Zadie Xa with Benito Mayor Vallejo: Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything

Preview: written before the show opened

When this installation was shortlisted for the 2025 Turner Prize, Mark Hudson wrote in The Independent that its room at Bradford's Cartwright Hall felt "more like some psychedelic nightclub than an art display", and that Xa's paintings ended up as "pieces of decorative scene-setting". Emily Steer, reviewing the same room for Ocula, called it "visually thrilling", with a gold floor throwing watery shapes onto the ceiling and whale calls playing through speakers.

The Power Plant's version is Xa's first major solo show in Ontario, made with her long-term collaborator Benito Mayor Vallejo and reworked for this building. It mixes new and older work: paintings, murals, sound, and more than 600 brass bells hung from the ceiling in the shape of a conch shell, so look up. The subjects are Korean mythology, folklore, diaspora and sea life, tied this time to the shore of Lake Ontario.

Bring Hudson's complaint and judge whether the paintings hold their own against the room. Entry is free, and it opens on 24 October.