Gosen began to research these young women and others like them. She describes what she discovered as a crisis in young motherhood. With 96 cases per every 1,000 women aged between 15 and 19, the average rate of teenage pregnancy in Venezuela is double that of the rest of Latin America. While this is not a new issue for Gosen’s home country, it is one that remains underdiscussed and therefore unresolved.

The photographer began exploring this difficult topic, documenting Venezuela’s young mothers and their families in the initmate photo essay, Grandmothers at 30. The work was recently awarded the Marilyn Stafford FotoReportage Award, which is granted annually to a professional woman photographer whose work addresses an important social, environmental, economic or cultural issue. Gosen hopes the award grant of £2,500 will allow her to continue her work – and to focus on offering solutions to the many young women she’s met.

Of these women, there is one 21-year-old second-time mother whose story sticks in her mind. The photographer recalls the obstetric violence this young woman experienced, the hospitals she gave birth in that had neither water nor light, and the physical and emotional scars she was left with as a result. “These conversations are really hard to have with them,” Gosen acknowledges, “some of them are really, really traumatised.”

“The reason they were detained was that they were accused of robbery, and if you asked them, they would tell you that they were hungry and that they didn’t have a choice but to commit the crime” – Ana María Arévalo Gosen

Despite this trauma, the photographer succeeded, gradually and over a period of years, in gaining the trust of Venezuela’s young mothers. Grandmothers at 30 is a testament to the strength of the relationships she built. Thematically, the project’s images are impressive in their mundanity, indicating a complete acceptance of Gosen’s presence. Visually, they offer a striking juxtaposition between the blue skies of Venezuela, and the dark, cramped homes of the country’s young mothers.

Although these images are now award-winning, the photographer has no plans to move on from Grandmothers at 30 – instead, with the help of her recent grant, she intends to campaign for change. She is planning a documentary film that will be delivered to impacted communities, wants to bring gynaecologists and obstetricians to schools and, perhaps most importantly, hopes to contribute to a change in Venezuela’s abortion laws. “I’m already 35 years old, I already got the abortion, I already got the therapy,” Gosen says passionately. “I think in my heart, that’s one of the main reasons why I’m doing this now, because I could have been one of these girls.”

“We’re always navigating that space between online activism, real world activism, and art activism. It’s like murky waters sometimes. We wanted to bring that out of the social media bubble”

Eliza Hatch

The brief for the open call was simple: to submit work that centred around community activism and uplifting marginalised voices. “By the nature of what we both do, and how we both exist on the internet, I don’t think it could have been on anything else,” says Bee. “It was inevitable because so much of our lives are spent talking about these issues.” 

Eliza adds that they wanted to create an exhibition that had a voice and a cause. “We’re always navigating that space between online activism, real world activism, and art activism. It’s kind of like murky waters sometimes. We wanted to bring that out of the social media bubble that we’re used to,” she says. 

Both Eliza and Bee recognise that during Women’s History Month, institutions, brands, and organisations can fall into a trap of showing a “one-dimensional” version of womanhood. “While I may not identify as a woman, it’s really important that we still have all genders involved in these spaces… We wanted to encompass intersecting ideas,” says Bee. The result is sure to be dazzling, and a testament to the power of art to inform, communicate and inspire positive change.

Hysterical will be on show at no format Gallery in Deptford, London, from 24 March until 03 April 2022. Donate to their fundraiser here.

“If I saw it coming, then someone else must have seen it coming too”

Neville’s relationship with Ukraine began in 2015, when the Ukrainian Military Hospital requested a translated version of his Battle Against Stigma (2015) to give to war veterans. Neville made the project following a trip – commissioned by the Imperial War Museum – to Helmand, Afghanistan, in 2011, to study the stigma of mental health in the British military.

Like many soldiers, Neville returned from the frontline a changed man, with depression and PTSD. He was also disillusioned with the media. “Throughout my time in Helmand I became increasingly aware of this chasm between what is presented in the media and the reality… devastating injuries were barely reported in the UK; it was only if a British soldier lost their life that it would make the TV news,” he writes. In the last decade, Neville recognised the same shortcomings and lack of information regarding the reporting of the political crisis in Ukraine, which was undoubtedly escalating, and felt the need to raise awareness of the responsibility to rectify this. 

