Exhibitions, public installations, talks, readings, workshops… For its 29th edition, the Canadian photography festival puts the image at the heart of Toronto.
Intimate family portraits by Anu Kumar are displayed at the corner of College and Clinton Street, Laure Tiberghien’s photosensitive experiments appear in the Davisville subway station, and large-format portraits by Rosalie Favell take over the façade of the Onsite Gallery… Throughout May (and even beyond), Toronto transforms into a vast playground for visual experimentation. For its 29th edition, the CONTACT Photography Festival spreads across the city with around a hundred events. While firmly rooted locally, the festival also embraces a global perspective, spotlighting international artists.
“This year, visual and multidisciplinary artists continue to explore timely and relevant themes and practices: decolonization, community building, activism, protest and revolution, personal and collective memory, gaps in historical and contemporary archives, as well as a return to experimentation and the origins of the medium,” the organizers note. This experimental approach resonates in the work of Laure Tiberghien, whose 20 abstract color prints, taken from her first monograph Time Capsule, explore camera-less photography. Installed at Davisville subway station, her intervention offers visual relief to commuters while revealing the depth of her research.
Explorations and Experimentations
In public spaces, proposals multiply throughout the streets. Two series by Kiri Dalena offer a vision of Philippine history by reworking archival images to evoke the struggles for self-definition. Alanna Fields, with Unveiling, presents a series of collages that, by rescuing historical photographic traces of Black queer life, symbolize the complexity of the boundaries between visibility and invisibility. Jordan King, for her part, pays tribute to performer International Chrysis through his Polaroid practice.
The journey continues at Sankofa Square, where two short films by Alisi Telengut animate photographs of plant environments, from underwater ecosystems to botanical gardens, evoking a return to the natural roots of life. Suneil Sanzgiri offers a dual installation: My Memory is Again in the Way of Your History, displayed outdoors, examines disappearance and forgetting, while An Impossible Address, presented at Mercer Union, explores historical ties of solidarity between India and Africa in the face of the Portuguese empire.
From the Subway to the Exhibition Hall
Crossing the threshold of The Image Centre, visitors are invited into a cinematic experience with Creatura Dada by Caroline Monnet. This film takes viewers around a banquet table, orchestrating a gathering of six French-speaking Indigenous women who celebrate their identity, heritage, and shared indigeneity. The Istituto Italiano di Cultura hosts Emotional Geographies, a project by Italian photographer Tomaso Clavarino. Through four series created in northern Italy, he brings provinces and suburbs, margins and marginalities, adolescence and uncertainty into dialogue.
Diverse practices, aesthetics, and perspectives continue at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, where Sandra Brewster presents FISH, a work combining drawing, photography, and sculpture. She offers an interpretation of land, water, history, and identity, rooted in diaspora experiences. Installations by Natalie Hunter in the windows of the Bentway Studio and Terrace are illuminated by daylight. This setup creates a slow, ephemeral cinema, questioning the material effects of light on its surroundings.
Times and Spaces for Gathering
Beyond solo exhibitions, the festival fosters a spirit of gathering. This collective dimension comes to life in 10×10 Photobooks: Flashpoint! Protest Photography in Print, an exhibition designed as a reading room at the Contact Gallery. Over 80 books, zines, posters, and publications on protest and resistance are featured, illustrating photography’s role in social struggles. Nearby, a second room invites reflection with a central question: “What Makes a Photobook Sustainable?”, addressing issues of photobook production and distribution.
To further encourage exchange, the festival continues its CONTACT Photobook Fair for a fourth edition. This moment of sharing brings together independent publishers and contemporary photographers—a great opportunity to discover new publications and foster meaningful connections.
Contact Photography Festival
Toronto, Canada
May 1, 2025 to May 31, 2025
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