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30th Edition
May 2026
Toronto

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Independence Square II","display_artist":"Delali Cofie","display_address":null,"display_dates":"May 1–31","display_venue":"Queen and Augusta Billboard","display_artists":null,"display_title_raw":"Delali Cofie - Independence Square II","display_reception":null,"title_array":["Delali Cofie","Independence Square II"],"status":"published","password":null,"year":["2026"],"program":["core","public-art"],"type":["public-art","exhibition"],"slug":"delali-cofie-independence-square-ii","permalink":"/festival/2026/core/delali-cofie-independence-square-ii","thumbnail":"b845e8e1-dcf1-4abb-bd6a-0bbf6300a909","excerpt":null,"parent":null,"attachments":null,"title":"Independence Square II","artist_in_title":true,"start_date":"2026-05-01","start_time":"00:00:00","end_date":"2026-05-31","end_time":"23:59:59","start":"2026-05-01T04:00:00","end":"2026-06-01T03:59:59","show_in_calendar":null,"child_sort":null,"alt_venue":null,"alt_artist":null,"content":"

In tandem with his solo exhibition A Place of Ours at United Contemporary, Ghanaian-Nigerian photographer Delali Cofie presents a larger-than-life, black-and-white photograph as a billboard installation at the corner of Queen Street West and Augusta Avenue. Set against the visual landscape of the city, the fleeting moment Cofie has captured is transformed into a monumental public image, inviting passersby into a scene drawn from everyday life in Accra, Ghana, while moving through their own daily routines across the Atlantic.

The photograph depicts a young rider sitting barefoot atop a white horse rearing up in the middle of a paved road. The horse’s front legs lift high off the ground, its body tense and angled upward, while the rider leans forward, gripping the reins with quiet concentration. He wears casual clothing, his hooded jacket and shorts an outfit that situates the scene firmly in the present, contrasting with the timeless, almost mythic image of horse and rider. Cofie’s photograph sits somewhere between documentary realism and cinematic intensity, transforming street to stage in a fleeting but resonant gesture.

The young man pictured guides his steed through the open grounds of the capital’s Black Star Square (also known as Independence Square), a site historically associated with national identity and public gathering. Yet the photograph does not depict ceremony or spectacle; instead, it shows a recreational moment. This contrast between the historical weight of the location and the casual activity unfolding within it reflects that public spaces are defined as much by everyday life as they are by history.

The relationship between rider and horse is at the center of the image. The horse rises with taut force, while the rider remains assured; his calm posture suggests familiarity, skill, and trust. The image becomes not simply a display of control, but a portrait of connection and confidence. Presented alongside A Place of Ours, this image speaks to Cofie’s ability to form an intimate archive that honours the gentle rhythms and shared experiences that define home. Through portraiture and landscape photography, he traces the evolving contours of childhood, friendship, and masculinity, moving from boyhood into the tender uncertainties of becoming.

Independence Square II embodies both memory and presence—a large-scale interruption of the city’s visual landscape that carries with it another geography, pace, and understanding of freedom.

Presented by CONTACT Photography Festival. Supported by PATTISON Outdoor Advertising.

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Iranian-American artist, educator, and activist Sheida Soleimani’s work is presented in a two-part exhibition as part of Capture Photography Festival, Vancouver (April 2026) and CONTACT Photography Festival, Toronto (May 2026). Soleimani constructs detailed compositions that marry photographs, props, found objects, live animals, and people to create magical, dream-like montages. Deliberately combining her familial history with the political, Soleimani’s practice considers her cultural inheritance, the environment, and migration, all through evocative, visually sumptuous pictures.

The daughter of political refugees who escaped Iran in the early 1980s, Soleimani often creates work that includes her parents as subjects. Her works for Capture include Deliverance (2024), an image which pays homage to her father’s two-week long trek on horseback to Turkey, traversing the Zagros Mountains. In this work, her father sits on horseback, a pose historically reserved in paintings for men in positions of power. He is depicted, however, without shoes, as a reference to the moment when his guide urged him to run in the snow to help regain sensation in his frostbitten toes. Safar similarly references her parents’ migration from Iran. The image features pomegranates, fruits her mom planted from seeds she brought from her garden at home to propagate in her newly adopted country. The red suitcase in the image is the one her father used as he escaped over the mountains; the tag is from JFK airport, where he eventually landed.