Stop Tanks with Books, published by Nazraeli Press, does just this. A collection of portraits of Ukrainian people taken between 2015 and 2021, it opens with a sobering quote by German politician Heiko Maas: “If Russia stops fighting there’ll be no war. If Ukraine stops fighting there’ll be no Ukraine.” It warns of the critical gravity of the situation, and is followed by an illustrated map of the Ukraine-Russia border.

Highlighted in red, the image of the occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk reminds us that this crisis is not an isolated incident, but a continuation of escalating tensions in the region, notably Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the ongoing war in Donbas led by the Russian-backed separatist movement. The UNHCR estimates that in 2017 there were already 1.8 million internally displaced refugees in Ukraine, and hundreds of thousands who fled to neighbouring Europe and Russia. 

“In a way it’s too late, but in another way, it’s completely timely.”

The book is an example of Neville’s undertaking to make photography with a purpose. He brings together images, storytelling, research and information in an urgent, resounding call to action: “Allow Ukraine to join NATO. Allow Ukraine to join the EU. There need to be tough sanctions against Russia. Crimea needs to be returned to the Ukrainian government. Troops need to be withdrawn from Russian-occupied Donbas.” 

We see portrayals of Ukrainian traditions and customs and holidaymakers in Odessa, but also how life has changed. Displaced families, a woman sewing camouflage clothing in a basement, crowds queuing at checkpoints to cross the borders between Russian-occupied and Ukrainian-occupied territories – all part of everyday life in eastern Ukraine for nearly a decade.

The tome, edited by David Campany and translated into three languages – English, Ukrainian and Russian – also includes five stories written by Ukrainian poet and writer Lyuba Yakimchuk of her encounters and experiences from the Russian-occupied Donbas in 2014. Though the book has been eight years in the making, Neville was already testifying that this battle began a long time ago. “What I don’t understand,” he says, “and I’m not a political strategist, is that if I saw it coming, then someone else must have seen it coming too.” 

“The international community needs to ask itself a series of urgent questions,” Neville writes in the book’s introduction, with a sense of foreboding. “If Russia’s invasion escalates it will result in a massive exodus of refugees. Ukraine has a population of over 40 million, what will happen if only 10 per cent of these people suddenly flee the country? How will the international community cope with such numbers?… And if Ukraine falls to Russia, which country will be next?”

The importance of providing immediate mental health support for a nation of people who have lived in a state of deep uncertainty is also advocated. “Mental health issues among the population of the Donbas region have risen exponentially due to the incredible stress and pressure of living on the frontline of a war for nearly eight years. This will cause lasting damage,” Neville writes.

Press day

Four days before the invasion, some of the initial print-run’s 750 copies were distributed. “In a way it’s too late, but in another way, it’s completely timely,” says Neville. Just a few weeks before, the books were printed and bound at unprecedented speed in just two weeks in Istanbul by MAS Matbaa printers. They continue to be distributed all over Europe to a list of key policymakers, members of parliament, ambassadors and key media around the world.

The message, then, remains the same: “The aim is for recipients of this book to be prompted into real action, which will result in an end to the war, an end to the killing in eastern Ukraine, and the withdrawal of Russian forces from occupied territories in Donbas and Crimea,” and, indeed, the rest of Ukraine. 

markneville.com

Stop Tanks with Books is published by Nazraeli Press and is available to pre-order now

If you are looking for ways to help and donate to Ukraine, see below for a list of verified resources, among many others.

Choose Love Ukraine Appeal

British Red Cross Ukraine Appeal

The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR)

Save the Children

United Help Ukraine

Nonprofit volunteer organisation currently fundraising to provide emergency medical aid and humanitarian relief to those on the front lines.

ukrainewar.carrd.co

A link for verified fundraisers and useful information that can be shared on social media.

