Toronto Biennial of Art highlights this week: Performances by Sister Co-Resister | The View from Here with Bonnie Devine | Dispatch with SKETCH Working Arts

Claire Lim and Emily Mun, to my past and future ancestors. Photo by Stefan Hagen, Open Source Gallery, 2019. Courtesy Annie Wong.

With only one week remaining for Toronto’s inaugural Biennial, now is the time to plan your last-minute visit or to revisit a favourite! From November 22 to 28, attendees can enjoy 100+ artworks, and events ranging from performances and concerts, to talks, workshops and artist-led games.

In addition, we are excited to share that beyond the Biennial dates, we are offering ongoing programming and learning projects for the public to experience, including the free Tools for Learning Toolbox.

For a complete overview of exhibiting artists, locations, and hours, plus, the Programs and Events calendar, visit our website.

This week’s highlights include:

Isonomia in Toronto

Performance by Sister Co-Resister
Program: Currents
Date: Fri, Nov 22
Time: 7-9pm
Location: 259 Lake Shore Blvd E

My sister by the river is a séance to mourn and move memories of lost feminist kin into the future. Performed by an ad hoc coven of artists, this séance engages rituals of radical remembrance and hospitality as a method of solidarity building among the living and the dead.

Performance by Sister Co-Resister
Program: Currents
Date: Sat, Nov 23
Time: 2-4pm
Location: Small Arms Inspection Building

This event will be a conversation with Sister Co-Resister and collaborators to their share letters written to Spirits, the intentions behind each member’s ritual practice, and other processes involved in the making of the collective séance

My sister by the river was conceived and created by Annie Wong with Nedda Baba, Yara El Safi, Frizz Kid, and co-produced by Marilyn Fernandes and Pamila Matharu.

Unsettling: Settlers of Catan, 2019. Courtesy Toronto Biennial of Art

Talking Treaties – Text and Sound with Ange Loft and Jumblies Theatre
Program: Currents
Date: Sat, Nov 23
Time: 11am–1pm
Location: Small Arms Inspection Building

Open to adults and older youth of all experiences, backgrounds, and abilities, the activity begins with a presentation of the Treaty text and images from the previous workshop, along with the poetry from the Before All Else: Place and Relationship activity pack. In small teams, these texts are collaboratively disassembled and reassembled as short spoken and/or musical performances. Invited artists and musicians join the creative process, encouraging participants to co-create, culminating in a site-specific performance piece that takes place across the Small Arms site.

Unsettling: Settlers of Catan with Golboo Amani
Program: Co-Relations
Date: Sat, Nov 23
Time: 2– 5pm
Location: 259 Lake Shore Blvd E

Unsettling: Settlers of Catan is a playful, discursive intervention of the popular board game, Settlers of Catan. Artist Golboo Amani disrupts its colonial narratives with methodologies of treaties, collaboration, and allyship, and inserts new game pieces, cards, and rules. With these new tools, players develop strategies of building on, and repatriation of, the colonized landscape, offering the opportunity to play out various strategies for radical, social, political, and industrial change.

Bonnie Devine, Titled/Untitled, 2018. Courtesy the artist.

The View from Here with Bonnie Devine and Luis Jacob
Program: Currents
Date: Mon, Nov 25
Time: 2–4pm
Location: Union Station

In response to various objects in Luis Jacob’s installation The View From Here, Bonnie Devine introduces a surveyor’s transit from her project Circles and Lines: Michi Saagiig, 2018. View-finding instruments have been used since antiquity to mark out, allot, and regulate land, including the land of the Mississauga Nation that was transferred to the British in the Toronto Purchase of 1787, and the Toronto Indenture of 1805. Bringing Jacob’s sculpture The Riddle, 2018, into conversation with the transit, Devine engages visitors in a discussion around cartography, ownership and the weaponization of the Colonial gaze.

Dispatch with SKETCH Working Arts
Program: Co-Relations
Date: Mon, Nov 25
Time: 6–9pm
Location: SKETCH Working Arts, Artscape Youngplace, 180 Shaw St

In this iteration of the Dispatch program, young artists with SKETCH Working Arts—Angaer Arop, Beerus Junior Ayrah Taerb, Kim Ninkuru, with remarks from Ola Mohammed and Anique Jordan—respond to Syrus Marcus Ware’s dispatch from the future in a post-apocalyptic state, and post-climate change. It offers both caution and hope for a future wherein we all survive. Young artists respond with their pressing concerns and initiate action in the present day as they reimagine a different future.

Co-presented in partnership with SKETCH Working Arts.

Tools for Learning Toolbox
Designed by Chris Lee and Ali Qadeer
Program: Tools for Learning
Available for download via torontobiennial.org/tools

The free Tools for Learning Toolbox, designed by Chris Lee and Ali Qadeer, offers a host of collective activities which invite visiting schools, community groups, and others to make and repair—or even undo and refuse—relationships between their own experiences and the artistic practices utilized within the inaugural Biennial. Inspired by the approaches of many Biennial participants, as well as educators and thinkers, the Tools for Learning Toolbox can be downloaded for free and activated in exhibition spaces or closer to home.

About the Toronto Biennial of Art
The Toronto Biennial of Art (the Biennial/TBA) is a new international contemporary visual arts event that is as culturally connected and diverse as Toronto itself. For 10 weeks every two years, the city will be transformed by exhibitions, talks, and performances that reflect the local context while engaging with the world’s most pressing issues of our time. In an effort to make contemporary art available to everyone, the Biennial’s free, citywide programming aims to inspire people, bridge communities, and contribute to global conversations from a variety of perspectives.

For more information, visit: torontobiennial.org, @torontobiennial, and #TObiennial19 on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

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Media Contacts
For additional information, Libby Mark or Heather Meltzer at Bow Bridge Communications, LLC, Toronto: +1 647-544-8441, New York City, +1 347-460-5566; info@bow-bridge.com.