A growing library of content and concepts, the Toronto Biennial of Art Publications emerge from and expand on TBA’s exhibitions and programs. Each publication invites readers and contributors alike to further consider the ongoing processes of exhibition-making, programming, learning, and unlearning that inform TBA’s curatorial and organizational approaches. Comprised of singular and iterative publications in printed and digital forms, TBA gathers contributions from curators, artists, collaborators, and writers, including: catalogues, artist books and editions, essays and learning tools. As this library grows over time, it offers resources for intergenerational readers, while building upon past and current areas of research.
For more information on the below publications, please contact curatorial@torontobiennial.org.
Precarious Joys
Printed Publication
In partnership with Art Metropole and Goose Lane Editions, TBA released the exhibition catalogue, Precarious Joys, at the opening of its third edition on September 21, 2024. Edited by the Biennial’s 2024 curators, this publication includes conversations between artists, curators, community and staff members, as well as reproductions of artwork by featured artists. Together, the texts and images offer readers insights into how artistic practices can amplify political consciousness and reassert the power of aesthetics in shaping collective existence.
Available to purchase through Art Metropole and at booksellers across Toronto. Precarious Joys is also available through various online retailers including Amazon and Indigo.
Programs Publication: Growth From Within
Digital Publication
As part of a growing series of publications produced by the Toronto Biennial of Art (TBA), Growth From Within is the second digital publication devoted to our public and learning programs. Published in partnership with Art Metropole and designed by Matt Nish-Lapidus, it is currently online and accessible for you to explore!
Extending the lines of inquiry running through the 2022 Biennial edition, What Water Knows, The Land Remembers, this publication dives into TBA’s Storytelling Program specifically. As we revisit this impactful program stream, contributing Storytellers help us digest countless interactions with visitors, artists, educators, and artworks. Commissioned responses from Emily DiCarlo, Jeffrey Canton, lwrds duniam, Melissa (Melly) Davidson, and Nicole Markland reflect their own artistic practices as dancers, visual artists, scholars, poets, educators, and storytellers, and offer approaches and examples for engaging and (un)learning with those around us. Our Guest Contributor, Reneltta Arluk, offers a poetic “Welcome” – an invitation to consider the healing and restorative nature of storytelling.
Water, Kinship, Belief
Printed Publication
Edited by Tairone Bastien, Candice Hopkins, and Katie Lawson
Co-published by the Toronto Biennial of Art and Art Metropole
Publication date: April 2022.
In relation to the 2019 and 2022 Biennial exhibitions, this publication is a place where the continuities, resonances, and dissonances between editions are made evident. Water, Kinship, Belief is a means to bring the artists, artworks, collaborators, and ideas that have informed the exhibitions together, irrespective of chronology and part of a greater whole. Through its content and unique design, this publication is both a generative guide to the exhibitions and a Biennial site of its own that creates new artistic relations through text and images that course through the book like tributaries.
Available to purchase at: Type Books; Flying Books; AGO Giftshop; Mercer Union; READ Books (ECUAD), Vancouver; Or Gallery Bookstore, Vancouver; Another Story; CCA, Montreal; Textile Museum of Canada; Robert McLaughlin Gallery; Printed Matter (New York); A Different Booklist, Queen Books; York University Bookstore; Likely General; Spacing Store; Swipe Design Books; and Amazon.ca.
A Treaty Guide for Torontonians
Printed Publication
Created by the Talking Treaties Collective: Ange Loft, Victoria Freeman, Martha Stiegman, and Jill Carter
Published by Jumblies Press and Toronto Biennial of Art in partnership with Art Metropole
Publication date: June 2022.
What does it mean to be a treaty person in Toronto?
