Image: Still from Nave (2022), an immersive multimedia installation by Camille Turner. Commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art.
Toronto Biennial of Art 2022
Saturday kicked off the 2022 Toronto Biennial of Art (TBA), a 72-day cultural extravaganza presented across nine venues in the Greater Toronto Area until June 5, 2022.
This year's edition is the second of two parts and is titled What Water Knows, The Land Remembers. As the title alludes, the Biennial’s exhibition and programming sites are grouped in relation to four waterways: Etobicoke Creek, the Laurentian Channel, Garrison Creek and Taddle Creek. The locations, which combine above and below ground water systems, move inland from the shoreline of Lake Ontario.
“As a Biennial situated along the Great Lakes, the world’s largest freshwater system, we are foregrounding water to attune ourselves to its ecologies, its adaptations, its sense of time and its cycles,” note curators, Candice Hopkins, Katie Lawson and OCAD University Faculty of Art Assistant Professor Tairone Bastien.
The Toronto Art Biennial, which launched in 2019, is Canada’s leading visual arts event focused exclusively on contemporary art from around the world. For 10 weeks every two years, local, national and international artists transform Toronto and its partner regions with free exhibitions, performances and learning opportunities.
This year, 70 Canadian and international artists will participate in the Biennial and its partner programming including that of OCAD U graduate and Sobey Art Award winner Stephanie Comilang, Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Art Francisco-Fernando Granados and Ange Loft, 2021 member of OCAD University’s Indigenous Education Council.
More than 20 new works were commissioned by artists for the 2022 edition, including an immersive video installation by OCAD U alum Camille Turner that emerges from her research into Atlantic Canada’s under-recognized involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. Some of the newly realized artworks have been in development for the last four years.
In order to experience the Biennial’s impressive lineup of programming, Bastien recommends spreading out your visits over several days.
“I suggest exploring the Biennial sites in clusters on different days. Select a different waterway each day and visit the sites that are marked in relation to it,” he notes.
Most in-person programs will be held at the Biennial’s two main exhibition venues, 72 Perth Ave. in Toronto's Junction neighbourhood and the Small Arms Inspection Building in Mississauga.
The Biennial’s 2022 programs are collaboratively developed by Roxanne Fernandes, Mary Kim, Kesang Nanglu, Emily Schimp and Ilana Shamoon, with contributions from exhibition curators Tairone Bastien, Candice Hopkins, Katie Lawson and former curators Clare Butcher and Myung-Sun Kim.