Soleimani learned bird rehabilitation from her mother, and The Blind Owl (2023) features a bird, one of thousands that have come into the artist’s care over the past five years. It arrived blind and unwell and eventually was euthanized by the artist and her mother. The image includes sour oranges suspended around the owl that were also grown from seeds brought by the artist’s mother from her garden when she escaped Iran. The work is symbolic of the owl’s burial in the family garden, which is no longer accessible to the artist and her parents. Each image demonstrates the deeply metaphoric nature of Soleimani’s works, embedded with personal and cultural histories.

On view as part of CONTACT are Agitator and Dissident (both 2025), again centring the artist’s parents. For these works, Soleimani has constructed elaborate backdrops, which she photographed with her parents situated therein. Unlike standard portraits, the purpose of which is to capture likeness, both individuals face away from the camera, denying viewers access to their faces, creating both singular portraits and anonymous figures.

There is a long history of painted portraits featuring husbands and wives, often used to demonstrate wealth and social status. In these images, however, both her parents raise their fists, typically a gesture of solidarity, power, and resistance, often with a political movement. This gesture of defiance against authority, along with the titles of the works, serves to suggest her parents’ political beliefs, a critical part of the artist’s family narrative embedded in much of her work.

Billboards presented by CONTACT Photography Festival in partnership with Capture Photography Festival. Supported by Pattison Outdoor Advertising.

Public Art Projects

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Hassan Hajjaj’s photographic series La Salle de Gym des Femmes Arabes (The Arab Women’s Gym), shot over approximately a decade and a half, accomplishes what the artist does best—makes the viewer do a double take, look deeper. Women in niqabs take centre stage against the backdrop of the gym—a space that, especially in the Arab world, has largely been male-dominated. Hajjaj’s images deftly undermine stereotypes and subvert Western views, featuring strong, empowered women unapologetically claiming space in a masculine world, and having fun doing it.

Hajjaj is an artist who does not neatly fit into any conventional boxes. Growing up in Morocco and London, he has, from an early age, been shaped by spaces and places that on the surface seem to have little in common. Moving to London at the age of 13, Hajjaj made the city his own by creating opportunities that reflected his needs, first as an “underground” club and special event promoter, and later designing accessible streetwear inspired by luxury fashion houses, under his clothing brand “RAP” (Real Artistic People). His creative spirit and artistic eye soon found expression in photography, which melded all of his interests—fashion and design, high art and street culture, rap and hip-hop, London and Marrakesh—onto the printed page. He collaborates across disciplines with artists, designers, and photographers, and through his work celebrates a boundary-lessness and creativity that comes from embracing the richness of living between cultures.

Dressed in colourful, sports-inspired outfits with generous lashings of luxury-brand designer logos and patterns, in La Salle de Gym des Femmes Arabes (2006–ongoing) Hajjaj’s models are photographed either in a Moroccan courtyard or posed in front of his trademark plastic mat (or Hssira in Darija, Moroccan dialect) as a backdrop. His visual language is riotous and hybrid, the posed and carefully constructed studio setups a nod to iconic African studio photographers Samuel Fosso, Seidou Keïta, and Malick Sidibé. Hajjaj’s use of luxury-brand logos contributes to a rap-star sensibility, and his layered, street-inspired compositions and poses merge the backstreets with high art. His elaborate, colourful frames are inspired by their historical counterparts in Western museums, where frames were custom-designed to be unique, artistic contributions to paintings. In Hajjaj’s approach, the frames echo Islamic designs through their patterned visual repetition, though here, everyday consumer goods such as canned foods and Lego blocks are used to create this effect. This is a nod to the artist’s love for bold graphics and bustling markets, but is also reminiscent of mid-twentieth century Pop Art’s elevation of the ordinary, and its playful celebration of consumerism and mass media. Styles, colours, cultures and disciplines merge in each artwork.

