Calendar

Storytelling seeks to shift the mediation of contemporary art away from conventional modes of interpreting and informing to narrating and embodying through weekly walks and conversations. An intergenerational and multilingual group of storytellers share personal insights and experiences of the city as they guide visitors through the Exhibition’s installations, research, and political perspectives. Taking us along hidden river routes, through archives, and into speculative futures, storytellers bring submerged narratives related to Toronto’s shifting shoreline to the surface.

Meeting Place: Storytelling Sessions will begin near the Archtop Cafe at Small Arms Inspection Building.

Storytelling Sessions will take place at Small Arms Inspection Building each Thursday from 4-6pm and Saturday from 12-2pm, and 259 Lake Shore Blvd E each Friday from 5-7pm and Sunday from 12-2pm. There is no registration required for these sessions.

From 1890 to 1979, the Humber College Lakeshore Campus was a psychiatric hospital. The Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital Cemetery is two kilometres north of the campus, where 1,511 patients are buried in mostly unmarked graves. Humber College students and members from the Among Friends Community Mental Health program created a commemorative artwork based on the history of the site and the patients. Community groups and individuals are invited to gather and remember patients’ names through talks and community art projects that engage with people’s lived experiences of the mental health-care system.

A screening of the short film 1511, created in collaboration as part of this community engaged project, will be followed by a discussion. A newly commissioned sculpture by Rocky Dobey will also be unveiled in memory of the former patients.

Coffee, cookies, and refreshments will be served.

Co-presented in partnership with Humber College, Humber Galleries, and Among Friends Community Mental Health Organization.

Image caption: “1511,” 2019. Film still. Courtesy of the artist.

Storytelling seeks to shift the mediation of contemporary art away from conventional modes of interpreting and informing to narrating and embodying through weekly walks and conversations. An intergenerational and multilingual group of storytellers share personal insights and experiences of the city as they guide visitors through the Exhibition’s installations, research, and political perspectives. Taking us along hidden river routes, through archives, and into speculative futures, storytellers bring submerged narratives related to Toronto’s shifting shoreline to the surface.

Meeting Place: Storytelling Sessions will begin at the main entrance of 259 Lake Shore Blvd E.

Storytelling Sessions will take place at Small Arms Inspection Building each Thursday from 4-6pm and Saturday from 12-2pm, and 259 Lake Shore Blvd E each Friday from 5-7pm and Sunday from 12-2pm. There is no registration required for these sessions.

Marshall Trammell will perform Warrior Ethos, two visual compositions (graphic notation): one for drum set, and the other for drum set, bull roarers and face jugs. The first composition was created for Trammell by San Francisco Bay Area-based composer and bassist Lisa Mezzacappa for his “Indexical Moment/um” installation series held at Southern Exposure at the beginning of his current tour in April 2019. The second is derived from a 10-month residency at Off Lomas in Albuquerque, NM. There he formed In Defense of Memory “Burn the Temples/Break Up the Bells,” a community engagement, Insurgent Learning Workshop (ILW) referencing methodologies deployed by a collective of Pueblo Indians for the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.

Adrian Blackwell’s two interrelated structures at 259 Lake Shore Blvd E and the Small Arms Inspection Building host weekly performances and readings. Invited guests include poet CAConrad, artists Camilo Godoy and Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Apache violinist Laura Ortman, Sister Co-Resister, and percussionist Marshall Trammell.

Image: Agatha Urbaniak (UK). Courtesy Marshall Trammell.

On Saturdays throughout the Biennial, a team of artists from Jumblies Theatre & Arts facilitate public art-making workshops for all ages, backgrounds, and abilities. After viewing the installation, By These Presents: “Purchasing” Toronto at Small Arms Inspection Building, participants are invited to write, draw, or embroider their responses on felted quilt pieces. Both Iroquois and Anishinaabe beading styles are shared, alongside open discussion of the installation’s content. Following the workshops the pieces generated will be combined in a giant quilt that addresses the Dish with One Spoon regional treaty and presented at the Biennial’s 2021 edition.

Image Caption: Jumblies Theatre & Arts, “Talking Treaties, 2018.” Courtesy Jumblies Theatre and Liam Coo.

