Greater Toronto Art 2024
March 22–July 28
Presenting Sponsor
Greater Toronto Art 2024 (GTA24) is the second edition of MOCA Toronto’s recurring triennial exhibition, which was conceived in 2021 to look more closely and consistently at artistic practices with a connection to the Greater Toronto Area (GTA).
Featuring a constellation of twenty-five intergenerational artists, duos, and collectives, GTA24 looks back as much as it looks forward. The exhibition presents work made between the 1960s and the present, allowing the comingling of art created in different decades to provide new ways of understanding the current moment and imagining the future. In celebration of the divergent cultures and formally diverse practices connected to this region, GTA24 engages a multitude of voices and perspectives across installation, photography, painting, moving image, sculpture, drawing, sound, food, and performance. Encompassing the museum’s three floors—and an energetic series of live programmes and screenings—the exhibition features fifteen newly commissioned presentations, performances, and events, furthering MOCA’s commitment to supporting artists in the development of new work and ideas.
Thinking through the formation and designation of the Greater Toronto Area, GTA24 considers the arbitrary lines drawn to create maps, the ambiguities of an ever-widening geographic designation, and the precarity that arises for those displaced by rapid growth and expansion. These conditions create a state of otherness, and GTA24 reflects on the artistic strategies of working with, on, and against dominant cultural forms. Within this context, the exhibition emphasizes the crucial roles artistic language plays in developing more sustainable and caring ways of living together, and in building solidarity.
The exhibition is a consideration of that which is truly greater: the distinct peoples and communities from all over the globe that make the GTA their home. Casting a net across a vast constellation of centres, margins, and diasporic tentacles, GTA24 proposes that this is a place with enough space and resources for everyone, if we allow it to be.
GTA24 is organized by guest curators Ebony L. Haynes and Toleen Touq and MOCA Curator Kate Wong.
FLOOR 1 Ésery Mondésir
G.B. Jones and Caroline Azar as Fifth Column
June Clark
The works on the museum’s first floor provide alternative maps, perspectives, and registers for thinking about the GTA and how our varied lives connect to this place. Revealing how objects and their tracing can embody relations, Sukaina Kubba presents a composition of hand-drawn sculptural vignettes of a Persian rug that has been in her family for decades. A haunting musical composition by G.B. Jones and Caroline Azar as Fifth Column plays on loop in the museum’s south stairwell, referencing a past multimedia performance installation. Questioning relations to land and urban planning, Lisa Myers’s newly developed audio and augmented reality walk is an invitation to assume another self in a partly fictionalized narrative. Each functions as a method for mapping that holds affective potential for relation and sustenance.
1 Lisa Myers
Lisa Myers
Mani Mazinani
Sukaina Kubba
By its own name, the GTA presents the city as too much, as both great (greater than what?) and vague (what constitutes an area?). And yet, this capaciousness doesn’t mean that everyone fits or can fit. This capaciousness simply opens things up, makes it possible for there to be more rubbing up against each other, for more contact, and for more friction.
–Tiana Reid
June Clark’s intimate black-and-white photos from the 1970s and ’80s provide social and spatial context for Toronto from her unique perspective as a newcomer during this period. Ésery Mondésir’s video The Mother was Feeding It Alright (2019) demonstrates, through an interview with an American border guard, the dehumanization of Haitian migrants and how the imaginary lines that divide geographies result in precarity and violent “othering.” Based upon ancient pentatonic scales and harmonic pulsation, Mani Mazinani’s atmospheric sound, light, and haptic installation Solar Scale (2024) offers a space of respite: an environment that welcomes visitors to slow down, to listen, and to feel.
