Things Fall Apart
A twelve-week event held every two years, the Toronto Biennial of Art commissions artists to create new works for a city-wide exhibition in dialogue. Building upon past editions and offering new ways of seeing and listening, each Biennial connects people to engage in meaningful dialogues and imagine new futures.
Things Fall Apart carries the theme of water, introduced in the first Toronto Biennial. Led by Indigenous thinking, the 2019 and 2022 Biennials explored the many histories of the city’s ever-changing shoreline by asking: What does it mean to be in relation? The 2026 Biennial continues this trajectory outward, tracing expansive but interconnected relations from the geography of Toronto through the waters of the Great Lakes and the Great Loop to vast global waterways of the Atlantic Ocean, the Middle Passage, the Nile, and the Persian Gulf.
Conceived and curated by New York-based curator and writer Allison Glenn, known for realizing ambitious and experimental exhibitions and sitespecific projects around the globe, Things Fall Apart features more than 30 artists from Canada, the US, the Caribbean, South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, including 100 reproductions of work by the participating artists as well as Glenn’s own in-depth curatorial essay. It will also include a multitude of voices and approaches from curators, artists, and writers, offering a compendium of ideas, insights, and thinking.
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Allison Glenn is a New York-based curator and writer focusing on the intersection of art and public space through public art and special projects, biennials, and major new commissions by a wide range of contemporary artists. For over fifteen years, Glenn has been devoted to realizing ambitious and experimental exhibitions and site-specific projects with artists working across the globe.
Her previous roles include Artistic Director of The Shepherd; Co-Curator of Counterpublic Triennial 2023, Senior Curator at New York’s Public Art Fund; Visiting Curator at The University of Tulsa; and Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. She also held a curatorial position with New Orleans’ international art triennial, Prospect.4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp. She gained broad acclaim for curating the pathbreaking 2021 exhibition Promise, Witness, Remembrance at Louisville, Kentucky’s Speed Art Museum.
