A cultural platform for exploring critical ideas of our time through art and dialogue.

Join the Koffler Gallery in a collective conversation to explore the themes Art, Money & Power as raised in the exhibition SIREN, facilitated by Dr. Michael Prokopow.

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Focusing on the content, form, and materiality of the exhibition, important issues related to art making and audience engagement will be explored via a series of facilitated public discussions. Through explorations of Art, Money & Power, and Art, Nature, Thresholds & Borders, participants will ask: How do we respond to foundational principles and ideas about our sense of community? How are our responses mediated and shaped by elemental flows into political action?

How do we respond to foundational principles and ideas about our sense of community? How are our responses mediated and shaped by elemental flows into political action? ART & Conversations are facilitated collective conversations offering opportunities for audiences to collectively engage with, and together unpack, these challenging questions and other ideas underlining SIREN at the Koffler Gallery.

Through the collective explorations of Art, Power & Money, and Art, Nature, Thresholds & Borders, participants will ask: How do we respond to foundational principles and ideas about our sense of community? How are our responses mediated and shaped by elemental flows into political action?

Reflecting on the exhibition nichola feldman-kiss \ SIREN at the Koffler Gallery, cultural historian and curator, Dr. Michael Prokopow will facilitate a collective conversation on art, money and power. Together we will unpack some difficult topics concerning the role of artists within hierarchies of political and institutional power. What do art and artists have to model to communities of financial and political authority? What positive social evolution could be imagined through nonhierarchical spaces of art? In the absence of politically neutral financial models that support artistic work, where else might these conversations be located? The collective conversation will focus on SIREN artworks to interrogate participant initiated ideas, premises and frameworks.

Facilitator: Dr. Michael J. Prokopow

Dr. Michael J. Prokopow is a cultural historian and curator. His areas of expertise include material culture, aesthetics and design history. He has written widely about material life and domesticity and is currently working on a project on middle class taste in North America between 1940 and 1975. Between 2004 and 2008, he was curator of the Design Exchange, Canada's only museum of 20th century industrial design. In 2012, he was co-curator of –Museum for the End of the World "The Monumental Project, Scotia Bank Nuit Blanche, in Toronto. In addition, in 2011 he curated an exhibition on the work of architect and theorist George Baird at the Daniels Faculty of Landscape, Architecture and Design and he was co-curator of the Leona Drive Project, a site specific installation in Willowdale, Ontario. Currently he is working on an exhibition on the roles of Scandinavian aesthetics in Canadian design culture between 1920 and the present and a project for the New York Times on prison architecture and the aesthetics of incarceration.

Collective Conversation: Art, Money & Power

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