The Unfinished Conversation: Encoding/Decoding

Cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932 – 2014) devoted his life to studying the interweaving threads of culture, power, politics, and history in order to articulate their relationship to the construction of personal and national identities.

Taking Hall’s essay Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse (1973) as its point of departure, this exhibition explores how meaning is constructed and can become distorted and detached from its original intent to produce specific or slanted narratives. The exhibition includes film and video installations that cull from image and audio archives in order to reflect upon recent socio-political events and the way they become historicized. They suggest that multiple and alternative perspectives are integral to understanding these moments in history as their accounts are too often moulded by dominant narratives. In doing so, the works on view reframe the past in an effort to propose new ways of understanding the world we live in. They push formal boundaries to tackle significant social issues confronting contemporary culture.

Exhibition organized and circulated by The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, in partnership with Autograph ABP. Co-curated by Gaëtane Verna (Director, The Power Plant) and Mark Sealy (Director, Autograph ABP).