TBA Programs are a key component of the Biennial’s activities, offering accessible public and learning programs that engage artists, partners, collaborators, and intergenerational visitors year-round, with a particularly generative period during each Biennial. Artist-led, participatory programs inform and are informed by each Biennial edition’s curatorial direction.
Things Fall Apart, curated by Allison Glenn, is an exhibition presented at multiple sites in Toronto and beyond, as well as public engagement through experiences of gathering and connection. The project unfolds through a set of propositions anchored by the question: What can we learn from artists who explore rupture as an ontological tool or a way of understanding? This question guides TBA’s public and learning programs as well, inviting us to consider what moments of rupture reveal, and what they teach us about care, resilience, and our shared futures.
Things Fall Apart considers ideas of syncopation and disruption through shared thematics that emerge from artists’ voices, explored deeply through movement and migration, notions of borders, water networks, the transformation of knowledge, and both water and land as conceptual links. Glenn’s curatorial framework notably relies on the shared geographies of the Great Lakes as a place of departure, tracing expansive, interconnected relationships between them and over twenty international waterways, trade routes, and voyages spanning five continents.
As with past Biennials, our events and activities are critically shaped by artists, partners, and key collaborators. This year’s public programs, developed as part of the larger curatorial frame and by exhibiting artists, encompass processional performances and sonic experiences on water, a three-day convening taking us outside the city centre, artist talks and panel discussions, and programs centred around seeds, harvesting, and food as holders of knowledge and memory.
These core concepts of rupture and water’s capacity to resist containment are central to TBA’s public and learning programs, led by Senior Manager of Learning & Community Partnerships, Mary Kim. An artist-led Learning Guide in our growing collection of Mobile Arts Curriculum offers deeper insights into select artist projects, inviting intergenerational participants to move between ideas, places, and perspectives. TBA’s school Storytelling Sessions are led by educators from the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) while public sessions have been developed in collaboration with the Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis (CBP) and the Art Museum at the University of Toronto. All Storytellers draw upon their own experiences to guide visitors through the exhibition. TBA’s School Programs are offered free of charge and invite moments of reflection and active engagement for students from K to 12.
Please explore our programming further through the links below as well as through our Programs Calendar.
TBA’s Learning Programs are made possible with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Arrell Family Foundation, Hatch, Frances & Tim Price, Goodman Family Foundation, Lewitt Family Foundation, Norman & Margaret Jewison Charitable Foundation, and Ronald Kimel Foundation Trust.
Public Programs are interdisciplinary moments of engagement envisioned by the 2026 TBA curator and exhibiting artists, and shaped by collaborations with partners and key collaborators. They include new Biennial commissions, performances, a three-day convening, artist talks and panel discussions, and more.
The Mobile Arts Curriculum (MAC) is a collection of learning resources developed by artists and centring decolonial practices through the arts. Each learning tool supports and expands learning curricula, building upon the curatorial ideas explored in each Biennial edition.
TBA’s Storytelling Program offers visitors of all ages new ways of engaging with the artworks presented in the Biennial by offering participatory sessions in the exhibition spaces. For each edition, local multidisciplinary artists are commissioned as Storytellers and offer booked and drop-in tours to intergenerational audiences through the duration of the Biennial.
School Programs are led by Storytellers who engage with students and educators through artist-led, narrative, and embodied sessions and workshops. Storytellers are practising artists in the areas of spoken word/poetry and movement, and they lead learners in response to the artworks presented in the Biennial.
TBA grows its library of content and concepts with online and printed Publications connected to its exhibitions and programs.