Tools for Learning
Tools for Learning, generated with Biennial participants and collaborators, comprises group exercises, performative scores, proposals for collaborative thinking and making, artist interviews, and audio tours. Tools can be instruments to make and repair, but also strategies to undo and refuse. Whether in the Biennial, the classroom, or at home, our multimedia toolbox can be put to use by educators, students, and other community members in connecting their own experiences and curricula with process-based, playful approaches to contemporary artistic practices. Practically and conceptually, Tools for Learning offers materials and methods for reimagining relations with land, water, and each other.
Tools for Learning is made possible with founding support from the Lang Family Foundation and a generous contribution from the Rossy Family Foundation.
Book a visit for your students or community group. All ages welcome.
Tools for Learning Toolbox
This growing Tools for Learning Toolbox offers a host of collective activities which invite visiting schools, community groups, and others to make and repair—or even undo and refuse—relationships between their own experiences and the artistic practices within The Shoreline Dilemma. Inspired by the approaches of many Biennial participants, as well as educators and thinkers, the Tools for Learning Toolbox, designed by Chris Lee and Ali Qadeer, can be downloaded for free and activated in exhibition spaces or closer to home.
The list below comprises downloadable individual tools from the 2019 Biennial. For the consolidated PDF of all tools, download HERE.
Toolbox: Introduction
“What is a Biennial?”, “Where are we?”, “What are tools for learning?” Exploration of these questions helps provide a context for the Tools for Learning Toolbox within The Shoreline Dilemma exhibition and the many approaches that have informed the Biennial process.
Toolbox: Abel and Wilson Rodríguez
The relationship between Abel Rodríguez and Wilson Rodríguez’s lives and work inspires an intergenerational tool for observing and learning from the natural materials around us as well as each other.
Toolbox: Adrian Blackwell
Through a bodily exercise, this tool responds to the ways in which Adrian Blackwell’s Isonomia in Toronto? (2019) reconsiders how we learn with and through the body in space.
Toolbox: Adrian Stimson
As a survivor of the residential school system, Adrian Stimson shows that ways of remembering and sharing knowledge can take many forms through Iini Sookumapii: Guess who’s coming to dinner? (2019).
Toolbox: Arin Rungjang
Sometimes words are not enough to describe an experience. Inspired by Arin Rungjang’s Ravisara (2019), this tool offers a silent space for gestural and embodied modes of expression that go beyond words.
Toolbox: Dana Claxton
What stories do cultural belongings tell? Dana Claxton’s Headdress fire-boxes offer a meaningful way of representing relationships based on kinship and exchange.
Toolbox: Hera Büyüktaşçıyan
Memories are often hard to transcribe. In the spirit of Hera Büyüktaşçıyan’s Reveries of an Underground Forest (2019), this interview exercise invites you to listen to memories of “home” from another perspective.
Toolbox: Judy Chicago
In response to Judy Chicago’s pyrotechnic Atmospheres (1978–), this tool offers some starting points for creating your own spatial intervention.
Toolbox: Kapwani Kiwanga
How long does it take land to move? This tool invites you to take time in relating to the methods and materials brought together through Kapwani Kiwanga’s Soft Measures (2018-9).
Toolbox: Maria Thereza Alves
“Remember, the rivers are here,” says Maria Thereza Alves in relation to her site-responsive projects in Toronto’s Bickford Park and Riverdale Park West. This tool continues the process of tracing waterways both above and below ground.
Toolbox: Susan Schuppli
As global temperatures rise, Susan Schuppli’s Learning from Ice (2019) invites us to tune into ice core samples and listen to the wisdom of glaciers.
Additional Tools for Learning
What tools do you need when visiting the Biennial? Maybe a tool for making notes, a tool for finding your way, a tool for looking more closely, or a tool for resting? The word “tool” has been used in many ways, in relation to more practical tasks of making, repairing, and undoing, to political strategies of collaboration and resistance. Through a growing toolbox of downloadable Tools for Learning, we adopt some of these approaches along with many others inspired by the participants and artworks in the inaugural edition of the Biennial.
Exploring Inuit Culture Curriculum
Exploring Inuit Culture Curriculum is one of a host of multimedia units of instruction designed by Isuma—Inuit independent production company—to teach students about the Inuit, native people of the Canadian Arctic, and Nunavut, the newest territory in Canada established in 1999.
In the Making with Adrian Stimson
Acclaimed artist Adrian Stimson collaborates with art legend AA Bronson to address an unsettling family connection on Siksika Nation.
In the Making is an immersive journey inside the creative process. The documentary series follows host Sean O’Neill across the country and around the world alongside some of Canada’s leading artists as they bring new work to life and face pivotal moments of risk and reward.
In the Making with Curtis Talwst Santiago
Trinidadian-Canadian artist Curtis Talwst Santiago travels through Portugal to explore his ancestry and create artwork to debut at the Frieze art fair in New York.
In the Making is an immersive journey inside the creative process. The documentary series follows host Sean O’Neill across the country and around the world alongside some of Canada’s leading artists as they bring new work to life and face pivotal moments of risk and reward.
NEVER SETTLE! Activity Booklet
NEVER SETTLE! is an ongoing, collaborative educational effort between Inpatient Press and filmmakers Adam and Zack Khalil of The New Red Order. NEVER SETTLE! is an activity booklet for minds young and old who are curious about the exciting growing field of SAVAGE PHILOSOPHY. Prepare for a career as an accomplice in the New Red Order with fun games, puzzles, and plenty of brain teasers . NEVER SETTLE! will get you ready to capture culture and commit crimes against reality.
Kayak Magazine: We are all Treaty People
The September 2018 issue of Kayak features guest editor Cynthia Bird (Wabi Benais Mistatim Equay) of Peguis First Nation. This issue is about Treaties and the historic Treaty relationship between First Nations peoples and the British Crown, now represented by the government of Canada. Learning about Treaties gives us a chance to reflect on our shared history and to learn why “We Are All Treaty People.” Understanding this is important for us as Canadians. We need to know how we have each benefited from our Treaty story. It is who we are.