Jean-Paul Kelly (Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream) is among the 25 intergenerational artists, duos and collectives showing work at Greater Toronto Art 2024, the second edition of the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto’s recurring triennial show.

Other members of the Daniels Faculty community featured in the exhibition include sessional lecturers Sukaina Kubba and Oliver Husain. Alumnus Mani Mazinani, who graduated with an Honours B.A. in Visual Studies in 2008, rounds out the Daniels contingent.

MOCA Toronto’s triennial exhibition was conceived in 2021 “to look more closely and consistently at artistic practices with a connection to the Greater Toronto Area (GTA).” 

This year’s edition, which “looks back as much as it looks forward,” presents work made between the 1960s and the present, “allowing the co-mingling of art created in different decades to provide new ways of understanding the current moment and imagining the future.”

The director of the Visual Studies department until this year, Kelly is a prizewinning artist who makes videos and exhibitions that pose questions about the limits of representation by examining complex associations between found photographs, videos, sounds and online media streams. 

For GTA24, he created a new installation, How cruelty disgusts the view, while pity charms the site (pictured above and below), which is composed of six line drawings in graphite. The drawings are inspired by 18th-century English artist and social critic William Hogarth’s modern moral prints The Four Stages of Cruelty.

The exhibition will also include B.A.A.D.C. (Bonjour aux amis de calamité), a 2016 wall-based sculpture that references writer and political activist Jean Genet’s sensual short film from 1950, Un chant d’amour (A Song of Love).

A multidisciplinary artist who joined the Faculty as a sessional lecturer in 2021, Kubba is represented in the triennial with a series of new wall-based sculptural drawings made from PLA filament. Her series is traced from a Persian rug that has been in Kubba’s family for generations. The fractured vignettes highlight narratives of travel and trade, of migration, and of relationship to land.

Sessional lecturer Husain, an artist and filmmaker, often collaborates with other artists and friends on his projects, which frequently have “a fragment of history, a rumour, a personal encounter or a distant memory” as jumping-off points.

At GTA24, Husain and collaborator Kerstin Schroedinger, an artist working in performance, film/video and sound, are showing DNCB, a 2021 three-channel video installation that ruminates on the complex history of Dinitrochlorobenzene, a chemical substance that is used in the processing of colour film and was also explored as an experimental alternative AIDS treatment in the 1980s and 1990s.

Husain and Schroedinger will also present Hypericin Yellow Movie, a new lecture performance based on this body of research. The free showing (one of their 2021 films is pictured below) will take place at MOCA on Friday, May 31 at 7:00 p.m.

Alumnus Mazinani, lastly, is an interdisciplinary artist who makes work that connects scale and sensation, improvisation and ancient thought. His practice encompasses installation, lens-based media, sculpture, sound and music. 

For GTA24, Mazinani was commissioned to develop a major new work, Solar Scale, an immersive five-channel sound and light installation structured around pentatonic music and harmonic pulsation.

At 7:00 p.m. on July 19, Mazinani and a group of collaborators will present a musical performance that extends the Solar Scale soundscape to a live experience. The concert will feature the Solar Organ, an electronic pentatonic instrument created by Mazinani, playing improvised and composed music on MOCA’s ground floor. A variety of invented and traditional pentatonic scales will be used by the musicians, covering a spectrum of approaches to pentatonic sound generation.

This year’s triennial runs at MOCA through July 28. For more information on the exhibition and other works on display, click here.

Image credits from top to bottom:

“How cruelty disgusts the view, while pity charms the sight,” No. 1-6, 2024. Six graphite drawings on laid paper, painted wood frames and fabric wrap mats, painted and oxidized steel posts. Installation view, Greater Toronto Art 2024 at MOCA Toronto. © and courtesy of Jean-Paul Kelly. Photo by LF Documentation.

“How cruelty disgusts the view, while pity charms the sight,” No. 4, 2024. Graphite drawing on laid paper, painted wood frame and fabric wrap mat, painted and oxidized steel post. Installation view, Greater Toronto Art 2024 at MOCA Toronto. © and courtesy of Jean-Paul Kelly. Photo by LF Documentation.

Oliver Husain and Kerstin Schroedinger, "THE GARDEN – Cinematics of the Soil." Installation view, 2021. Courtesy of the artists and Silent Green Kulturquartier. Photo by Husain/Schroedinger.