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The inaugural edition of the Toronto Biennial of Art runs through December 1. Helmed by senior curator Candice Hopkins and curator Tairone Bastien, the exhibition is titled “The Shoreline Dilemma,” which the curators have defined as a paradox that “implies the breakdown of scientific conventions in the face of nature’s complexities.” Shorelines, which are constantly evolving and nearly impossible to map accurately, are but one example.
The tour de force exhibition looks at the various ways in which artists are exploring some of the most pressing issues in contemporary society, from climate change to water rights, and places a focus on centering the voices of indigenous artists from around the world.
[Read a review of the 2019 Toronto Biennial of Art.]
Among the best works in the Biennial is the New Red Order’s Never Settle (2019), a room-sized installation with recruitment and initiation videos for a secret society that seemingly advocates for indigenous people. The work skewers the ways in which non-indigenous people often have a tendency to speak for indigenous people rather than allowing them to speak for themselves. “I know it’s not about me … but for me, it is,” one non-indigenous person says during a testimonial in the video.
Other highlights include Syrus Marcus Ware’s multi-channel video Ancestors, Can You Read Us? (Dispatches from the Future), and photographic and video documentation of Judy Chicago’s 1960s ephemeral fireworks performances that countered the environmentally intrusive and male-dominated Land art of its era.
Below, a look at some of the highlights from the numerous venues spread across Toronto.
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Outside the Biennial’s main venue, 259 Lake Shore Boulevard East, is a banner that reads “YOURS FOR INDIGENOUS SOVEREIGNTY” by the ReMatriate Collective, who are based in unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh Nations in Canada. The phrase is taken from picket signs by a three-year protest against Muckamuck Restaurant that brought together indigenous women and other allied activists in 1978.
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In each of the two main venues, Adrian Blackwell has constructed large-scale structures that are meant to serve as gathering spaces for the Biennial’s various programs. This wooden construction with benches, a ramp, and a podium, titled Isonomia in Toronto (harbour), is the first thing visitors see when they enter 259 Lake Shore Boulevard East. It’s title comes from the Greek word meaning “equal order.”
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Jae Jarrell, one of the founders of the art collective AFRICORBA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists) is showing a new piece, Ornaments of Reflection, 2019—a stunning suit in red, black, and green leather meant as a tribute to empowered African-American women.
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The best work of the biennial is the New Red Order (Adam Kahlil, Zack Kahlil, and Jackson Polys)'s piece Never Settle, which visualizes the collective’s aims to create a recruitment center for a “public secret society” that aims to question non-indigenous people’s often-exoticizing views on indigeneity. The two videos on view take mimic the form of recruitment and orientation documentaries, and include testimonials, a white spokesperson, and cheesy music.
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As part of a residency in the run-up to the biennial, Maria Thereza Alves researched disappeared waterways throughout Toronto. For this installation, titled Garrison Creek, 2019, Alves has put on display soil excavated from Bickford Park. The park is located on the former site of the Garrison Creek, which was filled in for residential development. The photograph above shows the creek before it was displaced.
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Luis Jacob’s The View From Here (Library), a new commission for the Biennial, brings together the artist’s extensive collection of rare volumes dating back to 1872 that revolve around the city of Toronto, ranging from marketing materials to scholarly texts. Viewed as a whole, the work offers a view of Torontonians' evolving perception of their city.
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As part of a collaboration with AA Bronson, Adrian Stimson (Blackfoot) has created Iini Sookumapii: Guess who’s coming to dinner?, an elaborately set dinner table. The work is related to Bronson’s proposal for apologizing for his family history of brutality to the Siksika Nation. Bronson would deliver his official apology on the Biennial’s first public day.
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An untitled 2008 drawing by Qavavau Manumie (Inuit).
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Laurent Grasso’s large neon sign reads “visibility is a trap,” bringing Michel Foucault’s 1975 statement (from a larger text about prison systems in the West) into the present.
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Hera Büyüktaşçıyan’s 2019 installation Reveries of an Underground Forest presents several tan-colored industrial carpets with various small, slightly abstracted patterns carved into them that resemble what appear to be a lost alphabet, aerial views of the disappeared waterways that have been filled throughout Toronto, or migratory patterns.
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In one gallery is a hanging parachute connected to a complex set of motors that lift the fabric as visitors approach it and walk underneath. When the motors are on, the underside of the fabric (shown here) becomes visible. The work is part of an installation collectively titled Lo’bat by artist trio Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian.
