Connectors: International Speakers Series – Pablo Helguera

Join us for an evening with artist Pablo Helguera, whose talk, Building Strange Oases: Practices of Play, considers how play operates as a critical artistic strategy, inviting participation, experimentation, and reflection within social space. Rooted in socially engaged practice, Helguera’s work frames participation as a generative force, an approach that resonates with , the concurrent exhibition at The Power Plant. There, the gallery is reimagined as an interactive environment shaped by its visitors, where open-ended play gives way to a more radical proposition: young people as active contributors, testing possibilities, negotiating shared space, and engaging questions of environment while imagining the future.

To engage more closely with the ideas of Colourful Parachutes, join us for a curator-led tour led by Frances Loeffler, Curator of Exhibitions prior to the talk:

• 5:30 PM–6:15 PM — Curator-led tour, Colourful Parachutes (The Power Plant, 231 Queens Quay West)
• 6:15 PM: Talk Begins — Doors open (Studio Theatre, Harbourfront Centre, 235 Queens Quay West)
• 6:30 PM — Pablo Helguera’s talk begins Building Strange Oases: Practices of Play

Building Strange Oases: Practices of Play

In this talk, Pablo Helguera reflects on play as both a method and a mode of inquiry within contemporary artistic practice. The title draws from the German philosopher Eugen Fink (1905–1975), who described play as a “strange oasis” within the structures of everyday life—a suspended space governed by its own rules, temporalities, and possibilities. Taking this notion as a point of departure, the talk considers how artists construct such oases within social and institutional contexts.

Drawing from pedagogy, psychology, and the history of postwar art—particularly postminimalism, process-based conceptualism, and performance—Helguera examines how artistic frameworks can invite participation, experimentation, and reflection. As a socially engaged artist, his work is grounded in the research of social environments and the development of site-specific, participatory projects.

Central to his approach is the use of play as a generative tool: a way to disrupt self-imposed mental barriers, unsettle social conventions, and temporarily suspend inhibitions. These constructed “strange oases” operate as spaces of permission—contexts in which audiences are encouraged not only to engage, but to rethink their own assumptions and behaviors.

Through examples from his own practice and related artistic strategies, Helguera explores how playful structures can open pathways to address broader questions embedded in everyday life. Rather than positioning play as escapism, the talk proposes it as a critical and transformative force—one capable of producing moments of insight, connection, and shared inquiry.

About the Speaker

Pablo Helguera (Mexico City, 1971) is a New York based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, socially engaged art and performance. Helguera’s work focuses on a variety of topics ranging from history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, ethnography, memory and the absurd, in formats that are widely varied including the lecture, museum display strategies, musical performances and written fiction.

His work as an educator has usually intersected with his interest as an artist. This intersection is best exemplified in his project, “The School of Panamerican Unrest”, a nomadic think-tank that physically crossed the continent by car from Anchorage, Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, making 40 stops in between. Covering almost 20,000 miles, it is considered one of the most extensive public art projects on record as well as a pioneering work for the new generation of artworks regarded under the area of socially engaged art.

His musical composition, “Endingness” has been performed by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Helguera has exhibited or performed at venues such as the Museo de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; MoMA, ICA Boston; 8th and 11th Havana Biennal, PERFORMA, Manifesta, Zurich, Fundación Proa in Buenos Aires and many others. He is a Guggenheim fellow and recipient of the Creative Capital, Art Matters, and Franklin Furnace Grants. In 2011 he was named winner of the International Award of Participatory Art of the Region Emilia-Romagna in Italy. He has also received the Franklin Furnace and Art Matters grants.

2026 exhibitions include the Centro de Cultura Contemporánea in Valencia, the MCA Chicago, and the Americas Society, among others.

Helguera has worked since 1991 in a variety of contemporary art museums, including as head of public programs at the Education department of the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1998-2005) and from 2007 to 2020, Director of Adult and Academic programs at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He has organized close to 1000 public events in conjunction with nearly 100 exhibitions. In 2010 he was appointed pedagogical curator of the 8th Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil, which took place in September 2011. He is currently Assistant Professor of Arts and Entrepreneurship at the College of Performing Arts at the New School in New York.

He is the author of many books, including Education for Socially Engaged Art (2011), The Parable Conference (2014) and A Journal of the Year of Ph*rm*cy (2021). He writes a weekly column titled Beautiful Eccentrics.

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