During the Biennial, the Cinesphere becomes a world within a world, merging film and sound art with scent and changing atmospheric conditions. From cosmological origin stories, to a future in which civilization is extinct, The Drowned World contrasts deep time with the decline of global ecologies. The project’s title refers to J.G. Ballard’s 1962 archaeopsychic cli-fi novel in which the ice caps have melted and submerged the world, forcing the migration of a dwindling and devolving human species into the Canadian Arctic.

Prehistoric sounds; the sonification of a dying star; the submarine beats of Detroit’s bubble metropolis; the sacrifice of a muskrat; the love of an octopus. Within this brave new world, the artificial boundaries of modernity’s civilizations have evaporated, and life in all its forms continues to shift.

Complete schedule and details can be found HERE.

Guest curated by Charles Stankievech

With the creative and generous contribution of COMME des GARÇONS and MVS Proseminar, University of Toronto—John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.

Storytelling seeks to shift the mediation of contemporary art away from conventional modes of interpreting and informing to narrating and embodying through weekly walks and conversations. An intergenerational and multilingual group of storytellers share personal insights and experiences of the city as they guide visitors through the Exhibition’s installations, research, and political perspectives. Taking us along hidden river routes, through archives, and into speculative futures, storytellers bring submerged narratives related to Toronto’s shifting shoreline to the surface.

Meeting Place: Storytelling Sessions will begin near the Archtop Cafe at Small Arms Inspection Building.

Storytelling Sessions will take place at Small Arms Inspection Building each Thursday from 4-6pm and Saturday from 12-2pm, and 259 Lake Shore Blvd E each Friday from 5-7pm and Sunday from 12-2pm. There is no registration required for these sessions.

Meeting point: RBC Plaza at 200 Bay St, 12:45pm.

WalkingLab and RiVAL’s curated project brings together various artists and the public for a walking tour through Toronto’s Financial District, built on Haudenosaunee and Mississauga lands and home to many ghosts, notably those dispossessed by the global extractive industries headquartered in the city’s infamous Bay Street area. New Mineral Collective contributes with a sound walk around the headquarters of a mining company.

New Mineral Collective provides audio therapy, guiding listeners through a stratification of Toronto’s Financial District and looking at Canada’s entanglement with the realm of the extractive industry and its symbiotic relationship between geology, nationhood, and power.

Image Credit: “New Mineral Collective,” film still from Future Prospects, 2019. Image courtesy of New Mineral Collective (Tanya Busse & Emilija Škarnulytė).

Following his performance of Warrior Ethos on October 4^th at 259 Lake Shore, Marshall Trammell will conduct an Insurgent Learning Workshop (ILW) as community engagement, an open rehearsal re-designating the array of Underground Railroad quilt block codes as an artist-driven reimagining of navigating the global economy rendered as a collective, music conduction system practicum and performance.

Adrian Blackwell’s two interrelated structures at 259 Lake Shore Blvd E and the Small Arms Inspection Building host weekly performances and readings. Invited guests include poet CAConrad, artists Camilo Godoy and Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Apache violinist Laura Ortman, Sister Co-Resister, and percussionist Marshall Trammell.

Image: Agatha Urbaniak (UK). Courtesy Marshall Trammell.

During this Open Studio, Elder Duke Redbird engages visitors in questions around “Our Environment,” focusing on Indigenous perspectives on stemming destruction based on age old practices together with reverence and respect for Mother Earth. Set around Wigwam Chi-Chemung—a 40-foot pontoon houseboat docked at the Ontario Place Marina—the Open Studio session is part of an evolving art installation and Indigenous interpretive learning centre created in partnership with Indigenous intellectual, poet, painter, broadcaster, filmmaker and orator Elder Duke Redbird. Over the summer and fall, visitors have an opportunity to spend time, learn from, and celebrate the Indigenous peoples who historically thrived, sustained and populated the extensive shoreline of Lake Ontario.

Location Notes: This event will take place at the Ontario Place South Marina.

For further information on the process and program around Wigwam Chi-Chemung, please visit: wigwamchichemung.com

Image Credit: “Wigwam Chi-Chemung at Ontario Place.” Photo by Elijah Nichols. Image courtesy of Myseum.