Through his layered visual language, Hajjaj challenges cultural clichés, elevating the everyday and the overlooked. Viewers are confronted by the hybrid, globally integrated world which we all inhabit, and the lived reality of cultural blending—and, critically, the rich fusion that emerges from it—is made visible and offered as a cause for celebration.

Presented by the Aga Khan Museum

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CLOSER THAN IT'S EVER BEEN","display_artist":"Sin Wai Kin","display_address":null,"display_dates":"Apr 28–May 24","display_venue":"College and Delaware Billboards","display_artists":null,"display_title_raw":"Sin Wai Kin - CLOSER THAN IT'S EVER BEEN","display_reception":null,"title_array":["Sin Wai Kin","CLOSER THAN IT'S EVER BEEN"],"status":"published","password":null,"year":["2026"],"program":["core","public-art"],"type":["public-art","exhibition"],"slug":"sin-wai-kin-closer-than-it-s-ever-been-b","permalink":"/festival/2026/core/sin-wai-kin-closer-than-it-s-ever-been-b","thumbnail":"fbcdecf3-f3ee-4f6a-a301-bca4bfccfb38","excerpt":null,"parent":null,"attachments":null,"title":"CLOSER THAN IT'S EVER BEEN","artist_in_title":true,"start_date":"2026-04-28","start_time":"00:00:00","end_date":"2026-05-24","end_time":"23:59:59","start":"2026-04-28T04:00:00","end":"2026-05-25T03:59:59","show_in_calendar":null,"child_sort":null,"alt_venue":null,"alt_artist":null,"content":"

Taking form as an advertising campaign, Essence promotes a new men’s fragrance of the same name. “Wai King” is the cologne’s brand ambassador, a hero seeking for “something you can’t see” but possibly something he can already feel with a slogan promising \"Your true self awaits\". The campaign is viewable at Sankofa Square, CONTACT Gallery, and posted on a billboard. Sin's Essence reveals: “There isn’t an underlying objective reality that we uncover. What is ‘real’ is what we agree that it is.”

Presented by CONTACT Photography Festival and Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival, organizations each celebrating their 30th anniversary in 2026. Supported by Sankofa Square and Pattison Outdoor Advertising.

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In the heart of the South Australian outback, along the desolate Stuart Highway, lies Coober Pedy, the surreal “opal capital of the world” and subject of this billboard installation and recently published book by Australian photographer Tim Georgeson. Kupa Piti / White Man in a Hole is a visual ode to nature and its power; a meditation on landscape punctuated by glimpses of human presence and the sacredness of the land. Through this evocative journey, Georgeson blurs the lines between utopia and dystopia, myth and reality, desert and dream.

The town’s name is derived directly from the Aboriginal phrase kupa-piti, a literal and metaphorical reference to a life lived underground. Often translated as “white man in a hole,” the place is defined by relentless heat and vast isolation. Miners, migrants, and outsiders have carved subterranean homes beneath the earth, searching for \"cosmic\" opal seams left behind by an ancient inland sea.

Georgeson’s lens captures this post-apocalyptic frontier with stark beauty and poetic restraint. His photographs, both in black-and-white and colour, move between repetition and subtle shifts, mimicking the rhythm of life in a place where time, space, and silence stretch to extremes. The landscape, seemingly lunar and abandoned, dominates. Human presence is suggested rather than shown directly. In rare portraits, figures appear as visitors, humbled by the sheer force of their surroundings.

The book and the billboard installation in Toronto were developed in close collaboration with curator and editor Lucie Černá, whose approach builds on the unique visual rhythm of Georgeson’s work. With a focus on sequencing, together they carefully layered black-and-white and colour images to reflect the psychological and spatial contrasts of Coober Pedy, a non-linear arrangement echoing the fragmented, immersive experience of the place itself.

