@torontobiennial

The Toronto Biennial of Art is currently seeking an Exhibitions and Programming Assistant, who will play a vital role in the ongoing operations and event planning for the next edition of . Learn more via the link in our bio! Applications due October 14th, 2020

One year ago today, we launched the inaugural Toronto Biennial of Art, and over the course of 72 days, TBA provided the public with 215 free programs, performances, and events, and free access to 29 commissions and over 100 artworks across 15 sites. In doing so, we supported artists, participants, and performers from more than 70 places of origin, including 29 Canadian and international First Nations and Indigenous communities, with almost half the Biennial’s participants identifying as Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour. (For a detailed look at insights, impacts and recommendations, read our 2019 Evaluation Report.) In 2021 we will continue this important work with our second edition, set to launch on September 25 and running until December 5, 2021. Mark your calendars!

"It’s important for people anywhere, not just here in Toronto, to be as aware as possible of the place they are in. Especially if you are in a place that is colonized...because there is this tendency in a continuing colonization process to treat the land, the original land and its peoples and its resources, as commodities for the making of wealth. And it’s easy to do in a colonial set-up, because you never consider the land as part of your history. You define yourself as not being from the place instead of saying “Oh! Who’s here?” “What’s here?” “What is the land here?” “What is my obligation to being here?”" - Maria Thereza Alves, 'Short Format' Podcast, 2019 Tune into more of Maria Thereza Alves’s insights into her ongoing situated practice and those of other contributors with , a series produced by @AliyaPabani and @Shackel4000 for the Toronto Biennial of Art. Available on torontobiennial.org, @spotify, @itunes, or wherever podcasts are found.

TBA is growing! To support our development, we are seeking dynamic and devoted Board members to lead and represent the organization. For more details on this role, visit the link in our bio. In addition, TBA is seeking a full-time Communications Manager, who will be responsible for the development of an impactful internal and external communications strategy in alignment with the Biennial’s priorities. This role is set to begin Oct 2020, with applications due Sept 14. Visit the link in our bio for the complete job listing! *Note: please indicate which position you are applying for in the subject of the email*

“I am often knitting, sewing, weaving or quilting something. As an anxious person, moving thread through my fingers helps me feel grounded and present. Not surprisingly, many of my favourite artists are ones that use textiles as part of their practice. I can’t get enough of Louise Bourgeois, Shelia Hicks, Anne Low, Shinique Smith, and Eric N. Mack (RIP Scrap Metal Gallery for showcasing mind-blowing works by Smith in Mack!) So, the @textilemuseumofcanada is my happy place. It’s where I’d go pre-Covid to just hang out and get inspired. I HIGHLY recommend the Anna Torma show on through March 2021. Her large-scale embroideries are colourful, dense, and complex, showcasing her incredible skill and wild imagination. I was fortunate that the slot I’d booked was quiet, and allowed me ample time in front of each piece to study her technique. I couldn’t wait to get home and start a little sketch on a scrap piece of embroidery I’d started a couple months back. During the dark days of lockdown, interacting with an artist’s work like this was something I didn’t think I’d get to do again. I’m so grateful to frontline and public-facing workers & volunteers for giving me this opportunity. Stay safe and healthy. Thanks for reading.” - Jill Thorp-Shepherd, Development Coordinator

"Hiya. Welcome back and happy Wednesday! Viewing art in person is not easy right now, but if you’re able - and have access to art where you live - I highly recommend booking a visit, putting on a mask, and giving it a try. @PatelBrownGallery was the first gallery I’d visited since February, and 'Adapt/Pivot' was the perfect return to the irl art experience, offering works by an amazing and varied group of artists including Shary Boyle, Vanessa Brown, Nicholas Galanin, Alexa Hatanaka, Anique Jordan, Rajni Perera, Nep Sidhu, Howie Tsui, and Naama Tsabar. There were linocuts, photography, paintings, and sculptures; featuring beadwork, porcelain, embroidery and zari stitch. As a maker, I was drawn to the hand-printed, starched and quilted, paper Haori works by Alexa Hatanaka, each a delicate meditation on labour, process, time and history. Another favourite were the stunning black and white photographs by Anique Jordan, that stopped me in my tracks, not only for their beauty and sculptural quality, but because they reminded me how woefully rare it still is to see powerful depictions of Black bodies on gallery walls, and how urgently that needs to change. Next up: my visit to the Anna Torma show at the Textile Museum of Canada. Bye for now!" - Jill Thorp-Shepherd, Development Coordinator Image 1: Alex Hatanaka, ‘mottainai, too good to waste,’ 2020. Image 2: Anique Jordan, ‘Darkie,’ 2018.

