Navigating the Epoch of Fracture: An In-Depth Review of the Fourth Toronto Biennial of Art

By Neil Price
Published by Art Review / Hyperallergic

Main Facts

The fourth edition of the Toronto Biennial of Art, titled Things Fall Apart, stands as a monumental, sprawling exhibition that interrogates how contemporary creators respond to the pressures of our late-capitalist epoch. Running through December 20, the festival is spearheaded by curator Allison Glenn—whose upbringing in Detroit, crossing back and forth into Canada via Windsor, profoundly informs her transnational worldview.

This year’s iteration brings together more than 30 international artists and collectives, expanding its footprint well beyond traditional museum walls. While anchored across 13 distinct venues in Toronto, the exhibition has also established an extended international footprint with satellite presentations in Anchorage, Alaska, and Times Square in New York City.

Central to Glenn’s curatorial vision is a deep, abiding engagement with water, using the Great Lakes watershed as a poetic and political anchor. At a time when Canada-United States diplomatic and economic relations have plummeted to unprecedented lows, the premise of a cross-border exhibition rooted in shared, fluid ecologies feels urgently appropriate. Yet, beneath its geographical coherence lies a provocative theoretical inquiry: How do artists conceptualize and survive historical, political, and ecological "rupture"?

Chronology and Evolution of the Biennial

The Toronto Biennial of Art has rapidly evolved into a major fixture on the international contemporary art calendar since its inception.

• Pre-2026 Preparations: Curator Allison Glenn began developing Things Fall Apart against a backdrop of escalating global instability, marked by supply chain collapses, intensifying climate disasters, and tightening geopolitical borders.
• January 2026: At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney declared that the international order is "in the midst of a rupture, not a transition." This pronouncement was quickly adopted into the curatorial framework of the Biennial, serving as a defining epigraph for its catalog and theoretical underpinning.
• Fall 2026 (Opening): The fourth edition officially opened across Toronto, utilizing major cultural institutions such as the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), the University of Toronto Art Centre (UTAC), the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), Mercer Union, and the Scarborough Gurdwara, alongside remote partner sites in Alaska and New York.
• Current Status: The exhibition continues to draw international critical acclaim and debate, with site-specific installations, performances, and public programming running through December 20, 2026.

Supporting Data and Key Installations

Spanning a dizzying array of mediums, geographies, and thematic concerns, the works featured in Things Fall Apart can be organized into three primary categories: historical reckonings, embodied knowledge, and geopolitical-spiritual geographies.

1. Historical Encounters and the Afterlife of Slavery

The most profound works in the exhibition treat history not as a settled narrative to be passively archived, but as an active, imaginative encounter.

• Dawoud Bey at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO): Bey presents Material Histories, Living Landscapes, combining tight clusters of landscape photographs with his two-channel video 350,000 (2023). Placed in direct dialogue with historic sculptures and ritual objects from West Africa and the Kingdom of Kongo drawn from the AGO’s collection, Bey establishes a resonant visual and sonic call-and-response across the Middle Passage. The video’s immersive point-of-view tracking shots through dense, gnarled forests, accompanied by heavy breathing, assert that the historic violence of racial slavery continues to haunt our physical environment.
• Antonio Obá at the University of Toronto Art Centre (UTAC): Visitors entering the gallery are immediately confronted by Jardim (2022–26), an installation of brass bells strung across the gallery length that only chimes when bodies brush against them, treating memory as a living performance. This leads to A Folia: travessia (2026), a monumental painting that radically reinterprets Douglas Martin’s iconic 1957 photograph of 15-year-old Dorothy Counts integrating a high school in Charlotte, North Carolina. Replacing the jeering, hostile mob with a supportive, carnivalesque procession, Obá offers a restorative alternate reality—a call to stand with Counts in courage and solidarity.

2. Embodied Knowledge and Intergenerational Survival

Moving from grand historical trajectories to intimate personal narratives, several artists look to the body and material culture as archives of resilience.

