Toronto/CMEDIA: New details for its Fall 2026 season has been announced by The Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA) 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.
Having developed complex, site-specific projects for MOCA, Kher and Morelos test 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 devastating and thrilling processes unfolding at every scale. These ideas are extended by Glenn-Copeland 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, The messenger, 2012. Fibre glass, sari, resin, granite, wooden rake, 188 x 132 x 80 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin. Photo: Genevieve Hanson.
Bharti Kher
Bones
Oct 4, 2026–Feb14, 2027
Floor 1: Price Family Community Gallery and the Lindy Green Forum and Floor 3
Acclaimed for her masterful approach to assemblage,Bharti Kher (b. 1969, London, United Kingdom) composes ready-made materials and castings into spellbinding creations.
Involving breaking apart and reconstituting objects to “know them better,”her process embraces 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.
Bringing together works from the past 15 years with new sculptures, placing distinct series into dialogue, Bones, Kher explains in her presentation at MOCA refers both to bodily remains and to a foundation upon which something can be built.
Introducing striking platforms as support structures and navigational tools at MOCA, Kher’s surreal female figures—some draped in traditional Indian saris, others dreseed with spiralling forms—stand or float among abstract elements.
Described 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, and share a cosmological and physical presence. Throughout her practice, Kher returns to the ways shapes organize systems of belief and perceptions.
Mirrored Matter paintings, their surfaces densely covered with bindis that sweep into particulate formations are also on view 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.
A choreography that balances instability with control, Bones’ forms tilt, hover, and recalibrate, creating a universe of tension in which opposites coexist and everything is in flux with continuous transformation, active, uneasy condition on which all things rest.
Delcy Morelos, El abrazo (The Embrace), installation view, Dia Chelsea, New York, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo: Don Stahl.
Delcy Morelos
Ombligo
Oct 4, 2026–Feb,14, 2027
Floor 2: The Karen Green Gallery
Unveiling this fall at MOCA a major site-specific commission by Bogotá-based artist Delcy Morelos (b. 1967, Tierralta, Colombia) with her relationship to the land in her native Colombia. Reflecting both the earth’s nourishing, regenerative strength Morelos’s practices 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.
Originally trained as a painter,Morelos’ practice has evolved into volumetric installations sculpted from earth and organic materials. T
hese works defined by their formal precision, also activate memory through scent and touch, incorporating aromas blended by the artist herself.
A form that stretches and swells from the ceiling will be encountered by the visitors on Floor 2, illuminated by natural light. BAmong 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. Inspired by the ingenuity of the spider, Morelos spins and weaves a sensory web that binds, catches, shelters, and nurses.
Evoking the mark of our origins and our earliest lifeline, the work Titled Ombligo (navel) presents the Earth embedded with mixtures of corn, tapioca, and tobacco, recalling their medicinal roles in the Americas before European contact and the imposition of political borders.
Looming physical presence, fragrance, and texture,Ombligo creates a space for reflection on sustenance, ritual, migration, extraction, and restoration.
Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Light of the Heavens (Official Video) (still), 2026. Courtesy of the artist, Third Side Music Inc., and Transgressive Records.
Beverly Glenn-Copeland
Light of the Heavens, 2026 (7:24 min, looped audio)
Oct 4, 2026–Feb 14, 2027
South Stairwell
Returning this season with music by the revered Canadian singer and composer Beverly Glenn-Copeland at MOCA’s South Stairwell Sound Series resonates throughout the stairwell. 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 celebrates its 40th anniversary this fall.
Spare, shimmering, and weightless the song was recorded while Glenn-Copeland was living a quieter life on the Canadian Shield embodies the contemplative spirit and sonic language that has drawn generations of listeners to his body of work, including more recent admirers and collaborators Sam Smith, Bon Iver, Romy, and Wu Tsang, among others.
Glenn-Copeland’s tender voice supported by a mysterious blend of synthesizers as he sings, “by the guiding stars, the cosmic veil, we are ever coming home to the light of the heavens” e
vokes both the expanse of the universe and a sense of our belonging within it, ‘Light of the Heavens’ reflects Glenn-Copeland’s enduring belief in interconnectedness and spiritual openness.
Shedding new light on Glenn-Copeland’s enduring practice, which he describes as “a gift from my past,” offeris a meditation on the ties between humanity and the unknowable.
Courtesy of the artist, Third Side Music Inc., and Huxley Management
A non-profit independent museum dedicated to fostering access to the arts in an inclusive cultural hub, The Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA) presents rotating exhibitions that prioritize twenty-first-century artistic production, primarily through commissioning of new work. With its mission as a locally rooted and internationally connected organization with artists, partnerships, experimentation, and reciprocal initiatives are at the centre of MOCA’s mission. Focusing on core values promoting equity, inclusion and access, MOCA fosters active participation and engagement to serve as a welcoming gathering place in the hyper-diverse city of Toronto and offering unparalleled access to contemporary art becomes the ultimate art destination in the GTA.
For more information on MOCA Toronto visit moca.ca.
