What to See at the Toronto Biennial of Art

Toronto is once again becoming a vast exhibition space. The fourth edition of the Toronto Biennial of Art (TBA), “Things Fall Apart,” runs through December 20, 2026, bringing together artists from around the world to museums, galleries, and public spaces throughout the vibrant Canadian city. The biennial’s central exhibition hub is the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, while the broader program extends to several institutions including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Aga Khan Museum, and the CN Tower. This year, TBA has cast a broader net with commissions across North America, including in Detroit, New York City, and Anchorage.

In organizing the biennial, curator Allison Glenn asked a deceptively direct question: “What can we learn from artists who explore rupture as an ontological tool or a way of understanding?” The answer, it seems, is vast. 

“We are, and have lived through, seemingly insurmountable instability,” Glenn tells Galerie. “Looking back about 40 years to the first Culture Wars in the United States, there is evidence of how artists and arts workers created organizations and systems in response to the defunding of artists. What emerged from this moment are organizations like Creative Capital and Art Matters, and I do still believe in the power of our sector to nimbly respond to change, while being frustrated that we often have to do so.”

Rupture becomes a starting point—ranging from personal loss to collective tragedy. The biennial title also bears a number of references, including Chinua Achebe’s influential novel. “While many of the artists in “Things Fall Apart” are looking to the generative nature of rupture, this framework does not posit this nor assume that all moments of fissure that artists are examining have the potential to be generative,” Glenn says.

Spread across the city (and the continent), the biennial offers countless lines of inquiry that visitors can–and should–explore for days. With so much on view, here are the top projects to see from the main exhibition and corollary projects around Toronto.

What to see at Art Museum at the University of Toronto

1. Taqralik Partridge, umiakkut (by boat), (2026)

In her moving, immersive installation, Taqralik Partridge draws inspiration from the journey of her grandmother and her siblings across the Hudson Strait, from Kimmirut in Nunavut to Nunavik, Québec.

“I wanted to honor her journey and the fact that Inuit have been traveling with only our own means of transportation across land and sea; it’s harsh, but it’s our home,” the artist says. “I wanted to create something beautiful to reflect on this.” 

At the center of the work is the umiaq, a sealskin, whale-bone and driftwood boat. Surrounding the boat is an installation of mirrors, projections, and sound that incorporates interviews with relatives and recordings of water. 

The work is especially attuned to Glenn’s curatorial framework of waterways as connective tissue. “I wanted to expand upon ideas that were laid out in the first two Biennials, and look at how a city like Toronto, on the shores of Lake Ontario, connects to global waterways,” Glenn explains. “With “Things Fall Apart,” water networks—including trade routes, voyages, and bodies of water—become active agents in the development of this Biennial.” Rather than treating water as a boundary, Partridge presents it as a carrier of memory, family, and cultural knowledge.

2. Rebecca Belmore Gichigami, (2026)

A striking meditation on humanity and environmental devastation comes from Rebecca Belmore, whose installation Gichigami grew out of time spent with her family in Thunder Bay. The area is home to Lake Superior and a nearby park frequented by unhoused populations. Reflecting on the daily act of watching them, Belmore remembered an experience in which she saw an endangered golden eagle on a trash pile. Using these as conceptual starting points, she created a moving and unsettling installation that consists of seven garments covered in layers of discarded plastic water bottles. 

During the biennial’s opening weekend, participants will wear the garments in a silent procession through Queen’s Park before leaving them in the gallery. Joining these objects that turn waste into garments is a secondhand muskrat coat that invokes a Nishnaabeg creation story in which the muskrat dives into floodwaters to retrieve a piece of land, a poignant warning for the future of humanity. 

3. Bonnie Devine Multiple works, (all 2026)

In new commissions made for the biennial, Toronto-based artist Bonnie Devine examines the overarching themes of rupture and waterways through the lens of the Great Lakes and significant bodies of maritime trade and transport worldwide, including the Strait of Hormuz. 

“When I was thinking about who to include, Bonnie was someone I really wanted to have in the biennial,” Glenn says. “There was so much resonance in the way we look at the Great Lakes on different sides of the border.” In mixed media paintings, Devine depicted these crucial maritime arteries in abstract, bird’s-eye views. Looking at generative waterways, she considered the similarities between choke points of trade and arteries in the human body, both of which sustain life in different ways.

