Toronto Biennial of Art

Abstract

One of the first moves Senior Curator Candice Hopkins and her team made for the Toronto Biennial of Arts inaugural edition was to commission a document by performance artist Ange Loft titled the Toronto Indigenous Context Brief . The document offers an attempt by the biennial's curators to orient the exhibition in its history and geography, and in doing so, to pay respect to Indigenous land. This sort of document, in a similar vein to the land acknowledgements spoken before cultural events that have been increasingly common especially in Canada since 2008's Truth and Reconciliation Act, is an effort at centralizing Indigenous communities into cultural conversations. Loft's Brief raises the question “What does it mean to be in relation?”—which the Biennial asked its exhibiting artists to consider. Accordingly, I will ground my critique of the first Toronto Biennial with an attempt at a response. To begin, there's the relation between land and capital. The theme of this biennial was “The Shoreline Dilemma,” which explains its two main exhibition sites, located along Lake Ontario, rather remote from the city's core. Toronto, as Hopkins told ArtNews , is a “city with its back to the water.”1 While Loft's Brief outlines about one thousand years of activity by Indigenous communities along the water, Lake Ontario's recent history is mostly comprised of urban pollution and exploitation. Certain city developments exemplify this lack of care for the lake, such as focusing city planning further north, and building the Gardiner Expressway, a highway that runs along the lakeshore and makes access to the water difficult. Situating the Biennial's two main sites along the lakeshore, one in a former Volvo dealership, and the second in the Small Arms Inspection Building in Mississauga, a neighboring municipality swallowed into the Greater Toronto Area, is, I suppose, a way …