Along the American continent’s Atlantic coast, populations have – due to colonialism – become a mix of Native Americans, Africans and Europeans. In Mexico, however, the myth prevails that Black people are non-existent. It is an idea deeply embedded in the national history, in a country formed by the encounter between the Spanish invaders and the Indigenous peoples. Combining journalism and autoethnography, Mexican artist Koral Carballo explores the Afro-Mexican identity, assembling a visual narrative that reclaims erased histories and creates new and impactful forms of presence and representation.

Started in 2017, the project, titled Siempre estuvimos aquí (We were always here), aims to dissect the African presence in Mexico and the legacy of the people of African origin who were kidnapped and forced to work by slavers. Through its focus on ordinary lives, and a touch of the supernatural, Carballo’s work challenges the general neglect of origin and the internalised racism that continues to cloak Afro-descendancy. “I wanted to direct my photography towards questioning, towards an alternative narrative to the one imposed by the state in the face of terror,” Carballo says. “I am part of the generation of artists who had to grow up in the midst of a state-invented war to control territorial and structural reforms.” The project connects past to present, ancestralism to contemporaneity, the familiar to the estranged. It also ties mystic traditions to the abominable history of enslavement, encouraging the (re)discovery of identities.

In the first of many chapters, Carballo reports on the carnival of Coyolillo – an Afro-Mexican community in the south-east of Mexico. Here, and throughout, the photographer plays with visibility and obscurity, presence and absence. Born from a celebration of freedom on the one day of rest the enslaved were granted per year, carnival-goers disguise their faces and wear antlers to give them the appearance of animals. Interspersed with colour, natural motifs and costume, the imagery is both revelatory and obfuscated. “The colours of my work arise from a dialogue with the atmosphere of my territory,” she reveals.

Because of the lack of acknowledgement, the contribution of Afro-Mexicans to the establishment of the country has been effectively erased. “I make oral accounts of the communities where I am working, and translate these into the visual. This approach is an important step for representation, which previously was only theorised by academia,” Carballo explains. By setting eerie, ominous photographs against historical images, the second chapter documents the locations where enslaved people were subjected to heinous crimes, as well as their places of rebellion. Visually reconstructing the landscape, Carballo calls this a reflection on space as a witness of time. It traces the pain and struggle hidden by official narratives, and offers a vigorous reclamation of Black history.

The project’s impact is the most poignant when Carballo uncovers family stories, including her own. “Through theory – feminisms have been important guides – but also through listening to my family, the idea of telling a story about what it means to be free has opened up paths to the intimate, the historical, and also the public.” Addressing the collection and preservation of family albums, and discovering her own genealogy, Carballo provides the young with tools to question traditional canons and tell their story. Tales that no longer deny the roots of the people, but proudly affirm their origin – a possible Afro-Indigenous mestizo.

koralcarballo.com

“When I found out about the atrocities that were taking place in Vietnam, I wanted to find a way to make work that related to that. That’s why I started using photographs. I wanted to get away from work that had to be in the gallery, and I saw the leftist magazines and newspapers of that time as a good way to get my work out there.”

As well as being an artist, Kennard is professor of political art at Royal College of Art, where he has taught for 25 years. The studio plays an important role in both his practice and work life – especially when the pandemic forced education online. “It’s important to keep a working space,” says Kennard. “Even if I’m not coming up with a lot of ideas, it’s good to be around the materials, because suddenly something will click… You start thinking visually rather than intellectually. Everything is like a visual dictionary of ideas.”

A lifelong Londoner, born-and-raised in Paddington, Kennard studied fine art at Byam Shaw School of Art then the Slade School of Fine Art. A turning point came during the anti-Vietnam War protests in 1968. “That’s when I became politicised,” he says. “When I found out about the atrocities that were taking place in Vietnam, I wanted to find a way to make work that related to that. That’s why I started using photographs.” Kennard freelanced for the left-leaning newspaper Workers Press, while living out of a Camden squat and working night shifts as a telephonist for the Post Office. “I wanted to get away from work that had to be in the gallery, and I saw the leftist magazines and newspapers of that time as a good way to get my work out there,” he says.