"Hi! I want to introduce myself. I’m Jill and the Development Coordinator at TBA. I have worked in arts admin in Toronto for 20+ years, and have had the privilege to contribute to so many amazing organizations and teams throughout that time. Instead of using a personal photo for my intro, I wanted to share this random pre-COVID staff shot, featuring some of the amazing people that worked so hard to bring the Toronto Biennial of Art to fruition in 2019. Every day I am inspired, challenged, and humbled by my colleagues. They continually support me and lift me up, as I play a small supporting role, in the ongoing preparations to present free and accessible contemporary art, throughout the GTA, from September-December in 2021 (Sign up for our newsletter for announcements and updates! Link in bio.) I was asked to facilitate this week’s takeover, though I don’t personally have an IG account, so I thought I’d share some of the art that I’ve been out to see recently irl. I hope you’ll check back in Wednesday to find out more." - Jill Thorp-Shepherd, Development Coordinator

"In the latest issue of Flash Art, Elise Hunchuck considers Susan Schuppli’s 2019 film 'Learning from Ice' (commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art) in the context of other artistic projects on glacial melt and the landscapes of climate crisis – namely Olafur Eliasson’s The Glacier Melt Series and Roni Horn’s Vatnasafn (a library of glacial water). Hunchuck argues that “These are stories of friction and pressure, of bodies upon — and within — bodies, of worlds upon — and within — worlds…[in Schuppli’s work] glaciers come together as communities of individual entities, living and nonliving, under the pressures of temperature and atmosphere. Glaciers begin to form when snow falls, remains, and accumulates in the same area throughout the year, year after year. As layers of fresh snow fall onto older snow, any and all particles — soil, pollen, particulate — become trapped between old snow and new snow, and as the weight of the new snow presses down, forcing air out from between the flakes of snow (in what becomes called the snowpack), material traces of the time between snowfall and compression become trapped between molecules and within small air bubbles. As more snow accumulates and as the snowpack and ice move down to depths of hundreds of meters, the air bubbles become subsumed into the crystalline structure of the ice itself; though glacial ice can appear to have no air bubbles, it still holds trapped air. As the snow turns into ice, and as the ice begins to flow outward and downward under the pressure of its own weight, it becomes a glacier. Schuppli’s artistic research expressly reconfigures and recasts glaciers (her work focuses on Arctic environments) as a ‘vast information network composed of material as well as cultural sensors that are registering and transmitting the signals of pollution and climate change.’ " - Katie Lawson, Assistant Curator @sprngchckn 📸 : The glacier melt series 1999/2019, Fláajökull, 2019. Details. 30 C-prints, each 12 × 35.8 × 1 in. Photography by Michael Waldrep / Studio Olafur Eliasson. Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles. © 2019 Olafur Eliasson.

“Dionne Brand wrote recently in The Star, “But the pandemic situates you in waiting. So much waiting, you gain clarity.” And in this waiting, many of the learnings from TBA2019 are sitting with me. One of those stems from the immersive mural by artist and gardener Caitlin Taguibao (@taggybowow) which encompassed the Programs Hub at TBA’s venue in the Portlands: the shell of a former auto dealership. Her “Flourish and Unfold” (2019) reflected on the ecological relationships between the living and non-living, and the possibilities for “inhabiting the ruins of the present”. Every school workshop in that space, and other programs curated there by Myung-Sun Kim and myself with the support of our amazing team, was framed by those resilient networks moving between the cracks of brick and mortar. As I wait with this work at the end of a week in which I’ve leaned heavily on food metaphors, I’ll reach for one more: leftovers, the remains of the recipes which have cooked up the “normal” curricula, institutions and economies we inhabit. In the last months, I’ve heard many people expressing their struggles to imagine the short and long-term futures of education, health, housing, food security. And I wonder whether that has to do with how many leftovers are occupying the proverbial cold storage of what are meant to be shared resources. We need to make space, deciding together on what is worth keeping and what shouldn’t stay. How might our struggling imaginations flourish and unfold in now emptied exhibition spaces, universities and auditoriums? What healing pacts between the living and non-living would manifest an abundance of multiple futures that aren’t reliant on leftover metaphors? A final Ppps. (though there’s not enough space in this algorithm) With appreciation for my colleagues in “the kitchen”, long distance conversation partners and continued collaborators’ methods, mnemonic devices, and survival strategies, cohabiting the waiting and guiding next steps beyond the ruins.” - Clare Butcher, Programs Curator @bighairclare ——— 📷 : Caitlin Taguibao, "Flourish and Unfold", 2019; with card: Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, "With/out Modernity Cards", 2019.

