Easily the most impressive thing about this year's Luminato Festival– the local multi-arts extravaganza that works best when it presents genre-spanning spectacles requiring deep pockets and good connections – is the location itself. The long abandoned Hearn Generating Station has been a mecca for photographers of urban decay for years, but Jorn Weisbrodt, the artistic director of Luminato, has secured it as a venue legally accessible to the general public (I can only imagine what the insurance costs are). Unsound, the music festival within the festival, got its foot in the door last year and filled the big space with post-industrial drone music perfect for a place haunted by ghosts of the coming apocalypse (it was a coal-fired power plant, get it?). This year, rather than occupy venues across the city, Luminato has gone full Hearn and turned the cavernous hulk of a wreck into a cavernous hulk of an art centre. 
Michel de Broin, One Thousand Speculations
You can't have an abandoned industrial building in this day and age and not throw some art in it. The challenge is to curate work that isn’t dwarfed by the scale of the surroundings. The denizens of upstart art space YTB Gallery make a valiant effort in creating site-specific installations that respond to the neighbourhood, but other than a couple, like Franco Arcieri’s light and shadow show, they don’t make a big impact. Black pools of rainwater, dusty sunbeams crossing towering concrete blocks, and nests of overhead wires, all demand more attention. Only Michel de Broin’s equally massive disco ball matches the environment and turns the interior of the upper gallery into screen on which circling abstract figures of light roam beyond reach. 
Scott McFarland, PARTISANS, Jorn Weisbrodt, Trove
The festival’s ambitions are revealed in the virtual exhibition Trove, which gathers photographs of fifty exceptional objects – including many celebrated artworks – from collections around Toronto and pastes them into images of a proposed gallery within the Hearn. It’s a dream of what the space could be in the future. These composite photographs are then pasted to the brick along one wall. An accompanying map shows where they would be place if the imagined exhibition actually existed. And then there’s a map of the city that identifies the locations of doubles of all the images in an even more public exhibition. Confused? Me too.
The festival’s strength is also its weakness as discussions of the venue overwhelm the art at points. Trove takes a good idea and turns it into a Photoshopped pitch for urban development. Weisbrodt and some longwinded MPP overstayed their welcome by going on about the future when introducing the performance Monumental, which had already been delayed by an hour as the team of technicians worked out the kinks of this alien environment. All was forgiven when the collaboration between dance troupe the Holy Body Tattoo and post-rock ensemble Godspeed You! Black Emperor cranked up the sturm und drang with their evocation of urban social distress and upheaval. As bodies thrashed and feedback wailed, I looked up through the web of overhead steel girders and smiled. It wasn’t the right response to the violent drama on stage, but given the whole experience, I couldn’t help myself.
Luminato Festival: https://luminatofestival.com/
2016 Luminato Festival continues until June 26.
Terence Dick is a freelance writer living in Toronto. His art criticism has appeared in Canadian Art, BorderCrossings, Prefix Photo, Camera Austria, Fuse, Mix, C Magazine, Azure, and The Globe and Mail. He is the editor of Akimblog. You can follow his quickie reviews and art news announcements on Twitter @TerenceDick.
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2016 Luminato Festival
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