Art Toronto No Longer Sponsored by AXA, Insurance Giant Invested in Weapons Used in Israeli Genocide

Art Toronto is no longer sponsored by AXA, a multinational insurance giant with substantial investments in weapons manufacturing companies linked to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, The Grind has learned.

“It was AXA’s decision not to renew,” an Art Toronto spokesperson told The Grind by email, confirming that AXA was not a sponsor of the 2025 edition of the fair. 

“Fortunately, Art Toronto has new sponsors who came to the plate,” they added. 

Formerly known as the Toronto International Art Fair, Art Toronto is Canada’s largest and oldest contemporary art fair. Hosted at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre since its inception in 2000, the annual event features dozens of exhibitors, installations and commercial galleries from around the world. The 2025 edition, which was held last weekend, boasted a new exhibit spotlighting Latin American artistic production.

For the past two years, Palestinian advocacy groups have pressured Art Toronto to end its sponsorship with AXA, which began in 2008. The France-based company holds substantial investments in at least 14 weapons manufacturers, including $150 million of investments in 11 weapons manufacturers linked to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, according to a 2024 investigation commissioned by the corporate accountability group Ekō.

Artists Against Artwashing, a coalition of Canadian arts workers demanding cultural institutions divest from settler colonialism and genocide, responded to the news in a statement shared with The Grind.

“Art Toronto’s long-standing partnership with AXA has always involved overlooking AXA’s massive investments in Israeli banks and weapons companies that facilitate the death and forced displacement of Palestinians,” the statement reads. 

“In the past two years, as Israel’s genocide on Gaza was livestreamed globally, AXA’s complicity in war crimes came into full view. Even so, while Palestinian artists in Toronto watched their family homes reduced to rubble, Art Toronto refused to take a stand against war profiteering.

“To artists and arts organizations considering partnerships with sponsors that aid and abet genocide like AXA, let this be a reminder that these corporations offer little security and will taint your work in blood. We can and must reimagine how we live and work.”

When asked for comment on the decision to end its sponsorship with Art Toronto, a spokesperson for AXA told The Grind that it does not comment on individual sponsorships. “Each year, we evaluate our marketing investments to align with our business goals,” the spokesperson said.

Based in Paris, AXA provides investment management and other financial services through its subsidiaries, and is currently worth around $140 billion CAD. 

The company has been targeted by Palestinian activist groups for nearly a decade. In 2016, the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) National Committee launched a campaign calling on AXA to divest from multiple Israeli banks that are complicit in Israel’s illegal settlement of the West Bank, and from Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer. 

Over the next several years, AXA began to divest from these companies. In August of 2024, the global Stop AXA Assistance to Israeli Apartheid coalition announced that popular pressure had forced the company to sell its investments in all major Israeli banks and Elbit Systems.

However, AXA remains a BDS target due to its continued investment in at least 14 weapons manufacturers, including companies that produce depleted uranium, nuclear arms, and white phosphorus.

Art Toronto’s decision to cut ties with AXA comes less than a year after the Giller Foundation — the organization behind the prestigious Giller Prize for literature — announced it had cut ties with Scotiabank following a sustained campaign and boycott that drew attention to the bank’s investments in Elbit Systems.

“We are hopeful the end of this partnership [between AXA and Art Toronto] will force arts institutions in Toronto to reckon with the fact that, largely, our sector has sacrificed all moral standards during Israel’s livestreamed genocide on Gaza, and still we have been abandoned by AXA and other complicit corporations like Scotiabank,” a spokesperson for Artists Against Artwashing tells The Grind.

“These corporations have proved that they offer little loyalty or security for arts institutions already facing austerity. This shift at Art Toronto proves the necessity of building towards alternative, ethical funding structures.”