Exhibition
Mario Pfeifer @ Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery

Sat, 06/22/2019 -
Mon, 09/02/2019

The Power Plant presents video installations by Mario Pfeifer, guest of the Goethe-Institut Toronto, for his first solo exhibition in Canada.

“If you end up with the story you started with, then you're not listening along the way”

Berlin-based artist Mario Pfeifer is presenting a triology of video installations: 

#blacktivist (2015) is a two-channel video installation produced in collaboration with Brooklyn rap group Flatbush ZOMBiES. The work brings together Pfeifer’s music video for the group’s track Blacktivist with found imagery and interviews in a startling critique of contemporary gun violence.

Approximation in the digital age to a humanity condemned to disappear (2014) was filmed over a period of four months with the Yaghan people in Tierra del Fuego, Chile. Presenting an indigenous community forced to abandon or adapt their traditions as a result of settlers, anthropologists, tourists and the demands of global capitalism, Approximation brings together high-resolution imagery of the contemporary activities of the community with a soundtrack by Iranian born American electronic sound artist, producer and musician Kamran Sadeghi.

Again (2018) confronts attitudes to immigration and justice in the artist’s home country of Germany. Playing on the format of television crime re-enactments, the two-channel video installation restages the sequence of events involving Schabas Saleh Al-Aziz, a Kurdish-Iraqi refugee in Germany who was tied to a tree by four local men following what they perceived as violent behaviour in a supermarket.

Connecting to each of these works, Pfeifer has been commissioned by Contact Photography Festival and The Power Plant to produce a billboard outside the gallery depicting the Tierra del Fuego landscape.
 

Mario Pfeifer has had solo exhibitions at institutions including Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Germany (2018), Ludlow38 New York (2015); and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile (2014). His work was shown at Berlin Biennale (2018); Mercosul Biennale (2017); Montevideo Biennale (2016); and has been part of group exhibitions at venues including CCA – Center of Contemporary Art Lagos; Museum of Art and Technology, Lisbon and MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main.

The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery is Canada's leading public gallery devoted exclusively to contemporary visual art.

Curator: Gaëtane Verna
Assistant Curator:  Nabila Abdel Nabi