In Georgeson’s telling, the relics of Coober Pedy are not presented as literal monuments, but rather as subtle traces, symbols of resilience and eccentricity that emerge through suggestion, not exposition. He avoids literal documentation, choosing instead to bridge these worlds by letting the landscape speak in metaphor and echo. Happening upon his surreal views along the streets of Toronto, viewers are transported to the farthest geographical reaches of the world, the images effectively acting as portals collapsing time and space. Through Georgeson’s lens, what we see is only what we are allowed to sense, and that is precisely what makes the narrative unforgettable.

Presented by CONTACT Photography Festival. Supported by the Australian High Commission in Canada and Pattison Outdoor Advertising.

Exhibitions

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This group exhibition brings together the work of Marie-Claude Lacroix, Caroline Mauxion, Sophia Oppel and Anouk Verviers to explore the body as a site of negotiation between chronic illness, ecological crisis, and 21st century medical imaging technologies. Across painting, photography, video, and sculptural interventions, their practices ask how we see—and are seen—when diagnosis becomes both a promise and a form of exposure.

Working within the temporalities of chronic illness—flare, remission, latency—the artists resist the linear narratives often imposed by clinical discourse. Instead of presenting the body as a problem to be solved, they foreground it as a porous ecosystem shaped by environmental toxicity, extractive economies, and infrastructures of care.

Central to the exhibition is a critical engagement with modern diagnostic imaging—MRI scans, X-rays, 3D technology —tools that render the body transparent while translating it into data. These technologies promise objectivity, yet they produce highly mediated images shaped by algorithms and institutional bias. Informed by queer theory and crip studies, Mauxion’s work adopts the aesthetics of the X-ray to regain agency over her body and reveal the mechanisms of normalization that structure bodies and desires. Verviers reframes medical archives to question who is legible within them and whose pain remains statistically marginal. Oppel stages encounters between organic matter and imaging devices, exposing the tension between lived sensation and machinic vision. Lacroix’s paintings extend this inquiry through layered surfaces that evoke tissue, erosion, and atmospheric disturbance, collapsing interior and exterior worlds.

Through individual practices that foreground vulnerability, these artists invite us to reconsider what it means to inhabit a body in a century defined by acceleration, extraction, and the relentless production of images.

Presented by ZALUCKY

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Spirit Keepers","display_artist":"Group Exhibition","display_address":null,"display_dates":"May 25–Jun 5","display_venue":"The New Other","display_artists":null,"display_title_raw":"Group Exhibition - Spirit Keepers","display_reception":null,"title_array":["Group Exhibition","Spirit Keepers"],"status":"published","password":null,"year":["2026"],"program":["core"],"type":["exhibition"],"slug":"the-new-other-spirit-keepers","permalink":"/festival/2026/core/the-new-other-spirit-keepers","thumbnail":"7e607eda-4601-4d33-85f3-f27a70cd4646","excerpt":null,"parent":null,"attachments":null,"title":"Spirit Keepers","artist_in_title":true,"start_date":"2026-05-25","start_time":"00:00:00","end_date":"2026-06-05","end_time":"23:59:59","start":"2026-05-25T04:00:00","end":"2026-06-06T03:59:59","show_in_calendar":false,"child_sort":null,"alt_venue":"The New Other","alt_artist":null,"content":"

Co-curated by Kristofer Sakamoto-Marshall (Founder/Director of nomadic gallery The New Other) and Steffi Sin Tung Ng, the group exhibition Spirit Keepers—featuring Tkaronto/Toronto-based artists Alex Hall, Kristi Chen, Marzieh Miri, and Yujie Wang—explores the potential of image making to capture and reimagine fragmented memories, lost ancestral ties, and the histories that abide as “spirits” within Asian diasporic experiences and identities.

Since its invention, the camera has been explored as a tool for capturing the invisible. Aside from its spectral qualities, the medium fixes the ephemeral—a crack in a childhood home, the lace-like pattern of a dragonfly’s wing, the pulse of ripples in a lake. As philosopher Walter Benjamin observed, “A touch of the finger now sufficed to fix an event for an unlimited period of time. The camera gave the moment a posthumous shock, as it were.”¹ Through its lens, fleeting moments are kept as enduring traces. Images become the vessels where the spirits of the subjects remain.