The Toronto Biennial of Art and Harbourfront Centre will present Arin Rungjang’s Ravisara as part of Nuit Blanche Toronto 2019. On view at Harbourfront Centre’s Artport Gallery and vitrines the night of October 5, this multi-channel video installation explores stories and strategies of postcolonial resistance among Thai female immigrants in Germany. Ravisara is commissioned by the Biennial and co-presented with Harbourfront Centre.

Lou Sheppard’s audio work Dawn Chorus/Evensong will be also featured at this year’s Nuit Blanche. Installed at Toronto Sculpture Garden, Sheppard’s audio work interrupts the denaturalized landscape with music created through the transportation of spectrograms of birdsong on the shores of Lake Ontario. Played outdoors at the Garden over multiple speakers, the composition harmonizes with the streetcars, cathedral bells, cards, bird, and other melodies of Toronto’s urban soundscape.

Hajra Waheed’s exhibition as part of the Toronto Biennial of Art, Hold Everything Dear, will be on display at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery during Nuit Blanche 2019. Presentations of works by Vincent Meessen, Naeem Mohaiemen, and Rashid Johnson are also on view as part of The Power Plant’s Up All Night project. Waheed’s works take a single visual form—the spiral—as a poetic starting point to reflect on the processes of upheaval in human experience. For Waheed, the spiral visualizes ascent and descent, growth and decay, evoking both vital forms in nature as well as notions of flux inherent in forced displacement and political turmoil. Hold Everything Dear is presented by The Power Plant and on view September 21– January 9.

Storytelling seeks to shift the mediation of contemporary art away from conventional modes of interpreting and informing to narrating and embodying through weekly walks and conversations. An intergenerational and multilingual group of storytellers share personal insights and experiences of the city as they guide visitors through the Exhibition’s installations, research, and political perspectives. Taking us along hidden river routes, through archives, and into speculative futures, storytellers bring submerged narratives related to Toronto’s shifting shoreline to the surface.

Meeting Place: Storytelling Sessions will begin at the main entrance of 259 Lake Shore Blvd E.

Storytelling Sessions will take place at Small Arms Inspection Building each Thursday from 4-6pm and Saturday from 12-2pm, and 259 Lake Shore Blvd E each Friday from 5-7pm and Sunday from 12-2pm. There is no registration required for these sessions.

“Since 1983, we have worked in relation to each other: we collaborate as artists, as administrators, as organizers, and as teachers; and we work in relation to others – in artist run centres, festivals, publications, and public institutions – in the spirit of collectivity where we share experience and knowledge and accept the same from others while ideas, statements, and direct acts are developed together and put into action where they evolve over time, never static.

Each of the three parts of “…before I wake,” the work on display at Toronto Biennial of Art, is a contemplation on collaboration itself. We see the bodies of the artists in “We’re getting younger all the time” using the digital devices to mimic the quest for eternal youth; in “Practicing Death” the artists are displayed in a type of suspended sleep; and finally “Entranced” finds the artists under hypnosis, each walking through a door where the collaboration will cease to be.”

In the walkabout, the artists engage in questions of representation of collaboration and “the collective”— suggesting how collaboration itself contradicts or at least undermines the idea of the individual artist-as-creative-genius — and discuss the ways that artists have confronted death in their work, from Brueghel to Caravaggio to Warhol to Rebecca Belmore.

Image credit: Lisa Steele + Kim Tomczak, Practicing Death, 2003.

Storytelling seeks to shift the mediation of contemporary art away from conventional modes of interpreting and informing to narrating and embodying through weekly walks and conversations. An intergenerational and multilingual group of storytellers share personal insights and experiences of the city as they guide visitors through the Exhibition’s installations, research, and political perspectives. Taking us along hidden river routes, through archives, and into speculative futures, storytellers bring submerged narratives related to Toronto’s shifting shoreline to the surface.

Meeting Place: Storytelling Sessions will begin at the main entrance of 259 Lake Shore Blvd E.

Storytelling Sessions will take place at Small Arms Inspection Building each Thursday from 4-6pm and Saturday from 12-2pm, and 259 Lake Shore Blvd E each Friday from 5-7pm and Sunday from 12-2pm. There is no registration required for these sessions.

