For many local people in Toronto, the art world is an inaccessible community, with exhibits behind closed doors or in places where many folks don’t feel represented, invited or welcome.
Founder and executive director of the Toronto Biennial of Art, Patrizia Libralato, and the curatorial team of Katie Lawson, Candice Hopkins and Tairone Bastien, along with their curatorial fellows Chiedza Pasipanodya and Sebastian De Line have worked to change this concept and ensure that contemporary art is accessible to everyone.
“I think this is a good moment to be doing this, but we still recognize that not everybody is comfortable yet being in indoor spaces. We wanted to ensure that we were presenting a range of options,” Lawson said.
For 10 weeks every two years, local, national, and international Biennial artists transform Toronto and its partner regions with free exhibitions, performances, and learning opportunities. Grounded in diverse local contexts, the city-wide programming hopes to inspire individuals, engage communities and contribute to global conversations.
“For me, what excites me about the Biennial is that it’s much more about placemaking and community and it’s not so much a showcase of what’s new and noteworthy, but what has been shaped by this place,” Lawson said.
The Toronto Biennial of Art launched in 2019, opening up conversations about Truth and Reconciliation as well as anti-racism, inclusion, equity, and accessibility. Since then, the organization has continued to evolve and develop new ways of seeing and listening.
While the city is rich with arts and culture, it’s not always accessible or free, which is something that was very important to the curators of the Toronto Biennial of Art. Unlike institutions like the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) where people have to pay to access the art, everything at the Toronto Biennial is free.
“I think that especially in contemporary art, there are such beautiful forms of storytelling put forth that you don’t have to have a background in art to appreciate it or see something of yourself in someone else’s work or to have an experience of curiosity building.”
Katie Lawson, curator for the Toronto Biennial of Art.
For the 2022 Toronto Biennial, the organization purposely continued with the same 2019 curatorial team to keep the continuity going between programming. The curators are local and have spent considerable time with the community to work toward building the exhibitions, according to Lawson.
They also knew they were expected to play a significant role in the city’s recovery process by bringing artists and communities together again. This year the Biennial, which opened on March 26 and runs until June 5, is one of the largest art events open to the public. The majority of Biennial sites are AODA-compliant, with a range of accessible outdoor projects and a hybrid programming model of virtual and in-person events, all reachable by public transport.
Through their Storytelling Sessions, the Biennial offers weekly guided sessions, informal conversations, and spot tours to intergenerational audiences at their main exhibition sites. As an additional layer, they are also providing descriptive audio tours for people with low vision or living with sight loss and a select number of Storytelling Sessions will be accompanied by ASL–English Interpreters.
“This time around, we have a less conventional model of gallery educator for our storytelling program. The individual storytellers working for us are encouraged to bring their own lived experience to how they offer mediation for folks in terms of getting to know the artworks,” Lawson said.
While the inaugural Biennial 2019 titled The Shoreline Dilemma “traced various interconnected narratives and ecologies of the city’s ever-changing shoreline” the 2022 Biennial titled What Water Knows, The Land Remembers “moves inland to look at the tributaries and ravines both above ground and hidden, that shape this place,” according to their published guide Water, Kinship, Belief. The 2022 Biennial expands on these themes while addressing climate reckoning.
“We asked ourselves what was going to make it different and of value to the arts community that’s here, because there is already such a rich network of arts organizations, and things happening. How can you raise all boats by having more water?”
Katie Lawson, curator for the Toronto Biennial of Art.
From the beginning, the organization also asked themselves how they could create an environment different from the insular art world, where artists who were not already part of that community felt they could come and participate and see themselves reflected.
“We asked how the biennial is supporting artists first. I really loved working on these projects because the biennial is a commissioning body which means we support the production of artworks,” Lawson said.
This year 23 of the 36 artists the Biennial worked with were commissioned to create new work. The organization was also in dialogue with the artists to fundraise on their behalf with a mixture of private and public funding to ensure that everyone was paid equitably across the board — which is no small feat as a newer organization, according to Lawson.
“I think for an organization to be built and growing in this city, it’s important to lift up artists who are based here, and also we work in close partnership with a lot of arts organizations in the city,” Lawson said. “The histories of the different communities that have been here throughout time: It’s so nuanced and so layered and so complex. Those histories are not immediately evident in the present-day walking around unless you know where to look.”
The Toronto Biennial worked collaboratively together with both the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), a 22-year-old institution, and Mercer Union, an artist-run centre, on two co-commissions which meant a pooling of collective resources in order to pull off more ambitious projects. “There is a real, and rightfully so, scarcity mindset in the arts and there is only so much funding available. There are a lot of projects that we wouldn’t have been able to do on our own,” Lawson said.
Fostering connections is at the core of what the curatorial team is building with the Biennial through partnerships within the city and at the national and international levels — to encourage people to see what’s happening in Toronto and beyond. “We are encouraging folks outside of Toronto to get to see what’s happening in our community here and allowing for a broader exchange,” Lawson said.
Right from the start, when the first Biennial was in its planning stages, the curatorial team wanted to do things differently and look at the “complex relational context of Toronto” through an Indigenous lens — working with Ange Loft from day one — an interdisciplinary performing artist and initiator from Kahnawà:ke Kanien’kehá:ka Territory working in Tsi Tkarón:to. Loft was commissioned to write a foundational brief entitled “Indigenous Context and Concepts for Toronto” which they shared with artists in advance of each Biennial, informing some artists’ projects from their conception.
“Before the curators were even hired for the first iteration of the Biennial, the founders and directors were thinking very carefully about what it means to start such an organization in this place. Because of that, they were thinking a lot about the Indigenous histories of this land,” Lawson said.
