Scarborough Town Centre open all night long Saturday for Nuit Blanche
Scarborough Town Centre is being transformed from a shopping mall to an art gallery this weekend.
Starting Saturday evening, it will host a curated exhibition featuring five art installations created by local and international artists. Four other exhibits will be displayed within close walking distance from the mall at the Scarborough Civic Centre and in Albert Campbell Square.
The exhibition is one of several scattered throughout the city for Nuit Blanche — Toronto's annual celebration of contemporary art. The all-night event starts at 7 p.m. and will last until the sun comes up Sunday morning.
Thien Nguyen, director and general manager of Scarborough Town Centre, said Nuit Blanche has attracted between 30,000 and 65,000 visitors to the mall on average in recent years.
"We've always been proud of our ability to be the hub of Scarborough that really connects our community and bring people together," said Nguyen.
"We're also focused around food, providing great experiences and connecting people to great places."
Local artists displaying work for 1st time
It's the fourth year the mall is hosting programming for Nuit Blanche. This year's theme, "Breaking Ground," is meant to invite artists to explore thought-provoking ideas centered around the natural world, change, and innovation, according to the city's Nuit Blanche website.
The art will be displayed at the mall's centre court, transit bridge, and main entrance, according to a news release. Some restaurants in the mall will stay open all night, while others will extend their hours to serve visitors.
Par Nair, an Indian-born interdisciplinary artist and researcher who is now based in the Greater Toronto Area, is displaying her work at Nuit Blanche for the first time. She'll have five pieces at the civic centre, one at the Scarborough Town Centre and another at the Drake Hotel downtown.
"It's a very proud moment," said Nair. "I've gone to Nuit so many times. So it's really it's nice to be finally showing."
Par Nair's hand embroidery on her mother's sari, installed at Riverdale Hub, 2023. (Felicia Byron)
Nair's installation, called "Letters of Haunting," is made up of a series of textile installations featuring her mother's silk saris on which she has hand-embroidered letters to her mother. According to a description of the piece, these are "letters of love, frustration, longing, and reaching letters of impossibility" and the project is inspired by the "diasporic journeys" of the South Asian community.
"The pieces are about memory. It's about the memory that the saris carry because they belong to my mother and it's about me, you know, using this very labour-intensive process to hand-embroider my stories into the saris," Nair said. "So kind of like threading my stories with my mother's stories."
Nair's works at the civic centre will be accompanied by a soundscape composed by Hasheel, a South Asian classical musician and bansuri (Indian flute) player.
Patrick Cruz, a Toronto-based installation artists and assistant professor at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, will also be showing his work at Nuit Blanche for the first time.
His installation is made up of 20 double-sided paintings that will be hung on the skylights with chains, Cruz said.
"The piece is kind of a meditation on things that are happening around the world, the anxieties that are happening around the world, whether that's kind of political turmoil or capitalism," he said. "It's also kind of commenting where the installation is placed, which is the mall, which is basically a site of consumption."
Still from Find Face by Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader. (City of Toronto)
Toronto-based curator Noa Bronstein put together the Scarborough exhibition, which is called In the Aggregate.
Here are some of the other installations that are also part of the Scarborough exhibition:
For a full list of art installations and their locations, visit the Nuit Blanche website. You can plot your itinerary using the site's interactive map.
