Your Nuit Blanche 2010 Guide: Zone A

By Torontoist

Any suggestion of heading to Daan Roosegaarde’s Interactive landscape Dune (above) has to come with a caveat; it’s in Lower Bay Station and you may have to wait a while. Lessons have hopefully been learned from the massive line-ups during Doors Open and Nuit Blanche of 2007, leading organizers to find more stream-lined ways of moving the crowds through this sought-after space. Despite this risk, the installation looks like it could contain the ingredients of the most magical of Nuit Blanche experiences—a surreal spatial opportunity, wondrously tactile interactivity, and an immersive aesthetic that plays light against dark. AH

We all know it’s not the sugary cardboard taste of fortune cookies that make us love them so much. Rather, it’s the cryptic predictions that come wrapped inside the crispy crescents. But who is this sage that created such words of wisdom? How do they know a thrilling time is in my immediate future? And why should I “Make two grins grow where there was only a grouch before”? Well, if you think you can do a better job, now’s your chance with KortuneFookie (above, outside Montréal’s articule gallery), a giant cedar cookie that, at the touch of a button, emits fortunes generated by texts written at an interactive kiosk. If you can’t suppress your divination until Saturday, enter them early on the project’s website, created by Ottawa artists Jean-François Lacombe and Christian Desjardins. CM
Let he who hath never indulged in a narcissistic fantasy about his own death cast the first clump of dirt, we say. In a heritage church from the late nineteenth century, three Toronto artists have created All Night I Mourned Myself, an art installation that allows you to nourish the full death experience. You can lie down in the pews and listen to mourners sing your swansong on a CoffinPhone, choose the accoutrements to your memorial from photos of cemetery sculptures, and take in original funeral tunes composed by one of the artists. We love anything that celebrates morbidity. SS

Yorkville is certainly one of Toronto’s hearts: the heart of the shopping district, the heart of high-end restaurants, the heart of the city’s elite and glamorous. But this year, the Village of Yorkville Park will host another much more literal heart. Using performance, light, and sound, Kent Monkman and Gisèle Gordon’s Iskootāo (meaning “woman’s heart” in Cree) will turn a 650-tonne, billion-year-old piece of the Canadian Shield into a live, beating heart. At first it may seem obvious why a woman’s heart would lie in the centre of Yorkville, but actually the live performance by Monkman’s alter-ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle (above) is meant to represent Mother Earth, to bring the West’s obsession with consumerism back to our basic connection to nature and the land. CM

If you were approached a while back by a stranger with a camera asking you to smile for them, there’s a chance that your beaming mug might be among the 250 Torontonians whose images will be projected upon the Holt Renfrew Centre as part of Agnès Winter’s Monument to Smile (above). The mosaic of happy faces will be altered every twenty minutes and be accompanied by the strains of Charlie Chaplin’s “Smile” (which he wrote for the 1936 film Modern Times). The first version of the piece was projected onto New York’s Rockefeller Center in spring 2007, and future presentations are on tap for Venice and Tunisia. JB

Written by Jamie Bradburn (JB), Amanda Happé (AH), Steve Kupferman (SK), Carly Maga (CM), and Suzannah Showler (SS). Compiled by David Topping. Maps by Marc Lostracco.
Images not otherwise credited are courtesy of Nuit Blanche, or the websites of their respective artists and exhibits.