They also worked with Camille Turner and Yaniya Lee on their “Black history Navigational Toolkit” project as a way to navigate the city through its Black history. “Both are grounding. Both are a means to attune ourselves to sublimated histories and stories held in the land and water,” the exhibition curators wrote in the opening of Water, Kinship, Belief which they refer to as a “third” site which has informed the exhibitions themselves.
The Home Pitch explored the Biennial in person. With June being National Indigenous History Month and Pride Month, here is our curated list of highlighted exhibitions by Indigenous and 2SLGBTQ+ artists on until June 5:
Amy Malbeuf’s Kahkiyaw kikway (All of everything) at Arsenal Contemporary Art
Malbeuf is a Métis visual artist currently living on unceded Mi’kmaq territory in Terence Bay, Nova Scotia.
Malbeuf’s intentionally unadorned rawhide pieces suspended against cloth patterns of foliage are immediately noticeable and convey a wonderfully rich smoky scent. Malbeuf learnt hide-tanning techniques for traditional Indigenous communities of northern Alberta, where she was born. She created these wearable artworks for a spectrum of body types and genders and over time, each piece in the exhibition space will be gifted, leaving only a trace outline of the fabric where the garment once was. These garments are meant to fit any sized body because of the way the artist works with lacing and the design.
“After the Biennial closes the hide works are going to be taken off the printed panels that they are tethered to and will be a part of Indigenous Fashion Week. So they’ll be worn by Indigenous bodies and it’s a real celebratory moment,” Lawson said.
To see Malbeuf’s pieces worn in movement, visit Indigenous Fashion Week on June 9.
Ange Loft and Jumbelies Theatre & Art’s DISH DANCES at Fort York National Historic Site
Ange Loft is an interdisciplinary performing artist and initiator from Kahnawà:ke Kanien’kehá:ka Territory, working in Tsi Tkarón:to.
Loft’s beautiful three-channel video work, which was created in collaboration with Jumblies Theatre & Arts, captures a series of workshops she held over a number of days with an Indigenous youth group team of artists, choreographers, dancers and composers.
“Loft’s artistic practice is very much one of storytelling and of looking at oral histories of this land and breaking down things like The Toronto Purchase and what it means to us today. What does the concept of The Dish With One Spoon mean to us today as Indigenous teaching?” Lawson said.
For the 2019 Biennial, Loft also created a multi-media installation: Talking Treaties, an outdoor pageant, workshop, and installation that shared knowledge of the Toronto region’s treaty history. Her program featured gorgeous community-sewn maps of the waterways of Toronto.
Jeffrey Gibson’s I AM YOUR RELATIVE at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA)
Jeffrey Gibson is a Choctaw-Cherokee interdisciplinary artist based in Hudson, New York.
Entering MOCA’s lobby, Gibson’s explosions of colour, patterns, geometrics and collage using posters and stickers creates a visual archive — one that prioritizes Indigenous, Black, Brown and queer voices and speaks to genocide, stolen land, broken treaties, boarding schools, racism, health care and erasure. It also celebrates, spirituality, survival, family, resilience, joy and love.
Cut-out shapes allow views into, and out of, the semi-private enclosures these arrangements create. The shapes reflect the formal language that Gibson uses in his paintings, beadwork, and patterns and are in configurations that seem like symbols for communication.
Gibson’s series of brightly coloured stages can be moved and reconfigured for spontaneous gatherings and organized performances within the museum. Over the course of the exhibition, the stages are host to artists’ performances, talks, workshops, and gatherings that amplify community voices past and present and are supported through robust research, coordination, and production. Recordings of many of the events go on to form a permanent and broadly accessible archive.
Abel Rodríguez and Aycoobo aka Wilson Rodríguez at Arsenal Contemporary Toronto
Abel Rodríguez and Aycoobo aka Wilson Rodríguez are a father and son duo of Nonuya Indigenous artists from the Igara Paraná River region of the Colombian Amazon.
Rodríguez and Aycoobo are known for their incredibly detailed and colourful drawings of Amazonian plants that are significant in Nonuya culture for their healing powers and used in ritual. The elder Rodríguez’s formal education in plant knowledge was gained from his grandfather and interrupted when he was sent to a Spanish boarding school. His son, Aycoobo’s work embraces elements beyond the medicinal and practical uses of plants focusing on the relationship between humans and the “invisible world” and the use of plants as a means of expanding perception and forging connections with the ancestral world.
Libralato, the founder and executive director of the Biennial served as a guide during the in-person viewing of the commissioned film, titled Mogaje Guihu, El nombrador de plantas / Mogaje Guihu, The plant namer. The father and son duo created this moving documentary with the intention of passing down traditional knowledge from the perspective of the plants to decentre humans and centre ecologies that are being lost.
“Abel and many Indigenous people were forced to leave the forest in the 1990s. He now lives in Bogotá, and his role in the community is to know the plants, teaching knowledge and wisdom passed down from generation to generation,” Libralato said.
“I had never drawn before, I barely knew how to write, but I had a whole world in my mind asking me to picture the plants. I learned about the forest the hard way: I had to be awake for long hours at night, I had to lend my ears to the elders and make special diets. Our learning was a spiritual process; that is why we consider knowledge very valuable.” Abel Rodríguez from the Biennial’s website.
To visit the Toronto Biennial of Art, which is on until June 5, visitors can download the free TBA pass to access event sites. The closing weekend will showcase A Tribute to Toronto a one-of-a-kind Smoke Sculpture™ this Saturday, June 4 starting at 7 pm at Sugar Beach by the queer artist, Judy Chicago — considered one of the most influential artists of our time.
© Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York: © Donald Woodman/ARS, New York.
