What was the problem?
I didn’t know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?
Yes, I did know it was the money I earned as a poet that
paid
for the bombs and the planes and the tanks
that they used to massacre your family
—June Jordan, “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon”
What’s left of art in Toronto?
Since November 2023, four curators no longer hold their positions at contemporary art institutions in Toronto. Anishinaabe curator Wanda Nanibush’s “departure,” as the Globe and Mail put it, from the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) that month was followed several weeks later by the resignation of Inuk curator Taqralik Partridge from the same institution. Their exits left the AGO with neither an Indigenous curator nor a specialist in Indigenous art. In the year that followed, Kate Wong left the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA), as did Noor Alé at the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery. While not necessarily all activists, all four curators have resisted pressure to stay totally silent about the new Zionist genocide that began after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, and the quiet around their absences leaves questions. Did they quit? Were they fired—and if so, for posting on social media? Were they effectively forced out? Did they leave willingly? Were they pressured into leaving? And what does Palestine have to do with it?
While the specifics of these women’s departures—a euphemism that sidesteps the power structures at play—are shrouded by scarcity politics, powerful boards of trustees, and NDAs, this much should be clear: the state of art institutions in this city is dismal. What we are witnessing, across Turtle Island, is the erosion of what little cultural autonomy we had to begin with. Toronto, as the corporate capital of the country, is especially tarnished because its art, literature, and culture scenes financially benefit from Canada’s geopolitical allyship with a genocidal state—Israel is among Canada’s largest arms customers—while it pretends to be a progressive hub for diversity, despite its own history of genocide against Indigenous people. Toronto, with its guise of multiculturalism, its Canadian brand of politeness, its passive aggression, its milquetoast exhibitions, and pretense of open discussion. Toronto as a supposedly world-class city cannot meet its own promise.
Toronto’s art institutions excuse the departures of Nanibush, Partridge, Wong, and Alé by citing austerity, expansion, and restructuring. But they wield these economic reasons to extract surplus value and defang collectivity—or, in other words, to do exactly what they always do. The arts are politicized, whether or not corporations and boards admit it. The people know it. They live it. The culture industries are not divorced from state power. Perhaps that lesson was partially relearned in 2020, when the George Floyd uprisings and the Covid-19 pandemic shed light on demands to end the exploitative practices of museums (which include a lack of worker representation, unlivable wages, antiblackness, the overwhelming whiteness of museum leadership, and the list goes on). Museums quelled these demands with more “diverse” programming, more allure, more shine, and less substance. This current exodus of curators from Toronto institutions underscores, on the one hand, the disposability of those hired to assuage calls for diversity and, on the other, the repression of those who are vocal about the ongoing brutalities against Palestinian people. This disposability and repression reinforce each other. Consider what Nanibush, Partridge, Wong, and Alé have in common. Consider their race and gender. Consider their expertise in so-called noncanonical work—Indigenous art, aesthetic practices of the Global South and its diaspora, socially engaged institutions, et cetera—fields that dominant art institutions have willfully ignored. We need to recognize that ignorance as a long-established character trait, not an aberration. Rather than evidence that museums are not living up to their values, as if they were people, the plunder, hoarding, and dispossession are actually what they’re meant to do. This is an essay against reform, because these institutions have shown themselves to be beyond reform, and because, if activity directed against the institution from within the institution turns out to reinforce it, we have to practice elsewhere. We owe it to ourselves to explore what art looks like in our hands.
Right now, Canadian institutions are revealing their values by erasing existing Palestinian conditions. In the context of the Toronto art world, Palestine might not always be named, but Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, is always the name—no matter what is depicted on colonial maps. The way cultural administrators engage in a perverse politics of erasure by constantly redefining colonial borders, a common Zionist strategy, with its eye to what the scholar Fayez Sayegh called territorial expansion, intentionally suggests that Palestine doesn’t exist, that it is a nameless place and that before Israeli occupation, it was, as former British Columbia post-secondary education minister Selina Robinson said before she was forced to resign last year, “a crappy piece of land with nothing on it.” We must constantly resist this logic and echo Palestinian words on the ground, and in so doing, we will further distance ourselves from capitalist institutions that masquerade as public goods while exploiting our collective labor and imagination.
Given the contradictions that the question of Palestine is sharpening, how we might think about decentering—or even abolishing—powerful cultural institutions in Toronto? What do the frothy admin class, cloistered in their white-glove towers, truly know about art anyway? And what do they know about these most basic activities, being and making? They should not hold a monopoly on art. How can art itself be reclaimed?
Regardless of the actual circumstances that pushed four curators out of their roles at Toronto institutions, it is key to understand such hushed business as a function of a project that obscures the role of Canada in funding genocide and perpetuating Israeli propaganda, or hasbara. Jason McBride, writing in the Walrus, recently approached an accounting of what happened at the AGO, giving context to Nanibush’s distinct dance between politics and art and recounting the dozen of visits she made to the West Bank. McBride also reports that the curator’s “views on Palestinian justice,” expressed regularly on social media, “had irritated powerful members of the board of trustees” and led to reprimands by her supervisors over the nine years she worked at the AGO (first as a contractor, then a permanent staffer). In light of Nanibush’s longstanding commitment to Palestinian liberation, her noted success in strengthening the AGO’s Indigenous curation, and the AGO’s hostile work environment, her subsequent tight-lipped departure reveals both the “Palestine exception”—speech is free unless it supports Palestine—and the institutional need to obscure dispossession.
Sukaina Kubba, Enclave Exclave (31-32 Oakville Ontario), 2023-24. Hand-drawn PLA filament commissioned for Greater Toronto Art 2024, Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto. Photo credit: No Arms in The Arts.
In late November 2023, Stephan Jost, the director and CEO of the AGO, published an “open letter” on the museum’s website in response to various petitions and statements regarding Nanibush’s departure. There was nothing open about his vague platitudes. “I hear you,” he wrote, addressing the second-person to no one in particular. Jost did not even dare letter the word Palestine—where in Gaza, need I remind you, there has been nonstop bombing, an intentional famine, the destruction of medical facilities, not a single university left, and orchestrated assassinations of journalists—an omission that further underscores the museum’s anti-Indigenous and anti-anticolonial practices, because ignoring, let alone erasing, genocide in Gaza actively perpetuates violent colonial practices. But these practices run deeper and wider, beyond the museum’s helm. Other letters written in support of Nanibush by arts professionals, organizers, and community groups also sidelined the issue of Palestine, warping the stakes into a freedom-of-speech issue, not only distracting us from Palestinian liberation and trivializing resistance but also playing into the very liberal model that they attempt to critique. This results in the further decimation of Palestine by quietly sanctioning the collective punishment of its people and its diaspora. Even if a pen is not a sword, there is no turning away from the hell that is enclosing us, for to turn away is to turn toward another kind of hell (dissonance, denial, psychopathy).
Channeling a long-standing Canadian nationalist exceptionalism, contemporary artistic and cultural industries tend to frame centuries-old colonial and imperial violence as a conflict that happens elsewhere, as something that “we” (always some superfluous we) are against in the abstract but in which “we” do not have a direct stake. “I am taking this seriously and I know there will need to be a rebuilding of trust,” Jost claims in his statement. “I recognize there is much work to be done with open, honest, and brave conversations.” Jost’s letter uses the passive voice à la the New York Times in order to evade responsibility, obscure the agent (who will do the work? Who will rebuild trust?) and refuse any concrete plan of repair. This common form of liberal deflection contributes directly to the political isolation Palestine has been facing for over seventy-five years by refusing to name what’s really going on: a genocide backed by the imperial core. This passive deflection allows Jost to sidestep the historical and political context, which includes the AGO’s role as a tool of Canada’s imperialism—the AGO’s very incorporation was supported by legislation in 1903 giving the museum the power to expropriate land.
Furthermore, statements such as Jost’s, which jockeys phrases like “freedom of political thought” and “artistic expression,” are in fact anathema to the imaginative possibility of art. Expression is the watchword here, that superficial association between speech and moral good, but there is not much to watch. The same month as Nanibush’s departure, for example, the AGO mounted an exhibition cataloging over two hundred years of currency defaced as an act of rebellion. Before Jost even published his letter, the museum held up this record of protest as a monument to its institutional value of free expression, while the show coincided with protests—held inside its own gallery—staged in solidarity with Nanibush and against the general “censorship and institutional racism exemplified by arts institutions.” AGO workers then went on strike in March 2024, a first for the institution, as staff members, including café workers, custodians, archivists, handlers, assistant curators, and technicians were bound by Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s wage-restraint law, Bill 124. At the same time, according to the president of the OPSEU Local 535, management were getting 10 to 59 percent pay increases. The AGO’s evasiveness—using the social-justice actions of artists as a cover for its own oppression—ultimately masks an aesthetic reign of imperialism, where the art is used as a decoy, and the retaliation and disciplining are themselves the terrors shrouded by aesthetic aspirations.
Artist Jenin Yaseen during her sit-in protest at the Royal Ontario Museum. Image courtesy of the artist.
Given how quickly the diversity-politics fetish in Toronto gave way to the suppression of the Palestine solidarity movement, we can no longer feign shock at how art institutions normalize Zionism, exploitation, racism, and misogyny. As cultural heritage has been destroyed on an unfathomable scale in Gaza, we are not mere observers of colonial oppression. We are already participants, complicit in genocide. “Canada and Israel have an important shared history, as they are both settler-colonial states founded on the genocide and displacement of Indigenous peoples,” write Alia Hijaab and Rana Nazzal Hamadeh of Artists for Palestine – CA in an essay that outlines how Canadian art institutions have been silencing artists and staff. “Canada singles out Israel through unfettered diplomatic, political, and military support, which has allowed the state to violate international law with impunity.” As Hijaab and Nazzal Hamadeh note, Canada is Israel’s sixth-largest arms customer, and Israel is one of Canada’s largest customers—Canada exported almost $28 million in arms to Israel in 2021. This codependency extends into the cultural sphere where the public-relations initiative known as Brand Israel, as the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) guidelines clearly detail, puts culture into service as a shill for apartheid. The strategy is blatant: spend millions to use culture workers and their work to whitewash Israel’s image abroad, and to gloss over, in the words of the BDS activist Omar Barghouti, “the inconvenient fact that Israel is a state practicing occupation, colonialism, and apartheid.”
Furthermore, as an example of Brand Israel’s more covert ripples through Toronto, MOCA’s Free Fridays are sponsored by Scotiabank. The bank was the largest foreign shareholder in Elbit Systems, the Israeli weapons producer, until it cut its investment by over 40 percent in the spring of 2024 after cultural organizers pressured it to divest. “‘Free’ admission is not truly free when it comes at a cost to human life,” the No Arms in the Arts coalition states in a petition written in early 2024. “Scotiabank’s sponsorship of Friday nights at MOCA means that access to the museum is predicated on war profiteering.” Most of the artists involved in the Greater Toronto Area exhibition that was on at the time (and for which I had contributed a catalogue essay) also signed a letter against the Scotiabank funding. MOCA did not publicly respond to either.
Image credit: No Arms In The Arts.
“He must go on until he has found the seething pot out of which the learning of the future will emerge,” Frantz Fanon wrote, on his deathbed, of the native intellectual and artist in a revolutionary period. The pot is boiling over; it is time to release the energy we put into these organizations and don’t get back, divest from prestige and artwashing. We can start to do this by turning our energies to the art happening all around us, all the time—in coloring circles, classrooms, libraries, rehab centers, day cares, art-therapy rooms, on signposts, on social media. In doing so, we are learning to decenter cultural institutions while joining the history of the cultural boycott, popularized during South African apartheid, that is taking shape once again today, through endorsements of BDS and PACBI, and other forms of mobilization, disruption, sabotage, and counterprogramming.
So much is at stake. The longer I write this essay, the more people die—at least 61,709 Palestinians since October 7, 2023, according to Gaza’s health ministry (though a study says the true death toll is likely to exceed 186,000), and many more injured and disabled, with Israel targeting hospitals, refugee camps, journalists, schools, and libraries. Despite the abstraction that numbers take, each life is singular; each martyred life is one too many. The recent ceasefire agreement between Hamas and the Israeli occupation must only renew the solidarity and liberation struggles.
Across Toronto, organizers, community groups, artists, students, and activists have already begun to experiment with decentering the art institution. They continue to refuse the obscenities that museums uphold, their slash-and-burn philanthropy, their wealth- and art-hoarding. In November 2023, after the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) censored the work of three Palestinian women artists in advance of the exhibition Death: Life’s Greatest Mystery, they held an 18-hour sit-in. I was reminded of how, almost thirty-five years ago, various black artists, activists, and organizations protested ROM’s Into the Heart of Africa. The exhibition, which opened in 1989, portrayed antiblack racism and glorified colonialism by heroicizing the lives of white Canadian soldiers and Christian missionaries who looted artifacts from a largely anonymous African mass. As the black activist and civil-rights lawyer Charles Roach put it a few months after the exhibition opened, in 1990, the condemning of the exhibition concerned “the presentation of African culture through the eyes of those who enslaved, colonized, and inflicted genocide on Africans. It has to do with the museum not telling the whole truth. It also has to do with the power of the ROM, one of the most respected shapers of minds and attitudes towards culture.” Nearly three decades later, in 2016, the ROM apologized, but the messages of protest signs from that era, including “Racist Ontario Museum,” still linger given the contemporary situation. Death, for the ROM, a state-owned enterprise and the most visited museum in Canada, is not only an exhibition theme but the very logic of its colonial history. The poet M. NourbeSe Philip said in the Toronto Star in January 1991, “As long as institutions and individuals fail to understand how thoroughly racism permeates the very underpinnings of Western thought, then despite all the good will in the world, catastrophes like Into the Heart of Africa will continue to happen.”