This preoccupation with invisible yet lasting traces is echoed in the etymology of the Chinese name for photography. While the Western understanding of photography comes from the ancient Greek roots of phōs and graphé, meaning “to write or draw with light,” the Chinese term “攝影” (Cantonese pronunciation: sip jing) can translate literally to “capture the shadow.” This liminal space between light and shadow, the fleeting and the enduring, serves as an entry point to this exhibition.

Drawing from their Asian diasporic experiences, the four featured Tkaronto/Toronto-based artists—Alex Hall, Kristi Chen, Marzieh Miri, and Yujie Wang—approach this liminal space through their diverse practices of image making. Here, image making is not only confined to lens-based media, but also expands into the tactile and the sculptural.

Hall explores her family’s immigration histories and stories from a mixed-heritage perspective through Chinatowns in Barkerville (British Columbia), Toronto (Ontario), and the surroundings of her nearby hometown in Oakville; Chen weaves together narratives of cultural adaptation and intergenerational knowledge through the ritual of burning incense; Miri recollects the fluid, ever-changing memories of her home in Iran; and Wang orients our gaze to the absence, the sublime found within nature and the everyday.

Their artworks open up spaces of inquiry and exploration. What and where are the spirits within Asian diasporic identities? How can images serve as a medium to express, preserve, and reimagine the in-betweenness of diasporic experiences?

Taking place during Asian Heritage Month, and set in the former location of the Japanese Buddhist Church of Toronto, the artists and their works act as spirit keepers. Instead of offering foregone answers, they invite the audience to join them in this role—bringing their narratives into view by dwelling within the light and shadow, the transience and permanence, the presence and absence that lingers within our histories, identities, and memories.

Presented by The New Other

Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 174–75.

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The recipient of the sixth annual Prefix Prize is Québécois artist Yann Pocreau. Inspired to pursue the nature of light from a philosophical and an aesthetic perspective, Pocreau conceives of his work as a succession of images from which, in near-cinematic fashion, one may make a range of associations. For his prize exhibition, he presents an assemblage of new and recent works previously unexhibited in Toronto, including the world premiere of Les éclipses 1 (2026).

For the past twenty years, Pocreau has been developing an outstanding body of work grounded in light and its role in photographic image-making (and beyond), including prints, projections, sculpture, installation and public art projects. While colour and abstraction are often foregrounded, he also works with found photography, introducing historical portraits, snapshots and other representational elements into his work. These discarded source images are often damaged, deteriorated, mouldy, etc., and the artist treats such decay as a virtue. The overall effect of his work is one of a fleeting glimpse of humanity within the vast expanse of time and space.

In 2018, on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the founding of Québec’s Observatoire du Mont-Mégantic (OMM), he participated in a research-creation residency which was to have a profound effect on his artistic practice. Through his telescopic observation of the moon and the stars, he experienced an epiphany: “I became aware of my humanity, of the triviality of our star, of the billions of [planetary] systems around us, of that of the universe. And I was convinced that existentialism, [the philosophy which had guided much of my previous work], is, in fact, very close to the sciences of the heavens.” In recent years, his work has been driven by the notion of “cosmic vertigo”; that is, the incomprehensible scale of space from the outer universe to the centre of the Earth. Created in dialogue with both science and existentialism, his work speaks to our perception of our environment at the micro and macro levels and the myriad ways in which we strive to understand our place in the universe.