“Just before Canada went into lockdown, I had the privilege of participating in the second convening of “Under the Mango Tree: a self-organized gathering of unlearning” (@utmt_santiniketan) in Santiniketan, West Bengal, India. Connected via long lines of questions and methods, a group of artists + educators came together with a dynamic cohort of students and university staff under tree canopies (mangos included) in circles of learning within the experimental pedagogical hub conceived by Rabindranath Tagore 100 years ago. This kind of classroom, in the open air + surrounded by daily routines, requires a different understanding of body, attention, + community than a room bound by solid walls. How might this context require a recalibration of how we sit, move, listen, + organize ourselves? What pasts and futures of learning + unlearning are here? These questions led artist + professor Dharitri Boro (@ghumakkad_ladkii) and I to food, which for both of us was an essential ingredient in this gathering. While there are consistent practices of cooking together amongst the students, there is not always time to digest the gestures, modes, politics, histories and ethics which these practices incorporate. In-corp-orate: to put into the body. Over five days we worked together with students and members of the Santhal community to learn from the land around us, and the struggle for food sovereignty and equitable access to resources in the province. We identified leaves to create vessels for eating and drinking, steamed fish and vegetables in parcels of ginger and mustard seed, and created a campus garden using leftover seeds. It was within all this, and the gentle choreography of students serving one another at meals, that I began to glimpse a future – one of many I hope – for education. The soil beneath, bearing root systems of legacies and memories, grounded these emergent shoots and radicands. Here, to paraphrase the initiative Planting Justice, empires of epistemology could be composted. Pps. So much gratitude to the organizers, collaborators, cooks, + contributors who created this and future circles of learning!” - Clare Butcher, Programs Curator @bighairclare

“My gran and I have shared some of our best conversations in her kitchen. We’re the bakers in the family which is a specific kind of bond. As she’s trustingly shared her trade secrets for flaky pastry, sponge cake, rock buns and other standards which form part of our Southern African imperial inheritance, we’ve gotten to talk about some things rarely spoken of outside that intimate space. While whisking an egg white with a fork worn down from decades of the same repeated gesture, she’s shared with me her fears of the future, her mother’s struggle with mental health, her grandmother’s arrival in what was called “Rhodesia”, and her relationship with terms like “racism” and “apartheid”. These tools and stories, together with her handwritten recipes – always accredited to the recipe’s author and spattered with flecks of use – are an archive of lived and sprawling proportions. Similar to the more formal structures we might have in mind when we say the word “archive”, there are also gaps and redactions here. Different though, in that the imperfect wisdom of living archives is not always acknowledged, nurtured or preserved, as we’ve so starkly borne witness to in the last weeks and months through this pandemic. How will we collectively honour the loss of so many living archives? What practices might we put in place to steward those kitchen conversations while we can and hold nourishing knowledge? Not in answer to these questions but perhaps in spirit, earth historian Lauret Savoy posits in her book “Trace” (2015), “For if the health of this land is its capacity for self-renewal, then the health of the human family could, in part, be an intergenerational capacity for locating ourselves within many inheritances…” - Clare Butcher, Programs Curator @bighairclare

“Okay, so this image needs some context. Yes, that’s me, Clare Butcher - one of the curators for TBA Public Programming and Learning, looking pretty hangry, about to dig into a cake that our team and a number of guest contributors and participants would, in moments, partake of as we closed the last day of the inaugural biennial. A snow storm is raging outside. My first ever in Toronto, having arrived in the softness of spring only a few months before. Though I didn’t make this cake, it stands for me as an important reminder of many aspects of what it means to learn, collaborate, celebrate together. It is also a cake, but bear with me. The temporariness an event like a biennial often tends to obscure the ongoing physical, collective, intellectual and careful labour taking place in what we could call “the kitchen” of practices which bring about moments of encounter. The material ingredients and muscle memories, the personal and historical dimensions, as well as the complex layers of context that make up the the “what” and “how” of gathering and learning also need time for digestion. And now months, and some would say worlds, away from that stormy day, it’s even clearer how critical slow cooked, intergenerational and generous ways of being in relationship are. Over the coming days, I hope to share with you some notes from the kitchen conversations, critical tools and recalcitrant recipes that are asking me to consider the shapes and scales which embodied knowledge and care can take. Let’s get cooking! Ps. Thanks to Yuula Benevolski for commemorating this cake to the archive.” - Clare Butcher, Programs Curator @bighairclare