“Getting the message out to the people who are engaged in the struggles that I’m addressing has always been important. Photomontage is a public medium. It deals with images everyone’s seeing every day, but you’re putting them together in a way that shows what’s behind them.”

In the early-70s, there was no digital printing, photocopying and certainly no Photoshop. “I spent many hours in the darkroom, making different sized prints and cutting things up,” says Kennard. “A lot of these images are quite crude… I like the fact that you can see the breaks because they’re constructions and are not meant to look like reality.” Kennard sourced images from picture libraries, or magazines like The Sunday Times Magazine and Der Spiegel. “I see these photos as words that you form into sentences,” he says, gesturing to the images around him. “You put them all together, and it’s like creating a chapter in a book.”

Although the process is important, for Kennard the success of a final image is in its distribution. “The way they go out into the world is as important as the original,” says the artist, whose images have been used in The Guardian, New Statesman, NME, The Sunday Times and more. His photomontages have appeared on placards for global political movements, and illustrated the covers of books about the economy, welfare state and nuclear arms race. Among his most disseminated images are the iconic Broken Missile (1980), made for CND, and the series Stop the War (2003), created for protests against the invasion of Iraq. The success of this work hinges on visibility, but also accessibility. “Getting the message out to the people who are engaged in the struggles that I’m addressing has always been important,” he says. “Photomontage is a public medium. It deals with images everyone’s seeing every day, but you’re putting them together in a way that shows what’s behind them.” Many of Kennard’s pieces – particularly the anti-nuclear ones, and more recently his climate work – continue to be used by activist groups. For non-commercial use by NGOs and charities, or for demonstrations, all of Kennard’s works are free to use. But the success of such images is a “double-edged sword,” he says. “It means we’re still dealing with the issues that we were campaigning about 40 years ago.”

As he plans his retirement from teaching at RCA, Kennard is devoting his practice to the climate emergency. It has been almost 25 years since he made his first collage responding to global warming. Depicting a dystopic, barren land, it was a response to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, in which 192 countries signed an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Since then, Kennard has continued to produce work that visualises the threats to our planet and has campaigned with the climate activist group, Extinction Rebellion. 

“My generation had all these great hopes that we were going to change things,” he laments, “but it’s actually worse across the world now than it was back then.” Is he hopeful for the future? “Some days,” he says. “But one can’t live one’s life thinking nothing’s going to change. You have to keep going.” Kennard quotes the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” In other words, we must see the world for what it is, but have the courage and persistence to believe that we can overcome its challenges. 

peterkennard.com

Code Red, a retrospective of Peter Kennard’s climate work, is on show at Glasgow’s Street Level Photoworks from 30 October to 19 December.

streetlevelphotoworks.org

The group’s latest exhibition, Cloud Studies – on show at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester until 17 October 2021 – demonstrates the power of collective resistance. It presents the agency’s investigations into state and corporate weaponisation of air. Individual films reveal the movement of toxic air across borders, shown on both a large and small scale. Satellite imagery captures carbon monoxide emitted from the burning of Indonesian forests to clear land for crops, while analysis of methane released from fracking in Argentina forms part of a collaborative investigation into the fossil fuel industry with The Guardian. The “blinding lethal cloud” of the Grenfell Tower disaster is reconstructed through cloud imaging and witness testimony, contributing to a growing resource that supports survivors and the Grenfell Tower Inquiry.

Also on display is a moving-image work, which ties the varying strands of the survey together. Here, the process is defined as “forensics without inscription”, contrasting the study of fluctuating clouds with the group’s more recognisable work in the static, built environment. But these lethal clouds also have a fingerprint, an ephemeral architecture that can be exposed. For Weizman, the cloud is photographic “because it holds and refracts light”. Presented on the gallery’s large curved screens, the film envelops the viewer, conveying a common struggle by reproducing the spatial conditions of being within a toxic cloud.

FA’s sustained analysis of the Israeli Defence Forces’ bombing of Gaza during the 2014 war, and subsequent airstrikes using toxic chemicals, forms an important part of the exhibition. A statement at the entrance to the exhibition expresses renewed support for Gaza following recent events.