4. Cameron Harvey Multiple works, (all 2026)

The chaparral shrub, a hardy Southern California plant reshaped by wildfires, is the starting point for Cameron Harvey’s Family of Things series of paintings. Harvey began developing the works while displaced from her home during the Eaton and Palisades fires in early 2025, translating plants encountered on walks into luminous artworks.

“The seed of my practice is thinking about how humans are part of nature and all living things are going through something together,” the artist says. “I was thinking about the changes that are unseen.” The paintings resemble giant leaves with a visible channel down the center, like a large vein or passageway. “The image of the midline became the simplest way to depict what unites us–it’s the physical empty space like a spinal cord or the channel within a leaf that allows life-sustaining elements to travel through,” Harvey explains. “I think of the paintings as figures, but not necessarily human.”

Commissioned for the biennial, Harvey’s paintings are among the works that extend TBA’s reach beyond Toronto; part of a larger series, four additional paintings are on view at the Anchorage Museum in Alaska. 

Top Corollary Projects Around Toronto

1. Dawoud Bey Material Histories, Living Landscapes (through July 4, 2027) | Art Gallery of Ontario

Turning his attention to the relationship between landscape and Black diasporic history, photographer Dawoud Bey examines traces of people who have been marginalized or erased, including the journeys of enslaved people seeking freedom and the landscapes through which those histories unfolded.

Working with Glenn, Bey conceived of Material Histories, Living Landscapes as a site-specific installation within the Art Gallery of Ontario’s collection of African art and objects. Adding his own touch, Bey selected four African sculptures to appear alongside his photographs and film. The dialogue creates a visual and historical bridge between North America and Africa, giving the installation an additional layer of resonance within a biennial preoccupied with rupture, migration, and the passage of people across water.

2. Nanibah “Nani” ChaconWhat happens when they steal our babies . . ., (2026) | Gallery TPW

For her commission at Gallery TPW, Diné and Chicana artist Nanibah “Nani” Chacon created a stunning, intricate wall installation with paint, string, and nails. The work draws inspiration from the Diné creation story of Tééhoołtsódii, the Big Water Monster. In the story, a coyote steals Tééhoołtsódii’s children, resulting in a massive flood. At the center of her installation is the coyote carrying a child, around which Chacon has added a geometric pattern inspired by Diné rugs.

“I am fascinated by the cycles that ground us,” Chacon says. “In thinking of Tééhoołtsódii’s story, I was reflected on our current state in the world culturally and physically. We’ve witnessed genocide, epidemics of missing and murdered Native women, and the disrepair of culture and humanity. I see these as reflected in ecological disrepair, like the flood Tééhoołtsódii created with her overwhelming emotions.”

3. Andrés Ramírez Gaviria Sources (Toronto), (2026) | CN Tower 

At perhaps the most iconic landmark in Toronto, the soaring CN Tower, Andrés Ramírez Gaviria’s Sources (Toronto) transforms astronomical radio signals into a sequence of light projections. The site-specific installation draws from signals from within our own galaxy, as well as transmissions from pulsars and quasars billions of years ago.

The work introduces a sense of deep time to a biennial otherwise grounded in human histories. Gaviria’s slowly pulsing patterns reflect the movement of celestial bodies, while the translation from radio waves into light introduces an element of loss: information changes as it moves between forms.

4. Dawit L. Petros Emergent Formations (2025) | Aga Khan Museum

Dawit L. Petros’s film Emergent Formations (2025) examines how historical narratives are constructed and shaped by systems of power, considering the idea of “imagined geographies”—the ways places and histories are represented rather than understood as fixed or objective truths. 

“Rupture can provide a site of possibility and a critical reframing,” says Glenn. “Within this film that traces intersecting histories and perspectives on an 1884 British Empire military rescue expedition in Khartoum, Sudan, text-based statements come together with quotes from others, acting as measured punctum; advancing, reframing, and shaping the narrative.”

The work layers different voices, encouraging viewers to reconsider how historical events are interpreted and remembered, and the ongoing ramifications of such narratives. Across six installations at the museum, Petros further reimagines the Nile as an active anticolonial presence, transforming the river from geographical backdrop into a figure that participates in the work’s historical inquiry.