MERCER

PAST EVENT

SESSION/relay: Cassandra Myers

Impossible Time There are very limited words to discuss time in the English language. Time according to queer disability scholars runs differently depending on your positionality of privilege, and thus movement through the world. To question our relationship with time is to question our relationship with colonial understandings of a person’s milestones, their life path, their […]

PAST EXHIBITION

Welcome Back to Mercer Union

21 July 2021 - 21 August 2021

Beginning 21 July 2021, Mercer Union is open for walk-in visits to view Erdem Taşdelen’s exhibition, A Minaret for the General’s Wife. Our gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday from 11 AM – 6 PM. We are happy to accommodate private visits outside of regular gallery hours; please reach out by email at office@mercerunion.org to […]

PAST EXHIBITION

Erdem Taşdelen: A Minaret for the General’s Wife

21 November 2020 - 9 October 2021

The starting point for Erdem Taşdelen’s commissioned work is a little-known architectural oddity located in the Lithuanian city of Kėdainiai, approximately 120 km from the capital Vilnius. Built in 1880 and restored in 2007, this structure is a freestanding Ottoman-style minaret that peculiarly has no mosque below or attached to it, and currently sits in […]

PAST EXHIBITION

SPACE: The BAU | Functioning Circuits: Aunty Lucy’s

2 November 2020 - 8 February 2021

Mercer Union’s SPACE billboard commission has invited The Black Artists Union (BAU) for its 2020-21 season, featuring Functioning Circuits: Aunty Lucy’s as the first billboard in this yearlong series.

PAST EVENT

isthmus Live | Arriving Elsewhere

Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, and Ryan Ferko will conclude their isthmus collaborative research commission with a live online presentation on Sunday 15 November. This event gives space to an ongoing 11-person collaboration under the name Arriving Elsewhere, exploring the possibilities of shared experience while contending with the digital spaces that simulate proximity. For the month […]

PAST EXHIBITION

What’s Love Got To Do With It?
A new podcast series by Beatrice Gibson

4 September 2020 - 18 September 2020

This September, artist Beatrice Gibson pairs six contemporary poets discussing the topic of love: CAConrad and LeAnne Howe, Alice Notley and Precious Okoyomon, and Ariana Reines and Sophie Robinson. This three-part podcast series makes sonic space in which these poets share, listen and respond to one another’s work, and features unique compositions by Crystabel Riley. Gibson’s poetic reflections and citations on friendship, disobedience and […]

PAST EVENT

fORUM: NADI | COUSIN | Ogimaa Mikana Project

REGISTER TO ATTEND Native Art Department International invites members of COUSIN and Ogimaa Mikana Project to discuss horizontality as a strategic and behavioural order in collective practice and community development. Utilizing both the gallery and Zoom as spaces that can be activated by bodies and voices, this event is simultaneously a panel and a performance. […]

PAST EXHIBITION

SPACE: Erdem Taşdelen | Vicissitudes: Act Four

18 July 2020 - 8 September 2020

Erdem Taşdelen’s Vicissitudes: Act Four (2019) is the last edition in a series of four billboard images commissioned by Mercer Union. Installation views: Vicissitudes: Act Four, Commissioned by Mercer Union, 2019. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid. — SPACE invites one artist to produce a yearlong series of images for a public-facing billboard located on the east façade of […]

PAST EXHIBITION

9 February 2021 - 31 May 2021

isthmus is a connection; a site forged between places. This collaborative research commission invites artists whose thinking and work are bolstered by peer exchange and participatory forms of knowledge assembly. Presented on the Mercer Union website and using Miro, commissioned projects bridge geographies and temporalities between artists, their collaborators and publics; gathering a multiplicity of […]

PAST EXHIBITION

Deanna Bowen: On Trial The Long Doorway (2019) on Shift Key

30 May 2020 - 26 June 2020

Mercer Union presents Deanna Bowen’s video On Trial The Long Doorway (2019), streaming for a limited time on Shift Key—MOCA Toronto’s rotating platform for moving image artworks. In Fall 2017, Mercer Union presented a commissioned solo exhibition by Toronto-based artist Deanna Bowen. The work takes as its starting point a lost 1956 CBC teledrama ON TRIAL The […]

PAST EXHIBITION

19 May 2020 - 31 August 2020

Intervals is a digital image commission that engages the in-between—intervening times, spaces, pauses, and breaks in activity—as taken up by artistic practice. Presented on the Mercer Union website and Instagram, this program invites artists to consider their experience of temporality through its disruption, and the sense of before, during, and after that is punctuated in the process of reflection. Artists: […]

PAST EVENT

Opening Reception Postponed

We have been closely monitoring the evolving situation regarding COVID-19, with the health and well-being of our artists, staff, community and collaborators in mind.  Following the guidelines of Canada Public Health officials, including a recommendation to avoid large gatherings, we have decided to postpone our opening reception for Native Art Department International: Bureau of Aesthetics.  According to […]

PAST EVENT

CANCELLED | Aggregate: Filipa Ramos

— Following the guidelines of Canada Public Health officials, including a recommendation to avoid all non-essential international travel, this event has been cancelled.  — Making Plans for Nigel Nigel was a male Australasian gannet who spent his last years living in the New Zealand island of Mana, where he befriended a concrete decoy of a […]

PAST EXHIBITION

SPACE: Erdem Taşdelen | Vicissitudes: Act Three

14 March 2020

LISTEN: The Perfect Crime by Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross with musical accompaniment by Bog Myrtle The Perfect Crime  I’ve heard of exactly two perfect crimes in my lifetime: the first, the strangulation of a fraudster on the run by their own pet boa constrictor; the second, the murder of a man by icicle.             The others […]

PAST EXHIBITION

Native Art Department International: Bureau of Aesthetics

14 March 2020 - 31 October 2020

Mercer Union presents the first Canadian exhibition of Native Art Department International (NADI), a long-term collaborative project created and administered by Toronto-based artists Jason Lujan and Maria Hupfield. While Hupfield and Lujan have respective artistic practices, their work together is authored under the designation of NADI, a collective that produces artworks, exhibitions, events and screenings. […]

PAST EVENT

ONE HOUR MIXER: Miles Rufelds

  Please join us on Friday 21 February for a one-hour mix by Miles Rufelds and a drink on the house with good company. This is your last chance to experience our current exhibition, Laure Prouvost & Jonas Staal: Obscure Union, before it closes on 22 February. Not yet a member? To have access to this and future cocktail mixers, become a […]

PAST EVENT

SESSION: Desire x Politics

In Desire x Politics: Solve for x, where x is the variable prised open between the bodies of politics and the bodies of desire. Over the past eight months, a nine-person* working group led by Yaniya Lee and Fan Wu has been navigating the problematics of desire x politics, reading and writing to unravel this […]