Weizman stresses that to FA, “an exhibition is always an intervention”. It is inherently about “building lines of solidarity, including between Palestinians and Black liberation movements”. Samaneh Moafi, Senior Researcher at FA, highlights the personal impact of the conflict on the group: “We have collaborators and friends in Gaza, and it is important to use this forum to honour their courage.”

At Cloud Studies’ heart is the first phase of a new investigation, a journey into the suffocating plumes of the Petrochemical Corridor, also known as Death, or Cancer Alley. Snaking along 85 miles of the Mississippi River in Louisiana, the region is polluted by some of the most toxic air in the nation. The project interrogates corporate extraction and consumption, which fuels climate change and decimates communities descended from people enslaved on sugar cane plantations in the area.

The fallow land is now host to over 200 industrial plants, which, in the words of FA, inherit the “spatial logic of colonial occupation”. This 300-year legacy of slavery is felt not only in the pollution of the air but also in the desecration of ancestral burial grounds in the area, as industrial plants seek to expand and break new ground without adequate archaeological oversight. The overarching narrative adds an elegiac dimension to the factual, strategic nature of FA’s investigations, where cemeteries marked by magnolia trees are both “sacred groves” and “topological anomalies”.

The project was initiated by Sharon Lavigne, Director of grassroots activist group RISE St. James, alongside Louisiana activist and FA researcher Imani Jacqueline Brown, to gather evidence in support of claims for ecological reparations. Chemical pollutants in the area were brought into the visible register, while locations of erased cemeteries were mapped, with early findings published in The New York Times. The data, as always, was humanised by and anchored in residents’ testimonies.

These different forms of presentation reach varied audiences and encourage self-reflexive analysis. For Moafi, this allows projects to “evolve as they move, with the aim of bringing different stakeholders to account”. FA’s investigations are enriched and strengthened by this collaborative, critical ethos, delivering a message of hope through solidarity and accountability.

Cloud Studies by Forensic Architecture will be on show at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester until 17 October 2021.

“I was born in Minsk, Belarus, in 1989, and I still live there,” says Masha Svyatogor. “It’s unsafe to live there now, in addition to the lack of financial security and prospects.” Indeed, Belarus is authoritarian, and its leader, Alexander Lukashenko, has been described as “Europe’s last dictator”. Elected in 1994 as the country’s first president following its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, he has been in power ever since. Lukashenko – known for his short temper, aggression towards his opponents, and scolding of independent media – regularly wins an apparent 80 per cent of the vote. Those who dare question the election results, or indeed any of his policies, are violently suppressed.

Living under such a regime is like “some kind of nightmare,” says Svyatogor. The “endless repression by the authorities against civilians, striving for absolute control of everyone and everything” means it is difficult to make critical work. Nevertheless, the artist does so via collage, and is best-known for her ongoing project Everybody Dance!, which she started in 2018 using images culled from the likes of Sovetskoe Foto. The monthly publication was active from 1926 to 1991, and was the only magazine dedicated to photography in the Soviet Union during that time.

Svyatogor has also made other collage projects, including Everybody Strike! (2020-ongoing), A Brave New World (2019) and Autobiography Without Facts (2016-17). These use, respectively, images from Sovetskoe Foto, her own photographs, and family photos stretching back to the days of the USSR. 

The photographer’s current project combines Soviet imagery with surreal elements. A recent work, titled In the Deep Forest, comprises figures that include soldiers with birds’ heads. “The deep forest is a metaphor for the place where the authorities commit a crime and then cover their tracks. They obscure them so the traces merge with the surrounding space, as if they never existed,” she explains. “In my work, figures personify power. For example, uniformed men that don’t have human faces. They have an inhuman appearance, faces of monsters from my bad dreams, because I, like many others who live in Belarus, sometimes cannot believe that all this is really happening – it is so crazy, illogical, irrational and terrible.”

