2023 Festival Calendar

In the series featured in this exhibition, South African photographer Karabo Mooki explores the growing punk counterculture in Soweto and Johannesburg. Born in Soweto before moving to the suburbs of Johannesburg as a child, Mooki developed a passion for the AfroPunk skateboarding world that brings together an unlikely group of Black and white youth, crossing a divide entrenched by Apartheid.

Straddling the worlds of fashion photography and intimate portraiture, Jorian Charlton’s work emphasizes the beauty and style of her subjects while exploring contemporary modes of Black representation. This expansive solo exhibition by the Mississauga-based artist is grounded in relationships and interpersonal connections, reflecting varied expressions of cultural and personal identity.

Born in Harlem in 1941, June Clark emigrated in 1968 to Toronto, where she still lives and works. There, she began making photographs of street scenes as a way to situate herself in a new and unknown environment, seeking a community similar to the Harlem she had abruptly left. This exhibition features photographs by Clark, spanning the 1970s through to the 1990s.

Celebrating the legacy of American photographer George Platt Lynes, the male nudes, portraits, and ballet scenes featured in this exhibition highlight the artist’s memorable vision. Lynes illuminated the faces of a community of queer intellectuals and artists in Paris and New York who defined culture in the first half of the 20th century.

Toronto-based photographer Scott McFarland presents Night Ship, a series of four large-scale photographic images of an abandoned, three-masted barque ship. Using images taken during winter nights in early 2020 and throughout the winter of 2021, the artist’s work exemplifies his signature approach of layering multiple exposures to create hyperrealistic works of exquisite detail.

Vancouver-based artist Jayce Salloum presents an installation of photography, drawing, and sculptures that reflect the pandemic moment of time. Loosely referencing DNA, waveforms, organs, entities, time broken down and strung together, he works through conditions and relations referencing both a previous life and one we are hurtling towards. In the following artist's text, Salloum considers his motivations for the project.

American-Canadian photographer Lynne Cohen (1944–2014) is known for her striking photographs of mysteriously mundane domestic and institutional interiors characterized by odd symmetries, repetitions, and absurd disjunctions of scale. Exposing the peculiar nature of empty spaces long before a global pandemic made such scenes commonplace, the selection of photographs presented in Severance feel eerily close to home decades after they were created.

The New Generation Photography Award recognizes outstanding photographic work by three emerging Canadian lens-based artists, age 35 and under. This year’s exhibition features the winners from 2023: Vancouver-based Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez, Toronto-based Hannah Doucet, and Toronto-based Wynne Neilly. A testament to photography’s broad expressive capacity, this selection of artists represents the forefront of new lens-based practices in Canada.

Toggling between past, present, and future, Toronto-based artist Jawa El Khash’s project Nature’s Algorithm comes to life in two ways, exploring time, space, and memory through digitally generated holograms presented in an indoor installation, and in an online experience. Illustrating the mathematical algorithm underlying plant life, the works reveal past and present species existing on the grounds of the Evergreen Brick Works, imagining a diverse future ecosystem.

This exhibition brings together Oreet Ashery, Common Accounts, Stine Deja, Charlie Engman, Russell Perkins, and Vunkwan Tam, six artists who explore representations of death and grief within the digital sphere. Collectively, their work acts as an inquiry into the sociological implications of online death in the age of advanced capitalism—a complex, recently-emergent phenomenon whose consequences are yet to be fully understood.

Emerging Toronto-based artists John Delante and Ananna Rafa navigate their respective cultural upbringings in shrouded gaze, investigating the role of culture and immigration in the evolution of each of their identities and its place in their current lives and relationships. Through portraiture and personal archives, Delante and Rafa question the place of love, in all capacities of the word, through time, distance, secrets and things left unspoken.

In this exhibition, Montreal-born, New York City-based artist Jean-François Bouchard documents a squatters’ camp in the California desert. Depicting trash and debris snagged in the branches of the area’s few trees, each photograph offers a symbolic glimpse into the community’s conditions alongside an immersive three-channel video. The ghostly, post-apocalyptic scenes are a testament to the flagrant inequalities of modern society and its bleak, uncertain future.

Founded by Josef Adamu in Toronto in 2017, Sunday School is a creative agency that brings together visual artists from across Africa and the diaspora to share compelling stories. The exhibition and billboard installation encompassing “Feels Like Home” aim to foreground notions of identity, fashion, and culture at the intersection of art and education, celebrating the creators’ collaborative ethos through photographs and video work.

Berlin-based artist Aziz Hazara’s practice is deeply engaged with the geopolitics and enduring destabilization of Afghanistan. In the artist’s film-installation Bow Echo (2019), five boys are seen braving harsh winds to climb atop a large rock from which they ceremonially sound a kazoo—a small gesture that hopes to carry an urgent message in their community’s plight against repression and violence.

