings on Helen Keller and Anne Frank, both included in the writer’s new career-spanning essay collection, are reminders that all Ozick’s tales feel like cautionary ones—it’s just not always clear what to avoid or how.
An ongoing inquiry into the art and ideas of our time.
In conjunction with her career retrospective now at Koffler Arts, Elana Herzog speaks with curator and longtime friend Jessica Stockholder about 1970s New York, the misunderstandings of formalism, and the evolution of a practice decades in the making.
Actor, director, and playwright Christopher Morris on the intensive research and moral questioning behind his play The Runner, opening this week in a new production presented by Koffler Arts.
The images of British photographer Nadia Lee Cohen are by now widely recognizable—for their mannered artifice and cosplaying celebrity subjects. But are they saying anything more than "Look at me"?
The doubles and divided selves who populate the world of Severance are no less fragmented than the ones we inhabit everyday. Carl Wilson unravels the TV show's eeriest truths.
The survey exhibition Electric Op, now at the Buffalo AKG, reconsiders the short-lived and oft-derided Op art movement within a sixty-year trajectory of digital and new media art making.
Another DECADE, the multi-artist show now on at Koffler Arts, shifts the spotlight onto the many arts organizations that call the Youngplace hub on Shaw Street home.
As with so much of her writing, Durga Chew-Bose’s directorial debut is an exercise in the poetics of close observation and studied nonchalance. But is there anything deeper going on beneath its perfectly impenetrable surface?
Jonathan Garfinkel explores a new exhibition that attempts the sticky, contradiction-laden, and perhaps impossible task of figuring what sex means in a Jewish context, from the Mishnah to Dr. Ruth and beyond.
As with the field of botany, the idea of the botanic garden in the West is deeply rooted in the history of European imperialism and extractivism. Led by London's iconic Kew, botanic gardens around the world are now attempting to untangle the legacies of empire.
If singers and musicians are our culture’s de facto philosophers of love, what do their sometimes headline-grabbing relationships tell us about the art of creating together.
When it comes to 20th century intellectual power-couples, no two represented more disparate ideas about marriage and freedom than the chain-smoking liberationists Sartre and de Beauvoir on the one hand, and the neoliberal economists Milton and Rose Friedman on the other.
Arcade speaks with Toronto artist Nancy Friedland on what drove her mid-career transition from conceptual photography to painting, and how the anticipation of grief lay at the heart of much of her work.
While trying to work on a book about illness on a residency near the former POW camp of Stalag-17B, Jonathan Garfinkel is drawn into friendship and dark contemplation with the Australian transdisciplinary artist Ian Strange
The question of whether plants could have consciousness has not been left quietly back in the ’70s, as Linda Besner discovers in Zoë Schlanger’s new book, The Light Eaters.
As he approaches the first anniversary of his joining Koffler Arts as its new general director, Arcade spoke with Matthew Jocelyn about the tenuous position of Canadian arts organizations, and his vision for Koffler going forward.
The chaos and order of the garden has been a running theme through much of Olivia Laing's work, and her particular way of looking at the world. No matter how Edenic a garden, the outside world is always creeping in.
A conversation with Brazilian artist Giselle Beiguelman about her exhibition Botannica Tirannica—now showing at Koffler Arts—and understanding the colonial imagination.
Does a dream house imply a dream self? Linda Besner, hunting for a home, considers how the photography used in listings serves as a malleable, market-driven form of portraiture.
Though the original names of many native plants in Canada were lost to colonialism, with the garden he has designed in dialogue with the exhibition Botannica Tirannica, Isaac Crosby aims to show the resilience of both Indigenous knowledge and the plants themselves.
An excerpt from a recent lecture at Koffler Arts by historian and artist Natalia Romik on the hiding places Jews in Poland and Ukraine created during the Holocaust.
Fresh off of winning a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, Barbara Astman looks back at the materials and methods behind her two works included in Koffler Arts' recent group show DECADE.
Experimental filmmaker Midi Onodera talks with Arcade about her early adoption and explorations of new technologies, how art making in Toronto has changed, and what the glut of media images might be doing to us.
What’s the meaning of a sentence? A paragraph? Linda Besner considers the abecedarian work that makes Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries so much more than an exercise in spreadsheet manipulation.