Svyatogor’s use of Soviet political imagery is complex, reflecting both the contemporary parallels with Stalinist repression, but also the post-communist reality of Belarus, a country still peppered with Soviet iconography. It also allows her to critique the current government indirectly, instead of confronting its might head on, and to expose how such imagery is used to manipulate. 

“She is intelligent in how she uses the language that is open to her,” observes Andrei Liankevich, managing director and founder of Month of Photography in Minsk, who nominated Svyatogor, along with Polish photographer and activist Rafał Milach. “At the moment it’s hard to work in the street in Belarus as you can be shot or put in jail,” Liankevich continues. “Art is a safer way to work, and to a totalitarian regime it’s more difficult to understand. But while she uses archival pictures, it’s not an archive project. Her work is political; it’s about the totalitarian regime but also about art and the role of art under such a regime.”

mashasvyatogor.com

Nine of 13 photographs in Guerrilheiras are currently on view at a group exhibition, On The Shoulders of Giants, at Nara Roesler gallery in New York,  Each photograph shows a group member within her intimate surroundings, illustrating the daily juggle between supporting the movement and their personal lives. 

Marineide Jesus da Silva, a driver, gazes hopefully into the distance, while Sonia Mabel B. Barreto, who is originally from Peru, stands with her children and husband in their kitchen, wearing the uniform of their favorite football team. Leonice Penteado Lucas, a baker who sells her cakes at Ocupação 9 de Julho, is captured with her bolinhos – a Brazilian desert – which she considers as her contribution to the cause. Dressmaker Maria das Neves Pereira, who makes clothes for the group, stands proud among piles of fabric in her studio.

Stoic and dignified, the women radiate vigour, while emphasising their humanity and depth. The effortless sincerity seen in each picture stems from the artist’s interviews with her subjects about their everyday lives. The photographer encouraged them to open up about their occupations and asked the women: “What is your fighting tool?” Their responses, which ranged from motherhood, baking, and pure activism, informed the final portraits.

This same emotional commitment to her subjects informs her wider practice. For her three-channel video Sergio e Simone (2007-2014), she followed a trans shaman throughout a decade, and for her 2015 video, Cais do Corpo, frequented Rio de Janeiro’s Praça Mauá district for a month to document the area’s sex workers. In the process of observing, she builds a psychological connection with her subjects. And, along the way, the artist witnesses her own transformation behind the lens too. “Each project is a process of self-construction, and shows what is not finished within ourselves,” she says. “The work is not about the other but about an encounter with another.”

Guerrilheiras by Virginia de Medeiros is currently on show as part of a group exhibition, On the shoulders of giants, at Nara Roesler gallery in New York until 24 August 2021.

At Gallery 44, the oldest artist-run photography gallery in Canada, artists Tim Yanick Hunter and Isabel Okoro’s work is on view in a show titled A So-Called Archive, developed in collaboration with curator Liz Ikiriko and scholar Katherine McKittrick. The exhibition engages with the complexities of transformative justice in the wake of racial trauma, and the two artists, whose work intentionally embodies a fluid process of discovery and connection, reflects the collaborative, in-depth discussions between the four colleagues, as the show was planned throughout a year of on-and-off quarantining. “Working in this way functions to pull the curtain back and share creative practices with the intention that a viewer is an active participant in the exhibition,” Ikirio explains. “And that we all have an opportunity to consider how art can impact and affect us beyond simply appreciation.”

As a city heralded for its diversity, the visual interpretations of Toronto, particularly within its major art institutions, rarely reflect the region’s spirit of multiculturalism and interdisciplinarity. This dissonance has prompted creatives across the city to forge their own spaces, bridging the divide between local artists and the public, curating experiences that reflect communities and subjectivities simultaneously. For Ikiriko, including her exhibition in a major Toronto photography festival represents a necessary shift. She explains, “Presenting this work in the context of CONTACT aligns us with other artists and curators, such as Esmaa Mohamoud, Frida Orupabo, Onyeka Igwe and Michéle Pearson Clarke, among others, who are challenging the colonial capitalist structures that have encroached on our multiplicities, our complex ways of being, seeing and representing ourselves.”

