Toronto Biennial of Art was founded with a structural premise unusual within the international biennial conversation: that the question of whose land the biennial stages on should be the principal curatorial frame, not a preface to it.
The Toronto Biennial of Art opened its first edition in September 2019 — the second-newest of the major North American biennials, founded fourteen years after Performa, eleven after Prospect New Orleans, and a decade after the New Museum Triennial. Its founding Executive Director, Patrizia Libralato — who co-founded the biennial with Susannah Rosenstock and Melony Ward — had spent the better part of two decades in the Canadian and Italian gallery system (Wynick/Tuck Gallery, then Associate Director at Sable-Castelli Gallery until 2000, then five years in Italy on public and private gallery exhibitions in Venice, Verona and Vicenza), and the better part of a decade since her return to Toronto building the institutional and philanthropic infrastructure for a biennial the city did not have, in a city that had — across the late 1990s and 2000s — expanded its contemporary art infrastructure (the Art Gallery of Ontario's Frank Gehry renovation, the rebuilt Royal Ontario Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto's relocation to the Sterling Road tower) without producing a biennial of its own. The institutional case for the Toronto Biennial — that Canada's largest English-speaking city needed a biennial commensurate with its international art-world standing — was not in itself a novel argument.
What was novel about the Toronto Biennial was the curatorial frame the founding team — led by Indigenous curator Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation) with Tairone Bastien — chose as the biennial's founding premise. The 1st Toronto Biennial of Art (21 September – 1 December 2019), titled The Shoreline Dilemma, took the shoreline of Lake Ontario as its principal curatorial frame. The biennial was sited not in Toronto's downtown museum district but along a stretch of the lakeshore — from the Small Arms Inspection Building in Mississauga at one end, through the Power Plant and the harbourfront warehouses, to 259 Lake Shore Boulevard East. The founding premise was that the lakeshore — its ecology, its industrial-and-post-industrial history, the layered histories of Indigenous, settler, and migrant communities along it — was not the biennial's setting but the biennial's subject. The Lake Ontario watershed extends across Treaty 13 territory (the 1805 Toronto Purchase from the Mississaugas of the Credit), the Dish With One Spoon Wampum agreement between the Haudenosaunee and the Anishinaabe, the historical Carrying Place trail, and into the territories of multiple First Nations whose treaty and aboriginal-title claims to the watershed are continuing. The biennial took these histories not as background but as foreground.
The institutional argument the curatorial frame made — that the biennial form ought to begin with the question of whose land it stages on, not append the question to its programme through a perfunctory land acknowledgement — was new within the international biennial conversation in 2019. It is not new in the scholarship on settler-colonial contemporary art, particularly the body of work by Indigenous artists and curators in Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Australia. What was new was its institutional weight at biennial scale: the curatorial frame was not a thematic gesture but the structural premise, and the choice of Indigenous co-curatorial leadership in Candice Hopkins was not a representational gesture but a curatorial decision about whose epistemological framework would organise the biennial's reading of the work.
The 2nd Toronto Biennial of Art (26 March – 5 June 2022), titled What Water Knows, The Land Remembers, was curated by a three-person team — Tairone Bastien, Candice Hopkins and Katie Lawson, with contributions from former TBA curators Clare Butcher and Myung-Sun Kim — and extended the watershed premise — engaging the Great Lakes ecosystem as a single hydrological unit and the Indigenous knowledge systems organised around it. The 2022 edition opened during the continuing pandemic and shaped its institutional argument by treating the relationship between human and non-human ecologies as both subject matter and curatorial method. The 3rd Toronto Biennial of Art (21 September – 1 December 2024), titled Precarious Joys, was curated by Dominique Fontaine and Miguel A. López, with Hopkins's continuing curatorial advisory role — a shift toward Latin American and African-diasporic conversations while preserving the lakeshore-and-watershed institutional frame.
The institutional outcome of three editions is that Toronto Biennial has produced a distinctive curatorial-institutional argument that has found international resonance disproportionate to the biennial's youth. The biennial's continuing premise — that the curatorial-historical work of the biennial form ought to include the work of making legible the land it operates on — has been studied within the post-2020 international biennial literature, and shaped the curatorial registers of subsequent biennials including the Sydney Biennale (whose 2026 edition opens under Hoor Al Qasimi with a First Nations Curatorial Fellow in Bruce Johnson McLean) and the documenta 16 curatorial process. Whether the institutional argument the Toronto Biennial has made will hold across continuing editions — and whether the institutional model is sustainable beyond the founding philanthropic generation — is the principal continuing question.
The institutional architecture
Toronto Biennial of Art operates as an independent not-for-profit cultural organisation under founding Executive Director Patrizia Libralato, funded by a private philanthropic base (the Power Corporation of Canada, the McLean Foundation, the Andrew and Valerie Pringle Family Foundation among others), provincial Ontario Arts Council and federal Canada Council support, and the City of Toronto. The institutional model is structurally distinct from the major museum-anchored biennials (the Whitney, the Sydney Biennale at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the São Paulo Bienal at the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion) — Toronto Biennial does not have a permanent flagship venue and re-sites itself for each edition. The 4th Toronto Biennial of Art is scheduled to run 26 September – 20 December 2026 under New York-based curator Allison Glenn (Artistic Director of The Shepherd, Detroit), titled Things Fall Apart.