What would a polar bear say if he could rap? Why are bowhead whales so sexy? Join Iñupiaq artist AKU-MATU as she brings you to the Arctic through humour, rap, costumes and unique characters.

AKU-MATU’s performance is a part of the Biennial’s Performance and Reading Program: Isonomia in Toronto, a series which takes place within Adrian Blackwell’s two interrelated structures at 259 Lake Shore Blvd E and the Small Arms Inspection Building host weekly performances and readings. Invited guests include poet CAConrad, artists Camilo Godoy and Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Apache violinist Laura Ortman, Sister Co-Resister, and percussionist Marshall Trammell.

Image: AKU-MATU, photo by Christy Chow. Courtesy the artist.

On Saturdays throughout the Biennial, a team of artists from Jumblies Theatre & Arts facilitate public art-making workshops for all ages, backgrounds, and abilities. After viewing the installation, By These Presents: “Purchasing” Toronto at Small Arms Inspection Building, participants are invited to write, draw, or embroider their responses on felted quilt pieces. Both Iroquois and Anishinaabe beading styles are shared, alongside open discussion of the installation’s content. Following the workshops the pieces generated will be combined in a giant quilt that addresses the Dish with One Spoon regional treaty and presented at the Biennial’s 2021 edition.

Image Caption: Jumblies Theatre & Arts, Talking Treaties, 2018. Courtesy Jumblies Theatre and Liam Coo.

During the Biennial, the Cinesphere becomes a world within a world, merging film and sound art with scent and changing atmospheric conditions. From cosmological origin stories, to a future in which civilization is extinct, The Drowned World contrasts deep time with the decline of global ecologies. The project’s title refers to J.G. Ballard’s 1962 archaeopsychic cli-fi novel in which the ice caps have melted and submerged the world, forcing the migration of a dwindling and devolving human species into the Canadian Arctic.

Prehistoric sounds; the sonification of a dying star; the submarine beats of Detroit’s bubble metropolis; the sacrifice of a muskrat; the love of an octopus. Within this brave new world, the artificial boundaries of modernity’s civilizations have evaporated, and life in all its forms continues to shift.

Complete schedule and details can be found HERE.

Guest curated by Charles Stankievech

With the creative and generous contribution of COMME des GARÇONS and MVS Proseminar, University of Toronto—John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.

Storytelling seeks to shift the mediation of contemporary art away from conventional modes of interpreting and informing to narrating and embodying through weekly walks and conversations. An intergenerational and multilingual group of storytellers share personal insights and experiences of the city as they guide visitors through the Exhibition’s installations, research, and political perspectives. Taking us along hidden river routes, through archives, and into speculative futures, storytellers bring submerged narratives related to Toronto’s shifting shoreline to the surface.

Meeting Place: Storytelling Sessions will begin near the Archtop Cafe at Small Arms Inspection Building.

Storytelling Sessions will take place at Small Arms Inspection Building each Thursday from 4-6pm and Saturday from 12-2pm, and 259 Lake Shore Blvd E each Friday from 5-7pm and Sunday from 12-2pm. There is no registration required for these sessions.

Please note: Due to weather conditions, this event has been cancelled.

During the last Open Studio of the Wigwam Chi-Chemung fall program, Elder Duke Redbird asks “how are we in relation?” and reflects on the many conversations, collaborations, and connections formed during the project. Set around Wigwam Chi-Chemung—a 40-foot pontoon houseboat docked at the Ontario Place Marina—the Open Studio session is part of an evolving art installation and Indigenous interpretive learning centre created in partnership with Indigenous intellectual, poet, painter, broadcaster, filmmaker and orator Elder Duke Redbird. Over the summer and fall, visitors have an opportunity to spend time, learn from, and celebrate the Indigenous peoples who historically thrived, sustained and populated the extensive shoreline of Lake Ontario.

Location Notes: This event will take place at the Ontario Place South Marina.

For further information on the process and program around Wigwam Chi-Chemung, please visit: wigwamchichemung.com

Image Credit: “Wigwam Chi-Chemung” at Ontario Place. Photo by Elijah Nichols. Image courtesy of Myseum.