A Treaty Guide for Torontonians is an artful examination of the complex intercultural roots of treaty relationships in the place we now call Toronto. From the Two Row Wampum and Dish with One Spoon, to the Treaty of Niagara and the Toronto Purchase, we trace the history of treaty making between Indigenous nations, and between Indigenous nations and the Crown. Part of Jumblies Theatre + Arts’ multi-year Talking Treaties project, A Treaty Guide inspires an active approach to treaty awareness through embodied learning tools. Land-based activities, theatrical exercises, drawing and writing prompts help readers find their own relationship to this history, and to take up their treaty responsibilities in the present.
This publication has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the City of Toronto, the Ontario Arts Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and York University.
2022 Visitor Guide
Digital Publication
Download the PDF version of our guidebook!
TBA Programs Publication: This is Not An Archive
Digital Publication
The TBA Programs Publication: This is Not An Archive is the first chapter of an iterative digital publication produced by Toronto Biennial of Art Programs. Launched in Fall 2021, it brings together the voices and process-based methodologies of past and present contributors, and traces ever-changing networks of relationships between practices, ideas, and questions shaping Biennial Programs over time.
Contributors: Borelson, Bonnie Devine and Luis Jacob, Caitlin Taguibao, Diane Borsato, Fan Wu, Lost Rivers with Rivers Rising and the River Poets, Mark Dudiak, and Yan Wu (care of Gendai Gallery, 2010-2020)
Designed by: Ali Shamas Qadeer and Chris Lee
Edited by: Clare Butcher, Myung-Sun Kim, with editorial support from Ilana Shamoon and Melody Moon-Kyoung Cho.
Workshop participants engage with Mark Dudiak in the context of Embassy of Imagination + PA System’s Sinaaqpagiaqtuut/The Long-Cut (2019). Photo by Sue Holland.
2019 Guidebook: The Shoreline Dilemma
Digital Publication
Learn more about the inaugural Toronto Biennial of Art.
Download the PDF version of our guidebook!
A Public Apology to Siksika Nation
Printed Publication
Bronson’s multi-year project responds to European genocide, including his great-grandfather’s role as the first missionary at Siksika Nation and founder of the Old Sun residential school. (Old Sun, an influential Siksika leader, is an ancestor of Bronson’s collaborator, Adrian Stimson.) Generated from ongoing dialogue with Stimson and extensive research into museum and family archives, Bronson’s project makes actionable the responsibility of settlers in the era of reconciliation.
Bronson’s apology, first delivered at Siksika nation, now takes the form of a book. The more than 14,000 copies on-site at the Biennial were available for free from September 21st – December 1st, 2019.
By: AA Bronson, Ben Miller
Language: English
ISBN: 978-1-9992186-0-7
Publisher: Toronto Biennial of Art (September 2019)
QUÉ HARÉ CON MI LUGAR EN EL CIELO [para ser no-cantado] | WHAT WILL I DO WITH MY PLACE IN THE SKY [to be not-sung]
Printed Publication
Qué haré con mi lugar en el cielo parte de las esculturas Silla 1, Silla 2 y Silla 3 de Naufus Ramírez- Figueroa —proyecto provocado por la imagen de una pintura de los años 1830 de Jean–Frédéric Waldeck: un hombre caminando por una montaña con una silla atada a su espalda, llevando a otro hombre vestido de blanco con botas delicadas—, para sugerir y flexionar nuestras ideas del peso, la materialidad y el tránsito, y vaciar así el lenguaje de sus regencias más utilitarias.
What will i do with my place in the sky is based on the sculptures Silla 1, Silla 2, and Silla 3 by Naufus Ramírez Figueroa and commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art, which respond to an image in an 1830s painting by Jean–Frédéric Waldeck: a man walks along a mountain with a chair tied to his back, carrying another man who is dressed in white and wearing dainty boots. It aims to invoke and inflect our ideas about weight, materiality, and transit, and to thus empty out language of its most utilitarian forces.
By: Wingston González, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, Candice Hopkins (Forward)
Translated by: Urayoán Noel
Language: Spanish and English
ISBN: 978-1-9992186-1-4
Publisher: Toronto Biennial of Art (October 2019)
