Most biennales are designed in accordance with some abstract curatorial mandate; and while they display wonderful works in great spaces there is seldom any tangible connection between the work and the space. We feel this makes the typical biennale experience predictable and stale. Biennales have become corporate affairs, that is, events designed by curators and dealers, and treated by cities and regional tourist organizations as promotional tools. The result has tended to be that biennales have largely become like corporate franchises. We believe there is a need and a desire for a biennale that breaks this mould, one that puts the attention back onto the artist and his/her process. That is best done, we believe, by placing the artist in an environment with which s/he must interact and cooperate. This alternate approach takes the artist away from the predictable surroundings of glamorous museums and gallery spaces to other types of spaces with all their possibilities.

We understand that some curatorial policy is required, at least enough to ensure coherence in the sense that a visitor will be able to see how the various exhibits make up a singular biennale, rather than forming an arbitrary collection of disparate exhibits. What is our proposed curatorial policy?  It is to offer a challenge to the participating artists: They will each be assigned a space in the city of Toronto and given parameters within which they must work. The artists will work with the space and in the space, dialoguing with it so to speak. We believe that under these challenging conditions artists will flourish, producing exciting, innovative and surprising work, that is, work of substance influenced by the space. Because the resulting works will be site specific one might think the biennale will showcase what is commonly called 'installation' or 'environmental' art, but we do not want to limit the art by characterizing it in this way. Instead, we encourage the participation of artists who work in a wide variety of media, including those who normally would not take up such art practices, that is, artists who are more comfortable and familiar with traditional gallery spaces.

We want to invest the Toronto biennale with a creative energy that seems lacking in so many of the biennales around the world today. We think that we can achieve this through our idea of asking the artist to take into consideration the space s/he has been assigned and so make it an integral part of his/her work. It is the unpredictable and quirky features of such non-traditional spaces that open up the possibilities for challenging and inspiring artists. These possibilities are closed off to the artist who produces work intended for the institutional spaces of galleries and museums. In general these institutional spaces are not where art is nurtured so much as where it begins the process of fossilization.

Through its distinctive approach of getting artists to produce works directly influenced by the spaces they are in, the Toronto Biennale will bring to the world a refreshing new perspective on art.