TORONTO.- The Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto announced new details for its Fall 2026 season, featuring major exhibitions by Bharti Kher and Delcy Morelos, alongside a presentation of Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s recently recovered Light of the Heavens, part of the museum’s ongoing South Stairwell Sound Series. Opening October 4, the season brings together three world-renowned artists whose diverse practices position the human body in relation to natural forces, the movement and transformation of material, and the unseen powers—chemical, spiritual, and philosophical—that shape our experiences.
Kher and Morelos have developed complex, site-specific projects for MOCA by testing the possibilities of material, weight, and gravity. Their titles alone—Bones by Kher and Ombligo, which is navel in Spanish, by Morelos—turn our attention to the body as a generative centre, inseparable from larger natural processes unfolding at every scale, devastating and thrilling. Glenn-Copeland extends these ideas through music, tracing a circle of life with lyrics set to an ethereal synth composition.
"This season’s artists continue to impact contemporary conversations around the world," says Kathleen S. Bartels, MOCA Executive Director and CEO. "Each has developed a singular artistic language that speaks with extraordinary sensitivity and imagination. With a richness of textures, space-defining forms, and sound, each of them encourages us to slow down and open ourselves to mystery, contradiction, instinct, and connection."
Bharti Kher
Bones
October 4, 2026–February 14, 2027
Floor 1: Price Family Community Gallery and the Lindy Green Forum and Floor 3
Bharti Kher (b. 1969, London, United Kingdom) is acclaimed for her masterful approach to assemblage, composing ready-made materials and castings into spellbinding 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-scnes of grand orchestration.
Bones, Kher’s presentation at MOCA, brings together works from the past 15 years with new sculptures, placing distinct series into dialogue. The title, she explains, refers both to bodily remains and to a foundation upon which something can be built.
At MOCA, Kher introduces striking platforms as support structures and navigational tools. Her surreal female figures—some draped in traditional Indian saris, others entwined with spiralling forms—stand or float among abstract elements. Described by her as “shapes with no inside or outside,” Kher’s geometric sculptures, made of wood, stone, and concrete and often secured by ropes and chains, extend and activate one another, sharing a cosmological and physical presence. Throughout her practice, Kher returns to the ways shapes organize systems of belief and perceptions.
Also on view are mirrored Matter paintings, their surfaces densely covered with bindis that sweep into particulate formations, conjuring microscopic life and vast celestial visions. A new monumental tondo, Virus XXVI, gathers on the wall through thousands of hand-applied bindis, expanding this language into a hypnotic, orbit-like composition.
Bones is a choreography that balances instability with control. Forms tilt, hover, and recalibrate, creating a universe of tension in which opposites coexist and everything is in flux. Transformation is continuous—an active, uneasy condition on which all things rest.
Delcy Morelos
Ombligo
October 4, 2026–February 14, 2027
Floor 2: The Karen Green Gallery
This fall, MOCA will unveil a major site-specific commission by Bogot-based artist Delcy Morelos (b. 1967, Tierralta, Colombia). 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 Ember people, she draws on this heritage in works made from soil, clay, fabric, and plant fibres.
Morelos originally trained as a painter; 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.
On Floor 2, visitors will encounter a form that stretches and swells from the ceiling, illuminated by natural light. Among Morelos's most ephemeral large-scale works to date, it follows the contours of a womb and is woven from long strands of sisal rope treated with soil and corn roots harvested in Toronto. Pulling inspiration from the ingenuity of the spider, Morelos spins and weaves a sensory web that binds, catches, shelters, and nurses.
Titled Ombligo (navel), the work evokes the mark of our origins and our earliest lifeline. Earth is embedded with mixtures of corn, tapioca, and tobacco, recalling their medicinal and nourishing roles in the Americas before European contact and the imposition of political borders. Ombligo’s looming physical presence, fragrance, and texture creates a space for reflection on sustenance, ritual, migration, extraction, and restoration.
Beverly Glenn-Copeland
Light of the Heavens, 2026 (7:24 min, looped audio)
October 4, 2026–February 14, 2027
South Stairwell
MOCA’s South Stairwell Sound Series returns this season with music by the revered Canadian singer and composer Beverly Glenn-Copeland. Resonating throughout the stairwell is the artist’s latest release, Light of the Heavens (ca. 1986), a recently recovered song from his archives created during the same era as his landmark album Keyboard Fantasies, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this fall.
Recorded while Glenn-Copeland was living a quieter life on the Canadian Shield, the song is spare, shimmering, and weightless. Untethered to any album, it embodies the contemplative spirit and sonic language that has drawn generations of listeners to his decades-spanning body of work, including more recent admirers and collaborators Sam Smith, Bon Iver, Romy, and Wu Tsang, among others.
A mysterious blend of synthesizers supports Glenn-Copeland’s tender, measured voice as he sings, “by the guiding stars, the cosmic veil, we are ever coming home to the light of the heavens.” Evoking both the immeasurable expanse of the universe and the reassuring sense of our belonging within it, Light of the Heavens reflects Glenn-Copeland’s enduring belief in interconnectedness and spiritual openness.
Described by him as “a gift from my past,” the song sheds new light on Glenn-Copeland’s enduring practice while offering a meditation on the ties between humanity and the unknowable.
