Toronto Biennial of Art at the Aga Khan Museum
Installation
Wednesday, July 22, 2026–Sunday, April 11, 2027
Aga Khan Park, Atrium, Bellerive Room, Museum Collections Gallery, Museum Façade, Rasheed Dhuka and Nooruddin Khawja Family Gallery (formerly the Lower-Level Gallery)
Free Exhibition
While this exhibition is free to enjoy, we recommend purchasing Museum admission to fully experience our Collections and special exhibitions.
Header image credit:
Dawit L. Petros, Stratigraphic II, II (2026). Dye Transfer on Woven Light polyester, 67 x 56 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and Bradley Ertaskiran.
The Aga Khan Museum is proud to partner with the Toronto Biennial of Art 2026, one of Canada’s leading contemporary art events, transforming the city into a vibrant landscape of artistic discovery, dialogue, and imagination from September 26 to December 20, 2026.
This year’s exhibiting artist is Dawit L. Petros, with the installation Emergent Formations, 2026.
Emergent Formations will consider the lasting implications of an 1884 British Empire military mission which set in motion an extraordinary collision of worlds. As documented in participant’s accounts, the expedition included British, Irish, Scottish, Indian, Egyptian, and Sudanese workers, as well as 379 voyageurs from across Canada. Among the 379 Canadian boatmen recruited for this military rescue mission in Khartoum, Sudan, were more than 100 Métis, Mohawk, and Haudenosaunee men — skilled navigators whose river mastery had already been called upon during the Red River Expedition of 1870 in newly formed Manitoba. These were people whose homelands had been profoundly disrupted by colonial forces, now hauling wooden whaling boats against the Nile’s fierce currents, wading through rapids, and undertaking grueling portages across the Nile River delta.
Petros will examine the visual and textual languages used to depict the expedition, focusing on how its diverse participants and the environments they moved through were represented. He will incorporate archival materials – maps, illustrations, banners, images of boats, and historical photographs produced in Canada, Britain, Egypt, and Sudan – to explore and question how this multicultural encounter was documented and understood. Collectively, these works link events, communities, languages, and geographies often imagined as remote from one another. Petros’s art responds to this complex event through multiple site interventions displayed throughout the Aga Khan Museum’s public spaces.
Petros’ work will be installed in three phases at the Aga Khan Museum, starting soon. It will be completed for the opening of the 2026 Toronto Biennial of Art on September 26.
2026 Toronto Biennial of Art
The fourth edition of the Toronto Biennial of Art, Things Fall Apart, curated by Allison Glenn, unfolds through a set of propositions anchored by the question: What can we learn from artists who explore rupture as an ontological tool or a way of understanding?
Relying on the shared geographies of the Great Lakes as a place of departure, this Biennial traces relationships between the expansive but interconnected waters of the Great Lakes region and over sixteen global waterways that span five continents. Things Fall Apart considers ideas of syncopation and disruption through the lens of shared thematics that emerged from artists’ voices: diaspora through movement and migration, syncretic traditions, notions of borders, water networks, maritime histories of empire, corporeality, calls to action, global climate justice, genocides, speculative and science fictions, material memory, the transformation of knowledge, and both water and land as conceptual links.
Things Fall Apart is organized in three parts: a central exhibition that grounds itself in methodologies of collectivity, sovereignty, reflection, and refusal, a series of performances and artist-led programming that invites embodied engagement with these practices, and a collaboratively curated gathering.
As a Biennial partner, the Aga Khan Museum provides a natural home for these global conversations. Through art that crosses borders, cultures, and disciplines, the Museum becomes a space where visitors can encounter new perspectives, uncover untold stories, and engage with some of the most compelling artistic voices of our time.
Please visit torontobiennial.org for more information, including a schedule of Biennial programs.
Bios
Dawit L. Petros
Artist
Allison Glenn
Curator, Toronto Biennial
Commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art and the Aga Khan Museum and made possible with the generous support of RBC and Fonds Hamelys.
The Museum wishes to thank the Khimji Foundation for their support of this installation.
Government Partners
