Project Description

Project Synopsis

“Civilization and its Discontents” will be a multidisciplinary group exhibition in the Junction neighbourhood of Toronto, Ontario. From Oct. 24 – Nov. 8, 2009, the historic site at 3109 Dundas Street West will be transformed by a variety of media including photography, painting, film, video, installation art and performance. The Conjunction Collective will organize and curate an exhibition that brings local, national and international contemporary artists of varying disciplines together in an effort to engage the local community in an exploration of the boundary between past and present. It is our hope that by bringing contemporary art outside the traditional confines of the gallery, both the lives of the participating artists and the local community will be enriched.

Project Context

“Now let us, by a flight of the imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity… in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one. This would mean that in Rome… where the Coliseum now stands we could at the same time admire Nero’s vanished Golden House.”


When Freud published the above words in 1930, he was comparing the city of Rome to the human mind to illustrate his theory on memory and experience. Freud imagined the Eternal City as a place where every trace of antiquity would be carried into modernity, a city where the past was as real as the present. His vision of Rome was a city of temporal contradiction, an impossible city. Freud himself later dismissed this analogy as “unimaginable and even absurd”. However, the idea of the city as an archive of physical memories remains a salient metaphor for the urban experience.

Indeed, it is sometimes difficult to walk down a city street and not be struck by the existence of turn of the century buildings standing alongside modern developments. To have the city’s past and present folding and collapsing into each other, to have faded memories so concretely manifest in the here and now, is a wonderfully strange and exciting experience. Nowhere is this more evident in Toronto than in the neighborhood known as “The Junction”.

Preserved by a strong and developing grassroots community, this neighbourhood encompasses a landscape that marks a significant history and passage of time. Scraps of previous eras lay scattered about the streetscape, from traces of the area’s natural history in Baird Park to remnants of the Junction’s late 19th century manufacturing community to the big box stores that currently reside in the old stockyards.

The proposed site at 3109 Dundas Street West is a primary example of a space that embodies both past and present. The site’s constant evolution and its location within the Junction make it an ideal environment to bring different artists together to explore, interpret and play with these ideas of time and space, for who better than artists to re-imagine the “unimaginable and even absurd”?

“Civilization and Its Discontents” will explore these themes of time and space, past and present, memory and moment, through the work of various emerging artists of different backgrounds and artistic disciplines. By bringing together a variety of artwork of a uniquely diverse nature, “Civilization and Its Discontents” aims to transform 3109 Dundas Street West into a place where the boundary between past and present is challenged and explored creating a new understanding of space and place and the memories within them.