Throughout the years, CONTACT has questioned photography’s ability to represent the truth, explored rapidly increasing global interconnections and celebrated constructed imagery within a photographic culture. Despite its ever evolving conditions, a fundamental characteristic of the medium – its ability to preserve our individual memories and collective histories – at least for the moment, remains unchanged.

Photography has been associated with memory since its invention and memory has long been described as a continuous exchange of images. As we experience the global shift from film to digital technology, will photographic images merely become “memories made easy”? As the increasing participation in CONTACT demonstrates, photography is prevalent throughout our lives, now more then ever before, and wields a complex relationship to human experience.

Our primary exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA), 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. Ten artists from nine countries exhibit a wide range of images – from the epic to the everyday – and look beyond the headlines to explore private and social histories.

Raymonde April (Canada) Robert Burley (Canada) Luc Delahaye (France) Nan Goldin (USA) Adi Nes (Israel) Martin Parr (UK) Chi Peng (China) Thomas Ruff (Germany) Alessandra Sanguinetti (Argentina/USA) Bert Teunissen (The Netherlands)

For details on this exhibition at MOCCA Click Here

Further extending our theme into the city’s fabric, CONTACT transforms urban spaces with photography. Eight site-specific installations throughout the city invite reflections upon the evolving nature of our environments and the continuum that exists between image, personal memory and collective history. Feature exhibition venues become places marked by the past - from public chronicles of iconic events to personal recollections – with 29 exhibitions that explore the extent to which photographic images inform memory and influence understandings of history. Visit the Public Installations and Feature Exhibitions section of the website for more details.