Toronto Biennial Of Art Announces Featured Artists For Inaugural Event

Today the Toronto Biennial of Art (the Biennial) announced the participation of 33 more Canadian, Indigenous, and International Artists, collaborators and collectives presenting work at its inaugural event from September 21 to December 1, 2019. Co-curated by Candice Hopkins and Tairone Bastien, the free, 72-day event will include 20 new commissions and more than 100 works installed across 10 sites on or near Toronto's waterfront.

"We are beyond excited to launch Toronto's first art biennial this fall," said Toronto Biennial of Art Founder and Executive Director Patrizia Libralato. "Our inaugural roster celebrates local and Canadian talent and showcases artists from across the globe. Exhibited in unexpected locations along the waterfront, and working in collaboration with different cultural partners around the city, we invite the world to come to Toronto this fall to experience ambitious contemporary art.

In total, the Biennial will bring together more than 90 local and international participants, hailing from over 40 places of origin, including Brazil, France, Germany, Guatemala, Iran, Thailand, Turkey, and the United States as well as Nunavut and Indigenous communities in Canada, Colombia, Mexico, and Aotearoa | New Zealand. The range of contributors reflects Toronto's status as one of the most culturally diverse cities in the world and the Biennial's commitment to addressing the most pressing issues of our time from a variety of perspectives. Additional participants will be announced in August along with details for the Biennial's extensive public programs and creative partnerships.

The majority of the Biennial's exhibitions and programs will take place at venues along Toronto's waterfront between Etobicoke Creek and Ashbridges Bay. The city sits on the edge of Lake Ontario, which is part of the Great Lakes-one of the largest freshwater systems on Earth. The vision for the first Biennial has been shaped by the water and the multi-layered history of Toronto's ever-changing shoreline-a site of migration, colonization, and commerce that includes relics of heavy industry, dense condominium developments, active and decommissioned military sites, lost rivers, manufactured parks, and human-made spits.

The artists in Toronto's inaugural Biennial will engage with the waterfront's different ecosystems-environmental, cultural, spiritual, infrastructural, economic-to explore the effects of connection as well as disjunction. "The contingencies among people, nature, and economies inform the Biennial's central question: 'What does it mean to be in relation?'" said co-curators Candice Hopkins and Tairone Bastien. "The artworks explore how relations-both human and non-human-can reaffirm communion and generate ecosystems, but also have the potential to breed anxieties, glitches, anomie, and alienation."

Artists have responded to this query with new works that contemplate different kinds of relation and examine the past and the present to project alternative futures. New works for the 2019 Biennial include:

• Plot, a commissioned ephemeral sculpture by Abbas Akhavan, recreates the fragments of an Assyrian protective deity called Lamassu. Like the ghost of an unwanted inheritance, the work appears in the space as many tons of soil that will be redistributed to local community gardens after the Biennial.
• Two dynamic structures by Adrian Blackwell that will serve as gathering places for performance and programming at two different Biennial sites.
• An installation and performance by AA Bronson and Adrian Stimson born out of their ongoing dialogue and research into their respective ancestors' involvement with and enrollment in the Old Sun residential school on Siksika Nation, Alberta. AA Bronson's, A Public Apology to Siksika Nation, responds to European genocide, including his great-grandfather's role as the first missionary at Siksika Nation, while Adrian Stimson's response, generated in close dialogue with residential school survivors and leaders, reveals the layers of colonization and Indigenous resistance in his community.
• A series of LED fireboxes by Dana Claxton that are testaments to the beauty and resilience of Indigenous women whose portraits feature them wearing their cultural belongings.
• Groundbreaking wearable art and sculptures by Jae Jarrell that embody the vibrant spirit and bold aesthetic of AfriCOBRA, Chicago's Black Arts collective co-founded by Jarrell in the 1960s. Jarrell's work will be presented in partnership with the Art Gallery of York University.
• A selection of clay vessels by Jumana Manna that draw formal inspiration from khabyas (seed vessels), a key feature of rural Levantine architecture. Manna's vessels extend her insightful explorations into biodiversity, resilience, and preservation that were initiated in her film Wild Relatives (2018).
• A multi-channel video, textiles, and sculpture series by New Mineral Collective (Tanya Busse and Emiljia Škarnulyt?) that takes a critical look at the "perforated landscape"-land altered by extractive industries-as well as the marketing practices of mining companies.
• A swarm of more than 100 robotic Monarch butterflies by Fernando Palma Rodríguez programmed to respond to seismic frequencies. Monarchs, which have suffered rapid decline, are the only species to migrate between Mexico and Canada annually.
• The Drowned World, a film series at the Ontario Place Cinesphere presented by guest curator Charles Stankievech that will pay homage to Ontario Place's utopian architecture situated on human-made islands.

Jae Jarrell, Brothers Surrounding Sis in Ornamented Screen, 2017. Image courtesy of the artist and Kavi Gupta Gallery.