Critical Distance Program Type CONTACT Photography Festival

Billboard on Shaw co-presented by Native Women in the Arts and Critical Distance  in partnership with Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival and Partners in Art, featuring Shiibaashka’igan: Honouring the Sacred Jingle Dress by Nadya Kwandibens.

This outdoor component of the exhibition Materialized presents an image by newly-appointed Toronto Photo Laureate Nadya Kwandibens. Photographed at the Naotkamegwanning roundhouse, the portrait depicts three Anishinaabekwewag sharing a candid moment of laughter, subverting the “stoic Indian” trope that characterizes historical portraits by non-Indigenous photographers. It is said that laughter is medicine—this image brings together that energy with the healing power of the jingle dress.

Featuring works by Joi T. Arcand, Celeste Pedri-Spade and Catherine Blackburn, with a public art billboard by Nadya Kwandibens
Curated by Ariel Smith

Core Exhibition at the 2022 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival

Opening reception
Friday, April 21, 6 to 8 pm
Artist Panel
Saturday, April 22 from 1 to 3pm at Urbanspace Gallery

Native Women in the Arts and Critical Distance Centre for Curators are pleased to present Materialized in partnership with Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival and Partners in Art.

Combining portrait photography with elements from adornment arts, textiles, sculpture, and customary Indigenous art practices, Materialized examines themes of intergenerational memory, familial narrative, and decolonization. By using their craft to reclaim portraiture as a form of self-expression and self-determination, each artist resists the colonial metanarratives contained in settler-made images of Indigenous subjects.

Billboard on Shaw presented by Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival in partnership with Capture Photography Festival and Critical Distance, featuring Grow Up #4 by Jake Kimble.

Billboard on Shaw presented by Critical Distance, featuring EBBÓ (Sacrifice): Orula, The Witness, by Yelaine Rodriguez, 2021.

This edition of the Billboard on Shaw features an image from EBBÓ (2021), a new production by Yelaine Rodriguez, commissioned by Americas Society. EBBÓ (1998) is an opera-oratorio by Cuban composer Louis Aguirre and librettist Rafael Almanza. The piece is an expression and reinvention of Afro-Caribbean religious, aesthetic, and musical heritage.

EBBÓ (Sacrifice): Orula, The Witness is curated by Noor Alé and Claudia Mattos (AXIS Curatorial) and presented in conjunction with their exhibition OF THE SACRED, a Core Program of the 2022 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival.

Curated by AXIS Curatorial (Noor Alé and Claudia Mattos)
Featuring Farah Al Qasimi, Kaya Joan, Bea Parsons, Yelaine Rodriguez, Whyishnave Suthagar

Opening Reception
Saturday, April 23, 2022
1 – 4PM EST
401 Richmond Building, Suite 122

Of the Sacred is an exhibition that gathers a selection of artists who examine the divine through a highly personal lens, attesting to belief as a means of unearthing histories of colonialism, translocation, and individual circumstance. Tracing cultural inheritances of faith, lineages of intergenerational knowledge, and the syncretism of beliefs that emerge in the face of migrations, Of the Sacred initiates conversations about the role of belief in this time in history and the need for sanctuary—on a personal and collective scale—in light of the conditions of this age.

Of the Sacred is a Core Exhibition of the 2022 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival.