The Shape of a City at Franz Kaka

*The Shape of a City,* 2025, installation view, Franz Kaka, Toronto, CA.
Photo: LFdocumentation.

Like a piece of paper overlaid with writing not quite entirely erased, a city materializes as a palimpsest. Traces of earlier versions of the city remain, bleed through, and mix in with the new. Living amid these streets and places, citizens grow while the metropolis expands and remodels itself around them. The intricate web of social, political, and economic forces within a metropolitan area holds tightly the lives of its people. The Shape of a City, a group exhibition at Toronto’s Franz Kaka, evokes the layered hybridity of an urban environment. It considers the ever-changing and overlapping nature of cities: the multifaceted histories that transpired before and the others that will superimpose on these in the future. The show borrows its title from the Surrealist writer Julien Gracq’s portrait of Nantes (curious Torontonians can find a copy at the Toronto Reference Library, which was in turn taken from a quotation by Charles Baudelaire: "The shape of a city, as we all know, changes more quickly than the mortal heart."). In the text, the author traces his childhood experience of the hierarchy of the French city’s urban spaces. Gracq’s book engages in a hybrid stacking of memoir, history, reverie, criticism, and geography— modes shared by the multifarious artworks included in the Franz Kaka show. The book and the exhibition alike speak to the transitional nature of cityscapes, tracing their overlapping circuitous paths and boundaries, catching sight of poetry in their stratified shapes.

Zooming out, a visitor begins to encounter the layering that exists in Toronto even before reaching the exhibition—Franz Kaka itself subsists beyond the visible limits of its urban contours. For starters, the long, rectangular, white, fluorescently lit commercial gallery finds itself within a major metropolis (an increasingly difficult place to draw breath thanks to the ascending cost of living). Next, depending on the visitor’s starting point, they will cross the various administrative, geographic, social, political, and economic lines (official and implied) that divide neighbourhoods. When the visitor reaches the gallery’s address (1485 Dupont Street), they step off the public space of the sidewalk and enter the non-public territory of a private building. Inside, they walk up to the second floor via a staircase—a limiting line of (in) accessibility (the gallery apologizes for the difficulties the stairs may present for those with physical disabilities and offers more information and documentation for those who ask). Eventually, after navigating the barriers mentioned above and approaching the end of a quiet hallway of near-identical doors, a visitor reaches a unit adorned with the number 208: Franz Kaka.

The Shape of a City occupied the gallery through the doors of 208 from January 9 to February 8, 2025. The show included work by Lotus L. Kang, HaeAhn Paul Kwon Kajander, Tony Romano, Elif Saydam, Matthew Schrader, Alex Turgeon, and Alix Vernet. Among the works on view, four stand out as especially engendering the notion of city-as-palimpsest; each provides distinctive insights into the many layers of meaning and detail in a metropolitan area.

Cities move forward in continual flux, but traces from their many-sided historical narratives endure, and ghosts of previous writings on the urban surface haunt the streets. In The Shape of a City, the gallery goer encounters haunted graffiti incised on Alix Vernet’s aluminum condensers from window AC units. The three wall-mounted, alloy objects—Gold (2024), Blue (2024), and Silver (2024)—incorporate etchings that reveal layers of shiny, drawing-like marks on the grills ahead of the coils. The word “Baby” is scrawled into Blue. Streaks from what appear to be clasping fingers drag across the face of Gold. Deep and dangerous slashing impressions cut across Silver. The material list for Vernet’s graffitied condensers includes their New York City origin: Henry Street, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The Lower East Side historically offered a working-class immigrant enclave until rapid gentrification began in the early aughts. Now, sterile luxury condos take the place of historic tenements. Previously, window AC units (identical to Vernet’s defaced devices) hung outside windows sills on the facades of these tenements. One could vandalize the exterior of the metallic condensers via fire escapes. With her alloy sculptures, the artist evokes a vanishing metropolitan surface in an altering New York. Vernet’s cold metal sculptures are preserved remnants from a Manhattan disappearing under successive layers of gentrification.

Alix Vernet, *Blue*, 2024. Aluminum condenser, window AC unit, Henry Street. 8 x 16 ½ x 2 ¼ inches.
Courtesy of the artist and Franz Kaka, Toronto, CA. Photo: LFDocumentation.

