Allison Glenn To Curate 2026 Toronto Biennial, Expanding Beyond City

(MENAFN- USA Art News) The 2026 Toronto Biennial of Art, set to open on September 26 and run through December 20, will be curated by Allison Glenn. This edition marks a significant expansion, extending for the first time beyond the Greater Toronto Area through a series of artist projects and institutional collaborations across North America. The event aims to foster fluid exchange amid a sensitive period for cross-border relations between Canada and the United States.

Glenn's curatorial approach is defined by her research-driven and site-responsive methodology, which she has honed through roles at The Shepherd in Detroit, the 2023 Counterpublic Triennial, and New York's Public Art Fund. The Art Museum at the University of Toronto will serve as the primary hub for the 2026 Biennial, featuring 18 artist projects across two gallery sites. Other projects will be developed in collaboration with various institutional partners rather than dedicated Biennial spaces.

The Biennial's poetic title,“Things Fall Apart,” centers on the theme of rupture, a concept Glenn has explored for a decade. She explained that she has“been looking for about a decade now at artists who use rupture as an ontology, as a way of understanding.” This investigation first materialized in her essay“Notes on Rupture,” which examined how Caribbean artists employed fractures conceptually, formally, and materially. The essay later became the curatorial proposal for her role. The title itself draws from Chinua Achebe's 1958 novel of the same name, which derived its title from W.B. Yeats's 1921 poem“The Second Coming.” It also resonates with The Roots' fourth studio album, released during the anxieties of Y2K.

The 2026 Toronto Biennial will feature works by 30 artists and collectives, including 12 Canadian and 22 international participants from the U.S., the Caribbean, South America, Europe, Africa, the SWANA region, and South and Southeast Asia. Many projects are site-specific or adapted to their contexts, with 16 newly commissioned works installed in dialogue with Toronto's urban fabric. Notable artists include Antonio Obá, Charisse Pearlina Weston, Coco Fusco, Julien Creuzet, Kent Monkman, and Naotaka Hiro.

Glenn's selections highlight artists whose practices engage with rupture, waterways, trade routes, and voyages. She cited the Detroit-based“label for a movement,” Underground Resistance, which will present Drexciya. This legendary Detroit techno and electro duo, formed by James Stinson and Gerald Donald in the late 1980s, crafted an Afrofuturist aquatic mythology around a water-breathing nation descended from African women thrown overboard during the Middle Passage. Glenn described it as“a sonic and visual orthography that imagines an underwater world for those who chose water on the journey.” She also mentioned Dawit L. Petros, whose work examines a British imperial expedition along the Nile. Petros's speculative treatment of this history envisions the Nile itself as anti-colonial, with six cataracts becoming six installations at the Aga Khan Museum.

While many projects engage with water, some artists explore rupture through other lenses. Colombian artist Andrés Ramírez Gaviria, for example, translates astronomical data from radio telescopes into sound and then light, addressing the loss and transformation of information across different systems of representation. For the Biennial, Ramírez Gaviria is developing a site-specific light installation in the University of Toronto galleries that will pulse in response to data from quasars and pulsars. Glenn noted that this project will extend to the CN Tower, marking the artist's first intervention of this scale. Kenyan-born artist Brendan Fernandes, with strong ties to Canada, will adapt his 2023 performance“The Calls” for Toronto, presenting it as a choral performance with two dancers aboard a tall ship on the lake during opening weekend.

Source: Observer Arts

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