Toronto Biennial of Art Opens Second Edition on March 26

Toronto, ON…What Water Knows, The Land Remembers, the second edition of the Toronto Biennial of Art (the Biennial/TBA), opens on Saturday, March 26, 2022. The Biennial’s free Exhibitions and Programs, presented across several sites throughout the 72-day event, remain on view through June 5, 2022. What Water Knows, The Land Remembers draws from polyphonic histories sedimented in and around Toronto, revealing entangled narratives and ecologies across time and space. This second edition of a two-part biennial extends and deepens concepts of relationality, envisioning an expansive form of kinship—between curators, with artists and collaborators, and with the human and more-than-human. Exhibition and programming sites for the 2022 Biennial move inland from the shoreline of Lake Ontario, following the tributaries, above ground and hidden, which shape this place.

More than 70 Canadian and international participants will be featured responding to and expanding on resonant ideas through artworks and programming. Ghazaleh Avarzamani, Nadia Belerique, Judy Chicago, Jeffrey Gibson, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Marguerite Humeau, Jatiwangi art Factory (JaF), Brian Jungen, Jumana Manna, Eduardo Navarro, Paul Pfeiffer, Eric-Paul Riege, and Buhlebezwe Siwani are among the participating artists. Please see the opening week schedule below and visit this link for a full list of Biennial participants.

Biennial participants are from over 18 places of origin including Argentina, Canada, England, France, Germany, Indonesia, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Lebanon, Lithuania, Norway, Pakistan, South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago, United States, and Zimbabwe, as well as Indigenous communities in Canada, Colombia, Aotearoa | New Zealand, Norway, and the United States.

The Biennial’s Exhibitions and Programs are collaboratively developed by Exhibitions Curators Tairone Bastien, Candice Hopkins, Katie Lawson, the Programs team comprising Roxanne Fernandes, Mary Kim, Kesang Nanglu, Emily Schimp, and Ilana Shamoon, as well as former Programs Curators Clare Butcher and Myung-Sun Kim. The inaugural TD Curatorial Fellows, Sebastian De Line and Chiedza Pasipanodya, present their projects as a part of the Biennial. Whether in-person, outdoors, or online, Biennial Exhibitions and Programs create opportunities for learning and active engagement across the city with established art institutions, artist-run centres, arts organizations, community organizations, and educational institutions to engage a wide audience.

Most Exhibitions and Programs will be held at the Biennial’s two main Exhibition venues—72 Perth Avenue in the Junction neighborhood and the Small Arms Inspection Building in nearby Mississauga—and will also occur at site-specific locations throughout the city. Other programming sites include 5 Lower Jarvis Street; Arsenal Contemporary Art; Colborne Lodge; Fort York National Historic Site, Toronto History Museums; High Park; Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA); and Textile Museum of Canada. Visit this link for more information on all Biennial sites.

Opening Week Events

Jatiwangi art Factory (JaF) with LAIR clay music ensemble: Andzar Agung Fauzan, Pipin Muhammad Kaspin, Tedi Nurmanto, Kiki Rasmadi Permana, Tamyiz Noor Ramadhan, and Ika Yuliana

Terrakota Route

Performance – In person

Date: March 26, 2022 | Time: 11:00am 

Location: Small Arms Inspection Building

As part of the launch of the 2022 Biennial, members of Jatiwangi art Factory (JaF) come together in Terrakota Route for a mobile multimedia performance featuring original sound pieces and live activations. As a collective, their artistic practice emphasizes local rural life in relation to land and the terracotta industry in the Jatiwangi district, Indonesia. Clay, which is central to all of their artistic and cultural activities in the spirit of community empowerment, also serves as a material for fashioning instruments used by JaF’s music ensemble, LAIR. Inspired by the traditional obrog-obrog played each morning throughout the village of Jatisura in West Java to mark the beginning of Ramadan, LAIR’s performance ushers in a time of fasting, introspection, and prayer observed by many Muslim community members in Toronto.

Terrakota Route is a part of The Shape of Sound, a curatorial project organized by Sebastian De Line as a part of the Curatorial Fellowship program, made possible by the generous support of TD Bank Group through the TD Ready Commitment and in partnership with the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts, and the Gardiner Museum.

Eric-Paul Riege

2001-2011, kwe’é díí shighan ńt’ę́ę́, i wonder what this Key opens now?

Durational Performance – In person

Date: March 27, 2022 | Time: 10:00am to 6:00pm

Location: Small Arms Inspection Building

2001-2011, kwe’é díí shighan ńt’ę́ę́, i wonder what this Key opens now? is a durational performance by artist Eric-Paul Riege responding to his immersive, mixed-media installation, a home for Her, on view at the Small Arms Inspection Building. The installation is composed of a series of looms and blankets that together form the outline of the artist’s childhood home, presented alongside weavings created by Eric-Paul with the women of his family. Dressed in intricately-designed, hand-fabricated regalia, he activates elements of the installation and the site as a whole through measured movement, interaction, and moments of stillness—a slow activation during the full opening hours of the space as visitors come and go. Rooted in Hózhó-Diné philosophy and cosmology, both the performance and the work it responds to celebrate ancestral knowledge, spirituality, and familial interconnectedness beyond boundaries of life and death.