At the heart of his prize exhibition is Les mailles élémentaires (2021), a photographic diptych produced at a monumental scale that appears to represent two quadrants of a lustrous sphere (and is, in fact, a cross-section of a geode). In juxtaposition with the other works in the exhibition, this diptych seemingly evokes the fundamental essence of a celestial body such as the Earth, with its solidity and liquidity, its cores, mantle and crust. M81, la nuit du 20 au 21 avril 1979 (2018) and related works are a series of digital prints with embossing and annotated drawings that depict the galaxies M81, M82, M13 and M94. The works were created from astronomical photographs on glass plates found in the archives of the OMM. And Les éclipses 1 (2026) is a metallic print based upon a found photographic portrait of a man, the image of which is barely discernible through years of decay. Effectively, this work offers a glimpse into the past seen through the mists of time, and a reflection upon the transient nature of human existence within the context of a vast and incomprehensible universe.

The fundamental essence of photography, its historical and technological evolution, its material and immaterial manifestations—these are the core elements through which Yann Pocreau fulfills his artistic vision. In so doing, he offers nothing less than a metaphysical query into the nature of existence.

— Scott McLeod

__________

Launched in 2021, the Prefix Prize is awarded annually to photographic artists of any nationality. Designed to honour artists at any stage of their careers who have yet to receive the recognition they deserve, the prize recognizes one artist with an exhibition, a publication, a residency and a cash award of $5,000.00 and up to two artists with honourable mentions consisting of cash awards of $1,000.00 each. The candidates for the prize are nominated by ten photographic arts professionals, newly appointed each year, while the recipients of the prize are chosen by a jury consisting of representatives of Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art and its partners, along with national and international representatives.

For the Prefix Prize 6, the recipient of the principal award is Yann Pocreau (Montréal, QC), while Gabriela García-Luna (Saskatoon, SK) and Rula Halawani (Jerusalem) are the recipients of honourable mentions.

The Prefix Prize 6 was juried by Nathan Leung, designer, Underline Studio; Scott McLeod, director and curator, Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art; Gerald McMaster, independent curator and professor emeritus, OCAD University; Tara Smith, programs manager, CONTACT Photography Festival; Louise Wolthers, research manager and curator, Hasselblad Foundation; and Jennifer Young and Caroline Laxton, co-chairs, Project Development, Partners in Art.

The candidates for the Prefix Prize 6 were nominated by Katie Addleman, curator, Photography and New Media, Canadian Centre for Architecture; Amin Alsaden, independent curator; Aileen Burns and Johan Lundh, co-executive director and CEO, Remai Modern; David Diviney, chief curator, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia; Audrey Genois, director of curatorial affairs, Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal; Sophie Hackett, curator, Photography, Art Gallery of Ontario; Liz Ikiriko, curator, Gallery TPW; Bernard Lamarche, curator of contemporary art, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec; Monika Szewczyk, chief curator, the Polygon Gallery; and Tania Willard, director/curator, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia.

Presented by Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art in partnership with the CONTACT Photography Festival, Smokestack, Underline Studio and Urbanspace Gallery, and with the support of founding partner, Partners in Art.

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Aaron Jones is a Toronto-based artist who works across media, often using found images and collage to create unique and immersive environments. Lithic, which takes its title from the Latin word for stone, is a site-specific digital collage incorporating the artist’s own photographs with imagery drawn from his archive of print material and deaccessioned books from the library of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. The resulting cosmic landscape is deeply layered with both imagery and meaning.

In the foreground, Jones has assembled images of natural materials that are formed and shaped slowly over time—glacial ice, shells, crystals, and rocks—into a mountainous peak. Above it, iris blooms float in a celestial space streaked with light. A pair of outstretched hands emerge from top left, suggesting that this environment has been shaped by human intervention. While the composition evokes the majesty of an epic vista, it speaks beyond landscape alone.

For the artist, these elements offer a way to think about identity beyond representations of the physical body. Jones connects the physical qualities of minerals and stone to human strength and resilience. These hard, enduring forms are contrasted against three delicate iris blooms, fragile and fleeting. Jones describes the landscape as a site of stability: “this was a piece about trying to find footing or something hard to lean on—something grounded.” From this vantage, Jones explores the terrain and his place within it.

