Tairone Bastien

Tairone Bastien (he/him) is an independent curator, writer and educator based in Tkoronto and working internationally. He was a co-curator of the first Toronto Biennial of Art titled "The Shoreline Dillema" in 2019, and the second edition in 2022 titled "What Water Knows the Land Remembers". He is also the co-editor of "Water, Kingship, Belief," a book that serves as a third site for the first two biennials, examining their underlying themes and throughlines in more depth. His current research looks at the ecological impact, needs, processes, and visual languages of public art and art-making in the Global South, and is working with artists in Kingston, Jamaica, Dubai, UAE, and Johannesburg, South Africa, under the title "A Feral Commons," to develop artworks that service and feed-back into their respective communities and ecologies that rely on human and more-than-human collaborations.

Prior to moving to Tkoronto, Tairone established the arts program at Alserkal Avenue and the Alserkal Residency in Dubai, for artists, curators, and researchers in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. Whilst there, he curated numerous projects in collaboration with organizations such as Dhaka Art Summit, Samdani Art Foundation, Art Dubai, Delfina Foundation, and Shubbak Festival, UK. From 2005 to 2010 he was a curator for Performa in New York City, co-organizing the first three editions (in 2005, 2007 and 2009) of the ground-breaking biennial of live performance art. Tairone holds a Master's of Art from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York; and a Bachelor’s in Art History with a Minor in Critical Studies in Sexuality from the University of British Columbia.