From Kleinburg to Venice: McMichael Collaborators at the 2026 Biennale
The 61st International Art Exhibition of the Biennale di Venezia opens this May, bringing together artists from around the globe. Conceived by the late Cameroonian Swiss curator Koyo Kouoh, the 2026 exhibition In Minor Keys explores resonances, affinities, and unexpected convergences between practices, despite vast distances of geography and context.
Among the more than one hundred invited participants are a number of Canadian artists with close ties to the McMichael. Their contributions testify to how the conversations taking place here at home are connected to those unfolding on the international stage. While the works of these notable Canadians will be experienced in Venice this summer, they can also be encountered closer to home—in the McMichael’s galleries, across our publications, and through our exhibitions currently circulating across Canada.
Bonnie Devine
A leading voice in contemporary Indigenous art, the Anishinaabe artist and scholar Bonnie Devine is a valued and longstanding collaborator of the McMichael’s. Her multidisciplinary practice—spanning installation, video, writing, and curatorial work—engages deeply with land, treaty histories, and Indigenous knowledge systems.
Visitors to the gallery will likely already be familiar with From Water to Water: A Way Through the Trees, her site-specific installation in the Grand Hall alcove. Developed through her research into the historic Toronto Carrying Place Trail, which runs through the valley below our bluff, the work traces Indigenous movement through the landscape, connecting the Humber River to broader ancestral networks of travel and exchange. Combining painting with the display of historic Wendat ceremonial pipes, Devine brings layered histories into the present—grounding the work in both place and memory.
Her commitment to storytelling and knowledge-sharing extends beyond her own artmaking. Three years ago, Devine served as co-editor of Early Days: Indigenous Art at the McMichael, a landmark publication that brought together more than seventy Indigenous voices reflecting on works held in our collection. Under her editorial direction, the project foregrounded lived experience, community knowledge, and multiple perspectives—reshaping how our collection is understood and encountered today. Her award-winning lead essay, “On Looking and Reading,” offers a thoughtful framework for engaging with the McMichael’s Indigenous collection, centring Indigenous ways of seeing, reading, and remembering. An excerpt from the essay is available to read in our McMichael Magazine.
Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka
Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka is a Japanese Canadian artist known for her very contemporary application of ancient techniques from her heritage. Her lived experience informs a practice that spans printmaking, textiles, and installation, drawing on traditional techniques such as Japanese washi and gyotaku while engaging urgent concerns of the moment, including climate change, mental health, and collective resilience.
In 2024, Hatanaka undertook a residency in the McMichael’s Tom Thomson Shack, culminating in her work Final Gasp of the Nervous System. Traditional Japanese washi paper and other handmade paper from southeast Asia are used by Hatanaka various printmaking, dyeing, and painting techniques create works that respond directly to the surrounding environment. The pieces move between the personal and the ecological—Hatanaka is a queer artist and lives with bipolar disorder—tracing connections between emotional states and the destabilizing reality of environmental change.
Hatanaka’s work Nuna/Land (Arena), 2018–19, is currently on view in Fresh Air: New Acquisitions in Context. This large-scale linocut draws inspiration from her time spent in Kinngait, Nunavut, where she led community artmaking projects with local youth. The composition evokes the region’s dramatic terrain—its hills and rock formations shaped by glaciers, wind, and ice over millennia. The ink used in this print was made from rocks Hatanaka sourced in Kinngait, allowing her to express her experience of the land through the products of the land itself.
of powdered iron ore from the Baffin Island iron mine on Haini Kozo paper from the Kashiki Seishi
paper mill, Japan, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, purchased with the generous support of the
Edith Kennethea Dunn Memorial Acquisition Fund for Canadian Women Artists, 2022.10.
Hatanaka will return to the McMichael on May 24 for Artists in Conversation: Contemporary Landscape in Canadian Art, joining artists Sky Glabush and Michelle Sound in a panel discussion on contemporary landscapes to address themes of environment, identity, materiality, and lived experience. You can register here.
Manuel Mathieu
Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1986, Manuel Mathieu moved to Montreal at age nineteen and has since gained international recognition for his multidisciplinary practice spanning painting, ceramics, installation, and, most recently, perfume-making. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; The Power Plant, Toronto; the Phi Foundation in Montreal; and the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Miami. He has received national recognition as part of the 2020 class of Sobey Art Award recipients.
Mathieu’s work hovers between abstraction and figuration. Working across media, he constructs paintings that resist fixed interpretation, unfolding instead as spaces of sensation and psychological depth. As the artist said, “I start a painting when it becomes impossible to paint — when the concept becomes so complex that it leaves the realm of words and enters the sphere of my imagination.”
Over the past several months, Mathieu’s gestural and textured painting Within the Figure, 2023, has been on view at the McMichael, above the front desk, greeting visitors to the gallery. The work never settles into place—its shifting forms and layered textures suggest constant motion. While abstract, Within the Figure seems haunted by figuration—perhaps by the marks of memory, spiritual presence, or historical violence. The painting will enter the McMichael collection as a promised gift of Christine and Andrew W. Dunn.
Rajni Perera and Marigold Santos
The artists Rajni Perera and Marigold Santos will present collaborative work at the Biennale, building on their evolving artistic dialogue. Their partnership—in projects such as Efflorescence / The Way We Wake—is grounded in a shared exploration of diasporic identity, mythology, and transformation. Working together, they create richly layered worlds populated by hybrid figures and otherworldly bodies, reimagining how identity, ancestry, and the natural world intersect and evolve.
McMichael visitors may recognize Perera’s work from her solo McMichael exhibition Futures, curated by Sarah Milroy. This mid-career retrospective brought together key works alongside new commissions and was accompanied by a richly illustrated publication featuring an interview with the artist and essays by acclaimed environmental writers Fariha Róisín and Britt Wray. Since its debut in 2022, the exhibition has travelled nationally to eight institutions.
As well, Perera’s work Tundra has recently been added to the collection, a mysterious image of environmental desecration and redemption featuring a mutated raven, a seeping oil barrel and a flourishing array of mushrooms and fungi repairing environmental damage—all of it set in a swirling Arctic landscape.
115 x 164 cm, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, purchased with the generous support of the Edith Kennethea Dunn Memorial
Acquisition Fund for Canadian Women Artists, 2024.4. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.
The gallery has also partnered with the filmmaker David Hartman to create a short film exploring Perera’s practice in her Toronto studio.
Abbas Akhavan
The multidisciplinary artist Abbas Akhavan has been selected to represent Canada at this year’s national pavilion in at the Venice Biennale. Born in Tehran and based between Montreal and Berlin, Akhavan in his practice reflects on the relationships between place and history, attending to the geopolitical forces that define both physical and psychic spaces.
McMichael visitors may recall Study for a Garden, a significant early work recently presented in our permanent collection show Conversations. Suggestive of both cultivation and conflict, the installation evokes crude weaponry, garden stakes, and gathered wood. Human territoriality emerges as a central theme, expressed with purposeful ambiguity.
purchased with the assistance of Francis and Eleanor Shen, Jane Wells and Mark Bursey, 2023.39. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.
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