Business Finance Media Technology Policy Wealth Insights Interviews

Art Art Fairs Art Market Art Reviews Auctions Galleries Museums Interviews

Lifestyle Nightlife & Dining Style Travel Interviews

Power Lists Nightlife & Dining Art A.I. PR

About About Observer Advertise With Us Reprints

The Toronto Biennial Sets Ancient Wisdom Against Modern Collapse

Curator Allison Glenn’s “Things Fall Apart” mythmaking and ancestral epistemologies to rethink how art might respond to ecological, political and technological rupture and steer us toward a future that is enriched by the past.

This year’s Toronto Biennial of Art is dispersed without sprawling, articulating itself through a limited number of interventions conceived specifically for the sites where they are shown and forming a narrative constellation woven across the city and extended through the wider Great Lakes region. As in other recent biennials, water is a key thematic anchor—and, more specifically, waterways as both channels of human connection and carriers of the global complications that trade, exchange and warfare have wrought.

Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter

Thank you for signing up!

By clicking submit, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime.

In the catalog, curator Allison Glenn recalls encountering a maritime map of the Great Loop, a continuous 9,700-kilometer waterway linking the Mississippi River to the Intracoastal Waterway of the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean Sea, the Atlantic Ocean, the Hudson River, the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes, connecting North America through a web of estuaries, canals, rivers and freshwater and saltwater bodies. The map became both framework and inspiration for the Biennial, tying Toronto to a broader geography of ecological, sociological and political disruption.

The Great Loop is  an active network in Céline Semaan and Jean-Marc Bullet’s Notebook of Return / Carnet de Retour (2026), which connects artist gardens and land stewards across multiple sites. Through the circulation of seeds and cultivation practices, gardening becomes an archive and a connective thread across geographies, carrying ecological knowledge and memory from one community to the next. Brendan Fernandes’s performance The Calls (2023), adapted to take place aboard a boat on Lake Ontario, extends the notion of the embodied journey, foregrounding solidarity among places that share histories and ecological and social concerns.

As the Toronto Biennial’s title, “Things Fall Apart,” suggests, the exhibition confronts the collapse of an entire epistemological and cosmological system that gave rise to today’s socioeconomic structures. It acknowledges the impact of imperialism, climate change and unchecked industrial development while turning toward ancestral knowledge and wisdom that, across geographies, can teach us once more the vital bond of respect with the land.

The exhibition draws on Glenn’s multiyear investigation into artists who use rupture as an ontological tool to reimagine or revive alternative worldviews. “I have been looking for about a decade now at artists who use rupture as an ontology, as a way of understanding,” she told Observer in an interview ahead of the opening. “It becomes a kind of throughline through which they understand their work.” That inquiry first took shape in her essay “Notes on Rupture,” which considered a group of Caribbean artists and the ways they employed rupture conceptually, formally and materially, and which later became the curatorial proposal she submitted for the Biennial. The notion has only grown more urgent. As Glenn notes in the catalog, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke at the World Economic Forum of political and economic violence as “a rupture in the world order.” Shortly after, Janna Wale and Michaela McGuire–Jaad Gudgihljiwah published “Reflections on Rupture: Mark Carney’s New World Order & an Indigenous Response,” asking rupture of what, and by whom, and calling for renewed recognition of the epistemologies and ontological systems Indigenous to the land as forms of knowledge that might guide us through it.

This fourth edition of the Biennial officially opened on Sept. 26, with Rebecca Belmore’s performance Gichigami (2026), which drew the audience into a procession and collective ritual from Queen’s Park to the University of Toronto Art Museum. Leading it was a group of young girls in coats covered with plastic water bottles, their movements producing a sound like waves breaking against the shore. Along the way, they paused to honor an old tree in the park, gathering around it in a circle. At the university, they brought everyone together and closed the performance with a final movement before a monument commemorating the ancestors. The work was inspired by the Nishnaabeg creation story of a flood that left all the animals stranded on the water. “We are in a sea of waste of our own making, and the creation story reminds us that we all need land,” the artist writes in an accompanying statement. The performance set........

© Observer