It is with acts of attention that we decide who to hear, who to see and who in our world has agency. In this way our attention forms the ground not just for love but for ethics.​

— Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy​

With a focus on movement, dance, and the body, 2024 Biennial Programs addressed the inherent wisdom we all carry within us. Through a series of performances, workshops, talks, and gatherings these programs offered ways of contemplating, sensing, and experiencing the body.

Inspired by the Biennial’s title, Precarious Joys, and artist/scholar Jenny Odell’s writing about time, TBA Programs offered a performance and pedagogical series centring the body as a container of time and attention. This focus explores the potent corporeal knowledge we all hold as well as the physical, ecological, and psychological cues offered by this information.

In the foreground, Annie Wong is hunched over, her head hung, with her arms raised above. She is in movement, holding her glasses. In the background, several people stand in a choir next to music stands and mics. They are all wearing black.

Your Timing is Perfect: Moments and Movements of Inquiry was a performance series in which artists investigated the body as a living archive, exploring both its exceptional depth of data, extraordinary strength, and resilience over time, as well as its tenderness, fragility, and limitations.

In this series, several artists explored gestures of resistance, protection, action, and care. Some incorporated opportunities for collective listening, observing, singing, and creating, whereas others investigated the connection between land and body, attuning through slowing, softening, researching, and deep consideration. These movements and moments leave traces that endure and tell the stories of presence, resilience, and courage.

In the workshop series Keeping Time, artists inspired participants to pay special attention to time, space, and movement. The series employed the idea of physical learning to access the body’s deep-rooted knowledge, harmonizing the relationship between body and time.

In this time of polycrisis and precarity, suffering, inequality, injustice, violence, and destruction can feel overwhelming. How we care for ourselves and others, and how we spend our precious time, energy, and attention is consequential and impactful. Moments of movement, poetry, listening, dancing, swaying, kicking, and singing may seem inadequate, but can be critical, and sometimes joyful, forms and reminders to come back to the body, and reveal a glimpse into the shared experience centred in all bodies.

Many TBA Programs are presented with local artistic partners and community groups, further supporting the important work of our incredible participating artists and inquiries.

Visit the Events Calendar for up-to-date information on upcoming programs.

A photograph of the Gather Round Singers choir performing. In the foreground, a Black person with curly hair and wearing an orange shirt is seen smiling, holding and waving a large scarf attached to a paddle with a face drawn on it. In the background there are multiple people with multiple ages and abilities singing outwards to a crowd of people. Some are in movement, others are performing ASL, and others are sitting and singing. Many are wearing orange as well.

Image credits: MOSSBELLY by Angela Vitovec. Photography: Dorothea Tuch | A Choir of Demands and Desires of Repeat, Ada X with Suzanne Fernando, Rea Sweets, Ahreum Lee, Feliz Tupe, Yarijey Noomsson, Nadia Hammouda and Soukayna. Courtesy of Ada X (2019). | Gather Round Singers at Border Crossing Odyssey. Photography: María Vega.