2 Ésery MondésirFLOOR 2
Catherine Telford Keogh
Ésery Mondésir
G.B. Jones
Jean-Paul Kelly
Jes Fan
Lotus L. Kang
Throughout the exhibition is a recognition that, as in the 1990s, identity politics has come to the fore of art-making. On floor two, three experimental black-and-white videos by Wendell Bruno made in the ’90s explore identity and desire. Oreka James’s paintings and kinetic sculpture think through cosmic architecture, archaeology, and ancient philosophies as a method of world-building. Jes Fan’s discrete sculptural ecosystems employ organic and inorganic materials–including soy sheets–as skin, probing binary conceptions of gender and identity. And Oliver Husain and Kerstin Schroedinger’s multi-channel installation DNCB (2021) explores biopolitical regulation and the uneven distribution of care through an investigation of a toxic chemical substance.
The artist’s role is to raise the consciousness of the people. To make them understand life, the world, and themselves more completely.
–Amiri BarakaMichael Thompson
Oliver Husain and Kerstin Schroedinger
Oreka James
Tim Whiten
Wendell Bruno
3 Michael Thompson
Catherine Telford Keogh’s new site-specific installation Carriers (Gravity-Fed) (2024) combines bio-matter, food stuffs, industrial materials, and hand-blown glass into a static system of conveyance that considers deep time and the impacts of human life on the environment. Michael Thompson’s paintings explore personal and shared histories connected to industrial automotive production through a focus on objects and found images, while G.B. Jones undertakes psychogeographical explorations of haunted historical buildings in southern Ontario. Tim Whiten’s Temno III (1995) is an intimate yet universal reflection on spirituality and faith, and in her newly developed greenhouse installation Receiver Transmitter (Butterfly) (2023–24), Lotus L. Kang considers built environments as vessels for personal and collective rememberings.
FLOOR 3
Jean-Paul Kelly
Matthew Wong
P.Mansaram
Sin Wai Kin
One of the most insidious uses of language is to separate us from a sense of integrity and wholeness.
–M. NourbeSe Philip
Artistic language permits us to communicate our shared experiences, to sustain memories and historical archives, and to imagine and project ourselves into the future. On floor three, six works on paper, canvas, and plywood by P.Mansaram from the 1960s collage together disparate visual systems and textures, while Timothy Yanick Hunter’s newly commissioned multimedia installation Stereo As a Prefix (2024) engages techniques of splicing to explore the relationship between diasporic history and fragmentation. Jean-Paul Kelly’s site-specific presentation of six graphite drawings on steel posts interprets the vernacular language of urban space to defamiliarize traditions of realist representation.
Timothy Yanick Hunter
Tim Whiten
Theo Jean Cuthand
Tim Whiten’s Chestnut & Almond (1973) and Tabernacle (1980) are cultural objects that draw from various spiritual traditions, mythologies, and rituals to question who we are as human beings and how we relate to one another and the universe. Theo Jean Cuthand’s experimental low-fi videos Love and Numbers (2004) and Sight (2012) employ an intimate, first person–style narrative in a reflection on madness, love, queerness, and indigeneity. Sin Wai Kin’s 2021 film A Dream of Wholeness In Parts suggests dreams can interrupt normative processes of desire, while two 2016 paintings by Matthew Wong offer poetic pathways for imagining.
4 Tim Whiten 5 Timothy Yanick HunterVISIONARY SUPPORTERS
Gilles & Julia Ouellette
The Price Family
Anonymous
PRESENTING SPONSOR
CURATOR’S CIRCLE
Hesty Leibtag & Terry Verk
Hon. Bill Morneau & Nancy McCain
CONTRIBUTING SUPPORTERS
Geoff and Adrienne Plant
DIRECTOR’S COUNCIL
McAlpine Family 158
The GTA24 Live Programme presents newly commissioned performances and events that draw connections between the GTA and other geographies and histories, laid out as moments for contemplation, gathering, and exchange. All events take place at the museum unless otherwise indicated.
