For the first time in 2026, TBA will introduce a new model of collaboration that extends beyond Toronto through a series of artist-driven projects developed and presented in partnership with institutions in other cities.
Various new commissions will unfold across multiple locations—responding to each site’s social, cultural, and geographic context. Notably, participating artists Céline Semaan and Jean-Marc Bullet’s work spans sites in Toronto, Detroit, St. Louis, Medina, Nyack, and St. Joseph. Things Fall Apart will include simultaneous presentations of artist-led projects at the Anchorage Museum (Anchorage, AK, USA) and at Times Square Arts’ Midnight Moment program (New York, NY, USA), introducing a new model of collaboration that extends beyond Toronto for the first time, developed through Glenn’s curatorial vision and presented in partnership with international institutions.
These collaborations involve shared commissioning, production, and presentation, with partner organizations contributing local knowledge, audiences, and infrastructure. TBA supports artists in developing projects that are context-responsive and multi-sited, shaped through ongoing exchange between Toronto and each partner location.
Notebook of Return
Jean-Marc Bullet and Céline Semaan have each created artist gardens in Saint-Joseph, Martinique, and Nyack, New York, respectively, that focus on the care and stewardship of seeds and native plants. Together we developed Carnet de Retour/Notebook of Return (2026), a new commission that is a simultaneous harvest at multiple sites around the Great Loop, many of which are artist gardens that exist outside of the main Biennial footprint. Collaborating with organizations across borders, this work offers a radical lens: the garden as archive, the seed as knowledge, and the notebook as an instrument of return. At a time when communities are reclaiming their stories and restoring their lands, Notebook of Return brings together artists, farmers, and memory bearers to record, protect, and share what has long been silenced. Jean-Marc and Céline’s title is a literary reference to Martinican poet and author Aimé Césaire’s book-length poem, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land).
Guided by a red thread—a metaphor for interconnectedness across land, cultures, and displacement—Céline and Jean-Marc foreground the notebook as a central form: a space to record encounters, to map connections, and to trace the invisible lines that tie people to place. With a set of questions, the artists set forth in the collaborative process, distributing seeds, notebooks, and cameras to each partner site, with the only requirement being that the seeds are grown and the resulting food is shared with their communities. A large part of this collaboration included dialogues with Céline and Jean-Marc, who posed key questions to the collaborators, including:
What can a seed teach us about survival, about migration, about memory?
How do farming communities along The Great Loop take part in the fight against global warming by providing answers to their own existential problems?
How can this resilience be revealed by working with seeds shared with all those communities?
Following The Great Loop, which is a system of waterways that connects Canada with the United States, the project is a multi-sited, highly collaborative dialogue amongst land-stewards working across borders.
Commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art in collaboration with the Toronto Black Farmers and Food Growers Collective, Allana Clarke’s Amend Garden in Detroit’s Little Village, Antioch Baptist Church/Sumner High School Community Garden, as part of Counterpublic Triennial, and Mary Mattingly’s Floating Garden, as part of Medina Triennial. Co-presented with the Art Museum at the University of Toronto and made possible with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Allana Clarke’s Amend Garden
Allana Clarke is an interdisciplinary artist and educator and is currently an Assistant Professor at Wayne State University (Detroit). Her creative research initiative, Amend Garden, is an organic farm that functions as an ecological, arts-centered space, cultivating land-based knowledge and addressing food insecurity among low-income residents.
Antioch Baptist Church and Sumner High School with Counterpublic
Antioch Baptist Church and Sumner High School are historical anchors of The Ville (North St. Louis), a culturally significant neighbourhood that was among the first in the area where Black Americans could own property. The Church’s garden is stewarded by the high school students and contains an active food pantry, highlighting their ongoing commitment to community support.
St. Louis’s Counterpublic is a triennial that reimagines the possibilities of art in public life. It creates art with lasting impact by bringing together bold ideas with the region’s most pressing challenges through artist commissions, convenings, editions, and civic initiatives.
