Dates

March 26 to June 5, 2022

Curatorial Statement

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, following the tributaries, above ground and hidden, which shape this place. Biennial sites are grouped in relation to these seen and buried waterways, and follow the trajectories of Etobicoke Creek, the Laurentian Channel, Garrison Creek, and Taddle Creek.

As a Biennial situated alongside the Great Lakes, the world’s largest fresh water system, we foreground water to attune ourselves to its ecologies, its adaptations, its sense of time, its cycles. The earth neither gains nor relinquishes the water it harbours, and the water that composes and sustains human and more-than-human bodies and environments carries with it at least 3.9 billion years of history. It is an archive as is the land. Over long expanses of time, the bottom-most layers of earth move slowly upward, continually revealing its past to us.

Alongside land and the water as our relations, framing and guiding our collaborations, is a lexicon—a shared vocabulary including terms like ancestor, conspiracy, and inheritance—that grounds our collective thinking and processes of exhibition-making. This vocabulary is a scaffolding that holds resonant ideas and offers a way to follow threads that are both knotted and braided together over time. The terms are woven through the Biennial exhibition and programming.

The Biennial’s inaugural Curatorial Fellows, Chiedza Pasipanodya and Sebastian De Line, present projects across the exhibition and programming sites, and are a constitutive part of What Water Knows, The Land Remembers.

– Candice Hopkins, Katie Lawson and Tairone Bastien

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Water, Kinship, Belief

Edited by Tairone Bastien, Candice Hopkins, and Katie Lawson. Co-published by the Toronto Biennial of Art and Art Metropole.

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.

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2022 Visitor Guide

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2022 Evaluation Report

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Exhibitions

Exhibition Sites Overview

In total, the 2022 Biennial included 23 new commissions at nine sites across the city, and brought together more than 38 local and international artists, hailing from over 18 places of origin.

For a comprehensive list of all artworks in the 2022 Toronto Biennial of Art, click HERE.

5 Lower Jarvis

72 Perth Avenue

Arsenal Contemporary Art Toronto

Colborne Lodge

Fort York National Historic Site, Toronto History Museums

Mercer Union

Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto

Small Arms Inspection Building

Sugar Beach

Textile Museum of Canada

Programs

Programs Overview

Our reflection on and consideration of several ideas emerging from TBA 2019 alongside the Exhibition curators helped nourish the 2022 Curatorial Vision. Together, we developed a lexicon that has helped guide our process-based collaborative work, and some of its terms have directly informed our programmatic approach to the second edition of the Biennial, What Water Knows, The Land Remembers. This shared vocabulary invites layered understandings of the relationships between terms as an alternative to fixed definitions.

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Virtual

Donors: 2019–2022 Our Team: 2019–2022