TORONTO.- The Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto announced its full 2026 exhibition programme. The museum has turned the building over to dynamic, multi-floor projects by Kimsooja, Sara Cwynar, and Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi spanning textiles, ceramics, performance, and intricately constructed, monumental photographs and films. Through their subtle and hyper-visual sensibilities, the artists pose timely questions about the unnerving and liberating effects of an increasingly immaterial world.

As the seasons shift, the fall programme becomes more elemental through the materially driven practices of Hugh Hayden, Delcy Morelos, and Bharti Kher. On each floor of MOCA, space-defining gestures and charged materials foreground the qualities of imbalance, fragility, and contradiction. Bringing together new commissions and recent works, MOCA’s Fall 2026 exhibitions move with the building’s infrastructure, light, and spatial rhythm to produce singular, thought-provoking encounters.

“Together, these projects reflect the ambition, care, and curiosity that continue to define MOCA’s curatorial vision,” says Kathleen S. Bartels, MOCA Executive Director and CEO. “While the two seasons are distinct, they share a deep engagement with materiality, process, and our shifting cultural and social realities. We look forward to welcoming visitors to MOCA and to offering immersive experiences that invite reflection and deeper engagement with the questions shaping our world today.”

Spring 2026

Kimsooja
Dimensions of a Needle
May 15–August 16, 2026
Floor 1: Price Family Community Gallery and the Lindy Green Forum and Floor 3

Leading conceptual artist Kimsooja (b. 1957, Daegu, South Korea) presents site-specific installations across Floors 1 and 3 that illuminate the philosophical and material foundations of her practice. Working across diverse mediums, the exhibition unfolds through the metaphor of the needle​​—an axis, threshold, and point of encounter—through which Kimsooja has long explored handcraft traditions, female labour, nomadism, co-existence, memory, and transformation. Rooted in a philosophy of “non-doing” and “non-making,” her work uncovers rather than imposes. The needle becomes a model of consciousness—piercing yet binding, dividing yet connecting—while stillness emerges as a resistance to the acceleration of contemporary life.

On Floor 1, suspended traditional Korean bedcovers—historically used by women to bundle belongings for travel, migration, and gift-giving—hover as portable architectures of memory and as canvases released from their stretchers. Nearby, the video A Needle Woman – Paris (2009) anchors the space in stillness: the artist stands motionless within the city’s flow, a living point threading disparate lives and drawing attention to the urban fabric. On Floor 3, the Meta Painting works return to painting’s material origin in linen cultivated and hand-processed by the artist, while ceramic vessels and plates from the Deductive Object–Bottari series translates wrapping into weight and void, each pierced or patterned with constellations of needle holes that open form to air and light. A photographic series centred on the artist’s hands further distills gestures of crossing, binding, and release. Together, these works propose wrapping and piercing as acts that shape not only objects, but consciousness itself—where the simplest fold or incision holds the depth of the unknown.

Sara Cwynar
Baby Blue Benzo Beta
May 15–August 16, 2026
Floor 2: The Karen Green Gallery

Vancouver-born multimedia artist Sara Cwynar (b. 1985), MOCA’s Digital Futures Resident, transforms Floor 2 into a hybrid theatre, photo studio, and showroom. Working across photography, film, performance, and a collage-like treatment of space, she disassembles images to reveal the power they exert over personal and collective imagination.

The Canadian premiere of Baby Blue Benzo (2024)—her most ambitious work to date—anchors the exhibition. It begins with the Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR, the most expensive car ever sold at auction, and expands into a research film about the arbitrariness of value and its production. The film also links “Benz” to benzodiazepines—medications commonly prescribed for anxiety and insomnia. Original, stock, and AI-generated imagery scrolls forward and backward, mirroring the relentless feed of daily life. Visible seams and awkward glitches hint at the burden of images and their false promises. Playing within a former auto factory, MOCA’s current home, the film draws pointed connections between photography and its role in manufacturing illusion and advancing capitalism.

Also presented for the first time in Canada, Alpha/Alphabet (2025/26) reconfigures the gallery through custom modular panels inspired by Aby Warburg’s unfinished Mnemosyne Atlas (1925–29). Pulled from terms searched frequently online and Cwynar’s own browsing history, words and phrases like “disinformation,” “new woman,” “plastic,” “wrestle,” and “youth” are translated into visual form. Extending Warburg’s method, Cwynar records recent cultural memory by indexing our collective search for meaning.

Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi
Suspension (Sierra Brooks, Daisha Cannon, Luci Collins, Olivia Courtney, Naveen Daries …)
May 15–August 16, 2026
South Stairwell Sound Series

Building on MOCA’s sound programme, the museum presents Suspension (2020), an audiovisual work by Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi (b.1980, New York, United States), projected in the museum’s South Stairwell. The video moves through intimate close-ups of recognizable female gymnasts of colour at the height of their discipline. Rather than staging triumph or failure, it centres a shared state of concentration. Altered by haunting music, the sequence of portraits reflects the immense training and sacrifice condensed into these moments, while drawing attention to the overwhelming expectations these athletes must also train to resist and overcome.

Fall 2026

Hugh Hayden
October 3, 2026–February 14, 2027
Floor 1: Price Family Community Gallery and the Lindy Green Forum

Over the past fifteen years, Hugh Hayden has become known for provocative wood carved sculptures and installations that challenge American ideals. Born in Dallas, Texas (1983), and trained as an architect, he works with wood as both material and metaphor, combining and manipulating different species. Familiar objects—furniture, utensils, and sports equipment—are reimagined and distorted into surreal, menacing forms, often bristling with thorns, unruly branches, and stiff fibres that repel the body and signal the threat of pain. Other artworks include garments and shoes covered in tree bark that function as armour and camouflage. Technically inhabitable, Hayden’s sculptures evoke the unease of moving through social spaces, and the longing to blend in. Leaning into the multipurpose character of the museum’s ground floor, Hayden’s site-specific project inverts private and public space, opening onto the vulnerabilities and unspoken thoughts that circulate beneath the surface of human interactions. This exhibition is his first solo presentation in Canada.

Delcy Morelos
October 3, 2026–February 14, 2027
Floor 2: The Karen Green Gallery

On Floor 2, MOCA will unveil a major site-specific commission by Bogota-based artist Delcy Morelos (b.1967, Tierralta, Colombia). The work is conceived in relation to the building’s infrastructure and design, built from soil and grains harvested in the Greater Toronto Area.

A self-identified painter whose early works consisted of pigments on paper and earth-covered textiles, her practice has evolved into all-encompassing sculpture made from soil embedded with organic materials such as herbs and spices. The scents emanating from the earth stir memory and emotion. Audiences can also experience Morelos’ sculptures through touch. The combination of scent, texture, and immense scale transports visitors, provoking thoughts on sustenance, conflict, migration, and spirituality.

Raised in the Córdoba region of Colombia by her grandmother—a descendant of the Emberá people—Morelos’ work remains close to that Indigenous heritage, as well as her knowledge of sacred geometries, philosophies, and traditions of minimal art. Morelos’ exhibition extends MOCA’s ongoing collaboration with artists whose practices confront one of the most urgent challenges of our time: repairing the increasingly fragile relationship between humans and the natural world.

Bharti Kher
October 3, 2026–February 14, 2027
Floor 3

Bharti Kher (b. 1969, London, United Kingdom) is a New Delhi and London–based multimedia artist acclaimed for her masterful approach to assemblage, transforming readymade materials into spellbinding sculptures and installations. Her process often involves reconstituting objects or recomposing materials to “know them better.” By opening objects, she reveals what remains hidden when whole. Embracing the irrevocability of her actions, Kher accepts that things cannot return to what they once were. She reconstructs them by fusing disparate elements: architectural fragments converge with mannequin bodies and wheels; furniture meets stone remnants and faux fur.

For MOCA, Kher has conceived a project exploring the triangle—a recurring form in her practice whose meaning varies across cultures, disciplines, and belief systems. Large wooden triangles hang from the ceiling like protractors, suspended by ropes and counterweighted with granite column pillars, their shifting balance producing moments of delicate equilibrium. Like sacred geometries that Kher describes as “shapes with no inside or outside,” they extend and activate one another, sharing their cosmological and physical embodiment. Within this seemingly charged atmosphere of flux, hybrid figurative sculptures made over the last twenty years stand in their divergent truths. Driven by experimentation and rediscovery, Kher’s arrangement of past works proposes a world where opposites coexist, chaos finds its own synchronicity, and what is fractured is also complete.