The Light Fantastic at the Art Gallery of Alberta (AGA)
This exhibition features a selection of works by contemporary artists who re-infuse light with a sense of magic and wonder. The artists use common domestic light including its fixtures, lamps and bulbs, to create immersive experiences with light that instill the everyday with a sense of the uncanny.
The AGA notes that Victorians saw the electric light and the force of electricity, or “the lightning,” as having an almost “religious power.” “For many, the possibility of bright, far-reaching, long-lasting light at the flick of a switch was nothing short of miraculous. Today, we take the miracle of electric light for granted. Our world is permeated and saturated by artificial light emitted from a myriad of sources day and night. In a strange inversion, we now find mystery, enchantment and magic in the flickering light of a candle and the bright blaze of the fireplace,” said the AGA.
The exhibition is being organized by the AGA and curated by Catherine Crowston. It will open on August 29, 2026.
Things Fall Apart at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto
This fall, the fourth edition of the TBA takes place across the city and beyond, with the Art Museum as the main exhibition site partner. Curated by Allison Glenn, the exhibition Things Fall Apart brings together artists “whose practices engage rupture as a generative force, reconsidering the histories, geographies, and systems that shape contemporary life while proposing new ways of understanding the present.”
The Art Museum at the University of Toronto is the main exhibition site partner for TBA 2026, with the exhibition unfolding across both of the Art Museum’s gallery spaces: the University of Toronto Art Centre in University College and the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery in Hart House, from September 26 to December 20, 2026.
This Biennial traces relationships between the expansive but interconnected waters of the Great Lakes region and over 16 global waterways that span five continents. Things Fall Apart 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? It 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.
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.
Fall exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA)
The Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA) will open its Fall 2026 season on October 4, featuring major exhibitions by Bharti Kher and Delcy Morelos, alongside a presentation of Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s recently recovered Light of the Heavens as part of the museum’s South Stairwell Sound Series. Together, the three presentations explore the human body in relation to natural forces, material transformation, and unseen chemical, spiritual, and philosophical forces that shape experiences.
Bharti Kher’s Bones brings together works from the past 15 years alongside new sculptures, exploring transformation, material, weight, and gravity. She is acclaimed for her approach to assemblage, composing ready-made materials and castings into creations. Her process involves breaking apart and reconstituting objects to “know them better,” embracing the impossibility of returning things to what they once were. Light sources and architectural remnants, androgynous body casts, and pillars collide in unusual mise-en-scènes of grand orchestration. The exhibition also includes Kher’s mirrored Matter paintings, whose surfaces are covered with thousands of bindis arranged into particulate formations. A new monumental work, Virus XXVI, expands this approach into an orbit-like composition. The title Bones refers both to bodily remains and to the idea of a foundation from which something can be built.
Bogotá-based artist Delcy Morelos presents Ombligo, a major site-specific commission rooted in her relationship to the land of her native Colombia. The title, which means navel in Spanish, features work that evokes the mark of our origins and our earliest lifeline. Rooted in her relationship to the land in her native Colombia, Morelos’s practice reflects both the earth’s nourishing, regenerative strength, and the violence of dispossession. Raised in Tierralta by her grandmother, a descendant of the Emberá people, she draws on this heritage in works made from soil, clay, fabric, and plant fibres. Morelos originally trained as a painter, however, her practice has evolved into volumetric installations sculpted from earth and organic materials. Defined by their formal precision, these works also activate memory through scent and touch, incorporating aromas blended by the artist herself.
MOCA’s South Stairwell Sound Series returns with Light of the Heavens, a recently recovered song by Canadian singer and composer Beverly Glenn-Copeland. Created around 1986, during the same era as his landmark album Keyboard Fantasies, the 7:24-minute work will play on a loop throughout the stairwell. Recorded while Glenn-Copeland was living a quieter life on the Canadian Shield, the song features shimmering synthesizers and his measured vocals. The recently recovered recording offers another perspective on the artist’s decades-spanning practice and its focus on interconnectedness and spiritual openness. The presentation coincides with the 40th anniversary of Keyboard Fantasies, an album that has continued to influence new generations of listeners and artists. Light of the Heavens was described by Glenn-Copeland as “a gift from my past” and offers a meditation on humanity’s relationship with the universe and the unknowable.
All three presentations will be on view at MOCA from October 4, 2026, to February 14, 2027.
