Still from Vera Frenkel's 'As If by Chance,' mounted as an art installation at Koffler Arts in Toronto.Vera Frenkel/Koffler Arts/Supplied
At 87, Toronto artist Vera Frenkel is busy engaging in her “favourite mischief.”
Her mischief, which she has deployed regularly in a long career exposing abuses of power, is to thread plausible fictions into seemingly factual videos.
Her latest is As If by Chance, a series of real conversations between elders and children mixed with a story about the mysterious disappearance of a fictional community worker who organized the encounters.
“You can project so many things on an absence,” Frenkel said in a recent interview, remarking on the influence of detective fiction on her work.
As If by Chance, mounted as an art installation at Koffler Arts, features two hours’ worth of video, playing on two channels, in which elders and children recruited for the project tell stories and ask questions as they paint on glass, taking their inspiration from a series of random cue cards.
For the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Eva Respini, it’s all about the art. Period.
Filled with charming impromptu moments, their unscripted conversations offer a gentle rebuke to ageism.
“Even in my own life, I encounter one experience after another of being invisible or being patronized,” Frenkel said. “Older people are not taken seriously. … Invisibility starts at both ends of life’s arc. And that annoys me.”
Her initial inspiration was William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. The late 18th-century collection of poems about childhood and old age was both written and illustrated by the English artist of the Romantic period, who subtitled it Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.
“The songs address both age levels. They’re not imprisoned in any particular audience, they speak to both in a format that is accessible for everyone,” said Frenkel, who was introduced to Blake’s work early in her career because, like him, she was a printmaker.
'As If by Chance' features two hours’ worth of video in which elders and children tell stories and ask questions as they paint on glass, taking their inspiration from a series of random cue cards.Vera Frenkel/Koffler Arts/Supplied
When it is not gently countering ageism with the real activity on screen, As If by Chance features a darker element in its fictional voice-over narration: Natasha, the woman who founded this drop-in art centre where elders and youth meet, has disappeared.
Playing the role of Natasha’s assistant, Frenkel herself provides the twisting narration that asks more questions than it answers. Was the caring, altruistic Natasha really fronting for Russian political interference or perhaps for developers, establishing the art centre as the first step in a gentrification scheme?
Careful listeners will quickly realize this is all fabrication, but it’s initially credible. When the work was shown briefly at Art Toronto last year, Frenkel recalls that a security guard who had been standing near the piece just wanted to know: “What happened to Natasha?”
She complained that nobody could hear the sound at the Art Toronto fair, but she is not one to demand reverential viewing. Video presented in art galleries often seems counterintuitive, providing neither fixed start times nor comfortable seating even for films that are longer and have a narrative arc. Frenkel, however, said she is not trying to create a cinematic experience.
“I don’t assume people have that kind of time and that kind of attention,” she said, adding that a brief encounter with the video should be enough to reveal the relationships between the elders and the children. “I don’t feel they need to feel obliged to watch all of it. Some have done, and that’s very sweet, very kind.”
Frenkel began shooting the piece in 2017 after her production manager recruited various local seniors and children to appear in the videos.Vera Frenkel/Koffler Arts/Supplied
The theme of gentrification lurks beneath Natasha’s disappearance as Frenkel’s comment on the way artists are forced from the neighbourhoods they have made attractive; it seems particularly apt because, as she points out, production of the video was interrupted by one such eviction.
Frenkel began shooting the piece in 2017 after her production manager recruited various local seniors – they include artist Tim Whiten and critic Gary Michael Dault – and children to appear in the videos.
She started editing during a residency at Charles Street Video, but work was interrupted by the pandemic and then further delayed when the organization was forced out of its home at the Toronto Media Arts Centre on Lisgar Street in a dispute with the City of Toronto.
(The situation dated back to 2015, when the city blocked the arts centre’s ownership of a space provided as part of a development deal, citing changes in the centre’s management. The subject of a lengthy legal battle, their disagreement was complicated by the bankruptcy of the developer, leaving the space partly finished.)
“The narrative emerged through the editing. I did not anticipate that when I did the shoot,” she said of the gentrification critique. “I became angrier about the way the city was dealing with cultural issues. Culture and economics have been twinned.”
After Charles Street Video found a new home in 2022, the work was further delayed by a fall that caused Frenkel injuries requiring months of rehab.
The piece, which was unveiled at Charles Street and Art Toronto in 2025, is finally getting a fully installed exhibition accompanied by still photography at Koffler Arts.
The Koffler is housed in the Youngplace building on Shaw Street that was originally established as a cultural centre by Artscape – until that non-profit real estate venture, which produced its fair share of gentrification, went bust in 2023. Throughout her long career, Frenkel’s mischief-making has often found unexpected resonances.
As If by Chance continues at Koffler Arts to June 14.