You are invited to imagine the Tanks as a conceptual ‘clearing in the forest’. Displays are curated along shared themes, foregrounding ideas of environmental knowledge, cyclicality and regeneration. The Tanks are historically generative spaces, having once fuelled the building using oil, itself a natural product originating from the earth. Here, they are presented as the fertile soil on which the museum lies, and from which new growth can emerge.

This forest of coiled carpets maps histories of displacement

Reveries of an Underground Forest consists of upright rolls of industrial carpet which resemble tree trunks, singed with geometric patterns. The burnt markings derive from Indigenous textiles and aerial maps, reflecting the different histories bound up in the urban development of the city of Toronto, Canada, where the work was originally installed. These include the displacement of the Mississaugas, the Anishnaabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples - First Nations communities on whose traditional territories the city now stands. The work also speaks to the destruction of Indigenous lands in the construction of the city’s foundations, and the displacement and immigration of parts of the Punjabi community since the early 1900s. Presented together, these histories question the notion of land rights through stories of dispossession.

Hera Büyüktaşcıyan believes that carpets ‘collect our memories’. She undertook research into their particular significance for migrant groups, and the role they can serve as a link to one’s home and heritage. The artist gathered archives, including aerial images of the city, historical textile patterns, maps and various visual materials related to legacies of displacement. She noted similarities in patterns between Punjabi and Anishnaabe textiles. Inspired by those patterns, and the city structures visible on aerial maps, she created her own abstract compositions. She then singed these into the surface of the carpets, reconstructing shapes where time and history had erased traces of life. Büyüktaşcıyan connects this form of mark-making with the significance of burning rituals in Anishnaabe culture. The artist said, ‘through the act of burning these marks I began to create surfaces that look almost like monumental petroglyphs (rock carvings) or tree trunks that carry marks of several timelines.’

This display will transform over the course of the summer. The forest of carpets will be arranged into new formations, creating a set of small clearings which will house additional textile and video-based works by invited artists.

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