Toronto Black Farmers and Food Growers Collective
The Toronto Black Farmers and Food Growers Collective cares for a thirteen-year-old urban farm. It was co-founded by residents who sought to put ancestral ways of growing and sharing into practice through the knowledge of Black farmers. Increasing access to land, with a focus on education and training, the Collective strengthens local food systems by working with crops from tropical, equatorial, and local seasonal zones.
Jean-Marc Bullet’s Heritage Des Îles
Heritage Des Îles is a creole family garden located between two tropical forests in Martinique, Rabuchon and Coeur Bouliki, that maintains traditional practices inherited from African ancestors who grew medicinal plants and crops outside the plantation. As the local environment faces ecological issues, like chlordecone pollution, they experiment by adopting practices from Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Mary Mattingly’s Floating Garden with Medina Triennial
Mary Mattingly is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans large-scale public sculpture and collage-based photography, imagining adaptive futures shaped by ecological interdependence. Her sculptural ecosystems inhabit civic space—from floating food forests to tidal water clocks—bringing attention to water, food, and shelter.
The Medina Triennial is a contemporary art triennial centred in the Western New York village of Medina, along the Erie Canal. Intersecting art, ecology, and rural contexts, the Triennial considers maintenance as a social, political, and environmental condition shaped by fragility and resilience.
Céline Semaan’s Slow Forest
The Slow Forest is an artist-run initiative focused on land stewardship, rewilding practices, and planting native species significant to Lenape knowledge. Through workshops, natural dyeing, concerts, film screenings, and exhibitions, it fosters ecological care, cultural exchange, and collective learning.
Nos diables rouges, nos dérives commotions (…) danse papillon, 2025 by Julien Creuzet
Medium: HD video, colour, no sound; 2:50 min
Creuzet’s video, shown simultaneously at Toronto’s Sankofa Square and New York’s Times Square, centres on two glistening, mirrored bodies, Red Devil–like figures21 that move on or near water in a rotating dreamscape amid stones and shells floating in space. Echoed by a portion of the title, “Not to cross our gaze, our glassy souls, blissful, our eyes and our bodies stone,” the figures seemingly warn us of our fate. In his poetic title, he draws on foundational myths (Andromeda and Perseus, as well as St. George) to illustrate their expansiveness, inviting us to revisit even the most anchored histories to find them still shape-shifting.
—Ilana Shamoon
These works are screened every night from 9pm–9:05pm in Toronto’s Sankofa Square and from 11:57pm–12am during the month of November in New York’s Times Square. These parallel presentations offer an echo of the expansiveness of Julien’s references, clues to which cascade from his poetic artwork titles.
Nos diables rouges, nos dérives commotions (…) danse papillon, 2025 is co-presented by the Toronto Biennial of Art, Sankofa Square, and Times Square Arts, and is made possible with the generous support of Bell Media, Cadillac Fairview, and Mendes Wood DM.
View additional work by Julien Creuzet at the Toronto Biennial’s main exhibition site at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto
Cameron Harvey at Anchorage Museum
Artwork titles:
Ancestor 74, 109.5 x 75 inches, 2026
Ancestor 77, 108 x 74 inches, 2026
Ancestor 78, 108 x 86 inches, 2026
from Family of Things
Acrylic on unstretched canvas. Courtesy of the Artist
This series of paintings, three of which are simultaneously on view at the Anchorage Art Museum in Anchorage, Alaska, are inspired by the chaparral shrub, a fire-resistant and resilient species native to Southern California that has survived fires of 2024 and 2025, but was forever changed. Developed while evacuated from her home to her studio during the Eaton and Palisades fires in early 2025, Cameron Harvey sees her paintings as protective bodies that hold space for the viewer to contemplate their own relationships with the present moment, their physical bodies, and with other similar forms in nature.
Commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art and the Anchorage Museum, co-presented with the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, and made possible with the generous support of the Women Leading Initiative. Exhibited concurrently at both commissioning venues.