From rave buses to Art Nest, Nathan Phillips Square is where Toronto has always gathered. Josh Greenblatt on sixty-five years of the Toronto Outdoor Art Fair and its founding idea that art is for everyone.
Polish artist and architect Natalia Romik speaks with Arcade about her exhibition Plague Crystals, now at Koffler Arts, and why fragile, translucent towers of crystal might hold what haunts us better than any stone monument.
Approaching 80, the celebrated Belgrade-born artist insists with her new exhibition at Gropius Bau that "Now it is the right time to talk about eroticism."
The pioneering Toronto multidisciplinary artist speaks with filmmaker Egoyan about the thinking and creative process behind her latest work, As If by Chance..., and the two types of prejudice faced by elder artists.
With her new exhibition, Glorious Catastrophe, Toronto artist Gillian Iles seeks out the paradoxes and possibilities in moments of extreme transformation.
Toronto artist Kalmplex talks with curator David Liss about the inspirations behind his current exhibition at Koffler301 and his worries over the city losing its places of culture and connection.
An estate plan might be among the most important works that an artist leaves behind.
A Berlin exhibition of the beloved filmmaker's paintings and installations testifies to Lynch's 30-year connection with the city, from photographing its derelict urban spaces to an aborted attempt to establish a centre for Transcendental Meditation in Teufelsberg.
Theatre designer Teresa Przyblski on creating an environment for William Kentridge’s film series Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot, where immersion begins with restraint.
Patrick Pittman on David Blackwood’s lifelong devotion to the stories and storms of Newfoundland—and the fragile work of keeping a place, and its ghosts, from slipping away.
Photographer Dimitri Levanoff on his exhibition “BEING THERE: Portraits of the Toronto Art Community” and the draw of the artist as subject.
Often blurring the line between documentary and dreamscape, Tracey Snelling’s sculptures, installations, and other works—now showing at Koffler Arts—cast the viewer in the role of voyeur.
In a conversation with Eleanor Wachtel presented by Koffler Arts and the Canadian Opera Company, William Kentridge discusses a career marked by indeterminacy, shadows, and restless energy, where drawing is at the heart of his work.
In Koffler301’s inaugural exhibition, Sage Szkabarnicki-Stuart uses goats, pigeons, and plastic bags to strange, slapstick effect, blurring the boundary between the mundane and the magical.
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.
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"?
An exhibition at the Jewish Museum Berlin, offers a penetrating glimpse of the legendary documentarian as he begins to unravel the complex layers of the Shoah, and the challenges of capturing the presentness of the past.
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 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.
On the strained, surreal intimacies of Luca Guadagnino’s new adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ Queer.
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?
From her talk presented by Koffler Arts, producer and actor Jennifer Podemski reflects on her early years navigating her dual Jewish and Indigenous identities, what that taught her about the importance of continuity, and how her career has shaped the way she thinks about representation in media.
Everything the wind blows on has decisions to make. The latest novel from Sarah Hall joins a growing conversation about non-human consciousness—and explores it with more joy, and more filth, than your average climate novel.
Actor, producer, and director Alon Nashman discusses World Play, an ongoing series of readings performed in multiple languages around a theme, and the pleasures of deep listening.
Tia Glista unravels the Möbius strip of narrative in Catherine Lacey’s latest book—a hybrid of memoir and fiction, about a recent break-up and an earlier loss of faith—and reflects on her own break with God, and what faith means in the first place.
In No Fault, Haley Mlotek searches for the language of love’s quiet undoing—from grief to the unexpected grace that comes with choosing to leave a marriage. Patrick Pittman traces what happens when cultural expectations, legal reform, and literary form converge in the finality of divorce.
Maybe true artistic freedom isn’t about about perseverance, but knowing exactly when to stop. Jowita Bydlowska reflects on the decision by her mentor and friend Barbara Gowdy to quit writing.
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.
Linda Besner considers the tangled intimacies laying about in Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie’s The Use of Photography.
Jowita Bydlowska examines the beauty, grotesqueries, and defiant paradoxes of autofiction as performative act of literary self-exposure.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Forty-nine years after a York University class concert that never quite ended, Eric Cadesky on candlelight, breakage, and the world’s only ensemble that builds, plays, and tours its own glass instruments.
How Toronto’s early punk scene erupted into life, shaped by art school, DIY spaces, and a city steeped in constraint, boredom, and borrowed influence—told by people who were there.
Poet and playwright Titilope Sonuga on her new libretto for Stravinsky’s 1918 theatrical work being performed by the Art of Time Ensemble, inspired by the story of the Canadian army’s first all-Black battalion.
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.
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.”
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.
From rave buses to Art Nest, Nathan Phillips Square is where Toronto has always gathered. Josh Greenblatt on sixty-five years of the Toronto Outdoor Art Fair and its founding idea that art is for everyone.
A new exhibition at Berlin’s Topography of Terror Foundation explores through diaries, propaganda messaging, and personal artifacts how much Germans knew about the Holocaust while it was happening.
A panel discussion on the uses and abuses of how urban dwellers think about their relationships with nature, patterns of gentrification in Toronto, and how people have been inhabiting spaces like the Don Valley much longer than people assume.
As Koffler Arts closes out 2025, General Director Matthew Jocelyn looks back on a year of exhibitions, experiments, and encounters—and makes the case for why cultural institutions should resist being easily summed up.
In conversation with Arcade, writer Shawn Micallef wonders whether Toronto really wants to be a city, and applies the lens of psychogeography to Tracey Snelling’s art.
In The Audacity of Relevance, Alex Sarian argues that struggling non-profit arts organizations need to adopt a more audience-based model.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cecelia Brooks on the collecting of Indigenous ancestral seeds as a form of memory keeping.