Emily Johnson

Being Future Beings

Performance – In person

Date: March 27, 2022 | Time: 4:00pm

Location: MOCA Toronto

A gathering. An invitation. A speculative architecture. A sounding. A call.

In Being Future Beings, choreographer and artist Emily Johnson performs a body-based work within and in response to 2022 Biennial artist Jeffrey Gibson’s exhibition, I AM YOUR RELATIVE. The performance marks the second collaboration between the two, who previously worked together on Johnson’s The Ways We Love and The Ways We Love Better – Monumental Movement Toward Being Future Being(s), performed in and around Gibson’s installation, Because Once You Enter My House It Becomes Our House (2020) at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, NY.

I AM YOUR RELATIVE is a multi-purpose installation featuring fifteen moveable stages that populate the first floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto. 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.

This program is co-presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto (MOCA) and the Toronto Biennial of Art. I AM YOUR RELATIVE (2022) is co-commissioned by MOCA and the Toronto Biennial of Art.

Giselle Dias, Sandy Hudson, and Syrus Marcus Ware

Abolition Is Love: How to Live Abolition in Everyday Life

Workshop - In person

Date: April 2, 2022 | Time: 1:00–3:00pm

Location: Small Arms Inspection Building

Biennial artist Syrus Marcus Ware, along with academic Giselle Dias and activist and writer Sandy Hudson, offer insights into building abolitionist communities rooted in social justice and care and future planning. On the first Saturday of each month during the Toronto Biennial of Art, Ware and fellow artists, activists and organizers gather for a hybrid series of workshops and performances that invite participants to consider the future, the stakes at present, and our collective freedoms. Drawing on prevalent concepts explored within Ware’s MBL: Freedom (on view at the Small Arms Inspection Building), participants will be led through a series of critical thinking exercises and activities that will aim to explore abolition, crip and disability justice and futures, climate change, and building futures together where we take care of each other.

April Programs

Babaylans and Encanadores: A Conversation with Paul Pfeiffer, Stephanie Comilang, and Simon Speiser

Artists Talk - Online

Date: April 8, 2022 | Time: 11:00 am

Biennial artist Paul Pfeiffer is joined by artists Stephanie Comilang and Simon Speiser for a conversation touching upon intersecting themes within their practices, including mythology, folklore, and spiritual iconography. Pfeiffer’s Incarnator series, on view at 72 Perth Avenue, examines how mass media has shaped contemporary culture and how icons can be interpreted and dissolved, drawing connections between religious worship and pop celebrity fandom. In the exhibition Piña, why is the sky blue?, on view at Gallery TPW from September 8 - November 5, 2022, Comilang and Speiser will present an AI assistant named Piña that has gained consciousness through an upload of customary Filipina and Ecuadorian worldviews. Taking cues from pre-colonial matriarchal lineages, Piña evokes links between ancestral knowledge and imagined futures. Collectively, the works of both exhibitions question and reflect on the evolution of human belief systems and how the technologies of today—and tomorrow—shape our interpretations of the past.

This program is co-created and co-presented with Gallery TPW

C Magazine Workshops with Erika DeFrietas, Jess Dobkin, and Francisco-Fernando Granados

Workshop – In person

Date: April 8, 22, 29, 2022 | Time: 4:30 – 7:30pm

Location: 72 Perth Avenue

In this series of artist-led workshops, participants develop approaches to alternative archival practices that are rooted in community rather than established by an institution. Informed by the tenets of C Magazine’s Experiments in Criticism program, which was formed in consultation with experts in critical art pedagogy in 2019, these workshops pose questions for contemplation, discussion, and activation, such as: How can we develop embodied historiographic practices using creative-critical methods? How can we immediately begin to write a future that doesn’t perpetuate the same erasures we’ve witnessed to date? How do we record select details of our present in ways    that will ensure they retain their vivacity over time, and by extension, how do we decide what to commit to memory?

This program is co-created and co-presented with C Magazine. Please contact info@cmagazine.com with any accessibility requests.

Storytelling Sessions with

Jeffrey Canton, Melissa Davidson, Emily DiCarlo, lwrds duniam, Nicole Markland

Exhibition walkthroughs – In person

Date: Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays in April, May, and June | Time: see website for further details

Locations: 72 Perth Avenue | Small Arms Inspection Building | 5 Lower Jarvis | Arsenal Contemporary Art

Join Storytellers at TBA’s main sites for weekly guided sessions, informal conversations, and spot tours. Storytelling sessions combine modes of conventional interpretation with artist-led, narrative, and embodied responses. Sharing personal insights and experiences of the city as well as offering perspectives on the artworks within the exhibitions, Storytellers guide visitors through the research and artist practises that form What Water Knows, The Land Remembers.

