In My Silk Road to You, Kazakh artist Almagul Menlibayeva plays on an audience’s exotic image of the region by posing women against monuments and landscapes of Central Asia.Courtesy the artist
An Asian woman poses in front of a medieval monument in Turkestan wearing an improbably large headdress fashioned from dozens of red-and-silver skullcaps, their interlocking arrangement echoing the decorative tiles on the wall behind her. An African couple stands in a dark space with corn stalks around them, their faces masked by husks and their hands replaced by cobs.
Those dramatically staged images – commenting on cultural identity in Kazakhstan on the one hand and the Ivory Coast on the other – are just two of the thousands of photographs that can be seen at this year’s Contact festival.
Ho Tam's Manifesto of Hair is a series devoted to the hair salons and barbershops of Manhattan’s Chinatown.Courtesy the artist
The May festival took a hit when it lost Scotiabank as a title sponsor this year: There will be no catalogue and fewer outdoor works. That’s a loss because those unlooked-for civic encounters with surprising Contact billboards are often the festival’s strongest suit. Still, there are some public art projects, including colourfully costumed and gymnastically posed human figures by Los Angeles photographer Arielle Bobb-Willis on display at the Davisville subway station. But the main action comprises the 36 curated shows invited by festival organizers, plus another 104 community contributions generated by an open call.
If a single theme emerges from this cornucopia, it is one of probing community identity through variations on documentary photography. In this regard, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ont., is unveiling a treasure-trove: more than 100 photographs of Indigenous life in Northern Ontario in the 1950s and 1960s, taken by John Macfie, a government trapline manager who travelled to Anishinaabe, Cree and Anisininew communities in the Hudson Bay watershed.
John Macfie's People of the Watershed exhibition has more than 100 photographs of Indigenous life in Northern Ontario in the 1950s and 1960s.Courtesy the artist
The exhibition, People of the Watershed, which continues all summer and fall after Contact wraps, will chart the transition from traditional to contemporary practices as hunters moved off the land in that period. Macfie, who died in 2018, shot adults at work, mending a boat or a fishing net, and children at play, skipping rope or showing off a caribou skull and antlers. He was an amateur photographer and non-Indigenous but the images reflect a sensitive eye and respectful approach to a solid documentary project.
In another time and another place, Yuwen Vera Wang’s images of her ancestral village near the city of Yantai in northeast China also take a documentary approach but with a decidedly elegiac tone. Last year, Wang returned from Canada to the Chinese village where her paternal grandparents spent their lives. As in many areas in rural China, its population is aged because the younger generation has left for the city.
Yuwen Vera Wang's images of her ancestral village near the city of Yantai in northeast China look at memory and loneliness in a disappearing China.Courtesy the artist
Wang’s images, on show at the Artspace Gallery at 401 Richmond are not an indictment of the lack of health care and social services that the photographer has observed, but rather a poetic look at memory and loneliness in a disappearing China. Many of her photographs include no people, but rather the objects that mark their presence: a magnifying glass, a Mao statuette or clean sheets hanging on a line.
Both of these projects relied on what the photographer might find in front of the camera; conversely, the art of Kazakh artist Almagul Menlibayeva and Nuits Balnéaires from the Ivory Coast is purposefully stagy. Both these artists produce photo shoots with elaborate costumes and props to create images that reveal or critique their cultures.
Menlibayeva, a Kazakh who works in Germany, is showing two series at the Aga Khan Museum. In My Silk Road to You she poses women against monuments and landscapes of Central Asia, dressing them in architectural costumes that include swathes of highly decorative fabrics, playing on an audience’s exotic image of the region. She critiques that colonial conflict between modernity and tradition more emphatically in a second series, Nomadized Suprematism, that poses women, sometimes in military uniforms, against the concrete remains of Soviet-era industrial or nuclear facilities.
Nuits Balnéaires evokes the seven families who founded the coastal city of Grand-Bassam in the 13th century, photographing their descendants in surreal portraits.Courtesy the artist
Meanwhile, Balnéaires evokes the seven families who founded the coastal city of Grand-Bassam in the 13th century, photographing their descendants in surreal portraits symbolizing the various attributes of each clan with extravagant props and lush landscapes. United in Bassam, at the Meridian Arts Centre in North York, includes, for example, a figure standing under palm trees in a yellow robe wearing a woven helmet that transforms him into a parrot, a reference to the Adahonlin family’s role as teachers while palm nuts symbolize their work as farmers. In other images, figures are surrounded by corn stalks, wrapped in gold robes or use bowls fashioned from the calabash gourd as hats, as Balnéaires commissions local artists in the Ivory Coast to craft a mysterious new iconography.
This startling work is also mounted on billboards at College and Delaware streets while Menlibayeva’s photography is on view both indoors at the Aga Khan Museum and outdoors in the surrounding park.
The work of Vancouver artist Ho Tam falls somewhere between these documentary and artistic impulses: His Manifesto of Hair is a series devoted to the hair salons and barbershops of Manhattan’s Chinatown, which he observed while living in New York in the 1990s and early 2000s. There are more than 100 such businesses in the space of a few blocks, outnumbered only by Chinese restaurants. On show at Paul Petro Contemporary Art, these addictive images use saturated colours and carefully observed street life to speak about identity – maybe joyous, maybe enforced – in a subculture marked by fierce ethnic pride and cutthroat entrepreneurialism.
Contact continues in the GTA through May.