‘To have impact, you have to get through all this visual noise’: How CONTACT’s outdoor installations keep Toronto guessing

Jake Kimble, Grow Up #1, 2022, installation view, 460 King St W, Toronto, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid

With the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival underway this month, Naomi Skwarna unpacks the artists, places, and ideas behind the outdoor programme, from utopic posters to North African billboards

Before cinema, before TV, before PCs, before smartphones, there was the not-so-humble billboard, filling the sky with enough colour and bombast to pierce the innocent traveller’s psyche between blinks. Designed on a monumental scale (the typical billboard is 14 feet high and 48 feet wide), advertisers jumped at the opportunity to make gods of their goods and services. 

With its unique, sprawling series of Core Outdoor Installations, the 27th Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival in Toronto makes canny use of the city’s billboard real estate, transit platforms, boutique hotel exteriors, public squares, and shadow-saturated spaces under expressways to temporarily obscure traditional views, providing both intervention and relief from the wages of city-scale marketing.

Now in its 21st year, the Outdoor Installations programming drops pins in twenty-one prime locations across the city, disrupting the traditional relationship between commuter and, for example, the gargantuan specter of a Spicy McCrispy. In public transit, the ads we stare at while waiting for the train will temporarily afford views into other more significant and enchanting worlds.

“I take the subway almost every day, and all you see is advertisements,” says Farah Al Qasimi, a multi-hyphenate artist who splits her time between New York and the UAE. Known for her intricately constructed technicolour mises-en-scène that evoke ’90s toy commercials by way of psilocybin, Al Qasimi will be taking over the walls of Davisville subway station – a sedately tiled open-air transit hub in Toronto’s midtown. With curator Sara Knelman, Al Qasimi’s Night Swimming installation (1 May – 2 June) offers 26 poster-sized images that “deal with ideas of transcendence and utopia,” in Al Qasimi’s words, “commercial, religious, or bodily.” 

“Farah was the first person I thought of for [the installation],” says Knelman. “I was really interested in thinking about what it means to take up the space of advertising – to work in that context of projection and desire and consumer space.” In Al Qasimi’s hands, the station will be filled with the intoxicating intrigue of strange spaces filled with strange figures. “It can be disempowering and frustrating to be so persistently targeted as a consumer in your everyday life, so I want these images to feel like a quiet or humorous escape from that,” she explains. 

“I don’t think putting photos in the subway makes art more democratic,” says Knelman, who recently joined C Magazine as its executive director and publisher. “But, there is a way in which putting these images in the public realm might cue an interaction that wouldn’t happen otherwise. Maybe you understand a little bit more what kind of power these spaces are exerting over you as you walk through them. You become more alive to them.”

To have impact and meaning, you have to make it big, make it loud, make it colourful, make it something that is going to get through all this visual noise

– Gaëlle Morel, Exhibitions Curator at The Image Centre, Toronto

Playing with the notion of momentary utopias is Tangier-based documentary photographer Seif Kousmate, whose installation Waha (Oasis) (1 May – 2 June) consists of four billboards integrated into a dense and bustling section of downtown Toronto, perched above an auto repair garage or framed by colourful buildings. Kousmate’s photos depict scenes from the mythical – and all-too-vulnerable – North African oases, threatened by the effects of climate change and poor maintenance. Kousmate deepens his relationship to the scenes documented by collecting materials from the locations where the photos were made, working them into the finished image. “I want to create a historical approach to the story,” says Kousmate, “adding another layer on top of the image itself.”

Kousmate teases the burning of the oases (a serious threat in the dry heat of the desert) by showering sparks onto the original image and recapturing it. The momentary beauty cedes to a process of swift consumption, suspended in time. The strikingly manipulated images offer a vivid juxtaposition to its metropolitan surroundings. 

Gaëlle Morel, exhibitions curator at The Image Centre in Toronto and curator of Kousmate’s series, selected the four images to compete with the busy environment that surrounded them. “To have impact and meaning, you have to make it big, make it loud, make it colourful, make it something that is going to get through all this visual noise.” While the Outdoor Installations invite vast public audiences, Morel recognizes that Kousmate’s work must make itself seen in an overstimulated attention economy – with the added challenge of portraying individuals in an environment that won’t be immediately legible to most passersby.

“In Canada and in North America more generally, I don’t think we talk enough about North Africa,” says Morel. “I come from a country [France] where North Africa is in the conversation constantly because of the colonial past. This offers another interesting story about colonisation within different contexts and cultures.”

