Scotiabank Nuit Blanche will light up the night

Options for insomniacs on October 2: complete an Orgasm Energy Chart from 1970; celebrate the birthdays of total strangers; watch two pianists play Vexations 420 times each over 12 hours.

U of T artists and curators are staging a wide range of exhibitions across all three zones of Scotiabank Nuit Blanche this year. The event - which draws thousands of people onto the city streets from sunrise to sundown in search of art - will involve students, staff, faculty and alumni.

“It’s a huge logistical undertaking,” said UTM professor Christof Migone, curator of the Zone C exhibition in the financial district. “The sheer number of performers, the scale, is very challenging.”

Migone commissioned ten projects and selected another five from an open call for submissions for the indoor and outdoor exhibition he titled: Should I Stay or Should I Go?
“That’s a fairly well known song by the Clash one of my favorite bands -- but it is also very much a concrete and immediate reaction to past Nuit Blanches where you are confronted with a lineup and you have to decide are you going to line up and stay or should you just go,” Migone said. “It can also be seen in relevance to other facets of life - should you stay in this job or should you go? Should you stay in school, in this relationship? That moment of decision is really critical.”

Among the video installations Migone commissioned is _scape with 6 and 7 by recent UTSC grad Annie Onyi Cheung. Live performances include Erik Satie’s Vexations (1893) 2010, in which pianists in Brookfield Place will play the same piece of music 840 times.
Each time a pianist plays through the score, it will be folded “like a little origami sculpture” and displayed so that passers-by have a visual sense of how far along the performance is, Migone said.

“It’s going to be a very disorienting listening experience in part because the simultaneous playing of the same piece means that one will hear the piece going in and out of sync,” Migone said.

In Zone B, spectators can join in the iconic ritual of singing Happy Birthday while watching celebrants at an outdoor table blow out candles and munch on cake. Fifteen minutes later, they can sing along with a new party of revelers. Happy Birthday to___________! (sic) is the creation of Jennifer Davis, a graduate student at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, and Vesna Jocic, a recent grad. (For information on how to participate go to www.happybirthdayto.ca )

“We all have a birthday but this moment usually happens in your living room or your backyard, so taking it out of that context and placing this personal event in a city-wide event seemed really interesting,” said Davis.

In Zone A, the University of Toronto Art Centre and Hart House will revisit seminal works of conceptual art with a focus on measurement. One exhibit at UTAC consists of a room papered with recently completed Orgasm Energy Charts, -a concept devised by the renowned art collective General Idea in 1970. Among the exhibits featured at Hart House is a version of the 1999 exhibit, 1,000,000 Pennies, by conceptual artist Gerald Ferguson, who died in 2009.
Hart House will also be the site of a new work by Danish artist Jens Haaning. Commissioned for Nuit Blanche, the installation will comprise national flags representing students’ countries of origin.