Memento mori: Women and gender-expansive artists express during Toronto Biennial of Art

The Toronto Biennial of Art’s 2026 exhibition, Things Fall Apart, creates a foundation for a life-sustaining spotlight upon dynamic creators who break down the walls of building new futures and colonial binaries.

Image taken by Darren Rigo

The Toronto Biennial of Art (TBA) is an international visual arts event that takes place across the city for 12 weeks every two years. For this year, it will go on from September 26th to December 20th open to the public. It launches city-wide exhibitions, with local venues transitioned into spaces for performance, political resistance and critical thinking.

Things Fall Apart is this year's exhibition for TBA which confronts how borders, binary structures and colonial systems are both deeply connected to communities and fracturing. It explores how artists actively build hopeful and alternative futures within the aftermath of wrecking. 

The exhibits highlight an overlapping and extraordinary integration of work by visionary artists such as the following three: Skawennati, Nani Chacon and Brendan Fernandes. 

1. Digital Futurity and Sovereignty: Skawennati at Gallery TPW

Skawennati, a multidisciplinary artist, brings her physical installations and landscapes to Gallery TPW, including Three Sisters: Reclaiming Abundance and Dollhouse Longhouse. 

Skawennati innovated in virtual-world building before many mainstream artists and tech companies started pursuing the metaverse, Skawennati uses her digital avatars to define community, fashion, power and beauty on her own terms.

Reflecting on avatar creation and virtual spaces showing how the avatar seems to be the perfect version of what society likes to see, “your avatar never has a zit, never has any hair out of place unless you want it to be. You know her boobs are perky… It's fun and easy and not exhausting,” Skawennati says.

Her avatar creation represents a way for viewers to consider how imagined and virtual spaces can provide a very comforting escape from the rules and expectations of the physical world.

2. Matriarchal Public Powers and Infrastructure: Nani Chacon

Nani Chacon bridges the gap between ancestral knowledge and industrial blights. 

Through her steel structures that imitate the heavy infrastructure of resource exploitation across landscapes such as the Navajo Nation, Chacon reimagines these forms through community engagement and local sovereignty. Such as her installations, Our Gods Walk Above Us, Our Gods Walk Among Us and Our Gods Walk Below Us. 

She discusses her approach towards the steel structures through personal memories, regarding the terms of trying to make people recall the systems which were constructed on the land.

" I wanted to create a sculpture that would make that apparent, you know, to look at something that, I think the worst part of industrialization is that we begin to forget that this was something that was constructed and put there, almost impermissible, impermissible to the land, impermissible to the people," Chacon says. 

Chacon’s art demonstrates how industrial environments which had been originally treated as a stiff boys club can be radically re-envisioned through Indigenous storytelling and community-engaged art. 

3. Staging Resistance: Brendan Fernandes

Brendan Fernandes work combines live performance, photographic murals and choreography as active propaganda.

Blending the classical structures of ballet with the textiles of Maasai Shuka, Fernandes' creations simplify one by one the unyielding gender binaries. 

"In my work in general, I'm trying to break down those binaries, give new space, new visibility to dancers... I'm going to create new ways to do things in the way that I make my performances,” Fernandes says.

Together, these artists show how existing structures can become a springboard for building something more profoundly buoyant. Through steel architectures, somatic choreography and digital realms, Fernandes, Chacon and Skawennati take apart the colonial topics not only by analyzing what is broken, but also by authoring the freed spaces which rise in their spots.