The Shoreline Dilemma Toronto Biennial of Art September 21 – December 1, 2019

How can we think about place more expansively, and against behaviours like imposition, dispossession and extraction? The guiding question that curators Candice Hopkins and Tairone Bastien posed in response resonated throughout the Toronto Biennial of Art’s 72-day inaugural exhibition: “What does it mean to be in relation?” Indigenous, Canadian and transnational artists took up this question in pluralistic ways across the multi-venue exhibition focused on Lake Ontario’s watershed. Rather than perpetuate an anthropocentric, grid-like understanding of the city, a constellation of sites anchored by the lake spanned westward from Etobicoke Creek, eastward to the Port Lands and all the way north to where Black Creek flows past the Art Gallery of York University. What surfaced in response was an unearthing of knowledges that have been submerged through colonial-capitalist expansion.

In thinking of what it means to be in (2019), an iteration of their (2017–ongoing) project, manifested as a multifaceted installation with weekly workshops at Mississauga’s Small Arms Inspection Building, informing audience members of Toronto’s Indigenous history and treaties, and asking participants to consider what treaty-making means to them. In the installation, a textile map of the city’s river network was surrounded by piles of various objects representing goods that were given by the British to the Mississaugas of the Credit in the alleged 1787 trade for Toronto, including kettles, glass jugs wrapped in fabric, mirrors and bags inscribed with a pound sign. In the group’s work, the much earlier land agreement of the Dish With One Spoon, made among the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous nations to peaceably share the region’s land, is also recalled, evidencing an altogether different understanding of this land and the beings that cohabitate it. These differences bring to mind what Hayden King—the writer and educator who recently announced that he “regrets” having written Ryerson University’s land acknowledgment, upon which so many others have been based—voiced: that treaties are not metaphors, and that the acknowledgement of these treaties today necessitates an ongoing commitment and obligation to action.