The third edition of the Toronto Biennial, “Precarious Joys,” has just opened at 32 Lisgar Street and in various locations across the city. With more than ninety works of art, it is the product of a series of conversations between curators Dominique Fontaine and Miguel A. López and artists navigating Canadian and international landscapes.
While Fontaine and López deliberately avoided a central theme, recurring ideas from their studio visits provided a sense of the issues artists are grappling with in this complicated period in human history. The title of the 2024 Biennial emerged organically out of these encounters, according to López. “It came from a list of concepts that Dominique and I had put together, but also from our process of listening and learning directly from the artists,” he told Observer. “Doing studio visits, traveling across Canada and internationally, and having conversations with different art professionals helped us to understand the temperature of the art practice.”
From these discussions came the 2024 Toronto Biennial’s “key directives”—six concepts (“Joy,” “Precarious,” “Home,” “Polyphony,” “Solace” and “Coded”) that encapsulate how these artists’ works amplify political consciousness and reassert the power of aesthetics in shaping collective existence. The artists’ vocabulary guided the curators throughout. In particular, “Joys” was inspired by the work of Pamila Matharu, a Toronto-based artist who was one of the first they encountered. She spoke about moving away from the language of “trauma” and reflecting on how BIPOC communities come from places of love, beauty and rebellion.
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López’s remarks highlight a critical shift away from how many recent exhibitions and biennials have addressed identity politics and post-colonialism. This shift feels particularly urgent in today’s increasingly divided society, where narratives of trauma often lead to the isolation of cultural groups and the polarization of opinions. This Biennial seeks to go beyond these divisions, embracing love as a means to encourage multicultural acceptance and universalism. “It’s all about how to embrace passion and love in a political moment where everything seems so vulnerable,” López added. “What is the role of love in creating a sense of togetherness so that it is still possible to imagine a future?”
While this year’s Biennial acknowledges the extreme precarity of current times, it recognizes this uncertainty as an opportunity for collective rebalancing and regeneration. Part of the title draws inspiration from the work of internationally celebrated Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña, one of the most senior artists in the exhibition. Specifically, a series of sculptures she made in the mid-60s from debris in Chile, where she was living at the time, engaging in an act of communication with nature. These sculptures, according to López, were made of feathers, small strings, shells and wood found on the beach, were placed at the ocean’s edge and left to be dissolved by the
This reflection shaped the framework for a Biennial in which artists confront today’s pervasive uncertainty and vulnerability while reclaiming the power of passion as a force for regeneration. This edition elevates themes of community, connectivity and shared experiences, weaving together threads that reveal common destinies in the story of global civilization.
The six core concepts are not treated as rigid chapters but as guiding directives in a Biennial that unfolds through open dialogues and poetic connections, exploring political and philosophical affinities. Some of the selected artists were even suggested by other artists, López told us, and that fostered a sense of community within the exhibition. “I think this created a really organic map of connections about what artists feel is important to engage with, address and highlight in the present time.”
The 2024 Toronto Biennial addresses a wide range of themes, including environmental justice, sovereignty, self-representation, belonging and migration, land dispossession, collective memory, feminist genealogies, diasporic sonic cultures, sacred plant wisdom, weaving as spiritual listening, resistance and resilience, ancestorship and queer worldmaking.
At the same time, the Biennial emphasizes local talent, featuring a large number of artists from the Toronto area. Yet its ambition reaches far beyond the local, using these stories and practices as a springboard to tackle global issues and challenges. “There are a number of pieces that address the various layers of Toronto’s history, and many others that tackle broader political and social concerns,” López clarified. “Some pieces may offer more intimate accounts, but most highlight the interconnections between the personal and the social, showing how they are deeply interwoven. No matter where the artists come from, most works address issues that are both local and global simultaneously.”
One work that López mentioned during our conversation perfectly illustrates how local histories can be elevated to a global, multicultural perspective. Sameer Farooq, a Toronto-based artist of Pakistani and Ugandan Indian descent, works across multiple mediums—sculpture, installation, video and anthropology—exploring new ways of representing the past in museum contexts. For the Toronto Biennial, he presents The Flatbread Library, a long-term research project that examines the political and social significance of flatbread and the tandoor, the clay oven used for over 10,000 years in South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. “The piece is essentially a large-scale sculpture representing a diverse map of Toronto, made from flatbreads obtained from various bakeries across the city,” López said. “It’s not about heritage or national identity but about continuous migrations, as the origins of flatbread remain ambiguous and shared by multiple territories.”