Walls, blockades, and barricades divide urban environments. Dipole (N/S) (2024) by HaeAhn Paul Kwon Kajander (collaborative duo HaeAhn Kwon and Paul Kajander) appears to pay particular attention to these dividing lines. The duo’s pairing of landscape-oriented chunks of aluminum one atop the other occupies the back wall of the space. The soft metal has been pounded to suggest the topography of a gridded gate; in the top element, the grid is most prominent while the bottom element privileges the space between the girders. The textured composition ranges in appearance from shining silvery-white to dull grey. The malleable object’s title recalls how two poles with opposite and equal electrical charges or magnetic forces confront one another across a small space. Artist and historian Leah Modigliani writes that throughout the work of artists such as HaeAhn Paul Kwon Kajander, the wall, blockade, and barricade appear as part of a formal and spatial repertoire of contention. She reports that these apparatuses “pose questions about how the city is used and by whom.”1 Within this group show, Dipole (N/S) perhaps functions as a poetic visual representation of the separations between the edges of access, of the freedom some experience to move past certain contours and the subjugation experienced by others.

In the contingent and ever-evolving shape of a metropolis, alternative forms of architecture can subsist; Alex Turgeon’s Untitled (Nest) (2022) investigates such other-than-normative spaces. It is a video, HD, about nine minutes long, in color. It loops, playing just below the ceiling—and above the visitor’s eye line— in the back left corner of the space. From below, visitors watch a hornets’ nest in slow motion. The installation evokes the architecture of CCTV surveillance and notably occupies the location where the yellow and black insects might build a home if they found their way into the gallery.

Atop the recording of a crawling nest, the artist overlays a blackout poem based on the selective obfuscation and highlighting of words from a legal proceeding involving the raiding of Truxx Bar (a known gay bar in Montreal) by the police in 1977. The artist concentrates on descriptions of the bar’s design while removing notions of gender. In a lyrical metaphor, the highly hung artwork equates Truxx Bar and the hornet’s nest as architectural alternatives to normative space; each also holds the potential to defend itself if threatened.

As long-standing small businesses shut their doors, the form of an urban area alters. Elif Saydam’s contributions to the exhibition seem to examine one such a closure. Zinc-coated rings connect two laminated inkjet prints: Open Forever (2023) and Closed for good (2023). The translucent, portal-like compositions drape from the ceiling. Both depict steps leading up to a voluminous door. It appears to be the entrance to a (once long-standing, now closed) small business. The two entryways face each other, in dialogue, like mirrored reflections—except for a few differences. In Open Forever, a sign with the word OPEN primes customers to enter, while in Closed for good, the word CLOSED forbids the public from the area beyond the door. On the face of Open Forever, vibrant four-leaf clovers float around the door handle, while in Closed for good, the good luck charms lie on the steps, muted and brown. Inky gestural floral drawings bloom across the curtain-like plastic of Open Forever’s titular sign, yet, on its closed reflection, the same flowers droop. In a developing metropolitan area, small businesses (not unlike the one it seems Saydam portrays) face an onslaught of challenges. Fierce competition (including from online shopping). Rising rents. Shifting demographics as neighborhoods transform through gentrification. Numerous hurdles persist; doors too often close, slamming hard behind the owner. As these places vanish, once beloved fragments of the urban environment hollow out, melting away into the past.

The multifarious artworks in The Shape of a City listen to and recognize the layered hybridity inherent in a metropolis. The artists in the show pay thoughtful attention to their cities. Altering. Developing. Dynamic. Transitional. “The shape of a city,” Julien Gracq notes, “changes more quickly than the mortal heart.”2 The author’s line brings to mind the experience of returning to an area of the city after a long time away and not recognizing anything. Imagine, for a moment, a citizen returning to an urban space they once frequented. They walk by the buildings, by the malls, in this otherworldly land. By the skyscrapers, shining in their dark majesty. By the lonely financial zone. Under the moon and stars, under the buzzing electric light. 3 Maybe a luxury condo replaces a historic tenement building. Or an expensive boutique stands in the place of that memorable, long-standing restaurant. Perhaps a new barrier prohibits people from a once public, now private park. The metropolis has been quenching its thirst for development. Looking around for a while, the citizen notices the overlays of what has changed, what is hidden, and what is haunting the present—like overlays of writing on a not quite entirely erased piece of paper. Perhaps in these moments of unfamiliarity, one is most sensitive to an urban environment and the breathing and palpable histories layered on its surface. At Franz Kaka, The Shape of a City connects with that palimpsest.

Leah Modigliani, Counter Revanchist Art in the Global City: Walls, Blockades, and Barricades as Repertoires of Creative Action (Routledge, 2024), 15.
Gracq adapts this line and the title of his volume from “Le Cygne,” a poem by poet, essayist, art critic, and translator Charles Baudelaire published in the section “Tableaux Parisiens” (Parisian scenes) of Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil). Julien Gracq, The Shape of a City, trans. Ingeborg M. Kohn (Turtle Point Press, 1985), 1.

Cityscape

The Shape of a City at Franz Kaka

“The shape of a city,” Julien Gracq notes, “changes more quickly than the mortal heart.”

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