The Toronto Biennial of Art Loses Focus as it Zooms Out

There are plenty of reasons for regarding our neighbor to the North as genuinely different. Canada is an hour away by plane, but its art world practically exists through the looking glass. There is a much larger pot of funding at both the provincial and federal level, and with it a bigger commitment to showcasing their work at home. The infrastructure that supports a comfortable standard of living doesn’t necessarily translate to a platform for world success, which has resulted in a funny paradox where greater resources have made an already small scene seem even more insular. The Canadian artists I’m most familiar with are either certified legends (Alex Colville, General Idea, Jeff Wall), market darlings (David Altmejd, Matthew Wong), social media stars (Chloe Wise), or who are thoroughly New York-based (Julien Ceccaldi, Lotus L. Kang, Mathieu Malouf, Tau Lewis). As of writing this, there is still no artistic equivalent to match The Weeknd or Tate McRae...

Even though the curators can occasionally overstate its political importance, a through line that unites many of the pieces is the sheer material invention on display. The warp and weft of textiles is a favorite metaphor for generational linkages, and some of the strongest work plays on the received ideas of traditional craft while swerving into much weirder and singular directions. Peruvian artist Cristina Flores Pescorán takes traditional Chancay weaving as a starting point to give distorted shape to her experience of navigating a cancer diagnosis and the hell of healthcare bureaucracy. Her piece “Acariciar el corazón del hueso” (2023-2024) is an ominous behemoth that turns the tactility of her fabric into a visceral analog for bone marrow. “Diario” (2022) is even more striking, a video that narrates her claustrophobia in real time as she sews a mask of gauze around herself.

Balinese artist Citra Sasmita’s paintings of fearsome goddesses are bloody enough on their own, but reach another level entirely when you realize that her canvas is reticulated python skin. In their 2021 video “Ofrenda,” the Nicaraguan performer Elyla chews and spits up an indigenous mask historically associated with Sandinista rebels and the local queer community, making sure to focus the camera on the torrent of blood cascading out of their mouth as they do. Even though I don’t fully buy the piece as a metaphor for the “violence of mestizaje, the ideology of whitening, and the colonial wounds resulting from the erasure of queer and Indigenous heritage,” it’s a thrillingly direct and gnarly confrontation.

Rajni Perera, who was a standout at EXPO Chicago earlier this year, is represented twice over: in the Collisions gallery and the Toronto Sculpture Garden. Perera’s “Vimana (N1 Starfighter)” is another major high point, a remake of a spacecraft from Star Wars in the style of Sri Lankan paper lanterns. It is absolutely lovely, a piece of public art that wears its heritage and geekiness lightly and stylishly. It’s unthreatened by the public and doesn’t need to justify itself, it can simply be what it is without emphasizing its larger political importance. The same is true of Ahmed Umar’s rework of obscure queer Sudanese folk songs, which serve as a flex of the artist’s skill as both a filmmaker and researcher. Every aspect of their video installation, “Truth Bears No Scandal ( الـواضِح مو فـاضِح)” is perfectly observed, as they shapeshift from Arabic diva to plaintive crooner and back again. The effect is of watching the best music video you’ve ever seen.

On the other hand, many pieces live and die by how specifically the artist wants us to engage with them. Rudy Loewe’s paintings of a trans Anansi “takes arachnids and their generative networks… as a way to explore transgender resistance and the invention of survival technologies.” Maria Ezcurra’s renderings of endangered birds on cardboard “symbolize the resilience and vulnerability of migrant populations.” Justine A. Chambers “investigate[s] a broad spectrum of minor gestures associated with resistance” by flailing around like a glitching video game character. This makes it a very rare thing: a virtue signal of a virtue signal. The show reaches its nadir with Pamila Matharu’s “tere naal _ with you” (2024), which serves as a tribute to (fellow Biennial artist) Winsom Winsom and a provincially-funded Black arts center she established from the 1990s. This manifests as a recreated safe space, an edgeless and twee celebration of government funding that’s speculative radicalism is undercut by its lame sloganeering (“THANK BLACK WOMEN”) and how literally state-sanctioned it is.

A recurring point of conversation among friends was how gentrification had made Toronto feel progressively more soulless, how the rising cost of living and the blight of ugly skyscrapers had made them feel more alienated by their hometown than ever. Apart from being relatable as a New Yorker, I was more surprised by how few works included addressed this reality head-on. It was interesting to observe how many of the art venues were held in post-industrial spaces like The Auto BLDNG or the Power Plant, which kept throwing into question for me whether or not the Biennial had added to or was simply another outgrowth of this feeling of decline. The best show I saw during my time in Toronto was “People Person” curated by Craig Spence, a group show outside the Biennial in the rented upstairs of a former Portuguese dance hall. Stephanie Ligeti’s color-inverted painting of Canadian icon Pam Anderson, Alexa Hawksworth’s hyper-cute history of fashion and Jacob Jiayi Zhang’s ominous drawing of gay villain Peter Thiel were proof positive that the city has ample reserves of young creative talent at its disposal — and that the Biennial would have been better off by acknowledging that.

Photos courtesy of the Toronto Biennial of Art