One of the artists Ikiriko mentions, Esmaa Mohamoud, has created an impactful public piece at 11 Bay Street, shifting the usual gallery presentation of her work into a large civic space. Titled The Brotherhood FUBU (For Us By Us), the sheer scale of the two subjects in her massive mural, conjoined by a double-headed durag and shot by the artist in the icy waters of Lake Ontario, fix their gazes upon passersby in the glory of their colossal presence. “In art institutions, you’re walking through a space and looking at photographs, with a viewer consuming the subjects,” Mohamoud explains. “There is very little agency for the subjects in that position, which is why I usually don’t shoot faces—I want to remove that voyeuristic gaze. But with this piece, I had the opportunity to manipulate and change the power dynamics by allowing them to face forward and stare the passersby down.” 

As an accompaniment to the piece, Mohamoud also created a bronze sculpture of the double-durag, which will be featured near the mural as an antithesis to colonial monuments found across the city. “When you walk down University Avenue in Toronto, and you see all these monuments of white people, you realize none of it actually reflects the people who live here,” she says. “We are living in the most multicultural city in the world, and yet we still prominently feature statues of old white men. It doesn’t make sense.”

Through a similar critical lens, London-based Onyeka Igwe will present her experimental film, titled A So-Called Archive, at Mercer Union, a non-profit artist-run space founded in 1979. Grappling with the false promise of Western institutions as sites of archival safekeeping, Igwe’s film toys with the colonial roots of museums and historical collections, laying bare the audacity of British gatekeeping practices through eerie visuals and tongue-in-cheek voiceovers. While Igwe’s piece primarily focuses on two former archives based in Lagos and Bristol, Canada is situated as an extension of this Commonwealth reach. The inclusion of Igwe’s work in this year’s festival highlights an important consideration in the local-international construction of events, and like the other artists featured throughout the programming, her message is simultaneously subjective and shared.

Frida Orupabo, another artist engaging with archival materials, creates collages that question colonial and modern representations of Black womanhood. Like Mohamoud’s public installation, Orupabo magnifies her intricate collage process into a giant installation on the north facade of 460 King St. W., a building in Toronto’s historical Garment District. The first piece, Woman with book, will be on view until September, when it’s switched out for another piece, Woman with snake. Through their arresting gazes, the women in the artist’s work assert their agency, reclaiming the power stripped of them within official archives. Framing Orupabo’s collages as a novel form of documentation, the public installation also asks us to imagine its location as a record, with layers and gaps systemically forgotten despite their saturation in complex histories.

The contemplation of place is also felt in the work of curator and artist Anique Jordan, whose contribution to CONTACT is grounded in her city’s recognition of what constitutes our definition of Toronto. Born and raised in Scarborough, a region in the east end of the city, Jordan has curated a three-part project, including two public installations and an exhibition at Doris McCarthy Gallery, brought together under the title Three-Thirty. Spotlighting Malvern, a neighbourhood boasting a wealth of successful intergenerational community organizers, Jordan worked with three local artists—Aaron Jones, Ebti Nabag, and Kelly Fyffe-Marshall—to generate programming, murals, and a film installation about the manifestation of youth culture and its relationship to power structures throughout the city.

The presence of Black creatives, making work throughout the sprawling fabric of Toronto, is by no means a new phenomenon—and this year’s festival demonstrates how so many of these storytellers, from the east to the west end of the city, are the foundation of the region’s art scene. “I wanted to work with CONTACT because it’s a great festival that shows really diverse works, which I’ve always admired,” reflects Mohamoud. “Working with them has allowed me to create something monumental, where the sheer scale of the work is hard to ignore.” Among the many compelling artists in this year’s Festival, CONTACT’s Core Program features Sasha Huber, Leyla Jeyte, Luther Konadu, Brianna Roye, Sebastein Miller, Christina Leslie, Dainesha Nugent-Palache, Bidemi Oloyede, and a group show at the Art Gallery of Ontario features the work of Dawoud Bey, John Edmonds, and Wardell Milan.

For more information on the artists featured in this year’s Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, see the full list of programming here, where audio guides are also available for both remote engagement and public roaming.