In When Future Falls are Imminent: The moves and returns of scoop choreography of the fall, Karyn Recollet explores the meanings and experiences of choreographies of the fall embodying a set of relationships to land-ing and falling as ways of being in relation with lands, and each other. This talk thinks alongside Afrofuturist and Indigenous futurist activators to consider “falls” as a way of land-ing into each other in expansive and fully relational ways.

Recollet’s talk is a part of the Biennial’s Performance and Reading Program: Isonomia in Toronto, a series which takes place within Adrian Blackwell’s two interrelated structures at 259 Lake Shore Blvd E and the Small Arms Inspection Building host weekly performances and readings. Invited guests include poet CAConrad, artists Camilo Godoy and Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Apache violinist Laura Ortman, Sister Co-Resister, and percussionist Marshall Trammell.

Image: Adrian Blackwell, Isonomia in Toronto? (creek), 2019, Canvas, poplar shavings, diameter: 457.2 cm; length: 9144 cm. Commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art. On view at Small Arms Inspection Building as part of the Toronto Biennial of Art (2019). Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy Toronto Biennial of Art.

Please note: this event and waitlist are currently at capacity.

In the spirit of John Cage and Fluxus artists searching for fungi in the forest, artist Diane Borsato and Amish Morrell of Outdoor School with Alan Gan, invite visitors to a community mycological foray—an informal, family-friendly event that offers participants the opportunity to collect fungi and learn about the culture of mushrooming.

Rain or shine – we will meet promptly at 10 am in the parking lot directly below Old Mill Subway Station. To get there from the subway, take the stairs into the ravine from the Northside of Bloor street. Look for a mural on the underside of the bridge, by Anishinaabe artist, Philip Cote. From there we will walk together along the Humber River and gather for a mushroom ID session and informal picnic under the Oculus Pavilion in Humber River Park.

What to wear and bring: Dress for the weather and the woods with layers, closed-toe shoes, and long pants. Please bring a basket in which to collect the mushrooms, and a folding pocket knife. Additional recommendations can be found on the website of the Mycological Society of Toronto. Please note that the path is unpaved, with uneven terrain. Note it is a 30-minute walk back to the subway from our endpoint.

This program is part of Outdoor School, an ongoing series of artistic and educational activities by Diane Borsato, Amish Morrell and various community collaborators.

Accessibility: Mushroom Foray involves active walking through various paths in a public park with a few stops to rest over the course of the three-hour program.

Image Credit: “Mushroom Foray,” 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

Storytelling seeks to shift the mediation of contemporary art away from conventional modes of interpreting and informing to narrating and embodying through weekly walks and conversations. An intergenerational and multilingual group of storytellers share personal insights and experiences of the city as they guide visitors through the Exhibition’s installations, research, and political perspectives. Taking us along hidden river routes, through archives, and into speculative futures, storytellers bring submerged narratives related to Toronto’s shifting shoreline to the surface.

Meeting Place: Storytelling Sessions will begin at the main entrance of 259 Lake Shore Blvd E.

Storytelling Sessions will take place at Small Arms Inspection Building each Thursday from 4-6pm and Saturday from 12-2pm, and 259 Lake Shore Blvd E each Friday from 5-7pm and Sunday from 12-2pm. There is no registration required for these sessions.

This Night Walk with the Lost Rivers and Rivers Rising initiatives traces hidden histories of the Garrison Creek, which enters Lake Ontario just east of Fort York, the military garrison for the region. Closed since the 1920s, the hidden creek has gained interest as new initiatives have formed to draw attention to the relationships between “lost” creeks, community planning, and urban design by restoring buried bridges and regenerating the Garrison Creek ravine system.

Event Notes: Rain or (moon) shine, participants will meet promptly at 8pm in front of Christie Subway Station on the corner of Christie Street and Bloor Street West.

Accessibility: The Night Walk involves active walking through various paths in a public park with a few stops to rest over the course of the program.

Image Credits: Maria Thereza Alves, Garrison Creek, 2019, on display at 259 Lake Shore Blvd E for the Toronto Biennial of Art.