Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto Announces Fall 2024 Programming

The Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA) invites you to bring your curiosity for its dynamic fall 2024 programming, running from Sept. 8, 2024, to Jan. 26, 2025. This season promises a captivating mix of exhibitions that merge interdisciplinary art, storytelling, and social commentary. Each artist is celebrated internationally for their conceptual and material innovations, suspending their audience’s disbelief through highly and cleverly executed aesthetics, while asking provocative questions about what it means to be alive today. Immerse yourself in the dreamlike work of Alex Da Corte, and marvel at Tishan Hsu’s works from the last five decades that show remarkable foresight into humanity’s relationship to modern technology. Finally, move between Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’s newest and past works to experience  his ground-breaking storytelling across time.

“MOCA’s fall programming welcomes inquisitive minds, art enthusiasts, and cultural seekers alike to delve into a transformative journey through contemporary art,” said Kathleen Bartels, Executive Director, MOCA. “This season’s exhibitions will illuminate the impact of these artists, each offering a distinct perspective and inspiring dialogue on the evolving landscape of artistic expression.”

“Spanning all three exhibitions this season are passageways and portals onto new worlds. Viewers are invited to lose themselves in twisting narratives, hybrid forms, and torrents of visual information,” added Rui Mateus Amaral, Artistic Director, MOCA.

Suspended and spinning in the Price Family Community Gallery are newly commissioned works by Vancouver-based artist, Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, who created and popularized the graphic style of Haida-manga, a mixture of North Pacific Indigenous narratives and frame lines and Japanese cartooning. Yahgulanaas’s site specific Daalkaatlii Diaries is composed of 26 vibrant paintings that adjoin to form the literary and physical structure of an accordion sketchbook. His extraordinary painterly gesture can be interpreted as a part mural, part book, part screen. Welcoming audiences into the space are Flesh Tones, a pair of new large experimental kinetic sculptures that expand Yahgulanaas’s presentation and deepen his practice as a storyteller.

Awaiting visitors on the second floor of the museum is a dreamlike environment envisioned by Venezuelan American artist Alex Da Corte. Vivid and surreal, Da Corte’s art is culled from popular culture, sexuality, violence, cinema, children’s literature, and art and design history, lending his work a certain familiarity. Within his wild imagination, however, popular symbols are stretched, shrunken, and softened, opening new ways of interpreting them and their cultural significance. For MOCA, Da Corte has reimagined his 2018 film Rubber Pencil Devil across several large-scale multicolor rear-projection cubes. This immersive work is countered by Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear), a newly realized work and intimate experience that invites viewers into the mind of the artist by way of his collected obsessions.

Tishan Hsu’s visionary multimedia practice has been steadily concerned with the nexus of technology and the human body. Trained as an architect and working as a “word processor” in the early 1980s, his education and early exposure to the accelerated use of softwares has guided his adoption of non-traditional materials, and explorations of how virtual realities and new intelligences might weigh on the human condition. Hsu’s exhibition on the museum’s third floor – his first in Canada – traces his dedication to experimentation from the 1980s until the present day, reflecting his pioneering thinking, as well as focusing on metamorphosis and alienation. Interface Remix combines painting, sculpture, installation, and includes a new site-specific work made from emergent technologies.

Still on view at MOCA until July 28th, 2024 is the museum’s triennial exhibition, Greater Toronto Art 2024 (GTA24). Presenting a constellation of 25 artists, duos, and collectives, GTA24 is a project that challenges the notion of individualism and focuses instead on the interconnectedness of individuals within a larger social fabric.

About the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA)

The Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA) presents rotating exhibitions that prioritize twenty-first-century artistic production, primarily through commissioning of new work. Artists, partnerships, experimentation, and reciprocal initiatives are at the centre of MOCA’s mission as a locally rooted and internationally connected organization. Focused on core values promoting equity, inclusion, access, courage, and responsibility, MOCA fosters active participation and engagement to serve as a welcoming cultural hub in the hyper-diverse city of Toronto.

For more information, visit MOCA Toronto

Image Credits

1. Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Red: A Haida Manga (detail), 2009. Red: A Haida Manga published by Douglas and McIntyre. © Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas.
2. Alex Da Corte, Rubber Pencil Devil (still), 2018. © Alex Da Corte.
3. Tishan Hsu, The Cross Product of Madame X, 1984. © 2024 Tishan Hsu Artists Rights Society/New York. Photo: Annik Wetter.