Reparations
"Reparations" by Richard Rhodes, Summer 2009, p. 22
Beyond the tall, mullioned window of Barbara Fischer’s office, inside Hart House at the University of Toronto, a cold grey sky threatens rain and makes April seem more like March, but Fischer is already thinking ahead to May, when she leaves to oversee the installation of works by Mark Lewis in the Canada Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. Selected a year ago as commissioner for the exhibition space, which is nestled between the German and British pavilions in the biennial’s Giardini site, Fischer, along with Lewis, has effected a literal turnaround for this year’s show. The wide-to-narrow, shell-like trajectory that the pavilion’s layout typically invites has been reversed, with a new entrance leading viewers through an expanding floor plan better suited to the four films that Lewis will be projecting inside (see Nancy Tousley’s story on the films of Mark Lewis on page 48).
It’s a new start for an old space. The pavilion came to Canada in the late 1950s as part of a Second World War reparations agreement with the Italian government and Fischer has high hopes that the changes will let us forget for a moment its insurmountable awkwardness as an exhibition space. In the months since her appointment, she has developed something akin to affection for the much-maligned space, and is appalled by what she calls its “homeless status” within the corridors of power in Ottawa. “Really, it is like an embassy; it should be taken care of,” she laments. “There should be a system in place to not only care for the building, but to care for the process, including the spon- sorship contacts that these projects now depend on. We shouldn’t have to start with an empty slate each time.”
Fischer being Fischer, these words convey more wisdom than complaint. It is this intelligent, gentle, thorough manner that has marked her career as a curator in Toronto and left a trail of major contemporary exhibitions criss-crossing the country. It was after her recent exhibition “Projections,” a survey of contemporary work in projected media, that she had the idea of presenting Lewis in Venice.
Driving home one day, she realized that the architectural subjects of many of Lewis’s films would fit the sectioned walls of the Canada Pavilion’s interior, overlapping with the “faceting-out of urban space, the montage of cinema and architecture in Mark’s work.” And so it went. A month later she won the Venice proposal competition managed by the Canada Council for the Arts and was suddenly faced with the formidable task of raising funds for the million-dollar project. With the help of her deputy commissioner, Natalie De Vito, Daniel Faria of Clark & Faria gallery in Toronto and the arts patron Elisa Nuyten, Fischer and Lewis started in on the first of many rounds of fundraising and planning.
The working title of the project, “Romance” (alluding perhaps to Lewis’s romance with the chaste, optimistic modernism of 1960s Toronto), eventually morphed into “Cold Morning” and a suite of new films set at the skating rink in Nathan Phillips Square, high in the Toronto-Dominion Centre office tower and on a Bay Street sidewalk (see stills from this work on page 56). A 2008 film, The Fight, was added to the mix to complete the project. All that remained was to make it happen, a mere matter of producing the catalogue (a collaboration with the Vancouver Art Gallery), staying on budget, keeping the press happy, building a website, allocating VIP passes, planning international patron dinners, hosting press conferences for the project in Paris, London and Berlin and finding staff for the opening. Fischer runs down the list quickly, with tired confidence. It’s all in motion now, and cloudy April might as well give way to the Adriatic sun and the smell of jasmine that lie a month and a continent away.
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