Presented by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection

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Centered on the digital era, the photo-based works in German artist Lilly Lulay’s exhibition Soft Errors, Hard Truths reach beyond, into both the past and future, to highlight the broken (or pending) promises of the age of Tech. As connection is eroded in favour of fragmentation, disorientation, and distortion, Lulay’s work examines the influence of digital technologies on photography and invites viewers to question their own engagement with digital media.

Bodies in Digital Fog

Born in Frankfurt in 1985—the year the first email was sent between Germany and North America—Lilly Lulay belongs to the generation that consciously experienced the transition from the analog to the digital age. She remembers life before the Internet, printed city maps, and the feeling of being “off the grid” on holiday. Her first mobile phone came at age 14, her first smartphone at 31, and since then it has been her daily companion, alarm clock, office, camera, and storage space for endless personal data.

Photography is the emotional glue that binds us to our smartphones. Through messaging apps and social networks, we exchange images while delivering invaluable data to tech giants. They mine information about our locations, preferences, human contacts, political views. Historically, there has never been an institution with as much knowledge about us as today's tech corporations. During Lulay's art studies in the early 2000s, digital cameras conquered the market. In photography classes, discussions about the truthfulness of digital images were central, tinged by a skepticism reminiscent of today's debates about AI-generated images and deepfakes. Yet this question has accompanied the medium since its inception. In the 19th century, photographs, though monochrome, were considered radically realistic. Then and always, however, they represent only a fragment of the space-time continuum. Photographs conceal as much as they reveal.

Algorithmic Aesthetics

The photo-based app Instagram embodies this contradiction, having developed into one of the world's largest social networks. But is it actually the images, or rather the algorithms, that captivate us? A sophisticated measurement and evaluation system determines what is shown to each individual user. Reward systems of “hearts” and growing numbers of followers create addiction and revenue models. Lulay’s series Into the Instagram Galaxy (2026) explores the app’s “discovery” page—that algorithmic control center that supplies users with supposedly suitable content, tailored to their interests. Lulay prints out and paints over screenshots with black acrylic paint until only fragments remain visible. Between these information islands, quotes from neuro-marketing tutorials appear, examples of the alluring barrage of \"feel-good experiences.”

As writer/scholar/activist Shoshana Zuboff describes, we live in the age of “surveillance capitalism.” Everything we do online—searching, sharing, archiving, commenting—is recorded, analyzed, converted into profit. We become walking databases while simultaneously working for free for platforms that profit from our attention and creativity. Lulay’s Liquid Portrait – fbarchive19012016 (2016) addresses Instagram's big older sister, Facebook. Consisting of video and sculpture, this body of work uses every image from one person’s profile (a friend of Lulay’s), but reveals only central elements and outlines of people. Between selfies, travel shots, and cultural references a portrait emerges—a portrait less of the individual user than of the aesthetics and entangled logic of the platform itself.

Photography as Mirror and Storage

In the series Time Travelers (2011–ongoing), people from the “analogue age,” captured in black-and-white vernacular snapshots, meet the pixelated structure of the present. Their once-clear gaze into the camera is transformed and obscured by abstract colour fields. These works ask: How will our images and stories live on? In a future where private photographs are no longer stored in physical albums but on servers, how will people—or machines—view, analyze, and evaluate visual messages? In Ghosts@Work / Text as Key (2023), the “whole” body appears fragmented again. Only the gestures of manual labour of the people originally photographed remain visible. Green squares mark the spots that an AI recognized as “relevant” during the process of content recognition. The human as we know it disappears, leaving behind algorithmic outlines. What is made visible or invisible in the age of AI? To what extent do machine visions already influence our understanding of reality and of ourselves?

Lulay’s Soft Errors, Hard Truths is an exhibition of works made in the past decade but which look well beyond, into both past and future. They confront us with an ever-growing paradox: The supposedly seamless digital networks that promise connection also deliver division, misinformation, and outright lies—and this transformation now often happens faster than we can learn to see anew. Soft errors in our daily interactions reveal hard truths about our algorithmic present.

Presented by the Goethe-Institut Toronto

Programs

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Free to attend!

