Curatorial Statement
For the third edition of the Toronto Biennial of Art (TBA), titled Precarious Joys, we have been immersed in dialogues and active listening, a crucial element in our curatorial journey traversing national and international landscapes, numerous artist studios, and art encounters in Toronto, throughout Canada, and beyond. Our interactions have traced connections between artistic creations reflecting social and ecological imperatives, resulting in us identifying key directives drawn from the artists’ endeavours: “Joy,” “Precarious,” “Home,” “Polyphony,” “Solace,” and “Coded” are terms that encapsulate how TBA artists’ practices amplify political consciousness and reassert the power of aesthetics in shaping collective existence.
Some of the presented artworks address the various layers of history that define life in Toronto, while others reflect broader social and political structures of inequality and power under global neoliberal governance. Key issues that resonate across the exhibition include environmental justice, sovereignty, self-representation, belonging and migration, land dispossession, collective memory, feminist genealogies, diasporic sonic cultures, sacred plant wisdom, weaving as spiritual listening, resistance and resilience, ancestorship, and queer worldmaking. Rather than presenting a single theoretical assertion, however, Precarious Joys is organized around open dialogues and poetic connections. Together, these many works will conjure sparks that light a fire amidst the fragility of existence.
—Dominique Fontaine and Miguel A. López
Exhibition Venues
The Toronto Biennial of Art’s central exhibition and programs hub was hosted at 32 Lisgar Street, in the heart of West Queen Street West. TBA operated two additional hubs on the 9th floor of The Auto BLDG at 158 Sterling Road and Collision Gallery.
TBA 2024 exhibitions and programs took place at the following venues:
- 32 Lisgar St and Park
- The Auto BLDG at 158 Sterling Road, 9th Floor
- Billboard at Abell St and Queen St W
- Collision Gallery, 30 Wellington Street W
- Art Gallery of Ontario, 317 Dundas Street W
- Gallery TPW, 170 St Helens Ave
- Toronto Pearson Airport
- Toronto Sculpture Garden, 115 King Street E
- Toronto Union Station, 55 Front St
- The Image Centre (TMU), 33 Gould St, Toronto, University Gallery
- The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, 231 Queens Quay W
2024 Curatorial Fellowship
During the 2024 iteration, TBA presented the second edition of its Curatorial Fellowship Program, made possible with the generous support of TD Bank Group through the TD Ready Commitment. The program offers an experimental and collaborative process through which emerging curators cultivate personal curatorial methodologies, and realize a substantial curatorial project within the framework of the 2024 Toronto Biennial of Art.
Conceived as a reciprocal mentorship model, TBA’s Fellows engaged, taught, and learned with artists, Biennial staff, and fellow culture workers, as well as connected with local, national and international audiences. TBA conceived of two roles for the Exhibition and Programs teams respectively: 2024 Curators Dominique Fontaine and Miguel A. López selected Nima Esmailpour as the Exhibition Curatorial Fellow, while Programs Curatorial Fellow Sarah Edo was selected to develop public programs alongside TBA Programs Curator Jenn Goodwin.
As TBA’s Programs Curatorial Fellow, Sarah Edo shared a timely and poignant program entitled Notes on Belonging: An Adaptation. In Sarah’s own words:
“Critically acclaimed director, playwright and scholar Jaye Austin Williams introduces a live stage adaptation of Toronto-based poet Dionne Brand’s renowned non-fiction book, ‘A Map to the Door of No Return’ published in 2001. Adapted and directed by Austin Williams with excerpts from Brand’s book, this program is staged as a ‘concert recitation:’ an intimate performance and dramatized reading by three local actors.
Held within 2024 Biennial artist Charles Campbell’s installation, how many colours has the sea, the program highlighted overlapping themes between Campbell’s work and Brand’s groundbreaking book, which both anchor the ocean and sea as sites of contemplation on Black being, ancestral memory, rupture, and mourning. While this adaptation contains excerpts from Brand’s book, it is not meant as a substitute and is instead offered as a visceral “tasting” by way of reframing passages from the book in a theatrical space, allowing for new and different interpretations. This performance explored the legacy that “A Map to the Door of No Return” created in articulating Black contemporary life in Canada, but also an incredible expansion and reimagining of Brand’s breathtaking and ruminative literary work through visual and performance art.”
Nima Esmailpour, TBA’s Exhibitions Fellow, curated the presentation of artist Morehshin Allahyari for the third edition of TBA. Nima writes:
“Along with the key directives of the Toronto Biennial of Art, Iranian Kurdish artist Morehshin Allahyari, represents Kabous, the Right Witness and the Left Witness, a VR installation from her long-term project She Who Sees the Unknown. The parallels are drawn by reflecting on the joyous act of embracing the monstrosity of jinn figures by the artist, employed in the process of “re-figuring” myths against our precarious historical backdrop. For her, reclaiming history through “re-figuration” involves reinventing material forms while preserving the immaterial, achieved through three stages: decolonial exploration, digital fabrication, and queer fabulation.
The eponymous figure in the work, Kabous (which literally translates to “nightmare” in Farsi) is a jinn that is known to bring sleep paralysis and night terror to humans during their sleep. Resonating with this precarious encounter with Kabous, the installation being presented at the biennial calls in the viewer to immerse in the dream space of the artist through VR. The ocular experience invokes an analogy between the jinn as a “dividing persona” and the paralysis caused by technological devices such as VR as a possessive medium in conveying meaning through vision.”