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Curtis Talwst Santiago’s Deluge VII, from 2016, is part of the artist’s ongoing “Infinity Series,” for which he fabricates small dioramas in reclaimed jewelry boxes. In this work, Santiago remembers Europe-bound African migrants who drowned while crossing the Mediterranean Sea. Some 50 entries from the series are presented on a long table.
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The 259 Lake Shore Boulevard East building's past as a Volvo dealership is left visible. The land it sits on was created in 1923, and the building opened in 1945 with Standard Chemical Company occupying it.
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In the Toronto Sculpture Garden, a small green space on a major street in the core of the historic Old Toronto, is Lou Sheppard’s Dawn Chrous/Eversong, a 14-hour sound installation that interprets birdsongs into musical compositions. The work is very quiet and can be almost impossible to hear amid the bustle of Toronto.
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At Ryerson Image Centre is a multi-channel video by Syrus Marcus Ware titled Ancestors, Can You Read Us? (Dispatches from the Future), an Afro-futuristic call from future generations thanking viewers for the actions they took to stymie climate change. “Black people survived because of you,” they tell viewers.
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At Toronto’s bustling transportation hub, Union Station, is the other half of Luis Jacob’s installation The View From Here, which pairs old maps of Canada and Toronto with the artist’s photographs of present-day Toronto. Taken together, the pictures are different ways of analyzing how a city imagines itself.
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In this floating 40-foot houseboat, Elder Duke Redbird will host a learning center where visitors can listen to indigenous elders talk about their perspectives. The boat’s design was done by Redbird in collaboration with painter and muralist Philip Cote (Moose Deer Point First Nation).
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Curtis Talwst Santiago’s new commissioned work, J’ouvert Temple, is sited in a closed-off parking lot of a factory in the Port Lands, an industrial part of Toronto that was created by infill. Visitors can’t enter the installation, and are left only peer at it from the fence.
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Curtis Talwst Santiago’s installation, J’ouvert Temple, acts as the site of a modern-day ruin complete with the crumbling remains of a building that looks to have had some sort of ceremonial function and a disco ball, along with other sculptures.
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Maria Thereza Alves’s mirror installation in Riverdale Park maps where the Don River once ran before it was straightened by the city as part of flood control. The work is situated on a field where players from softball games stepped on top of it, leaving behind their footprints.
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At the Harbourfront Centre’s Artport Gallery, Arin Rungjang presents his moving near-silent multi-channel video, Ravisara, which shows six female immigrants from Thailand to Germany performing choreographed movements on hardwood floors. At times, they come together to comfort each other.
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At the Small Arms Inspection Building, the Biennial’s second main venue in nearby city of Mississauga, Adrian Blackwell presents a second version of his Isonomia in Toronto? (creek), here portrayed as a snaking 300-foot-long cushion that shows the urbanized shoreline of the Etobicoke Creek, an important water source to the area’s earliest inhabitants, the Mississauga people.
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Kapwani Kiwanga’s curtain installation Soft Measures, 2018–19.
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During the 1960s, Judy Chicago created various ephemeral performances in desert landscapes where vividly colored fireworks temporarily feminized the landscape. The work was done in sharp contrast to the male-led Land art movement that created lasting impressions in nature as art.
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Algonquin-French artist Caroline Monnet’s sculpture The Flow Between hard Places visualizes the sound wave produced when the word pasapkedjinawong, which translates to “the river that passes between the rocks,” is spoken by Anishnaabe Elder Rose Wawatie-Beaudoin.
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The New Mineral Collective presents large columns meant to represent various scars in the Earth over time. The group bills itself as the “largest and least productive mining company in the world.” Among the company's many services is offering “counter-prospecting” advice to landowners.
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In a video by Althea Thauberger and Kite (Oglála Lakȟóta), the artists have invited Canada’s only conch shell sextet, members of the country’s navy, to perform a composition called “Battle Cry (Gift to the Shell Ensemble).”
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An installation made from the props used in three videos by the Jumblies Theatre & Arts with Ange Loft that details the history of broken promises between colonizers and the area’s indigenous peoples. The props are fabric-wrapped objects that represent what the British allege they paid the Mississaugas of the Credit in 1787 as part of the so-called Toronto Purchase. The Mississaugas did not recognize this gift—2,000 gun flints, 24 brass kettles, 120 mirrors, 24 laced hats, a bale of flowered flannel, and 96 gallons of run—as payment for their ancestral lands.
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