The third edition of the Toronto Biennial of Art (TBA), which opens Saturday, September 21, aims to recognize several truths at once. Aptly titled Precarious joysThis year’s edition will address the political, environmental and economic instability of our world, highlighting the sadness of living in such a fragile time and affirming the need for artistic spaces that will be the cradle for radical social change . The biennale runs until December 1 and features 37 local and international artists with performances, workshops and events across the country eleven locationsincluding two major interchanges at 32 Lisgar Street and the ninth floor of the historic Auto BLDG at 158 Sterling Avenue. Visitors can attend all programming events, from exhibitions to roundtables, completely free of charge.
The title of the upcoming edition is derived from six central concepts called “most important guidelines”, which co-curators Dominique Fontaine and Miguel A. López created through conversations with contributing artists: ‘joy’, ‘precarious’, ‘home’, ‘polyphony’, ‘comfort’ and ‘coded’.
“The most important guidelines obviously lent themselves to the title,” Fontaine said in an interview with Hyperallergic“and they speak of forms of solidarity between all forms of precarious life, both human and non-human.” Rather than responding to one theme for the biennial, the artists and curators were guided by these six cues as they produced and selected work.
Both Fontaine and López – based in Lima, Peru, and the biennale’s first international curator – emphasized that collaboration was central to their approach, seeing their role as that of dialogue facilitation rather than curation per se.
“Dominique and I decided to do joint curatorial research,” López said Hyperallergic. “When people ask me, ‘What is the section you put together?’ I can’t give them an answer, because we guided the entire process together.”
The curators have also consciously chosen not to include academic essays in the catalogue, but instead to have them created through conversations with artists and scientists. This decision, along with the vast spread of locations, was part of a concerted effort to make the biennial more accessible to Toronto’s diverse population.
To this end, public programming is planned to accompany it Precarious joys focuses on movement and dance as an archive and as an instrument to map trauma, resilience and pleasure. The biennale will also host multilingual events, including a Cantonese opera and workshop with the Starlight Chinese Opera Center for the Performing Arts on October 26. Each biennial location will also offer recurring Storytelling Sessions, where contributing artists can connect directly with visitors and provide deeper explanations of their practices.
The term “precarious” came from conversations with Chilean-born, New York-based artist Cecilia Vicuña, who in 1966 began making small temporary installations from waste and debris, which she ” precariosa plural form of ‘precarious’ in Spanish. The works of art are ephemeral in nature and are always at risk of being destroyed by the weather or washed away by the tide.
As part of the biennial, Collision Gallery presents Vicuña’s installation Futur.O [Futur.E]that pays tribute to a Canadian victim of Project MKUltra named Gail Kastner, who underwent severe electroshock therapy by a CIA-recruited doctor in an attempt to develop mind-control techniques. One of the new works is “Change of Consciousness,” a one-page artist’s book made from a cigarette box — a nod to the fact that 18-year-old Kastner wrote on cigarette boxes to keep records after an electroshock damaged her memory. Vicuña’s work also harkens back to ancestral crafts such as quipu (“knot” in Quechua), which was referred to in the first precario she made. Quipus were used as recording devices by indigenous communities in the Andean region and served as a physical lingua franca until Spanish colonial forces destroyed the vast majority of them. Vicuña will present an installation entitled “Quipu Girok (“Knot Record”)” (2021) at the biennial Lisgarstraat 32 center.
Self-taught Balinese artist Citra Sasmita similarly looks at ancestral storytelling in her practice and will present three new works of art during the biennale, based on her interest in the Kamasan painting style. The tradition was historic an exclusively male art formbut as a feminist artist, Sasmita adapts the style to reimagine Balinese myths and epics to center women and call for their liberation.
The second titular principle, “Joy,” was proposed by Toronto-based artist, activist, and educator Pamila Matharu. “I started thinking about a visual representation of joy because I felt a little overwhelmed by the idea of sharing a trauma story,” the artist said in an interview with Hyperallergic. They present a new multimedia installation entitled tender needle _ with you reflect on the teachings of their mentor, fellow exhibiting artist Winsom Winsom.
Matharu, a mente of the Fresh Arts movement of the 1990s, often honors the artists who shaped their practice, much of which depends on the ‘embodied archives” from black radical artists. They will appear on September 21 on a panel with Winsom and artist-activist d’bi.young anitafrika. Matharu explained that they jumped at the chance to participate in an event with Winsom. “A shradhanjali (homage) to you guru (teacher) is a very normal act of love [in South Asian culture],” they said, “and I am very tired of Western hegemony.”
