Contested Space (2022)

In our final exhibition of the year, Gallery 1265 is honoured to show Zi Yan Bai’s Contested Space. Bai is a multi-award-winning senior student at the University of Toronto with a long history with the Gallery. We could not think of a more fitting way to round off one of our most exciting seasons to date than with Bai’s work. From photography, to video, to sculptures — Bai does it all in Contested Space. Her pieces masterfully exist in tandem with one another as they each explore the tense relationship between artificial structures and the natural environment.

The theme of the exhibition will be about the ambivalent spaces – the relationship between artificial institutions and the natural environment. In the past, Bai had been investigating various social, cultural, and economic institutions through their intellectual construction, infrastructures, devices, contexts, etc. As a student she was also studying how education has responded to those institutions.

During the pandemic, however, there was a change in Bai’s research direction as she started paying more attention to the natural environment. As someone who grew up in the urban regions, nature was unfamiliar to Bai. But as Bai continued exploring the natural context and conducting research on its cultural connotations, she found that historically, nature has also been regarded as a space for artists to critically examine the institutions. It almost seems to Bai that nature itself already constitutes a critique of the institutions. Thus, the exhibition examines such phenomenon, but without a definite answer. 

Opened on April 2nd, 2022.

Please contact Gallery 1265 for potential exhibition archival.