Goethe Space
Toronto

The Goethe Space⁠— created in 2011 and redesigned in 2022 as a bicentric culture hub⁠—showcases diverse artistic positions from Germany, Canada and beyond. It presents thought- and conversation-provoking installations and exhibitions around a broad range of practices and topics, from questions of urban livability to explorations of the natural world and reflections of current affairs, expressed across photography, film & video, media & digital arts, or experimental sound. It has been giving voice to contemporary emerging, mid-career as well as established artists who add a unique perspective to their field, inviting culturally curious audiences to discover new art and artists and to cross borders. Artists featured have included media and light artist Mischa Kuball, Nobel Prize winning author Herta Müller, photographer Maria Sewcz, and filmmaker Wim Wenders.

Recent programs includes the North American premiere of Leipzig image artist Ricarda Roggan’s works “Kino,” comprising self-lit images of classic movie projectors and a commissioned literary essay film “The Movie Goer” as well as aesthetic appreciations by film projectionists. Whitney Biennal artist Kota Ezawa made up the Goethe-Institut’s first Contact Photography Festival Core Exhibition in 2022 with an animated video dialogue on art and protest. The space had just been reopened with an Indigenous-led Culture, Climate, Care conversation series around the new plant wall. A female creative team activated the post-Covid space as a diy urban maker utopia with How to Build a Feminist City.

 
Located at the Goethe-Institut Toronto, the Goethe Space centers around a media wall, complemented by additional screens, mobile tech devices, “reading rooms”, a "maker wall" and other open formats as needed. The exhibitions are either specifically created by the Goethe-Institut’s Program Curator Jutta Brendemühl, who initiated the space, or co-curated and designed with distinguished German and international partners such as Fogo Island Arts, Digifest, Luminato Festival, TIFF, German Music Council, or the Fassbinder Foundation.
 
The Goethe Space focuses on pertinent developments in the current international arts and culture scene in Germany (including European and Canadian-German artists) and strives to open up the work that is hosted to an expanded intercultural and cross-community dialogue.
 
Thematically, the shows were often connected to themes arising from the GOETHE FILMS series –the city on film; image makers’ creative influences– or other overarching projects or residencies programmed by the institute and its partners, e.g. multi-year The Future of the City and The Future of Mobility series with Evergreen Brickworks, MaRS Discovery District, Urbanspace Gallery, Union Station, York University and others.
 
The artists often join for a talk, lecture, performance, or audience encounter as well as exchanges with Canadian curators, experts and artists, e.g. Prof. Beth Coleman (U Waterloo Critical Media Lab) or Prix Ars Electronica winner David Rokeby.