Mario Pfeifer’s New Solo Show Opens in Toronto

This weekend, The Power Plant, a leading contemporary visual art gallery in Toronto, Canada, opens If you end up with the story you started with, then you’re not listening along the way, by artist Mario Pfeifer (Film/Video 09).

The trilogy of video installations marks the Berlin-based artist’s first solo show in Canada.

Pfeifer’s work often focuses on the lesser-known stories of individuals, communities— and even geographies—through a socio-political lens. Consequently, The Power Plant exhibition features:

• #blacktivist (2015), a two-channel video installation that serves as a commentary on police brutality, gun violence, profiling and the right to self-defense. Pfeifer collaborated with the Brooklyn-based rap group the Flatbush Zombies for the video, which features the band’s song Blacktivist set to startling visuals.
• Approximation in the digital age to a humanity condemned to disappear (2014) was filmed over four months in Tierra del Fuego, Chile. Pfeifer shows an indigenous community (the Yaghan people) who are “forced to abandon or adapt their traditions as a result of settlers, anthropologists, tourists and the demands of global capitalism.”
• Again (2018), which debuted at the 10th Berlin Biennale, examines issues of race and immigration. Pfeifer plays on documentary crime dramas, presenting re-enactments of the 2016 events in which Schabas Saleh Al-Aziz, a Kurdish-Iraqi refugee in Germany was tied to a tree by four local men because of perceived violent behavior in a supermarket.

In conjunction with the opening of the exhibition, the gallery presents a conversation and audience Q&A between Pfeifer and Canadian artist Stan Douglas on Saturday (June 22). The two first met when Douglas was a professor of photography and new media at the Universität der Künste Berlin (2004–06) and Pfeifer was a student (2005–07).

The public opening takes place on Friday, June 21, and the exhibition runs through Sept. 2, 2019.