The Center Cannot Hold at the Toronto Biennial

TORONTO — At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this year, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney declared that the world is “in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” The line is quoted in the catalog for the fourth Toronto Biennial of Art, Things Fall Apart, and could serve as the exhibition’s epigraph.

Curated by Allison Glenn, who spent her childhood in Detroit, crossing into Canada through Windsor, the edition brings together more than 30 artists and collectives across Toronto and, for the first time, sites beyond it, including Anchorage in Alaska and Times Square in New York.

Glenn keeps the Biennial’s long-running focus on water, taking the Great Lakes as her point of departure to ask what artists who work with rupture can teach us about histories, borders, and movement. With Canada–United States relations at an unprecedented low, a cross-border exhibition built around shared waterways feels just right.

The most affecting works treat histories of rupture as an imaginative encounter to be conjured rather than a settled narrative to be recorded. At the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), Dawoud Bey’s Material Histories, Living Landscapes hangs photographs from three landscape series tightly together around his two-channel video “350,000” (2023), alongside sculptures and ritual objects from the AGO’s collection with roots in Nigeria, Ghana, and the Kingdom of Kongo. The pairing sets up a striking sonic and visual call and response across the Middle Passage, elucidating the ways the afterlife of slavery permeates the physical world around us. The film’s point-of-view movement through dense woods, accompanied by the sound of heavy breathing and black-and-white images of gnarled landscapes and old homes, suggests that the fight to live free from racial violence is still an urgent one today.  

At the University of Toronto Art Centre, the exhibition’s main venue, Antonio Obá strings rows of brass bells across the length of a gallery for “Jardim” (2022–26), which visitors brush against as they walk a processional path. The work sounds only when bodies move through it; memory here is repeatedly reperformed rather than stored as an unchanging artifact. The path leads to “A Folia: travessia” (The Revelry: A Crossing, 2026), a large painting that reimagines Douglas Martin’s 1957 photograph of 15-year-old Dorothy Counts integrating a high school in Charlotte, North Carolina. Obá replaces the crowd that jeered and spat at her with one resembling both a supportive march and a New Orleans-style street carnival, a striking intervention within a painful chapter in history that points us toward a restorative alternate reality. He's asking us to imagine being there with Dorothy in that moment, surrounding her with courage and love; to let go of fear and hatred; to march toward and for a better future.

Moving from the historical to the personal, a second group of works takes knowledge held in bodies, materials, and practice as its guide. Wen Liu’s “In Light, Where Edges Yield” (2025), a human-scale steel-and-resin sculpture built around a spinal column, suspends Chinese herbal medicines prescribed to the artist after her father’s death, the herbs glowing like stained glass. It suggests that the body acts as an important source of familial and personal knowledge that might both illuminate our experience and carry us through difficult, disruptive periods.  

Taqralik Partridge’s “umiakkut (by boat)” (2026) revisits the journey her grandmother and siblings made across the Hudson Strait in a umiaq boat used by Indigenous Arctic peoples. In a mirrored room, she conjures the vessel, usually made with animal skins, from found materials, sewing, and beadwork, while an elder relative’s voice drifts through a soundtrack of water, passing on intergenerational knowledge that serves as a guide in this time of ecological devastation. 

Two standout works use place to reunite what was once separated. At the Royal Ontario Museum, Raphaël Barontini fills the Crystal Court with massive, draped textile panels that fold images of masks and sacred objects from the museum’s collections into an allegory of the Americas. “Follow the North Star – a Tribute to Harriet Tubman” (2026) connects Caribbean aesthetics that include anti-slavery heroines, water gods, and mythical figures to the Underground Railroad, a secret network that guided Black freedom seekers out of American slavery to a Canadian freedom still marred by racism. It casts liberation as a collective struggle that transcends not only geographic borders but the divide between the physical and spiritual. 

Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Scarborough, Nirbhai (nep) Singh Sidhu’s “A Deathless Potential In Remembrance By You” (2026), a permanent structure at the Scarborough Gurdwara built with earth from Sirhind, Punjab, is made for simran, the Sikh practice of stillness and deep listening. Bricks, steel, and water come together, binding paths of spiritual awakening to survival.

A final highlight, Rouzbeh Akhbari’s “Of Wool and Diesel” (2026) at Mercer Union, moves from these embodied and spiritual paths to geopolitical and economic ones. The 30-minute film follows the informal sheep trade around the Strait of Hormuz, binding shepherds and flocks to smugglers and moneychangers. Made as war in Iran was shutting down trade routes, it refuses to treat rupture as enclosure. Borders close, routes collapse, yet people and exchange persist.

Spread across more than 13 Toronto sites, with plenty of programming still to come, Things Fall Apart is ambitious and timely. It's a provocative and discursive exploration of how artists respond to our late-capitalist epoch with works that adapt to its social, political, and ecological realities rather than mourn what has broken. One challenge, though, is cohesion. The physical distance between sites and the dizzying range of subjects, from Inuit migration to Gulf smuggling, make it hard to hold as a whole.

But the deeper problem lies in the exhibition’s foundational concept. Rupture, as Carney and others envision it, presupposes a prior unity, and the exhibition never satisfactorily examines or troubles that perceived unity. Glenn’s catalog essay raises the right question (rupture to what, and by whom?), but the exhibition seldom pursues it with rigor. As I encountered each work, I repeatedly felt myself asking: Was there a time since modernity — which is inextricably tied to slavery, colonial extraction, empire, forced migration, genocide — when the so-called world order did not feel ruinous to those on its underside? The rupture may be less new than newly felt by those who have sought to order the world to their liking.

Things Fall Apart, the fourth iteration of the Toronto Biennial of Art, continues at venues across Toronto as well as select sites elsewhere through December 20. The exhibition was curated by Allison Glenn.