Since developing programming for the Biennial’s inaugural edition, The Shoreline Dilemma, the Public Programming and Learning team has centred the complex, relational contexts around us, prioritizing flexibility and responsiveness to the needs of artists, participants, partners, and communities. We continue to nurture these nimble methodologies, offering generative and participatory programming both online and in-person. Through community-focused engagement, we bring intergenerational visitors together, even at a distance during these times of uncertainty.
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.
Entries of particular attention (bolded below) include: coming together as part of a shared ethos at a given moment in time (collectivity); “breathing together” (the etymological roots of conspiring, further complicated by the current pandemic); expanding our close human connections beyond blood or ancestral relations, to include multiform intentional community-building (inheritance and kinship); experimenting new points of focus to better hear each other (listening); learning from more-than-human entities to support empathetic, relational, and adaptive ecologies (mycelial networks); and embracing narratives that impact and in some cases uncomfortably upend prior learnings as a guiding principle to look inward as we move outward together (unlearning).
Throughout the course of the 2022 Biennial, our programs bring together local, national, and international participants as they share their ideas and questions in hybrid gathering models. Their practices offer visitors multiple entry points for engagement in a series of programming streams:
TBA Public Programs is a platform for artist-led programming that invites visitors to engage directly with the creative and critical processes at work throughout the Exhibition.
Mobile Arts Curriculum (MAC) is a set of tools co-created with artists, available digitally on TBA’s website and physically at our main sites, that resonate with the Exhibition, and respond to intergenerational arts education and learning needs.
Storytelling expands the mediation of contemporary art beyond conventional modes of interpreting and informing to narrating and embodying through weekly guided sessions, informal conversations, and spot tours at TBA’s main sites.
TBA School Programs are led by Storytellers, who provide lively participatory, age-appropriate sessions for elementary, secondary, and post-secondary students both in person and virtually.
TBA Podcasts is a curator-led, experiential platform for focused reflection, listening, and learning with Exhibition artists.
Onsite Libraries offer a collection of textual, visual, and material resources for visitors to read and explore, inviting a deeper personal or collective dialogue with the ideas and practices within the Exhibition.