Fall 2024 Exhibitions at Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery

KWAG is thrilled to announce its compelling fall cycle of exhibitions to raise awareness about the global climate crisis and its profound impact on our planet.

Dan Hudson, Infinite Cave (detail), 2022. Digital video installation, dimensions variable. Installation view from the Esplanade Arts & Heritage Centre. Photo courtesy of the Artist.

SOS: A Story of Survival, Part III – The Planet

November 9, 2024 – March 9, 2025
Opening Celebration: Friday, November 15, 7 – 10pm
Unique DJ performance courtesy of DJ Charlie Star
Curated by Darryn Doull

SOS: A Story of Survival is a three-part exhibition exploring what survival is, what it looks like, and what it means to survive. The exhibition series has never pretended to have the answers to solve global climate collapse. We are already past all the tipping points. There is no going back. Instead, the series offers alternative and hybrid nodes, relations, and techniques as pathways into the future and for recuperating hope, juxtaposing the individual with the community, and emphasizing mutual aid. Part III – The Planet draws attention back to the matter of our world: to the rocks beneath our feet, the air in our lungs, and the water throughout and all around us. The exhibition feature artists from across the country and several with ties to Waterloo Region.

Part I – The Image launched the series from a place of cultural history in the art museum, as artists brought images and histories together to survive in new forms and contexts. Part II – The Body brought issues, frameworks, struggles, and successes of local and global significance alongside one another and looked to the body as a tool of survival while interrogating the forces that threaten it.

Related Programming:

Artist Talk with Dan Hudson
Saturday, November 16, 2pm
Free

More programs to be announced soon.

Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955), Carrara Marble Quarries #20, Carrara, Italy, 1993. Digital C print, 121.9 x 152.4 cm. Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery Permanent Collection: Courtesy of Edward Burtynsky, 2014. Photo: © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy of Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto.

A Broken Planet

November 15, 2024 – March 30, 2025
Curated by Jennifer Bullock

Drawing on the KWAG Permanent Collection, A Broken Planet builds on the themes of SOS: A Story of Survival, Part III – The Planet by looking at ways that environmental harm can be found in the Collection. Featuring the industrial devastation unfolding before Edward Burtynsky’s camera lens, the exhibition uses aesthetic and compositional beauty to approach difficult subjects that are otherwise much easier to look away from.

Related Programming:

ANTHROPOCENE: The Human Epoch
A film by Jennifer Baichwal, Nick De Pencier, and Edward Burtynsky
Thursday, March 6, 2025, 7 – 8:30pm
Free

ANTHROPOCENE: The Human Epoch follows the research of an international body of scientists, the Anthropocene Working Group who, after nearly 10 years of research, are arguing that the Holocene Epoch gave way to the Anthropocene Epoch in the mid-twentieth century, because of profound and lasting human changes to the Earth.

Installation shot of This dream pays for its space in my heart. Curated by ellipses collective (great Hamilton and Katherine Jemima Hamilton). Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, October 5, 2024 – January 26, 2025. Photo by KWAG.

This dream pays for its space in my heart

October 5, 2024 – January 26, 2025
Curated by ellipses collective (greta hamilton and Katherine Jemima Hamilton)

On view now until January 26, 2025, is This dream pays for its space in my heart featuring Darby Minott Bradford, Derya Akay, Eve Tagny, and sophia bartholomew. The exhibition results from KWAG’s Paradigmatic Pulse open call for curatorial proposals held back in the spring of 2023. This dream pays for its space in my heart, curated by ellipses collective (greta hamilton and Katherine Jemima Hamilton), was selected from over twenty submissions.

Borrowing the title from a somatic ritual written by poet CAConrad, This dream pays for its space in my heart frames the featured artist’s work through poetics—a refusal to be in relation through the language of capital. Poetry exists in each repeated gesture throughout the exhibition; the marks, weavings, and chirps of the artists’ work encompass a poetic sensibility that undoes the logic and language of capital. Considering the fluid relationship between one’s body, the language it speaks, and how it navigates land and grief, the artists emphasize that these relationships are porous and that sites of ancestral history hold memories and feelings. Considering the fluid relationship between one’s body, the language it speaks, and how it navigates land and grief, the artists emphasize that these relationships are porous and that sites of ancestral history hold memories and feelings.

About Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery

KWAG respectfully acknowledges that we are located on the unceded traditional territory of the Attawandaron (Neutral), Anishnaabeg and Haudenosaunee peoples. The Haldimand Tract, land promised to Six Nations, includes 10 km on each side of the Grand River.

As Waterloo Region’s leading public art gallery, the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery (KWAG) connects people and ideas through art. Its nationally acclaimed exhibitions and programs welcome all to be inspired and challenged through a deepened understanding of ourselves, our cultures, and our communities. For the benefit of current and future generations, the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery collects, preserves, researches, interprets, and exhibits the visual arts. It offers dynamic public programs that inspire creativity and an appreciation of the visual arts in the Region and beyond. Established in 1956 and incorporated in 1968, KWAG is a non-profit organization open to the public and administered in the public trust. Admission is free.

Accessibility: KWAG is fully accessible.

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Áine Belton
abelton@kwag.on.ca
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