Curated by Carolin Köchling

The tension between documentary and fiction promises to define Jonathas de Andrade’s first major exhibition outside his native Brazil. In O peixe (The Fish), 2016, he filmed fishermen tenderly embracing their dying catches, forging a new ritual through labor. With O levante (The Uprising), 2012–13, de Andrade was given permission by the Recife government to film a horse-drawn-cart race of his own design in the city (where farm animals are usually prohibited), thereby bringing the reality of the country’s rural poor to this cultural center through fiction. Highlighting sociopolitical inequities that correspond to identity and colonial history, the exhibition launches the Power Plant’s thirtieth season, alongside concurrent shows of Maria Hupfield and Kapwani Kiwanga, and should complement these native Canadians’ reexaminations of their country’s past on the occasion of their country’s sesquicentennial.

— Kaira M. Cabañas