Water, Kinship, Belief Toronto Biennial of Art 2019–2022

<p>The inaugural Toronto Biennial of Art in 2019, titled <i>The Shoreline Dilemma</i>, 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 <i>What Water Knows, The Land Remembers</i>, moved inland to follow tributaries and ravines, both above ground and hidden, that shape this place. </p><p><i>Water, Kinship, Belief</i> 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. </p>