• Wen Liu at UTAC: In In Light, Where Edges Yield (2025), Liu constructs a human-scale steel-and-resin sculpture centered on a spinal column. Suspended within the structure are Chinese herbal medicines prescribed to the artist following her father’s death, glowing with a translucent, stained-glass luminescence. The work posits the body as a primary vessel of familial memory capable of sustaining us through periods of acute grief and disruption.
• Taqralik Partridge: In umiakkut (by boat) (2026), Partridge recreates the arduous historical journey her grandmother and siblings made across the Hudson Strait in a traditional umiaq. Using found materials, sewing, and beadwork inside a mirrored room, and pairing the visual with an elder’s recorded voice over a soundscape of water, Partridge constructs an intergenerational navigational map for an era of ecological collapse.

3. Re-mapping Geographies: From the Underground Railroad to the Strait of Hormuz

Several large-scale public and institutional works explore how physical infrastructure and sacred spaces can heal historical ruptures.

• Raphaël Barontini at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM): Filling the museum’s Crystal Court with towering, draped textile panels, Barontini’s Follow the North Star — a Tribute to Harriet Tubman (2026) weaves Caribbean aesthetics, water deities, and anti-slavery heroism into an expansive allegory of the Americas. The work explicitly connects the Underground Railroad—which guided freedom seekers to a Canadian society still scarred by racism—to a spiritual and collective liberation that transcends borders.
• Nirbhai (nep) Singh Sidhu in Scarborough: Located at the Scarborough Gurdwara, A Deathless Potential In Remembrance By You (2026) is a permanent architectural structure constructed using sacred earth imported from Sirhind, Punjab. Combining brick, steel, and flowing water, Sidhu crafts an environment dedicated to simran—the Sikh meditative practice of deep listening—binding spiritual awakening directly to community survival.
• Rouzbeh Akhbari at Mercer Union: Shifting focus to global capitalism and state conflict, Akhbari’s 30-minute film Of Wool and Diesel (2026) documents the illicit, informal sheep trade operating around the Strait of Hormuz. Filmed just as escalating military conflict with Iran threatened to shut down regional commerce, the piece highlights human persistence, showing how trade routes and communities outlast geopolitical borders.

Official Responses and Curatorial Intent

Curator Allison Glenn has defended the sprawling nature of the exhibition as a necessary reflection of contemporary reality. In her catalog essays and public talks, Glenn argues that art must meet the fragmented conditions of late capitalism not by attempting to piece them back together into a comforting illusion of wholeness, but by learning to operate within the cracks.

Institutional partners, including the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Toronto Biennial of Art board, have praised the exhibition for pushing contemporary art out of traditional white cubes and into dialogue with diverse communities across Ontario and beyond. The expansion into international satellite nodes in Alaska and New York has likewise been hailed by participating municipal bodies as a bold step toward transnational artistic diplomacy.

However, the exhibition’s heavy reliance on Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos formulation of "rupture" has also invited intense scrutiny from cultural critics, theorists, and philosophers participating in the Biennial’s concurrent public symposia.

Implications: Challenging the Myth of Modernist Unity

While Things Fall Apart succeeds in showcasing a dazzling array of artistic responses to contemporary anxiety, it simultaneously opens itself up to a profound philosophical critique regarding its foundational premise.

Carney’s declaration that the world is experiencing a "rupture, not a transition" relies on a silent, unexamined assumption: that there was once a stable, unified world order that has only recently broken down. As critics and observant visitors traverse the exhibition, a recurring, uncomfortable question emerges: Was there ever a time since the advent of modernity—which was fundamentally constituted by transatlantic slavery, colonial extraction, imperial conquest, forced migration, and genocide—when the global order did not feel ruinous to those on its underside?

From the perspective of Indigenous communities dispossessed of their lands, Black descendants of enslaved peoples navigating institutional racism, or populations displaced by imperial wars in the Global South, the "rupture" is not a novel, twentieth-first-century phenomenon. Rather, it is the foundational condition of modern history.

By accepting the rhetoric of "rupture" without robustly interrogating who benefited from the previous illusion of order, Things Fall Apart occasionally falls into the trap of mourning a stability that was always built on exclusion. Yet, despite this theoretical blind spot, the artists assembled by Glenn achieve something vital. Instead of offering hollow nostalgia for a broken past, they provide working toolkits for living, resisting, and imagining otherwise in the ruins.

Things Fall Apart, the fourth iteration of the Toronto Biennial of Art, remains on view at venues across Toronto and select international sites through December 20, 2026.