Just outside an old public school, semi-recently renovated into the arts institution Artscape Youngplace, stands a billboard more modest in size compared to others featured in this year’s Outdoor programming. Hovering just above eye level is a single image from Nadya Kwandibens, Toronto’s newly-appointed Photo Laureate, curated by Ariel Smith as part of Critical Distance’s Materialized series, co-presented with Native Women in the Arts, CONTACT, and Partners in Art.

Kwandibens’ billboard features an outtake from a 2019 series shot in her homeland of Kenora, Ontario, Treaty 3 Territory: Shiibaashka’igan: Honouring the Sacred Jingle Dress (21 April – 3 June), photographed at the Naotkamegwanning roundhouse. In the candid and joy-filled image, three Anishinaabekwewag laugh with each other, their jingle dresses, eagle fans, and other regalia paired with sensible accessories like sunglasses and baseball caps.

“They’re teasing each other,” says Kwandibens. “Teasing is a huge part of Indigenous humour. Laughter is medicine.” Spotlighting joy as healing figures prominently in Kwandibens’ work, especially in the midst of ongoing pain and trauma in Indigenous communities. “Like a few years ago, when the children were found at the [Kamloops Indian Residential School], the unmarked burial grounds,” she says. “As hard as things like that are to cover, it’s moments like this too, that we have to remember as a community the joy and laughter that’s brought us through so much trauma as well.”

The jingle dress is a healing dress, says Kwandibens, and the billboard welcomes everyone to experience that up close. “To be exhibited in such a huge festival like CONTACT is really significant and powerful,” adds Kwandibens. “Keeping in mind the ongoing colonialism that we face everyday – having an Indigenous presence in the city, photographically, is really beautiful.”

Questions around colonisation – of land, culture, and mind – permeate many of the Outdoor Installations, from Al Qasimi’s harnessing of the consumer gaze to Kousmate’s endangered oases. While conventional billboards rely on images and words to elicit desire with lightning-fast clarity, multidisciplinary artist Jake Kimble’s use of text, laid in playfully wobbly configurations over still images both found and made, has the opposite effect. On a billboard-scale photographic banner curated by Emmy Lee Wall in partnership with Capture Photography Festival, Kimble poses riddles rather than directives. In Grow Up #1 (1 May – 30 June) the words I WAS TOLD PEACE WAS MINE TO KEEP float before a snapshot of the artist as a child, dressed as a cowboy. Kimble, who belongs to the Deninu K’ue First Nation, embraces his yee-haw moment of yesteryear, overlaying the innocence with adult awareness. Kimble finds these artistic revisitations healing.

“Playing matchmaker with text and image is something that will never bore me,” says Kimble about the pairings. “Most of the text was pulled from the Notes app on my phone. That’s one of my favourite realms to visit because so much of it just does not make sense at all.”

Site is very important in considering how an artist’s work or practice responds to the surroundings and how people move through that space

– Tara Smith, CONTACT Festival Executive Director

There is pleasure in inviting the sleep-drenched psyche to the public sphere. How will drivers interpret Kimble’s keeping of peace as they make their way, perhaps, towards a gridlocked Gardiner Expressway? “I once found a note that read ‘Tell Michelle Pfeiffer I get it’ from 5:28am so it’s safe to say that I’m playing with my own deck of cards,” says Kimble.

“Site is very important in considering how an artist’s work or practice responds to the surroundings and how people move through that space,” says CONTACT’s executive director Tara Smith. “In planning a project, we consider the work’s scale and a variety of presentation strategies and concerns, for example, how different photographs function as large-format images, and how the perception of them can change when presented on the street or on a billboard, or in relation to surrounding structures and communities.”

As Toronto moves into more seasonable spring weather, Smith suggests cycling around the city to visit the different Outdoor Installations, consulting the map provided by the festival. Alternately, and perhaps in tune with the imagery they are replacing, we can allow these installations to happen to us by chance. “Ideally, you don’t plan to see these in any particular way, but they find you,” says Al Qasimi. “Some of my favorite subway artworks in New York City are the ones I never plan to see – but sometimes I see them whizz past me from the train car window. I like knowing that they’re there.” 

Like most spontaneous public encounters, the Outdoor Installations invite the possibility of awkward but fulfilling connection. “I’m rather taken with how we can experience art in a public setting,” says Kimble. “I grew up in a town of less than 3,000 people that only had two sets of traffic lights. My first ‘galleries’ were the magazine stands at the grocery store and the light-up signs for the couple restaurants around town.” Luminous and unexpected, there is the hope, to paraphrase Knelman, that these experiences will make us just a little more alive to what’s around us – and in public, no less.

Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival is at museums, galleries, and public spaces throughout Toronto until 31 May