The rise and fall of Death: Life’s Greatest Mystery was indeed a continuation of institutional racism and Western thinking. In November 2023, I was on a virtual Labor Notes panel that highlighted how workers were organizing to help stop the genocide in Palestine. One of the other panelists was Sameerah Hosam Ahmad, who was among the Palestinian women artists whose work was censored by the ROM, as they were told to remove the word Palestine and put “West Bank” in its place, among other shameful suggestions. “We did not leave until the museum agreed that they were going to show our work,” she said, citing her experience in the labor movement as training for this act of civil disobedience. Also in the aftermath, the artists, along with other Toronto queer and working-class communities, organized vibrant public altars with fruit and flower offerings and a Día de Muertos ofrenda in solidarity with the artist Norma Rios-Sierra, whose ofrenda honoring her late father was featured alongside Ahmad’s work in one of the censored sections of Death: Life’s Greatest Mystery. The gatherings these artists created with their friends and colleagues, one of them a colorful installation outside the museum that called unabashedly for a free Palestine, far exceeded whatever the ROM could put together. They demonstrated with their exuberant, collective artwork the vigilance and action required to expose, reject, and move beyond the symbol of ignominy that is the museum.
Image credit: No Arms In The Arts.
An October 2024 report, “Surveilled & Silenced: A Report on Palestine Solidarity at York University,” documents before-and-after images of a student art installation at the university where I work, which critiqued the administration’s business-as-usual posture during a genocide. The installation consisted of various posters and protest images pasted on doors in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change. One of the larger posters initially read, in the colors of the Palestine flag: “Anyone else struggling with work genocide balance?” Like the ROM exhibition, it was then censored and removed in December 2023. Across Toronto, just in the last few months, there have been film screenings raising funds for Gaza’s food systems, a DJs Against Apartheid campaign to boycott Porsche Scopes Toronto, free book clubs with writers who have, in solidarity with Palestine, withdrawn from the Giller Prize, whose lead funder was Scotiabank until fifteen months of protests and boycotts led the Giller Foundation to end its partnership with the bank in February 2025. While the four curators that I opened this essay with are no longer attached to the same institutions, their work continues, since it was never the institution that nurtured their most important projects—Nanibush, for example, recently held the 2024 edition of aabaakwad, an annual Indigenous-led convening on Indigenous art and artists. Artists, too, are an especially precarious group, and the brazenness of the normalization of Zionism has resulted in vulnerable culture workers risking their livelihoods to stand with Palestine. Over the summer, in protest of MOCA’s financial relationship with Scotiabank, the artist Sukaina Kubba obstructed her own Persian textile–inspired sculptural wall drawings at MOCA’s GTA24 Triennial with a sign that said “THIS ARTWORK IS ON STRIKE.” Other efforts that are autonomous, in common, and perhaps more transformative than anything on a wall are still emerging. The horizon has yet to be formed.
I don’t go to bigger galleries as much as I used to. At night, when I can’t sleep, I’ll browse the Palestinian Museum Digital Archive, having lately become transfixed by eighteen-year-old Zainab Mustafa Abdullah who was murdered by the Israeli Occupation Forces at the Burj al-Shemali Palestinian refugee camp in south Lebanon in 1982. Her image—or rather my desire to know her and the impossibility of that knowing—reminds me both of Minor Detail, a novel by Adania Shibli (translated into English by Elisabeth Jaquette), and my former teacher Saidiya Hartman’s essay, “Venus in Two Acts,” which asks, “If it is not possible to undo the violence that inaugurates the sparse record of a girl’s life or remedy her anonymity with a name or translate the commodity’s speech, then to what end does one tell such stories?” We must interrogate our feel-good desires for closure, hope, and generativity, and acknowledge the violence at work in reading and writing about dead and often anonymous figures of slavery and colonialism. Remember that some are losing everything, have lost everything. To be in struggle against the cultural genocide in Palestine is to be against genocide in general.
University of Toronto encampments for the Palestine Liberation Movement. Photo: Tiana Reid.
The most beautiful thing I saw in person this year were the encampments at the University of Toronto. The sky was so blue, like a matrix out of which University College, completed in 1859, had been etched. But the Romanesque revival of the university’s first permanent building, with its sturdy, thick brick walls and ornate arches, had nothing on the slight breeze making the flimsy graffitied tents shimmer. I saw “WE OUT HERE” painted onto a tent. If it had been in a museum, these words could have been both a title and the wall text announcing a diversity of practices: a creative-writing circle, a conversation about antiblack racism, restorative bodywork, movement, counseling. But this was more than a museum could ever be; this was life and death. At that particular hour, on an afternoon in May, it was quiet. I saw more tents than people, giving the atmosphere a sense of preparedness. More was coming. The people were getting ready. Looking south, Palestinian flags installed on the fences interrupted the Toronto skyline. I tried not to be romantic about all of the terrible beauty—but either way, it was fleeting. The art was there, and now it’s gone.
University of Toronto encampments for the Palestine Liberation Movement. Photo: Tiana Reid.
