Arcade

Batten the Hatches: On Sarah Hall’s Helm

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.
by Patrick Pittman /

David Lynch, Beyond the Beyond, in Berlin

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.
by Jonathan Garfinkel /

Designing for What Isn’t There

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.
by Arcade /

Curating From a Sense of Necessity

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.
by Arcade /

A Very Psychogeographic Thing to Do

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.
by Arcade /

Windows Into Strange Worlds

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.
by Arcade /

The Artist’s Mind is Their True Studio

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.
by Arcade /

All Caught Up in the Infinite Middle

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.
by Tia Glista /

The Boring Kind of Heartbreak

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.
by Patrick Pittman /

The Art of Quitting

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.
by Jowita Bydlowska /

Form is Always Full of Meaning

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.
by Arcade /

Severance, My Doppelganger, and 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.
by Carl Wilson /

The Aspirational Realness of Bonjour Tristesse

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?
by Tatum Dooley /

The Jewish Position on Sex

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.
by Jonathan Garfinkel /

You Can’t Really Be Half of Anything

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.
by Jennifer Podemski /

Undoing Erasure: A Soldier’s Tale Retold

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.
by Orly Zebak /

When a Garden Leans into Complexity

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.
by Patrick Pittman /

Til Freedom Do Us Part

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.
by Linda Besner /

Tearing Up the Script

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.
by Arcade /
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