Water, Kinship, Belief

Edited by: Candice Hopkins, Katie Lawson, Tairone Bastien

The inaugural Toronto Biennial of Art in 2019, titled The Shoreline Dilemma, was the first edition of a two-part biennial that traced interconnected narratives around the city’s ever-changing shoreline. These connections sought to reveal strategies of resistance against industrial-colonial systems, uncover polyphonic histories sedimented around the shoreline, and open up relations between the human and more-than-human. To extend this artistic thinking and expand notions of relationality, in 2022, the second edition, titled What Water Knows, The Land Remembers, moved inland to follow tributaries and ravines, both above ground and hidden, that shape this place.

Water, Kinship, Belief is a “third” site, a place where the continuities, resonances, and dissonances between Biennial editions are extended. Its pages become a means to bring together the artists, artworks, collaborators, and ideas that have together informed the exhibitions, irrespective of chronology, dispensing with categories, and part of a greater whole. Through its content and unique design, it is both a generative guide to the exhibitions and a Biennial site of its own, presenting new artistic relations that course through the book like tributaries.

AUTHOR

Candice Hopkins

Candice Hopkins (she/her) serves as Forge Project’s Executive Director and Chief Curator, working with contemporary Indigenous artists to shape one of the preeminent collections of Native art in the country. Candice is a citizen of the Carcross/Tagish First Nation and spent many years in New Mexico, Canada, and Europe before moving to the unceded lands of the Muh-he-con-ne-ok in upstate New York to help build Forge into what it is today. Prior to joining Forge Project, Candice was the Senior Curator for the first two editions of the Toronto Biennial of Art.

AUTHOR

Katie Lawson

Katie Lawson (she/her) is a graduate of the Master of Visual Studies Curatorial program at the University of Toronto, where she previously completed her Master of Arts in Art History. She has held curatorial, education and programming positions at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Doris McCarthy Gallery, Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, bodega (NYC) and University of Toronto. She maintains a practice as an independent curator, editor and writer working within the tradition of eco- and material feminism(s).

AUTHOR

Tairone Bastien

Tairone Bastien (he/him) is an independent curator based in Toronto and an Assistant Professor in the Criticism and Curatorial Practice program at the Ontario College of Art and Design University. Tairone co-curated the inaugural Toronto Biennial of Art in 2019 and collaborated on the second edition in 2022. Tairone holds a Master of Art from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York, and a Bachelor’s Degree in Art History with a Minor in Critical Studies in Sexuality from the University of British Columbia.