In 2016, the Polish journalist Joanna Gierak-Onoszko arrived in Canada, where she would spend two years reporting for the centre-left weekly magazine Polityka. She first learned of Toby Obed in November 2017, through media coverage of the long-awaited federal apology for residential schools in Newfoundland and Labrador.

In recent months, the horrific death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed have prompted widespread reflection on the roles of race and racism in architecture. These events have spurred institutional statements, calls for action, and the sharing of syllabi and reading lists on architecture and race. Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present is a timely addition to these efforts.

This exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture proposes a timely rereading of postmodernism that moves beyond the period’s self-generated theories, stylistic commonplaces, and images.

Questions of agency, land rights, and culture arose again and again in the McCord’s retrospective on nineteenth-century photographer William Notman, yet neither Notman’s work nor the exhibition framing it provided any easy answers.

The fragments of this exhibition add up to an archive that attempts to answer a question: without the witness, how do we determine truth?

Viewers become mediators, with the series of scenes on each screen flowing not past, but through this audience – asking them to act as witnesses to the visual dialogue.

Elsworthy’s early photographs are in black and white, many of them tinted with watercolours, imbuing their everyday subject matter with … More