30/4/2008
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Different Venues, Toronto
Toronto Photography Festival. The annual event examines how photography shapes our understanding of the world around us and the enduring role it plays in the preservation of individual and collective memories. A wide range of images - from the epic to the everyday - look beyond the headlines to explore private and social histories. It comprises over 500 local, national and international artists at more than 200 venues. This year's thematic focus is "Between memory and history".
From May 1 - 31st, CONTACT will transform Toronto into a city-wide art gallery. From street corners to expressways, and cafes to museums, the city becomes the backdrop for over 500 professional, established and emerging photographers from Canada and around the world.
CONTACT’s PRIMARY EXHIBITION at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, will feature photography by acclaimed international artists including Britain’s Martin Parr, Germany’s Thomas Ruff and Argentinian-American Alessandra Sanguinetti. As the focal point of the 2008 festival theme Between Memory and History, the exhibition will explore how photography shapes our understanding of the world and the role it plays in the preservation of personal and collective memories.
Expanding this thematic focus into the fabric of the city, CONTACT also curates several large-scale and dramatic PUBLIC INSTALLATIONS of photography that take the museum experience outdoors. Internationally acclaimed Canadian artistist Rodney Graham will create a virtual forest on the columns underneath the Gardiner Expressway using his iconic images of inverted trees. Emerging artist Eamon MacMahon will present aerial views of disappearing glaciers and landscapes along a kilometre of moving sidewalk at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport.
With more than 200 venues exhibiting photography across the GTA, CONTACT has carefully selected 25 FEATURE EXHIBITIONS that explore multiple aspects of this year’s theme. Alliance Française, Ryerson University’s Blackstar Collection and Robert Mapplethorpe at the Olga Korper Gallery are among the many participating venues that help bring criticality and an international scope to the festival. Other CONTACT highlights include the Portfolio Reviews and resulting exhibition in the HP Gallery, a film program at the National Film Board and an international lecture series that includes many of the principle exhibitors.
“CONTACT presents images by hundreds of artists and photographers throughout the city in thought-provoking ways,” says CONTACT Executive Director Darcy Killeen. “It provides our audience with the unique opportunity to see new work and interact with the internationally acclaimed artists, photographers and industry professionals that we bring to Toronto throughout the entire month of May.”
About the CONTACT Toronto Photography Festival
CONTACT, a not-for-profit organization, founded in 1997, is generously supported by Hewlett-Packard (Canada) Co. (premier sponsor), Scotiabank Group, Concord Adex Developments Corp; media sponsors Fashion Television, enRoute Magazine and The Toronto Star, The Gladstone Hotel, The Drake Hotel, and Beyond Digital Imaging. CONTACT gratefully acknowledges the support of Canadian Heritage, Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council and Foreign Affairs Canada. As the largest photography festival in world, with over 500 local, national and international artists participating at more than 200 venues across the GTA, CONTACT attracts over one million visitors. CONTACT is devoted to celebrating and fostering an appreciation of the art and profession of photography.
CONTACT 2008 THEMATIC FOCUS
BETWEEN MEMORY AND HISTORY
The enormous impact of technology was clearly evident in much of the photography presented in this year’s festival on the constructed image. While we questioned whether the increasing popularity of constructed modes of working was leading to the demise of traditional photography, we celebrated the great effects to which constructed images could address major events of global significance. It is quite relevant that this years theme developed from the thematic focus of our last two festivals, Questioning Truth in Photography and Imaging a Global Culture, which both clearly revealed how constructed image making was a vital tool for so many.
Now we look towards next year and take our inspiration from some of the great works in this year’s festival. While of course they utilized various constructed modes of working, they also explored a variety of the most basic of social subjects – from private experiences to family histories. So it appears that our focus on the global has brought us back to the importance of the personal. Whether based on fact or molded through fiction, these images have reminded us of the fundamental splendor of photography to “capture the moment”.
Is this reinvention of social documentary as a constructed fiction challenging our relationship with the photographic image as a receptacle for the storage of memories? How do these constructed images co-exist with those that continue to represent “real” social situations? These questions invite a consideration of the evolution of the tradition of social documentary photography. Here too we now find a renewed interest in exploring personal and collective societal issues. To what extent do these subjective images contribute to a new contemporary reality, and at what point does personal observation become history?
The rapid pace of technology continues to diversify the ways in which we encounter and negotiate photographs on a daily basis. Images are transmitted to a global audience at record speed via the Internet, while cell-phone cameras are commonplace at every social event we attend. We are overwhelmed with images of our daily life, yet somehow depictions of the everyday remain a fundamental source of inspiration and pleasure for all of us. These great contrasts in the ways the ever-multiplying technologies of photography are utilized to document our personal and collective experience, call for an investigation of photography’s relationship to the forms of memory produced through these different types of social documentary. It is with these issues and questions in mind that we have entitled the thematic focus of CONTACT 2008 Between Memory and History.
This theme will undoubtedly enable us to explore the richness and complexity of imagery depicting social relations and provide fertile ground for discovery, discussion and debate - from explorations of photography as a surrogate for memory to reconstructions of history through photographic representation. We welcome your participation and look forward to once again showcasing the great community efforts that continue to grow in scope and scale and have made the CONTACT Toronto Photography Festival the great success it is today.
Photography and its culture – the way in which images are created and used – are subject, as many things are, to cyclical evolutions of birth, growth, entropy and renewal. Photography wields an enduring influence in our lives; it contributes to our understanding of the world around us, now more then ever before and is implicit in preserving our individual and collective experiences. Through a selection of photographic images by ten Canadian and international artists, Between Memory and History: From the Epic to the Everyday probes relationships that exist between the intimate and the public, between moments of personal significance to events of global resonance that affect each one of us.
Curated by David Liss & Bonnie Rubenstein.
952 Queen St W, Toronto M6J 1G8 MapQuest
Gallery, Art & Design District
Wheelchair access
Tues-Sun 11am - 6pm
T 416 395 0067 F 416 395 7598
E mocca@toronto.ca
Press contact:
NKPR
Bunmi Adeoye
416.365.3630 X26
bunmi@nkpr.net
http://www.nkpr.net