Jeffrey Gibson: A Parent’s Guide to Navigating Biennials

Of course, even with that re-envisioning, the other, more uneven group exhibitions would still stumble. In 2019, the chaotic presentations at a former Volvo dealership downtown and the Small Arms Inspection Building, once a WWII munitions factory, in the nearby city of Mississauga, were spirited. While I can appreciate the choice this time around to pull back and embrace the openness and contemplation — or even dwell sympathetically on how the pandemic might have curtailed exhibition planning — it felt cold and clinical in execution. At the Small Arms, the material evidence of performative activations within the Eric-Paul Riege and Jatiwangi art Factory works — the regalia laying on the floor of Riege’s pseudo-childhood home, the Factory’s unplayed terracotta instruments — evoke a you-had-to-be-there pastness. 

Worst, the building’s airy windows created unfortunate reflection issues that distract from an otherwise absorbing trio of framed Denyse Thomasos charcoal works and the CRT monitors in an installation by Timothy Yanick Hunter, recently long-listed for the Sobey Award. (Never mind that upon my second visit the stacked free-standing LCD monitors within Hunter’s installation were off, with an apologetic “sorry … temporarily out of service” sign positioned in front. When I reached out to the Biennial’s PR for comment, I was told that the building has power issues and occasionally goes out, impacting the media artworks onsite: “the artist and curator have been aware of the situation.”) While I let my daughter crawl over a large coffee table in an adjacent empty cafe area, I felt that what stood out most was the exhibition site’s historical “character,” and how its architectural elements — like the steel factory windows — loomed too largely.

(This also wasn’t an isolated incident: Ange Loft’s outdoor video installation at Fort York was similarly underserved by its poor presentation: a three-channel video installation, flat screens viewed from outdoors through the windows of Fort York’s museum, with a muted soundtrack. When I saw it on a cold April afternoon, I must have crisscrossed Fort York a number of times in blustery winds and ice pellets before encountering the installation. My frustration — glass reflection! Poor wayfinding! — unfortunately overwhelmed my ability to actually take on the work. This was all the more disappointing because Loft participated in both biennial editions and helped draft an Indigenous briefing on the waterfront that assisted the curators and other artists.)

Sometimes the art itself seems bent over backwards in service to its exhaustive research. At the 5 Lower Jarvis exhibition site — an awkward glass box in the lower level of a corporatized space near the city’s waterfront — viewers are asked to sit in the squat, cushioned stools to take in the artful piles of government reports accompanying Susan Schuppli’s COLD CASES installation. Dominated by a wall-sized infographic vinyl that tracks ice deaths, this seems like a zealous display for analytics following the emergence of “thermo-politics.” To me, these gestures allude to the artist’s desire for viewers to acknowledge and commend the sheer amount of research; unfortunately, the setup renders the data mostly inaccessible — the space did not seem to be designed for viewers to spend the necessary time with said research. (My daughter, however, enjoyed chewing on the headphone cushions.) 

By the time I reached the biennial’s Perth location — a former Pentecostal church in the city’s west end, and optimistically billed as the organization’s future home — my attention to its challenges shifted toward the overextended curation. A key phrase in the biennial’s curatorial vision is “polyphonic histories”; the music theory term operates as a shorthand for a collaborative curatorial mode with curators, artists, and even literal forces of nature at its center. But with the exception of the well-situated Andrea Carlson and Nadia Belerique installations, which maximized the surrounding architecture, my eye got caught in the spatial layers of process-based methodologies. A corner library with shelves of research materials and even studies by some of the participating artists, a learning space with its own title wall extolling “collectivity” and “unlearning” as their programmatic tenets. Then, with the click of my phone, I can swipe through the plethora of contact-free interpretative materials: QR code-activated audio guides, a mobile art curriculum, a context brief, and a podcast series. 

All of this frames well for screen-based consumption, especially if you are the type of art viewer invested in the Instagrammable potential of decoloniality. But within the safety gates that surround this semi-post-pandemic-vision of contemporary art, all this extensive babyproofing to ensure a safe, trigger-free experience results in the same protracted meanings and rhetorical mush. 

Here, polyphonic histories don’t necessarily sing. Instead, multiple notes read as one.

What Water Knows, The Land Remembers, the 2022 edition of the Toronto Biennial of Art, continues at multiple exhibition sites in Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area through June 5. The exhibition was co-curated by Candice Hopkins, Katie Lawson, and Tairone Bastien.