The Toronto Biennial of Art 2026 kicks off on September 26th, transforming the city into a vibrant landscape of artistic discovery, dialogue, and imagination through December 20th. The Aga Khan Museum’s 2026 exhibiting Biennial artist is Dawit L. Petros (CRF 2025), with the installation Emergent Formations, 2026.
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? Dawit’s installation 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.
Dawit 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, including 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. Dawit’s art responds to this complex event through multiple site interventions displayed throughout the Aga Khan Museum’s public spaces.
Learn more and plan your visit at agakhanmuseum.org and torontobiennial.org.
Complimenti, Dawit!
Image: Dawit L. Petros, Stratigraphic II, II (2026). Dye Transfer on Woven Light polyester, 67 x 56 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and Bradley Ertaskiran