Greater Toronto Art 2021
Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA), Toronto, Canada
September 29, 2021 – January 09, 2022

On September 29, 2021, the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA) will launch Greater Toronto Art 2021 (GTA21), a triennial survey. The first edition brings together 21 energizing artists and art collectives who work in the Greater Toronto Area or have direct connections with the city. Spanning all three floors of the Museum, the exhibition is a new triennial survey defined by MOCA’s pledge to support the work of Toronto artists and the commissioning of new projects that add to local and global discourse. The exhibition title plays on Greater Toronto Area, the name of the city’s broad metropolitan area, addressing the everexpanding notion of what Toronto might be and where it extends by exploring the practices and perspectives of a diversity of artists.

Organized by guest curator Daisy Desrosiers, Adjunct Curator Rui Mateus Amaral, and MOCA Artistic Director November Paynter, the exhibition includes new works by: Ashoona Ashoona and Alexa Hatanaka, Ghazaleh Avarzamani, Nour Bishouty, Jesse Chun, Tom Chung, Common Accounts – Igor Bragado and Miles Gertler, Julia Dault, Azza El Siddique, Kareem-Anthony Ferreira, Aaron Jones, Pamila Matharu, Native Art Department International – Maria Hupfield and Jason Lujan, Oluseye, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Jagdeep Raina, Tony Romano, Jennifer Rose Sciarrino, Walter Scott, Kara Springer, Sahar Te, and the collective of Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, and Ryan Ferko.

Visitors will encounter specially commissioned or never-before-seen artworks in a range of media including drawing, installation, paintings, sculpture, and video. Beyond the Museum walls, the exhibition features several public artworks, a set of responsive digital components, a variety of public programmes and learning initiatives, a dedicated website, and an accompanying publication. GTA21 has been generated by the curators with leadership and support from MOCA Executive Director and CEO Kathleen
Bartels.

“We are thrilled to launch Greater Toronto Art 2021,” said Bartels. “GTA21 marks a renewed focus by MOCA on the local art scene and offers significant support for the featured artists to realize new and/or expanded work. For the inaugural iteration, we asked each contributor to consider: What feels most urgent to you today? Taken together, their responses offer different imaginings of the city, society, and the world. Uniting them, however, is a profound belief in remembering, storytelling, questioning, resisting, celebrating, making, and speculating. This exhibition and accompanying catalogue highlight some of the most compelling and dynamic contemporary artists in Toronto today.

We are so grateful for the generous support of the BMO Financial Group (Bank of Montreal), The Jack Weinbaum Family Foundation, The Lindy Green Family Charitable Foundation, and many other supporters who have come together to realize this ambitious project.” BMO is being recognized as the Presenting Sponsor for Greater Toronto Art 2021 as the result of a generous gift of $1 million to the Museum. This gift is especially meaningful to MOCA as it is made in honour of Gilles Ouellette who has had an impressive career with BMO for more than 40 years and, along with his wife Julia Ouellette (Chair Emeritus of MOCA), has been a donor and crucial champion of the Museum.

With this new commitment, BMO will be the Presenting Sponsor on a major exhibition each year at MOCA for the next five years, supporting programming that aligns with BMO’s mission to foster an inclusive society, sustainable future, and thriving economy. Developed remotely over the past year, the curators’ approach to selecting artists and creating GTA21 was the result of building a network of relationships. “Rather than bringing these artists together under a particular theme, each participant was given space, resources, freedom, and curatorial support to explore what feels most urgent to them today,” said Paynter.

“As ideas emerged, we composed a structure for each Museum floor, an open plan that positions shared concerns and attitudes as well as contrasting artistic processes and practices.” The exhibition is presented in three groupings: Ambivalence, Inheritance, and Mutation. “The idea of Ambivalence, a push-and-pull state, revealed itself to be an apt place to begin. The exhibition’s planning has not been without paradoxes, hesitations, delays, and faulty internet connections, so why not lean into this truth? It is made in its time for its time,” said Amaral.

Desrosiers goes on to cite Inheritance as a vast framework to engage art, stating that, “Many of the artists in GTA21 examine enduring legacies and acknowledge others, like colonialism, to be undone.These artists are about making meaning of the world by combining history with materialtraces, imagination, and hope.” The exhibition concludes using the idea of Mutation to explore how perceptions alter-for good or for bad-to provide the spark that unleashes creativity and subtle changes that help society evolve. Read together, the artworks provide a set of projections and calls for more productive ways to coexist.

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