Lobbies, doorways, and escalators populate Toronto artist Jessica Thalmann’s video essay, Latent Images On My Skin. A rumination on time as a measure of distance, as a transformational space that converts experience into lingering imprint, the work traces the history of photographic chemistry, folding in photography’s earliest pioneers (and friends) John Herschel and Julia Margaret Cameron.

Presented across three sites in Toronto—at CONTACT Gallery, on billboards, and in an outdoor installation at Harbourfront Centre—the newly commissioned work of artist Maggie Groat implements a collage-based approach in installation, sculpture, and image. Groat’s work weaves together found and salvaged materials, layering, fragmenting, obscuring, and recombining, to hold up a distorted mirror to lived and speculative encounters with the natural world. Her practice investigates decolonial ways of being, alternative archiving, sustainable exhibition making, and the transformative potential of salvaged materials during times of living through climate emergencies.

In their video, animation, and graphic works, Amsterdam-based artists Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukács consider the intertwined relationships between reality, media, and fiction. This, their first solo exhibition in Canada, comprises two of their video installations, Forest on Location (2018) and Mastering Bambi (2010), both of which take nature as their subject matter and work to unhinge hegemonic ways of looking at landscape.

As acclaimed Spanish artist Lara Almarcegui's first solo exhibition in Canada, this public art project serves as a guide to the Leslie Street Spit, an artificial peninsula formed by the dumping of waste deposits from Toronto’s construction industry into Lake Ontario. Accordingly, the project addresses a subject of vital interest—construction, development, and the use of the land and water.

The recipient of the third annual Prefix Prize is Karen Zalamea, a Filipino-Canadian artist who resides in Burnaby, B.C. With an interdisciplinary practice rooted in photography, Zalamea is adept in the use of a wide range of photographic substrates, creative approaches and installation strategies. Accordingly, her works are occasionally abstract, often textural and layered, and always sensitive to their modes of display.

This exhibition by Trinidad-born artist Rodell Warner features a series of animated GIFs derived from archival, public-domain images distorted through optics of technology and time. Digitally-scanned visuals available online and free of copyright restrictions represent an institutionalized history filled with voids, inaccuracies, and erasure. Through digital intervention, Warner generates hybrid narratives, complicating the authority of archives and re-evaluating subjective relationships to captured images.

For the past twenty years, Winnipeg-based artist Sarah Anne Johnson has devised various methodologies for grappling with the limitations of static photography. Woodland extends this practice to the forests of Manitoba in photographs incorporating oil paint, holographic stickers, and dyes applied to their surfaces. By manipulating her photographs with material interventions, Johnson creates artworks that amplify the sublime and metaphysical qualities of the natural world.

In tandem with the commissioned billboard project Just How We Found It, Pumice Raft presents this solo exhibition by Montréal-based artist Nabil Azab. Framing photographic abstraction through the cultural and political context of family history, the artist’s practice engages archival and family photographs, immersing viewers within memories and ghost images that highlight the subjectivity of recollection and the role of storytelling in the formation of identity.

This new body of work by multidisciplinary artist Maja Klaassens, born in Aotearoa/New Zealand and based in The Hague, unfolds across media including photography, video, text, sculpture, and painting. The exhibition approaches the familiarity and suspense bound to practices of framing, exploring how narrative techniques used in film and literature influence experiences, memories, and perceptions of place.

Featuring works derived from the unique creative practices of Cassils, Suzanne Nacha, Roula Partheniou, and Gordon Shadrach, Works in Practice explores the use of photography and image-making by artists whose practices are centred in the mediums of performance, painting, and sculpture. Using a range of methods, the artists capture photographs at various stages of their process as a means of ideation, translation, and documentation.

Based in the territory of Treaty 18, FASTWÜRMS’ witch queer #VOLCANO_LOV3R is a primordial geo-queer liberation narrative, the super-heated witchcraft of “‘many and more," the vulcanology and libidinal economy of abundance, reciprocity, and generosity. #VOLCANO_LOV3R is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Mukwe Dodem (I Am Bear Clan) by Michel Dumont, a queer, two-spirit, Métis artist from the Robinson-Superior Treaty area.

Launched in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of The ArQuives—Canada’s only LGBTQ2+ archives with a national scope—Toronto Pride’s first exhibition and publication feature enlarged archival photographs, print media, and ephemera carefully selected from among the archives’ holdings and a public call for submissions. Kicking off Pride Season, this remarkable multifaceted project focuses on Toronto Pride from 1970 to the present day.

Serapis is an Athens-based multidisciplinary collective that takes their inspiration from water—oceans and seas, their slipperiness, and their interaction with human-made infrastructures. The collective describes their practice as a “multimedia ocean-themed novel.” Their interest in expanding and exceeding boundaries constitutes an interdisciplinary output across art, design, and fashion, and their fascination with water acts as an extension of this liquidity; their watery subject matter spills across media.