Programs Overview

The Co-Relations program explored critical issues—livability, access, interconnectivity—that intersected with and extended ideas addressed in The Shoreline Dilemma.

Co-Relations demonstrated a deep commitment to placemaking in a series of performances, conversations, and gatherings. All participants were invited into shifting and expanding dialogues that revealed the often invisible, intangible, or overlooked connections to each other and the environment: mycelial fungi workshops investigated networked growth beneath our feet; apple tastings and orchard plantings reclaimed and revived rare historic apple varietals; and responses to a dispatch from a dystopian future initiated action in the present day. These unseen or unnoticed connections provided insights into how to better sustain symbiotic relationships over time.

Co-Relations built on methodologies of care, empathy, and understanding in an attempt to repair what has been lost or forgotten. Drawing from relational practices and social processes, these events responded to emerging conversations during the inaugural 2019 Biennial and extended them to explore their complexities in locations and with communities across Toronto.

Co-Relations was made possible with the generous support of the TD Bank Group through its corporate citizenship platform, The Ready Commitment.

Currents was a platform for artist-led programming that invited visitors to engage directly with the creative and critical processes at work in the Exhibition. This stream consisted of talks, performances, symphonies, star-gazing, and ceremonies that traced ideas circulating within and beyond the 2019 Biennial’s main sites and connected with other Exhibition locations. Be it through acts of restitution, revolutionary wearables, ways of knowing with the water, or the ethics of making, Currents asked participants to reconsider what it means to be in and out of relation in the context of artworks featured in the 2019 Exhibition.

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

Storytelling sought 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 shared personal insights and experiences of the city as they guided visitors through the 2019 Exhibition’s site-specific installations, research, and generative proposals. Storytellers brought submerged narratives to the surface in relation to the history and politics of Toronto’s shifting shoreline.

The Toronto Biennial of Art Residency is an experimental platform for artists with socially engaged practices. It supports artists whose work is challenging disciplinary and aesthetic conventions to expand notions of collectivity and enact social change at various scales.

Tools for Learning, generated by and with Biennial participants and collaborators, comprises group exercises, performative scores, proposals for collaborative thinking and making, artist interviews, and audio tours. Tools can be instruments to make and repair, but also strategies to undo and refuse. Whether in the Biennial, the classroom, or at home, our multimedia toolbox can be put to use by educators, students, and other community members in connecting their own experiences and curricula with process-based, playful approaches to contemporary artistic practices. Practically and conceptually, Tools for Learning offers materials and methods for reimagining relations with land, water, and each other. Contributors include Isuma, Adrian Stimson, Curtis Talwst Santiago, and The New Red Order.