Nuit Blanche

Nuit Blanche at the Archives of Ontario

Join us for our first-ever Nuit Blanche! We’re partnering with Archive/Counter-Archive as a hub on York University’s campus for Toronto’s all-night contemporary art crawl. From sunset on October 1 to sunrise on October 2, 2022, you’ll find various projects in and around our building at 134 Ian Macdonald Boulevard, just across the street from York University subway station.

Here’s what’s on from 7pm on October 1st to 7am on October 2nd:

Inside our exhibit area, you can explore our exhibit ANIMALIA to learn about humans’ changing relationships with fish, bears, horses, dogs and birds and how these species have left their mark on Ontario’s history.

Archive/Counter-Archive curated six projects linked through the animal theme under the title, Biophilia. For one night only, we’ll bring them all together in one area – in, on and near the Archives of Ontario.

In our Reading Room, you’ll find Deirdre Logue’s The Opposite of Ignoring Chickens – a sculptural installation of 1980s-era CRT monitors displaying video of the artist tending to her chickens set to a polyphonic soundtrack.

Across the street, you’ll find Public Visualization Studio’s Fabulous Ones, an installation of oversized three-dimensional digital masks of creatures looking back at you, interacting with you through motion-sensing cameras and AI-generated animations.

Parked nearby, Archive/Counter-Archive’s mobile archiving microbus, CineMobilia, will make its debut. It’s a flexible, responsive infrastructure tailored to the unique archival needs of marginalized communities, specifically collections with limited staff, with difficulty preserving their collections and making them discoverable.

Tributaries by Jenn E. Norton will use a water screen projection and augmented reality content of native and invasive species to mark and draw attention to the freshwater habitats of the York University campus area, that were buried or rechanneled because of urban development.

Revisiting Keewatin is a 1950s film showing Catholic Missionary Activity with the Cree community. Jennifer Dysart found the film at Library and Archives Canada and her multi-screen projection for Nuit Blanche will focus on the animals visible in the footage, sifting through the Indigenous relationships with them.

Steps from the archives, Chris Chong Chan Fui's work Nocturnal Zodiac will be projected onto the circular ceiling of Vari Hall. The piece re-configures traditional Eastern and Western astrologies into a new cyclical archive of modern human characteristics and future-telling that drive our fate on this planet.