At the Toronto Biennial, precariousness is a good thing

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The curators of the third Toronto Biennial of Art would not be so presumptuous as to impose a theme on their 11-venue group show. Instead, they say they have listened to the vocabulary of the 36 exhibiting artists. At least from all that listening they have got a title: Precarious Joys.

That would seem a risky name for a big public event – audiences might prefer joys they can count on – but it does provide a strong organizing principle for a revelatory exhibition of international art. Themes, if I dare call them that, of the precarious, the transitory and the migratory emerge powerfully from a show that includes both existing work and 20 newly commissioned pieces.

The idea of precarity was initially inspired by sculptures of the Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña, selected for the biennial by Miguel Lopez, a Peruvian curator living in Toronto who has previously worked in Colombia, Costa Rica and Brazil as well as Europe. No surprise that there’s an impressive lineup of South and Central American artists for 2024.

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Since the 1990s, Vicuña has used scrap and natural materials washed up on beaches to create small sculptures she then allows to return to the sea, making art for the ocean rather than the gallery. There is a selection of more permanent versions of these fragile, jerry-rigged little items on the first wall of the biennial’s main hub at 32 Lisgar St., in the Queen and Dovercourt neighbourhood. They are a touching retort to materiality and acquisitiveness in art, even if Vicuña is now represented by an international gallery in New York, where she also lives when not in Santiago.

Just around the corner from her work, on a series of white walls, the Montreal artist Leila Zelli has stamped a wave of blue and black icons, stylized versions of figures protesting the hijab in Iran. The position of these women is precarious indeed: Many have disappeared into Iran’s notorious prisons. And the art itself will disappear when the biennial closes in December, creating a simple but deeply moving link between form and content.

There is significant representation of Montreal artists in the show thanks to its other co-curator, Dominique Fontaine. One of her best picks is the work of Maria Ezcurra, who was commissioned to create a public art piece outside 32 Lisgar’s north entrance, in the park fronting on Queen Street.

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She has done so by erecting a canopy on which she has suspended multiple shoes – from runners to pumps with stiletto heels – each one picked apart so that the uppers open like the wings of a bird. The Montreal artist, born in Argentina, raised in Mexico and living in Canada since 2010, has described herself as a double immigrant. And so, with this dangling display, she has created a charming metaphor for migration, both human and aviary.

Ezcurra is interested in birds: She also has impressive work inside 32 Lisgar, a large series of drawings of endangered Canadian birds, from the northern goshawk to the great blue heron, beautifully rendered on pieces of discarded cardboard. Are we throwing out species, the way we discard paper? Again there is a poignant connection between theme and materials.

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There are plenty of Indigenous artists included this year but themes of indigeneity and land, so central to the first Toronto Biennial in 2019 as it addressed its lakeshore setting, are less prominent. The most interesting work in this regard comes from Latin America, especially Guatemala and Peru.

As you come up the stairs at 32 Lisgar you are greeted by a collection of Amazonian masks by the Peruvian artist Nereyda Lopez. Installed as a lively group of animals and spirits, they are fashioned from forest materials in the tradition of the Uitoto people, an Amazonian community close to Lopez’s own Tikuna and Kukama roots. They suggest both friendly and mysterious beings, fleeting characters half-glimpsed within the forest.

They should be compared with another striking installation of masks at Union Station created by the Indigenous Alaskan artist Nicholas Galanin, whose heritage is Tlingit and Unangax: Threat Return is a series of dark woven vessels, reminiscent of both African and Northwest Coast basketry but rendered in bronze, and punctured with the eyes and mouth holes of a criminal’s black ski mask. Mounted on museum plinths in the classical architecture of the station’s western concourse, the piece reads as a layered comment on the role of museums in taking, displaying and now returning Indigenous art. Note that the holes cut in the bronze baskets render them useless as vessels.

The work of the Peruvian textile artist Cristina Flores Pescoran makes a more optimistic project of postcolonial retrieval and produces one of the biennial’s must-see installations. Pescoran, who now lives and works in the Netherlands, is reviving historic Peruvian crochet and knotting techniques. She uses Indigenous cotton, which had almost disappeared after it was banned by the colonizers so that it couldn’t compete with their plantations.

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In a ninth-floor gallery in the Tower Automotive Building in the Junction Triangle (now known as the Auto BLDG), Pescoran pins up a series of small knotted pieces of this work. She then surrounds them with stylized sketches of the female body, her line as stringy as her thread. It’s no coincidence that she compares the fragility of the lost textiles with that of the body: For years, she suffered a mysterious skin condition that was finally diagnosed as a rare form of cancer and successfully treated with chemotherapy. After years of medical treatment, she pins her work to the walls with many long, sharp needles.

This Sterling Road venue is the second largest after the Lisgar Street hub and it contains several other powerful examples of textile work, including a newly commissioned piece by the experimental Guatemalan weaver Angelica Serech that hangs like a great curtain across the space.

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Textiles are the most fragile collection in any museum, but food is even more transient. This grouping also includes Flatbread Library, a clever project by Toronto artist Sameer Farooq who has researched every form of flatbread – from pita to barbari and fougasse to naan – after noting the importance of the tandoor oven on a trip to his father’s native Pakistan. He found examples of every flatbread that can be bought in Toronto and brings them together as a sculptural installation, a record of the city’s many diasporas.

It is one of the few pieces in the exhibition that directly addresses Toronto; another is a suite of large-scale photographs of a changing Chinatown shot by Morris Lum and showing at both Union Station and Pearson airport.

Although about a fifth of the biennial artists come from Toronto, the city itself often seems overshadowed by more exotic or successful artistic cultures in exercises like this. There is a certain shortage of – or perhaps mild allergy toward – reliable Toronto veterans who would lend weight. With the exception of Sandra Brewster’s photographic panels and bold paintings of African and Caribbean spiritual iconography by the influential Mississauga artist Winsom Winsom, few senior Toronto artists are represented here. If Toronto’s place seems precarious in its own biennial, then it is indeed a joy to see Farooq and Lum’s art, work so emphatically rooted in this city.

The Toronto Biennial of Art continues to Dec. 1 at 11 venues concentrated downtown and in the west end. Most are free admission.