JES FAN AND SIN WAI KIN, Artist × Artist talk
Saturday, March 23, 2–3:30 pm
Paradise Theatre, 1006c Bloor Street West, Toronto
NOBUO KUBOTA, Performance
Friday, March 22, 7 pm
RICHARD FUNG, IMMONY MÈN, PETER MORIN, LISA MYERS, AND DANA PRIETO, Substitution: a Meal
Monday, May 13, 6–9 pm
Roncesvalles United Church, 214 Wright Avenue, Toronto
OLIVER HUSAIN AND KERSTIN SCHROEDINGER, Hypericin Yellow Movie
Friday, May 31, 7 pm
ALEXIS KYLE MITCHELL AND LUKE FOWLER, The Treasury of Human Inheritance (Circuits)
Friday, June 21, 7 pm
MANI MAZINANI AND COLLABORATORS, Solar Organ Concert
Friday, July 19, 7 pm
The GTA24 Screening Programme reflects the myriad ways that artists express their entanglement with place, whether through urban and personal histories, lived experience, or speculation.
ALEXIS KYLE MITCHELL, The Treasury of Human Inheritance
Monday, June 17, 7 pm
Paradise Theatre, 1006c Bloor Street West, Toronto
KAMIAS TRIENNIAL, Sasalubong/Will Meet
Saturday, July 13, 2 pm
Paradise Theatre, 1006c Bloor Street West, Toronto
SHARLENE BAMBOAT, Both, Instrument & Sound with contributions from collaborators around solidarity movements
Saturday, July 13, 7 pm
Paradise Theatre, 1006c Bloor Street West, Toronto
Ticketing and additional information about the Live and Screening Programmes for GTA24 can be found on the MOCA website.
ALSO ON AT MOCA PUBLIC AND LEARNING PROGRAMMES
GTA24 Publication Launch
Tuesday, May 21, 6:30 pm
MOCA After Hours
Saturday, June 15, 7 pm
Join MOCA’s learning team for a range of workshops drawing from exhibition themes and concepts. All Saturday workshops feature a local guest artist.
Mapping the GTA
Saturday, March 23–Sunday, March 24, 12–4 pm
Stories We Tell
Saturday, April 6, 2 pm and 4 pm
Sunday, April 7, 12–4 pm
CITATIONS
Tiana Reid, “A World Where I’m Not There,” in Greater Toronto Art 2024, edited by Jayne Wilkinson (Toronto: Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, 2024).
Amiri Baraka quoted in James Campbell, “Revolution song,” The Guardian, August 4, 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/aug/04/ featuresreviews.guardianreview12.
M. NourbeSe Philip, “Interview with a in Empire,” in Bla_K: Essays and Interviews (Toronto: Book*hug Press, 2017).
Poems with Friends
Saturday, May 4, 2 pm and 4 pm
Sunday, May 5, 12–4 pm
Sound and Light
Saturday, June 1, 2 pm and 4 pm
Sunday, June 2, 12–4 pm
Photographic Explorations
Saturday, July 6, 2 pm and 4 pm
Sunday, July 7, 12–4 pm
MOCA Summer Camp
Tuesday, July 2–Friday, July 5, 9 am–5 pm
Ticketing and additional information about MOCA’s Public and Learning Programmes can be found on the MOCA website.
IMAGE CREDITS
Cover: June Clark, Untitled, 1976, gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the artist and Daniel Faria Gallery.
1 Lisa Myers, Overture for Sterling Road, 2024, photograph of blueberry pigment text. Courtesy of the artist and Reza Nik.
2 Ésery Mondésir, The Mother Was Feeding It Alright, 2019, film still. Courtesy of the artist.
3 Michael Thompson, Mirror Match Shine, 2023, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Franz Kaka, Toronto. Photo by LF Documentation.
4 Tim Whiten, Tabernacle, 1980, chewing gum over plywood, vitrine. Courtesy of the artist and Art Gallery of Hamilton. Gift of the artist in memory of Tom & Mary E. Whiten, 2019.
5 Timothy Yanick Hunter, Untitled (Bergman), 2023, dye sublimation fabric SEG print in aluminum frame. Courtesy of the artist and Cooper Cole, Toronto.
6 Alexis Kyle Mitchell, The Treasury of Human Inheritance, 2024, film still. An Aleph Production.