Things Fall Apart is developed with 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? In connection with this guiding question, Allison Glenn collaboratively curated the convening, An Arrival, A Grounding, A Departure, which creates space for those who hold and share knowledge, including farmers, growers, musicians, Elders, artists, and more, to exchange and build intersectional and collective ways of understanding.
An Arrival, A Grounding, A Departure is organized with some of the exhibiting artists as well as invited co-curators, and consists of dialogues, performances, meals, and moments of collectivity that engage with six new commissions. Thematically grouped into three puncta, it unfolds over three days across the geographies, people, and ideas that make up the place known as Toronto.
A Grounding brings attendees together around TBA artist Nirbhai (nep) Singh Sidhu’s new commission A Deathless Potential In Remembrance By You, 2026. This permanent public sculpture and garden is located on the grounds of the Scarborough Gurdwara, and the day’s programming, led by Sidhu, will bring together speakers, musicians, Simran, and sangat in the embrace of a living sculpture, through a deathless memory.
Etiquette for visiting Gurdwara (Gursikh Sabha Canada): remove your shoes and store them in separate shoe rooms. Your head must be covered, and the artist will provide coverings as needed. Baseball caps and hats are not permitted. Dress modestly; sleeveless tops, short skirts, torn jeans, and shorts are not allowed.
Note: a bus seating up to 56 people will be offered on a first-come, first-served basis, departing from Art Museum at the University of Toronto. All remaining attendees will meet directly at the Scarborough Gurdwara.
Schedule as follows, subject to change:
2:00–2:45 PM: Attendees invited to partake in vegetarian langar, spend time with the monument and garden, or sit in Simran in the Gurdwara hall
5:30 PM: Arrival at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, second day wraps
This program is free, but registration is required in order to attend.
Presented in partnership with the Scarborough Gurdwara.
Image credit: Nirbhai (nep) Singh Sidhu, A Deathless Potential In Remembrance By You, 2026.
October 17
12:00pm – 5:30pm
Artist Bio
Nirbhai (nep) Singh Sidhu
Nirbhai (nep) Singh Sidhu is a Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist who works through labor-based knowledge production, Sikh interiority, and blood memory as an adaptive method for resilience and remembrance. Sidhu’s practice draws from a personal lifetime and family lineage of working in metal manufacturing factories and the building of community-based sites for youth development such as Sher-E-Punjab Sports Academy in Chakar, Punjab. His continued practice of sound and silence through a multitude of mediums including omni-directional sound systems (A Disappearance Potential, 2021) counter surveillance drum machines (The PIGG500 Security and Leisure Enhancement Console, 2017) and Simran focused visual output, reveals the expansion of both the social external and cellular internal.
Sidhu’s varying material approaches in painting allow him to express detachment and hyper presence as a guiding singular principle. An aesthetic of nondual activity is central as it precedes the radical distinction between subject and object in his painted works such as They Awakened in Algorithm, 2021. “Painting allows me to center realities of oneness that we don’t encounter physically, by pointing to the ecstatic and sensual in revealing a greater presence, with entities, ideas and one another.” In putting forth such works, the necessity to expand beyond poetics and abstraction become essential to address the realities of languaging, musicking and trancing as natural modes of ‘embodying a text’ or ‘becoming the music’ in the pursuit of a losing one’s autobiographical self. This reflection on life is a personal objective for Sidhu, to embrace continuous death, while alive.
Sidhu’s work has exhibited at the Aichi Triennale, Nagoya City Museum, Japan; Frye Museum of Art, Seattle; Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; Esker Foundation, Calgary and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, among others. He is a member of the Black Constellation collective and designs clothing and adornment under the Paradise Sportif moniker.
Photo by Ishmael Butler.
Partners
Related Programs
Convening: An Arrival, A Grounding, A Departure – Day 1
Community Gathering, Education, Talk, Walk
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Native Canadian Centre
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Convening: An Arrival, A Grounding, A Departure – Day 3
Community Gathering, Education, Talk, Walk
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Toronto Black Farmers and Food Growers Collective Farm, Downsview Park
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