Toronto Biennial Of Art Gathers Over 30 Artists For“Things Fall Apart”

(MENAFN- USA Art News) The fourth Toronto Biennial of Art, titled Things Fall Apart, features more than 30 artists and collectives across Toronto and additional locations in Anchorage, Alaska, and Times Square, New York. Curated by Allison Glenn, who grew up crossing the US-Canada border, the exhibition explores themes of rupture, history, borders, and movement, using the Great Lakes as its central point of departure.

The biennial draws inspiration from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's statement at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he described the world as“in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” This quote is featured in the exhibition catalog and serves as a thematic cornerstone.

Among the highlighted works, Dawoud Bey's Material Histories, Living Landscapes at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) combines photographs from three landscape series with his two-channel video“350,000” ( 2023 ). It also includes sculptures and ritual objects from the AGO's collection originating from Nigeria, Ghana, and the Kingdom of Kongo, establishing a dialogue across the Middle Passage. At the University of Toronto Art Centre, the main venue, Antonio Obá's“Jardim” ( 2022–26 ) uses brass bells that sound when visitors walk through, leading to“A Folia: travessia” (The Revelry: A Crossing, 2026 ), a painting that reimagines Douglas Martin's 1957 photograph of Dorothy Counts integrating a high school in Charlotte, North Carolina, by replacing the hostile crowd with a supportive one.

Other installations explore personal and material knowledge. Wen Liu's“In Light, Where Edges Yield” ( 2025 ) at Mercer Union is a human-scale sculpture integrating Chinese herbal medicines prescribed after her father's death. Taqralik Partridge's“umiakkut (by boat)” ( 2026 ) at the same venue evokes her grandmother's journey across the Hudson Strait using an Indigenous Arctic boat, featuring a mirrored room with handmade vessels and a soundtrack of an elder's voice. Partridge's work“Tuktujuq” ( 2024 ) also explores similar themes with reindeer hide and skull, beads, and Celine Dion CDs.

Sites that reunite what was once separated include the Royal Ontario Museum, where Raphaël Barontini's“Follow the North Star – a Tribute to Harriet Tubman” ( 2026 ) fills the Crystal Court with textile panels that connect Caribbean aesthetics to the Underground Railroad. In Scarborough, Nirbhai (nep) Singh Sidhu's“A Deathless Potential In Remembrance By You” ( 2026 ) is a permanent structure at the Scarborough Gurdwara, built with earth from Sirhind, Punjab, for the Sikh practice of simran. The biennial also includes Rouzbeh Akhbari's“Of Wool and Diesel” ( 2026 ), a 30-minute film at Mercer Union tracking the informal sheep trade around the Strait of Hormuz, which was made as war in Iran disrupted trade routes.

The exhibition, which continues at various venues through December 20, presents an ambitious and timely exploration of how artists engage with contemporary social, political, and ecological realities.

Source: Hyperallergic

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