Tracey Snelling: Intergalactic Planetary Exhibition at Koffler Arts

Tracey Snelling, Shanghai Chongqing at Intergalactic Planetary on view at Koffler Arts.

Tracey Snelling: Intergalactic Planetary

September 18 – December 14, 2025
Koffler Arts, Toronto

Koffler Arts is thrilled to welcome contemporary artist Tracey Snelling for a solo exhibition in her Canadian debut, Intergalactic Planetary (September 18 – December 14, 2025). Through the use of sculpture, photography, video, and installation, this exhibition is a blend of different worlds, geographies, people, and perspectives, forming a kind of visual and sonic cacophony. It’s a nod to global (or even galactic) unity, and to the idea that despite all the noise and division, we’re more alike than not.

Snelling explains, “Through this work, I ask: how can we move beyond our fears, borders, and egos to become more humane? Perhaps by staying curious, open, and willing to see each other more fully, we can take a small step toward connection, and even a glimmer of peace for the future.”

Tracey Snelling, Clusterfuck at Intergalactic Planetary on view at Koffler Arts. Photo: David Pace.

Intergalactic Planetary brings together imagery and works inspired by cities including Shanghai, Chongqing, Berlin, Tokyo, Bangkok and locations across the United States. The title, appropriated from the iconic Beastie Boys song the artist listened to in her youth, captures something essential to the show: a sense of playfulness and humour, mixed with the idea of universality, a connection that transcends space, borders, and cultures. It evokes the feeling of zooming out and viewing the world through a wider lens—not to erase difference, but to better understand the systems, tensions, and interdependencies that define how we live.

“Accidents happen,” says Matthew Jocelyn, General Director of Koffler Arts. “Sometimes they’re good. Sometimes great! Last September, I was walking across the Lützoplatz in Berlin heading from one exhibition to another, when I saw a sign for a show I had not clocked in my carefully curated program for the day. It was in the Haus am Lützoplatz, and when I walked in, I immediately knew I had stumbled across something very special indeed. Tracey had invested the multiple rooms of this house turned gallery with her astonishing architectural and domestic constructions, creating a visual cacophony of international urban squalidness, that somehow magically enabled the infinite poetry of individualised markings – our need to inscribe some kind of personality into our domestic space, however restricted, however impoverished – to emerge. A form of grace.

“While this exhibition could have been demoralizing, it was, in fact, the opposite. An affirmation of our need to create, to personalise, to make a home of where we are with what we have. It was clear that Tracey Snelling and her work had to come to Toronto.”

Tracey Snelling, Love Hotel at Intergalactic Planetary on view at Koffler Arts.

About the Artist

Tracey Snelling, born in Oakland, California and based in Berlin, creates installations, sculptures, films and photography derived from sociological issues, voyeurism and urban architecture. Her sculptures are more like 3-D paintings or sculptural films, capturing a place and people at a specific time in history. Snelling has exhibited in international institutions, including the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Belgium; Palazzo Reale, Milan; The Museum of Arts and Design, New York; and the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, Germany, among others. In 2023, she was awarded both a Pollock Krasner Grant and a Gottlieb Foundation Grant. Snelling showed at the Venice Biennale 2019 (with Swatch), Havana Biennale 2019, and the University of Venice during the Architecture Biennale 2021. Her solo exhibition How We Live (Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin) received much acclaim and press. She recently had a solo exhibition, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, at the Human Safety Net with Generali in Venice, and at Literaturhaus Munich. She presently has exhibitions at the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden and Schloss Biesdorf, Berlin. She has future exhibitions in Munich and Shanghai.

About Koffler Arts

Koffler Arts is a multi-disciplinary arts platform that celebrates Jewish artistic voices within a diverse and exploratory framework of contemporary expression. Firm believers in the inherent value of art as an essential vehicle for creating meaning and providing enjoyment, we strive to affirm our collective need for the compass and connection offered by the artist’s eye upon the world.