Fire, Tears, and Shadows Will Headline Nuit Blanche 2010

By Steve Kupferman

Interactive Landscape Dune by Daan Roosegaarde.

Nuit Blanche 2010 (okay, Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, but we’re only saying it once) is happening on October 2, which puts it just over two months away. Yesterday, the City announced the full programme for this year’s edition of the arty all-nighter. We have a few picks and highlights, after the jump.

What’s Changed

Of note this year is that Yonge Street will be completely closed to car traffic from Bloor Street all the way down to Front Street for the event’s entire sundown-to-sunup duration. Last year, by contrast, Bay Street was the designated north/south corridor for the night, and it was closed only from Gerrard Street to Front. Crowding has been a perennial source of complaints from Nuit Blanche attendees. This could help with that.
Also, all City-produced projects will be located along the Yonge-University subway line, which will make them more accessible by transit than they have been in previous years. (The City will be producing forty projects, and there will be ninety-three sanctioned independent projects. Unsanctioned installations have increasingly been piggy-backing on the event, so expect more to be happening on the night than the official map leads you to believe.)

What To See

We’ll be giving the list of exhibits a much more thorough going-over once the night draws a little nearer. Until then, here are five installations whose descriptions are particularly intriguing:

Crossings by the OpenEnded Group.

• Interactive Landscape Dune, Daan Roosegaarde: We were disappointed when we found out that this installation will have absolutely nothing to do with either the Frank Herbert novel or the David Lynch film, but the fact that it’s taking place in the TTC’s storied, abandoned Lower Bay Station more than makes up for that. Lower Bay—a fully operational subway platform below Bay Station, built but seldom used by the TTC—last featured in Nuit Blanche back in 2007. Dune, by all indications, should be a welcome return for the venue. The piece’s artist’s statement describes it as “an interactive landscape,” which “investigates nature in a futuristic relation with urban space.” And it’s glowy and tactile. Nice.
• I Cried For You, Julia Loktev: Most Nuit Blanche projects are built to attract eyeballs. Torontoist applauds Loktev for bucking that trend by coming up with something that will probably, actually, be hard to watch. Ads will be placed in Toronto newspapers seeking actors who can cry on command. Those actors will then sit for ten-minute “auditions” in Commerce Court where they will attempt to force themselves to bawl in front of Loktev’s camera and an audience of Nuit Blanche onlookers. “Tears function as a kind of currency,” says the artist’s statement, “the money of emotion.”
• Crossings, The OpenEnded Group: The exterior of the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal at the Royal Ontario Museum is going to be the canvas for an enormous video installation this year, and it sounds very cool. Projectors will clothe the structure’s strange, angular surfaces with images of shadowy figures walking, to echo the pedestrian traffic below. “Sometimes the figures will wrap around the bends in the faceted facade or suddenly find themselves mirrored, magnified, or transformed on a nearby or distant facet,” says the artist’s statement. Finally, a use for all those corners.
• Performance Café with Perforated Sides, Dan Graham: City Hall’s new podium green roof is getting in on Nuit Blanche this year, with an installation from Dan Graham, who creates sculptures that double as (or are indistinguishable from) architecture. His Performance Café promises to use use mirrors to create hallucinogenic effects, reminiscent of psychedelic drug trips and rock concert light shows.
• Just because you can feel it doesn’t mean it’s there, Ryan Gander: When your art installation’s list of materials includes “fire,” you’re bound to pique some interest. It’s not clear what, exactly, this piece will consist of. We know that it will involve “an intentional fire” in Yonge-Dundas Square, and that newspaper cartoon strips will somehow be implicated in the proceedings. Maybe that’s all we need to know.

The rest, of course, can be seen on the official Nuit Blanche site. Feel free to call attention to any promising projects we haven’t mentioned specifically (there are lots!) in the comments.
All photos courtesy of the City of Toronto.