Here, an ephemeral object like flatbread becomes a cultural artifact, encapsulating the intricate history of multicultural exchanges that have carried it across borders to various countries. Farooq’s project highlights the embedded cultural and traditional knowledge that travels with the bread while acknowledging how it has evolved and crossed borders, culminating in the diverse, multicultural reality of Toronto today. The work, according to López, reflects on what it means to create an archive “while also considering the many migration histories that have shaped life in Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area.”
Despite touching on significant topics, the Biennial steers clear of grand narratives and statements, instead embracing what López describes as a “fugitive condition”—this contemporary state of continuous movement and displacement. Though the Toronto Biennial is a commission-based exhibition, with more than twenty works specifically produced for the show, the curators avoided prescribing specific topics. “We were more interested in what mattered to the artists at this point in their lives, in their places,” he said. This approach, allowing artists to guide the narrative, is also reflected in the structure of the catalog, which centers on artist conversations. “We didn’t want the traditional academic essays, inviting scholars, curators, and writers,” López added. “We invited the artists to talk to each other.”
Some of the works in the Toronto Biennial take over public spaces around the city, engaging with their history and extending the Biennial’s reach beyond the traditional “art community.” One of the most impactful is the adaptation of Threat Return (2023) by Lingit/Unangax̂ artist Nicholas Galanin, originally conceived for the last Liverpool Biennial. The piece features seven bronze busts evoking Indigenous American and African basketry alongside portraits of ski-masked robbers. For this edition, they are arranged in a circle in the Oak Room at Union Station, Toronto’s main railway hub. The busts appear like ghostly presences, reoccupying the settler colonial space with cultural narratives and traditions, reclaiming Indigenous cultural property. “It’s really powerful how this work disrupts the architecture and atmosphere, raising critical questions about colonial violence,” López said.
In line with recent Biennials and continuing the legacy of previous curator Candice Hopkins, this edition prominently features Indigenous artists whose contemporary practices draw deeply from their native ancestral wisdom, spirituality and technologies. Textiles play a particularly significant role, not as decoration or craft, but as vessels of cultural memory and tools for connecting with ancestry and the cosmos. A standout example is Sámi-Norwegian artist and musician Elina Waage Mikalsen, whom the curators met during their Arctic research last year. Mikalsen works with sound, textiles, performance, text and installations. For the Biennial, she transformed her grandmother’s weaving tools into musical instruments to explore the concept of “Sonic Memory,” seeking ways to preserve Indigenous Sami sonic traditions. She approaches sound as a time machine, collapsing time and setting both the past and future into motion.
The concept of “sonic memory” as a means to preserve and revive cultural memories is a theme that many artists have explored in recent Biennials, and it reappears several times in this edition of the Toronto Biennial. An example of a piece that embodies this theme, mentioned by López during our conversation, is a work of Chinese Canadian artist Karen Tam. Tam’s research delves into the constructions and imaginations of cultures and communities, often through recreating spaces like Chinese restaurants, karaoke lounges and other cultural meeting points. In the Toronto Biennial, Tam presents Scent of Thunderbolts (2024), a multimedia installation that addresses Chinese diasporic sonic memory through the lens of Cantonese opera. This newly commissioned work will be activated in different ways as part of the Biennial’s Public Program, which López emphasizes as a crucial aspect of the exhibition.
The local community remains the primary audience the curators want to engage with. “We see the Toronto Biennale as a public service,” López concluded. “It’s seventy-two days of free art, and it’s a way to invite new people to maybe have their first encounter with contemporary art. We wanted to create a generous Biennial for the artists and for the art ecosystem, but especially for the city, for families and for the various communities. This is an opportunity to really expand perspectives, so we were committed to bringing art that challenges, that inspires and that helps us connect with many worlds.”
“Precarious Joys,” the third edition of the Toronto Biennial, runs through December 1.