The work of photographer of Vid Ingelevics, currently showing in the group show DECADE at Koffler Arts, documents moments of civic transformation with surprising intimacy.
Evan Nicole Brown reflects on the interruptions to the natural world at the heart of Wanda Koop’s current solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Objects of Interest.
As the dwindling number of spaces vital to Toronto's working artists continue to struggle or turn to rubble, Josh Greenblatt investigates the multi-fronted policy response it will take to enable artists to thrive as more than a civic afterthought.
Toronto author Tamara Faith Berger talks with Arcade about her latest novel, Yara, the different lenses on Jewish diasporic identity, and the malleability of language.
In collaboration with Koffler Arts, the Art of Time Ensemble are heading back to the Weimar era for one of their final shows. We spoke to the ensemble’s director Andrew Burashko about his journey into the legendary “human swamp of unfettered sexual desire.”
A preview of the upcoming exhibition DECADE, opening in February, which celebrates ten years of art making at Artscape's hub on Shaw Street in Toronto.
Sometimes, it's worth taking a moment to look forward, at all the good things in our future. A selection of picks for the art worth looking forward to in 2024.
“The Synagogue at Babyn Yar: Turning the Nightmare of Evil into a Shared Dream of Good” is as much an exhibition about how to memorialize a traumatic, genocidal event as it is about the synagogue itself. To mark the end of its run at Koffler, we look back at how this unique show came together.
As Barbra Streisand reflects in her new memoir, Isaac Bashevis Singer was famously grumpy about her film adaptation of his short story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy”. Should there even be such a thing as a definitive Yentl?
The blue you see is not the same blue that I see; I hear you differently than you want to be heard; my nose, my room, my furniture, my language is not the same as yours.
The art world still likes to maintain the pretense that art and commerce are somehow separate—except at fairs, where the architecture embraces the vulgar truth.
From his talk at the Koffler Gallery, visual artist Rafael Goldchain on his photographic series I Am My Family and how its approach to simulation as a means of commemoration represents a “double gesture towards the past”—an attempt to both recuperate and interrogate history.
From its origins as a pop-up shop in 2018, 100% Silk has quickly grown into a beloved fixture of the Toronto clothing scene for its obsessive attention to textures and a style that marries sustainability with avant-garde luxury.
Despite the deliberate erasures of Soviet historiography, the site of the massacres at Babyn Yar reveals a story spanning several eras of Ukrainian history—though mostly by examining how that story was allowed to be told.
Commentary from the concluding panel discussion at the half-day symposium “Babyn Yar, the Holocaust and Beyond: Architectures of Memory”, organized by Koffler Arts.
We like to believe that the clothes we wear say something about us. To understand what they actually convey, we must ask a fundamental question—what’s the difference between a costume and an outfit?
Soundstreams’ inaugural event of the new season brings together two of the great Jewish artists of the twentieth century—the artist Mark Rothko and composer Morton Feldman.
In our first instalment of “Stopped in My Tracks”, a new series in which a contributor reflects on a life-altering encounter with an artwork, Carly Lewis discovers a sense of regeneration in Judit Reigl’s Guano.
Authors Gary Barwin and Cary Fagan discuss the quest as narrative device in their work, and how journey stories can help children—and even writers—navigate difficult or traumatic subject matter.
At the intersection of the public and private, the clothed and unclothed, the swimming pool has long been a favoured motif among artists and writers. But as fall settles in, what about the months when it's closed? Who are the artists of the drained pool?
In a wide ranging on-stage conversation, the novelist Heti and Sol the poet discuss the role of religion in their work, how the loss of a parent can upend one's universe, and less reverent ways of naming God.
An interview with Oleksiy Makukhin, CEO of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, on how Russia's invasion of Ukraine has disrupted the centre's activities and forced it to question its approach to memorialization.
The fourth Bonavista Biennale in Newfoundland was an exploration of meeting points, of the communal but sometimes parasitic energy that sparks when one place becomes home to another.
From anatomical and astronomical texts to harlequinades and Buck Rogers—book collector Larry Rakow on how a 14th-century invention became a staple of childhood.
Manuel Herz, the Basel-based architect behind a new synagogue on the site of the Babyn Yar massacre, challenges prevailing notions of memorialization in architecture.
Jacqueline Rose’s new collection of essays navigates our present chaos with help from those who thought their way through the calamities of the last century.
