TORONTO.- Today, the
Toronto Biennial of Art announced its initial selection of Canadian and international artists for its third edition, on view September 21 to December 1, 2024. Dominique Fontaine and Miguel A. López are the curators of this free, 72-day event held at venues across the city.
Commissioned and invited artists participating in TBA 2024 exhibitions thus far include: Dineo Seshee Bopape, Sonia Boyce, Charles Campbell, Raven Chacon, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Maria Hupfield, Rudy Loewe, Tessa Mars, Pamila Matharu, Citra Sasmita, Karen Tam, Ahmed Umar, and Cecilia Vicuña.
“We are honoured to announce our preliminary list of participating Biennial artists—with more to come—and share a glimpse into the curatorial process and direction for the 2024 exhibition,” said TBA Founder and Executive Director Patrizia Libralato. “Our curators Dominique Fontaine and Miguel A. López are approaching their work with rigour and deep listening as they centre artists and their voices in all aspects of their research. This approach will ensure that the 2024 Biennial is relevant, impactful, and accessible for all."
“We remain committed to supporting artists from across Canada and beyond as they realize new commissions and showcase existing works. In these increasingly complex times, the Biennial will respond to local and global experiences through the unique visions of artists. Our team is eager to share these perspectives as we welcome audiences to the Biennial in fall 2024. We’re especially grateful to our partners and supporters who continue to champion art and artists and allow us to once again bring ten weeks of free art experiences and programming to Toronto,” said Libralato.
Additional participants will be announced in spring 2024 along with details of the Biennial’s extensive Public and Learning Programs as well as its creative partnerships.
When speaking about the curatorial process, Fontaine and López said, “The 2024 Biennial aims to showcase the ways artists from different localities respond to the impact of the aftermath of colonialism on everyday life. Taking our cues from artists, we have been inspired and guided by their practices when thinking about the Biennial’s structure. This includes the development of a preliminary list of key directives drawn from the artists’ creative labour, such as ‘Joy,’ ‘Home,’ and ‘Solace.’ The exhibition aims to create a collective dialogue around urgent issues of our times: environmental destruction, sovereignty, self-representation, belonging, collective memory, ancestral knowledge, migrant diasporas, queer futurity, and how art can participate in the process of restoring disrupted social bonds.”
Similar to the publication "Water, Kinship, Belief" created for the 2019 and 2022 Biennial exhibitions, the 2024 Biennial will be accompanied by a new publication. Structured around conversations between artists, curators, and other contributors, these discussions highlight the connections and common struggles that appear across the artistic practices featured within the Biennial.
2024 Biennial Highlights
Artists participating in the 2024 Biennial exhibition include:
Dineo Seshee Bopape (she/her, b. Polokwane, South Africa; lives in Johannesburg, South Africa). Bopape explores elemental, metaphysical, and socio-historical matters to consider how the social, political, and physical inhabit the world around us. Her TBA project, developed in partnership with The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, will be grounded in dreaming as a methodology to engage with reality. In collaboration with local communities, Bopape will connect with healing Indigenous practices based in herbal medicinal traditions. This new site-specific installation will turn The Power Plant’s LePage Gallery into an immersive environment bringing together video, sound, and organic materials.
Sonia Boyce OBE RA (she/her, b. London, UK where she continues to live and work). With an emphasis on collaborative work, Boyce has been working closely with other artists since 1990, often involving improvisation and spontaneous performative actions on the part of her collaborators. A site-specific version of Feeling Her Way (2022) will be presented in collaboration with the Art Gallery of Ontario and PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art, Montréal, where it will be shown in May 2024. Awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation at the 59th Venice Biennale, the installation combines video, collage, music, and sculpture to present a body of work that centres around the vocal experimentation of five female musicians and marks the Canadian debut of her work.
Charles Campbell (he/him, b. in Jamaica; lives in Victoria, Canada). The artist’s practice animates the future imaginaries possible in the wake of slavery and colonization. For TBA, Campbell’s sculptural installation project envisions itself as a portal into the space where the spirits of those who lost their lives in the Middle Passage reside. It will attempt to open a pathway to futures blocked by injustice and trauma by providing a space of acknowledgement, solace, and care for those spirits.
Raven Chacon (he/him, b. Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation; lives in Red Hook, New York). Chacon is a Pulitzer Prize–winning composer, performer, installation artist, and a 2023 MacArthur Fellow. His work explores the range of sound offering resistance to colonial narratives and myths of an uninhabited American West. For TBA, Chacon will create a film in Ontario that will be part of a new iteration of Three Songs (2021-2024), a series of videos paying tribute to Indigenous women who sing to past, present, and future landscapes.
Maria Hupfield (she/her, b. Parry Sound; lives in Tkarón:to/Toronto, Canada). The artist is an active member of the Anishinaabek Nation from Wasauksing First Nation (Huron Robinson Treaty), Ontario. Hupfield’s transdisciplinary practice is recognized for combining performance art and industrial felt. Her creations are further activated and put to use, fully actualized through their inventive appearances in live performances and collaborations as sculptural arrangements and in video. For TBA, Hupfield intends to create a new work that develops the form and sound of the spiral, as introduced in her previous work Jingle Spiral (2015).
Pamila Matharu (they/them, b. Birmingham, UK; lives in Tkarón:to/Toronto). Matharu approaches contemporary art from the position of critical pedagogy and uses an interdisciplinary and intersectional feminist lens. Their artwork often culminates in a broad range of forms including installation art, social practice, and experimental media art. For TBA, Matharu’s project will provide a multidisciplinary platform that experientially intersects contemporary art practices and critical pedagogy through community-engaged ways of knowing.
Cecilia Vicuña (she/her, b. Santiago, Chile; lives between New York and Santiago). Vicuña is a visual artist, poet, filmmaker, and activist who was recently awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 59th Venice Biennale. She created the autonomous concept of “precarious art” in the mid-1960s in Chile to name what vanishes. Her work bridges art and poetry as a way of “hearing an ancient silence waiting to be heard.” For TBA, Vicuña is developing a research project that connects her fight against the military dictatorship in Chile (1973-1990) and the current struggles against fake news and other forms of manipulations that undermine democratic legitimacy.
Preliminary List of Venues and Exhibition Partners
Building creative partnerships through collaborative installations, exhibitions, and programming across Toronto and beyond is integral to the Biennial’s core activities. The 2024 Biennial will work with established art institutions, artist-run centres, arts organizations, community organizations, educational institutions, and repurposed spaces.
Exhibition and Programming Partners include the Art Gallery of Ontario, C Magazine, Gallery TPW, OCAD University, PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art, Textile Museum of Canada, The Image Centre (Toronto Metropolitan University), The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto District School Board, Toronto Sculpture Garden, Toronto Union, and the Urban Indigenous Education Centre. Additional partners will be announced in the coming months.