Water, Kinship, Belief 

Edited by Tairone Bastien, Candice Hopkins, and Katie Lawson

Co-published by the Toronto Biennial of Art and Art Metropole

Publication date: April 2022. Available for pre-order now at this link. Available to purchase at: 72 Perth Avenue - Art Metropole bookshop; Small Arms Inspection Building; 5 Lower Jarvis Street; Arsenal Contemporary Art; Mercer Union and Textile Museum of Canada.

In relation to the 2019 and 2022 Biennial exhibitions, this publication is a place where the continuities, resonances, and dissonances between editions are made evident. Water, Kinship, Belief is a means to bring the artists, artworks, collaborators, and ideas that have informed the exhibitions together, irrespective of chronology and part of a greater whole. Through its content and unique design, this publication is both a generative guide to the exhibitions and a Biennial site of its own that creates new artistic relations through text and images that course through the book like tributaries.

TBA Exhibition Partners

Aga Khan Museum; Agnes Etherington Art Centre; Art Gallery of York University (AGYU); Art Toronto; Artica Svalbard; ArtworxTO: Toronto’s Year of Public Art 2021-2022; Castlepoint Numa; Evergreen; FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art; Gardiner Museum; Institut Français; Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts; Mercer Union; MOMENTA Biennale de l’image; Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA); Oakville Galleries; OCAD University; Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA); Textile Museum of Canada; The Daniels Corporation; and Toronto Sculpture Garden.

TBA Programs Partners

Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Art Gallery of Ontario, Art Metropole, Art Museum at the University of Toronto, C Magazine, Colborne Lodge, Gallery TPW, Gardiner Museum, Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts, Jumblies Theatre & Arts, Moccasin Identifier, Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA), Oakville Galleries, Small Arms Inspection Building, Textile Museum of Canada, Toronto District School Board, Urban Indigenous Education Centre, and Wedge Curatorial Projects.

TBA Donors and Supporters

The Toronto Biennial of Art is grateful to all 2022 contributing donors for their generous support. Major funders to-date include: The Pierre Lassonde Family Foundation; Scotia Wealth Management; The Michael and Sonja Koerner Charitable Foundation; RBC Foundation; Polar Foundation; Menkes Developments; Castlepoint Numa; Michelle Koerner & Kevin Doyle; Kilmer Mattamy Tricon; Newpoint Developments Inc.; the Delaney Family Foundation; The Rossy Foundation; Age of Union Alliance; The Jack Weinbaum Family Foundation; TD Bank Group; Hal Jackman Foundation; The Donald R. Sobey Family Foundation; Woodbridge Investments Corporation; Ron Kimel and Family; Miranda Hubbs; Nutrien; Yamana Gold Inc.; Waterfront BIA; Waterfront Toronto; Stratus Vineyards; Teknion Corporation; the Daniels Corporation with W.J. Properties; and Eleanor and Francis Shen. Much gratitude and thanks to our many other generous donors, including our Founding Supporters.

TBA is also grateful for our government supporters: Government of Canada; Government of Ontario; City of Toronto; Canada Council for the Arts; Ontario Cultural Attractions Fund of the Government of Ontario through the Ministry of Heritage, Sport, Tourism and Culture Industries, administered by the Ontario Cultural Attractions Fund Corporation; ArtworxTO: Toronto’s Year of Public Art 2021- 2022; Ontario Arts Council; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council; the Toronto Arts Council; City of Mississauga; the Institut Français, French Consulate in Toronto, with the support of the Consulate General of France in Toronto; Japan Foundation; SAHA Association; and the Council for Canadian American Relations.

TBA acknowledges the support of our media partners to-date: Akimbo; blogTO, Cineplex Media; NOW Magazine; Pattison Outdoor Advertising; St. Joseph Communications; Toronto Star; West End Phoenix; the Toronto Transit Commission; and Yonge-Dundas Square.

About the Toronto Biennial of Art

The Toronto Biennial of Art is Canada’s leading visual arts event focused exclusively on contemporary art from around the world. 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 Biennial’s city-wide programming aims to inspire individuals, engage communities, and contribute to global conversations.

The Toronto Biennial of Art launched in 2019 and was a popular and critical success. The Biennial provides expanded understandings of contemporary art practices and is building a legacy of free, inclusive, and accessible contemporary arts programming in Toronto, Mississauga, and their surrounding communities.

For more information, visit: torontobiennial.org, @torontobiennial, and #TOBiennial22 on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.