Each May, the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival launches its city-wide lens-focused arts initiatives throughout Toronto. Over the past 27 years, the festival has cultivated a huge community of artists, practitioners and photography enthusiasts by bringing together the city’s museums, galleries and artist-run centers for a spring lineup dedicated to the expansive medium. . This year’s edition features over 20 public art installations, three of which speak to the intersections of land, migration and imagination through the poetic possibilities of the materiality of photography.
Brooklyn-based artist Genesis Báez created a site-specific work for an installation at The Bentway, a public art space under Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway, as part of a project curated by Alex Rand. baez started ground cover rephotographing footage of highway construction in the 1950s and 1960s, then burying the negatives in its ground, where the film was altered – and partially processed – by mud, water and weather. The resulting abstract images, enlarged from these negatives and displayed at the site where they were made, visualize the intersection of the man-made environment with the infinite forces of earth and water.
About a 20-minute walk northwest of The Bentway is an installation, curated by Gaëlle Morel, of images by a Moroccan artist Seif Kousmate’s series واحة (wowOr Oasis in English) which replaces billboards. The series reveals how the climate crisis has seriously damaged the oasis ecosystem in the southern regions of the country. Kousmate traveled around the region, taking photos and meeting with communities to talk about the future of the region. His work provides a look at the current state of the landscape and counters the heavenly views of the country that proliferate under Western gaze. Similar to Báez, Kousmate uses natural elements in his experimental image-making process, using palm leaves, flowers, dried dates, and fire.
To the east of these two sites, the installation Writing without words: the self-portraits of Hélène Amouzou, curated by Mark Sealy, places the spectral images of Hélène Amouzou on a larger-than-life scale along the sidewalk of King Street West. Using long exposures, the Togolese-Belgian artist photographs herself in domestic interiors, often with suitcases, blurring and obscuring her figure as she moves in front of the camera. Through this work, she shares her own story of migration and displacement; to be at the mercy of the inhuman conditions of borders, nation states and citizenship; and the violent disruption it causes physically, emotionally and spiritually.
For more information on the 180 exhibits at this year’s festival, visit scotiabankcontactphoto.com.
