Vicissitudes: Act One

Mercer Union will present a series of commissioned images by Toronto-based artist Erdem Taşdelen. The project is presented within the context of SPACE, Mercer Union’s public-facing billboard platform that invites one artist to produce a yearlong series of images. SPACE prioritizes projects that consider site-specificity and takes up questions of visibility as the artist creates four new works over the course of a year, each image changing with the gallery’s exhibition cycle.

Taşdelen’s new work for the billboard is an extension of the artist’s current research and explores ideas of performance without the presence of live bodies. Entitled Vicissitudes, the project will emerge from adaptations of textual material from the 19th Century text The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, which comprises a seemingly exhaustive list created by French writer Georges Polti to describe and categorize all possible dramatic situations that may structure a story or performance. Out of the 322 sub-categories introduced by Polti in this volume, Taşdelen selects and typesets six situations for each billboard, arranging them in list form as if to suggest the sequence of events in an act. Taşdelen’s situational descriptors suggest ways of looking, offering to the reader a pair of lorgnettes through which the surrounding neighbourhood can become animated, and the goings-on of its people playfully subtitled.

With his private residence in proximity to the gallery, Taşdelen’s immersion into the Bloordale neighbourhood of Toronto provides Vicissitudes site-specificity and intimate local awareness. The project is accompanied by commissioned texts for each of the four images, offering an opportunity to activate and complement the public-facing work over the course of a year.