TORONTO.- Today, the
Toronto Biennial of Art and its curatorial team of Dominique Fontaine and Miguel A. López announced the title, full artist list, and venues for its third edition. TBA is a ten-week free event presented every two years. It will be presented from September 21 to December 1, 2024 at 12 locations throughout Toronto. TBA 2024 will also host a number of public and learning programs as part of its event, to be announced in July.
Title of the 3rd Edition of the Toronto Biennial of Art
The 2024 Toronto Biennial, titled Precarious Joys, explores the emotional climate of our times, acknowledging our vulnerability and grief while emphasizing the importance of passion and beauty in driving social change. The Biennial is organized around open dialogues and poetic connections. It explores artists’ responses to colonialism’s impact and the multiple ways representation contributes to collective survival and the regeneration of our social fabric.
The curators have been deeply immersed in dialogues and active listening, a crucial element in their curatorial journey traversing national and international landscapes, numerous artist studios, and professional art encounters in Toronto, Canada, and beyond. The 37 artists, including one collective, selected for this year’s exhibition hail from Canada and various regions of the world.
When speaking about the curatorial process, Fontaine and López said, “Our interactions have traced connections between artistic creations reflecting societal and ecological imperatives, resulting in us identifying key directives drawn from artists' creative endeavours: “Joy,” “Precarious,” “Home,” “Polyphony,” “Solace,” and “Coded”. Two of these directives, "Joy" and "Precarious," encapsulate how TBA artists' practices amplify political consciousnesses and reassert the power of aesthetics in shaping collective existence. The artists and their practices are at the heart of our process, inspiring and directing the structure of this Biennial edition. In these complex times, we hope that this edition of the Biennial can serve as a moment of introspection, offering a lens through which to navigate the flux of our world and contemplate the myriad challenges and opportunities it presents.”
2024 Biennial Highlights
Cecilia Vicuña (TBA 2024 commission, sculptures and textile installation). Vicuña is a visual artist, poet, filmmaker, and activist 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 will present a large-scale Quipu sculpture, a series of Precarious objects, and an installation that connects her activism against the military dictatorship in Chile (1973-1990) and the current struggles against fake news and media manipulations.
Citra Sasmita (TBA 2024 commission, installation and painting). Her work revisits Asian traditional languages, such as the Kamasan style painting, to reframe traditional stories and critique the vivid legacies of patriarchy and colonialism. TBA is presenting a new iteration of her long-term project Timur Merah (“The East is Red” in English), an installation composed of paintings on a Kamasan traditional canvas, Python Reticulatus snakeskin, and neon lamps. The work addresses the encounter and coexistence of Balinese mythology and spirituality along with Western ideas of technological advancement.
IKUMAGIALIIT ᐃᑯᒪᒋᐊᓖᑦ (those that need fire) (Film). Performance art quartet made of multidisciplinary artists: Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, Cris Derksen, Jamie Griffiths, and Christine Tootoo. TBA will present their film Aatooq (2021), whose title means “full of blood”. The film is narrated in Kalaallisut (Greenlandic) and is a visio-sonic poem about the gifts of blood.
Manuel Mathieu (TBA 2024 commission, film, installation). TBA 2024 will premiere Pendulum, multidisciplinary artist Manuel Mathieu’s first film. It depicts the search for an equilibrium between the past and an uncertain future. A woman knowledge keeper carries on her shoulders her most precious legacy: the liberation of her soul. This legacy sets in motion a spiritual choreography in which a group of men master their own freedom as they confront the complexities of their humanity. Amid this perpetual exorcism, they assimilate their liberation under a shower of white comets. What will remain of their essence? A new day begins.
Rajni Perera (TBA 2024 commission, sculpture and painting). Rajni Perera is an artist whose practice explores themes of hybridity, futurity, ancestral connections, and migrant and marginalized identities, as well as the realms of monsters and dreamscapes through the lens of science fiction. Her sculptural installation for the 2024 Toronto Biennial, ‘Vimana (N1 Starfighter)’ is the latest in a series of spacecraft lanterns, which draw inspiration from both mainstream science fiction and traditional Buddhist Vesak kūdu. TBA will also present her painting Joyous Procession / Infinite Serpent (2024), a work that depicts mythological figures dancing in line.
Santiago Yahuarcani (Painting), is a self-taught painter who belongs to the Aimeni clan (the White Heron clan) of the Uitoto Nation of northern Amazonia. In Yahuarcani’s paintings, the territory and its inhabitants show consciousness, affection, memory, and intelligence. TBA will present recent paintings by Yahuarcani made with natural dyes on tree bark that reclaim the force of the spirits guardians of the plants, trees, and animals, largely ignored in the modern era, stressing how climate catastrophe is not a recent event but part of a long history of colonial dispossession.
Sonia Boyce, DBE RA (Video installation) 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, on display now through September 8, 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.