The fifth edition of the CONTACT Photobook Fair brings together independent publishers and leading contemporary photographers from around the world to present newly released publications. The goal of the Fair is to foster opportunities for artists, publishers, and book enthusiasts to build connections, discover new projects, and exchange ideas on books and photography.

2026 participating publishers and vendors:

AC WORLD (Halifax)
AGO Publishing
Artbook | D.A.P. (NYC)
Art Metropole
Artexte (Montréal)
Chez Moi Books
Deadbeat Club (Los Angeles)
Erika DeFrietas
Feminist Photography Network
Final Form (Montréal)
Four Eyes Éditions (Paris)
Hyoryusha Books
Lyricalmyrical Books
Makan Press (NYC)
Omíkhlē Bookshop
Punto de Fuga (Bogotá)
Reflex Editions
Rooney's (Hamilton)
Some Print Studio
SPAO: Photographic Arts Centre (Ottawa)
STANLEY/BARKER (London, UK)
Untitled Publishing (Prague)
VU Photo (Quebec City)

+ recent titles from Aperture, Charcoal Press, Loose Joints, Nocturno Books, Tall Poppy Press, TBW Books, terminal°

Presented in partnership with Stephen Bulger Gallery. Supported by Cindy & Shon Barnett and Dara & Marvin Singer

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Winner of the 2024 Burtynsky Grant, Simon Emond’s haunting black-and-white images began as frames from wedding and family portraits that Emond created during his years as a photographer—while still bearing the scars of relentless bullying for being gay. Through meticulous post-production processes, he re-works these photographs into surreal self-portraits, turning his former clients into unwitting participants in a visual exorcism of his demons. The book’s title deliberately invites us all to speak his name, not to give it power, but to take it away, to break its hold on him and free him from torment.

Published by Sternthal Books
Designed by Maxime Rheault, Criterium

Simon Emond (he, they) is a self-taught photographer born in Canada. He lives in Métabetchouan, a small town on the shores of Lac Saint-Jean. In 2017 and 2019, lacking access to professional exhibition spaces, Simon exhibited independently in outdoor spaces in his native region. Since then, he has received several grants, awards, and international distinctions, and has exhibited in Canada, France, Denmark, Portugal, and Italy. In 2023, Simon was a finalist for the Lynne Cohen Prize at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, and in 2024, he won the Burtynsky Prize at the CONTACT Photo Festival in Toronto.

Simon's work explores the possibilities of post-production software, such as Lightroom, where manipulating brightness settings contributes to a transformation of the image. His digital photographs thus transcend the subject and situation captured by the camera.

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The Heart Has Not Stopped is a 76-page Risograph artist book of photographs by Grace Wang, designed and published by Howsem Huang. Hand-printed, hand-folded, and hand-bound over nine months, each copy features a unique silk-printed cover in one of two colour schemes.

The book includes photographs from Wang's multi-year series exploring the porous boundaries between perception, memory, and the natural world. Created through in-camera multiple exposures on analogue film, the images weave together fragments of landscape, flora, and human presence into luminous, dreamlike compositions.

Conversation between the artist, designer and publisher, and Brian St. Denis, CONTACT Festival Manager, at 4pm.

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Since 2017, photographer Zackery Hobler has been documenting and walking alongside prescribed burn technicians working across southwestern Ontario. He recently published his first monograph of this work, Beneath Two Skies.

In this talk at the City of Toronto Archives, Hobler will present images from the project made in Toronto’s High Park, contextualized by archival records and staff involved with the City’s Traditional & Prescribed Burn program.

For Zackery Hobler, photography is a means of learning about the external world and how it informs his internal one. Walking and photographing is a practice of searching, with hope, to find moments when the camera – between body and environment – reveals sensibilities often on the periphery of the conscious. As a self-publisher and editor, Hobler has developed a unique approach to photography and the photobook. His first monograph unifies the understanding that comes from working as a prescribed burn technician with the naïvety of his first walks through burn blocks, of uncertainly walking through wild space on fire.

Between Memory and History: From the Epic to the Everyday

Between Memory and History: From the Epic to the Everyday