Who knows if Toronto dreams of it, but the contemporary art biennial that has been held there since 2019 is such a unifier that the Ontario capital is becoming global. The third edition of the Toronto Biennial of Art (TBA), inaugurated in September, flies on the wings of diversity, including linguistic diversity.
Montrealer Leila Zelli contributes with her installation Why should I stop? (the same one that she exhibits at the Galerie de l’UQAM to denounce misogyny in Iran), with a poem in Farsi. Another Montrealer, Karen Tam created an installation for the TBA where an opera in Cantonese resonates, a vehicle of memory for the Chinese diaspora.
In this biennial full of screens, we witness songs in Creole, Arabic as well as Diné, Yuchi and Seminole — three indigenous languages. We hear intimate stories in Spanish, in Kalaallisut, the language of Greenland, and, yes, yes, in French (from France). Titles of works use Sami, Kaqchikel, Quechua, Korean and Hindi words.
“Toronto is one of the most fascinating cities I have lived in,” says Miguel López, Peruvian curator. Its artistic scene is stimulating, marked by difference, with its linguistic diversity. The art there is less predictable, less subservient, less white. »
A globetrotter who has visited Barcelona, Utrecht, Cali, Vienna and San José (Costa Rica), Miguel López forms with Montrealer Dominique Fontaine the curatorial pair for the international Toronto event. Under the title Precarious Joysthe duo selected 36 artists — “19 do not have a Canadian passport,” according to the press service. Five from Quebec are included thanks to an agreement with the Montreal biennial Momenta, supported for the occasion by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.
During “ten weeks of free art”, the TBA extends throughout the city and “brings back to life”, according to director Patrizia Libralato, a building built as a cultural center, but until then vacant. Also worth visiting: public spaces, galleries, museums (surprisingly not the contemporary art museum, the MOCA).
No theme, two concepts
A title with contradictory effects, “Precarious Joys” offers a mixture of observations, or personal or collective prayers. Some transmit positive values, others remind us of the fragility of our existence. The appearance of bringing everything together and its opposite arises from the open approach adopted by the commissioners.
“It’s not an exhibition with an imposed theme, illustrated by works,” explains Dominique Fontaine. Our process was guided by the artists’ research. »
The duo unearthed “key concepts” among the artists, including joy and precariousness. The first preserves the Toronto roots of the TBA, as it is used by Pamila Matharu, a local artist who opposes discourses of trauma stuck to cultural communities. Its installation tere naal _ with you takes the form of a rest room, equipped with carpets and cushions, and for sharing values, such as love.
Pamila Matharu and other TBA artists are among those making art “less enslaved, less white.” The biennial paints a broad, peripheral portrait. Flatbread Libraryby Sameer Farooq, is the emblematic work – the most astonishing too. The real pitas, markouks, naans, tortillas, fougasses and other “flatbreads” that make it up offer a cultural panorama taken from visits to Toronto bakeries that use a clay oven. Common base, variety of results, that’s the third TBA.
The concept of precariousness comes from the Chilean Cecilia Vicuña. This recently rediscovered elderly artist has been making ephemeral sculptures from waste since the 1960s. At the time, she abandoned them on the beach at the mercy of nature. Miguel López, who had already worked with her, sees in it “a language outside of human supremacy”. “Cecilia tries to communicate with the wind, the sea, the sand. These are fair dialogues,” he says.
The tiny assemblages of found materials that she exhibits are almost a provocation of the rules of conservation that govern the art world. Their precarious balance reminds us that the world hangs by a thread and will collapse in the absence of care.
Coded languages
If the biennial is not always balanced, with some spaces too cramped, others airy, it plays the diversity card well. The complexity of virtual reality, an experience to be lived alone proposed by the Kurdish Morehshin Allahyari, responds, for example, to the recycled cardboard on which María Ezcurra draws migratory birds in danger of extinction. The Montrealer is exhibiting the “Canadian” version of her avian collection unveiled in Quebec earlier in 2024.
The large number of textile art cases exhibited (six artists) demonstrates the richness of the approaches, including that of Angélica Serech, a Maya from Guatemala, who mixes tradition and experimentation, stories and motifs. The diversity of languages is therefore not just linguistic. With Charles Campbell, it is chromatic, sensory, sonorous. Its installation how many colors has the sea evokes the sea crossing of African populations sold into slavery.
In the video One hundred moreJustine A. Chambers expresses herself through dance and gestures. In a series of lithographs, Raven Chacon, a Navajo musician from Arizona, invents a coded writing, like a score outside Western languages, in homage to 12 indigenous sisters.
In light of this TBA tinged with the acceptance of differences, it is surprising to note that Winsom Winsom, priestess of a spiritual art in Toronto, appropriates a foreign culture – the Olmec, not to name it – and designates it, to explain its presence in his painting, “ancient African civilization”. Faced with this misunderstanding, joy is rather fleeting.
Our collaborator was the guest of the TBA.