TORONTO — In its second iteration, the Greater Toronto Art 2024 (GTA24) triennial at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) connects art-making with ever-shifting movements in the region’s flawed formation.

Until the late 1990s, when it was amalgamated into a single-tiered City of Toronto, the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) was Metropolitan Toronto, a hodgepodge of municipal governments. This megacity resulted in transit deserts in outlying boroughs and diminished democratic participation in local issues. During this period, the conservative government of Ontario, the province that contains Toronto, significantly cut cultural services, including arts organizations and youth programs. 

GTA24 at MOCA, located in Toronto’s West End, encourages visitors to reflect upon their positionality within this region. The triennial maps what it means to be an artist from here, from somewhere else but now living here, or from here but living somewhere else. However, the focus on cartographic pinpoints, as demonstrated by an infographic on the main floor that maps where artists were born and live, reveals gaps in connections between artists and resources, particularly concerning the region’s closed or cut spaces, organizations, and programs. (It’s worth adding that cuts in arts funding following the swell of COVID-19 emergency response benefits have caused many arts organizations, festivals, and studios to lose sponsorship, issue pleas for public support, or announce temporary closures.) 

GTA24 features interdisciplinary works by almost 30 artists, duos, and collectives connected to the GTA region, dating from the 1960s to today. Main floor installations by Toronto-based artists June Clark and Sukaina Kubba, born more than a generation apart in Harlem and Baghdad, respectively, establish the show’s emphasis on artists’ subject positions. (Clark is having a moment right now — she’s currently the subject of solo shows at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Power Plant.) Kubba’s sculptural “drawings” of imagery from her family’s Persian rugs, made of Polylactic Acid (PLA) filament, greet visitors at the entrance. Clark’s 1970s and ’80s black-and-white photographs capture her views of the city’s people and places: train tracks, a Kensington Market fruit stall, a Black woman showing off her West Indian gold bangles as she strokes her neck and gazes into the distance. The last, a self-portrait, captures a past self in repose, taking in her surroundings.

The curatorial team — MOCA’s Kate Wong, David Zwirner’s Ebony L. Haynes, and independent curator Toleen Touq — aims to emphasize “the crucial roles artistic language plays in developing more sustainable and caring ways of living together and in building solidarity,” according to its exhibition text. This invitation into intimacies is in productive contrast with MOCA’s architectural character. Remnants of the building’s past, as a WWII aluminum foundry, for instance, echo in works like Caroline Azar and GB Jones’s “The Bruised Garden” (2012), with its churning soundtrack — dramatic synths, machinery chugging, the goose steps of military troops. The original version purportedly included a component that analyzed how the Third Reich used black triangular symbols to “mark women as asocial, sexual outlaws, fortune tellers, and nonconformists.” While this didactic detail speaks to GTA24’s broad focus on positionality, it introduces an element of psycho-geographic remapping of the past that centers the fringe, the marginal, and the underrepresented. 

In addition to the stairwell installation, an intriguing series of charcoal drawings by Jones of haunted Southern Ontario buildings are displayed on the second floor. While these, alongside black-and-white photos from the 1980s Toronto punk scene in which Jones was involved, loosely address the Greater Toronto Area scene-making and imagination, the inclusion of Jones’s collages made in collaboration with artist Paul P. felt like too much work by one artist. Why the predominance of art by Jones and others, like Ésery Mondésir? Amid this intergenerational constellation, were these artists intended to exemplify the triennial’s themes? The curators don’t make it clear. 

Intentionally or not, I sometimes felt that GTA24 revealed the transactional nature of the region’s small, sometimes insular artistic cliques and communities. It is transactional out of necessity due to a scarcity mindset affirmed by its institutions, arts organizations, and collectives. Just as Metro Toronto was a hodgepodge of municipalities, GTA24 is a mishmash of past local shows, with the curators cherry-picking artists who have had recent retrospectives or taken part in past regional surveys. Granted, triennials are supposed to reflect recent developments and concerns, or commission new work. GTA24 checks all those boxes. But, with the exception of didactics mentioning artist P. Mansaram’s friendship with Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, there’s not much intel about the movements of these artists in the GTA region, or the spaces or conditions in which they’ve created their works. The assumption is that you have to be in “the know” to grasp it.

Some of GTA24’s works address how navigating the Greater Toronto Area can leave you lost or excluded by the somewhat closed-off arts community. Lisa Myers’s “Overture for Sterling Road” (2024) a “quest-style” audio and augmented reality walk, addresses the proliferation of real estate development around MOCA. The work compels visitors to point their phones at the once-industrial Railpath route behind MOCA to see squelching, digitally animated blueberries, highlighting how today’s skyline, full of construction cranes and condo towers, represents another form of colonialism in the form of real estate speculation and gentrification. But navigating the work wasn’t easy — I had to toggle between a print map and two browser tabs playing the audio soundtrack on SoundCloud and then the Augmented Reality activations. A more integrated online solution would be welcomed. Lotus L. Kang’s work, a greenhouse with food items like kelp knots and biscuits cast in aluminum and pewter, respectively, affirms the emphasis on contemplation and personal meaning but also feels impenetrable and distant, particularly since a clear stanchion indicated that visitors couldn’t enter. It reminded me of public green spaces like Dufferin Grove and Allan Gardens surrounded by encampments for unhoused city residents that continue to pop up and be torn down.

Oliver Husain and Kerstin Schroedinger’s three-channel video installation “DNCB” (2021) exemplifies the use of artistic language to illuminate under-recognized sociopolitical and cultural-historical contexts that the curators aim to foreground. Two projections play continuously. One cycles through archival research in the manner of a microfiche display; the other shows painted hands sensually touching a leather bag or pulling at a tank-topped torso in a highly stylized and neon after-hours setting. The work addresses the history of Dinitrochlorobenzene, a toxic color film processing agent that was an experimental AIDS treatment in the 1980s and ‘90s; most unexpected is the materiality that comes through in the layering of the two projections. “We had so little to lose,” an older male voice explains, part of an audio soundtrack featuring interviews with local AIDS activists reflecting on the period’s desperation and need for alternative medicines.

Two works on the third-floor gallery explore otherness. Theo Jean Cuthand’s two films screen on a loop on a comically oversized, pseudo-vintage TV console surrounded by gray carpeting. The environment, made to resemble the television viewing room of a hospital psych ward, reflects the artist’s voiceover about his experience with mental illness. On the south side of the space, behind a midnight blue wall, is Sin Wai Kin’s Turner Prize-nominated film “A Dream of Wholeness in Parts” (2021), which merges drag with traditional Chinese dramaturgy. Through the intimacy of the voiceover, both installations explore how it feels to contend with the sense that you’re not supposed to be here.

How many of us weren’t supposed to be here? How many artists, writers, curators, and arts workers have struggled to find their way in the Greater Toronto Area? The GTA24 triennial has great potential, and I think it will grow in its mandate and approach. To its credit, GTA24 reflects many artistic practices and disciplines. But I came away feeling a lack of curatorial context to explain how the participating artists have engaged with being from or now living in the GTA, and sensing a remove between the viewer and the art. 

At the same time, the picture that it presents about how artistic languages have both flourished and flailed in this region suggests that we all seem to operate at a distance. The artwork that we make and interact with reflects those struggles, but perhaps also potentialities.

Greater Toronto Art 2024 continues at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (158 Sterling Road, Toronto) through July 28. The exhibition was curated by Kate Wong, Ebony L. Haynes, and Toleen Touq. On Sunday, July 21, GTA24 will present Solo Organ Concert, a public program featuring participating artist Mani Mazinani and collaborators.