Mid-way through the Contact Photography Festival, the exhibition “Through the Body: Lens-Based works by Contemporary Chinese Women Artists” opened at the University of Toronto Art Centre. Though Chinese contemporary art has had impact on the international art world since the 1980s, the face of Chinese art has been dominated by male artists. Responding to this, curators Matthew Brower, Fu Xiaodong, and Yan Zhou decided contribute to Contact’s exploration of identity by bringing together the photography of eleven contemporary Chinese female artists and collectives whose work explores the social and political circumstances that surround them.
Magdalyn Asimakis
As a nod to the 40th year since hip hop was founded in New York’s south Bronx, the Gladstone Hotel is showing a selection of iconic photographic portraits of hip hop artists and emcees for the Contact Photography Festival. This exhibition does not only document the cultural phenomenon through these individuals, but also explores the communication of persona through photography, and the collaboration between photographer and artist to convey the subject’s identity, in particular the relationship between the individual’s past roots and present artistry.
Two years after the International Olympic Committee decided that Sochi would host the 2014 Winter Olympics, photographer Rob Hornstra and journalist Arnold van Bruggen decided to undertake an ambitious project of “slow journalism,” filming, photographing, and capturing oral histories in Sochi over four years.
Though the artists included in this exhibition look to history and ancestry to construct identity, their perspectives are not documentary or historical. Their work is exploratory, propositional, and contemporary, and challenges others to consider themselves in the same way. To see the issue of identity so deeply rooted in the oeuvre of even just these eight international artists suggests that we are at a moment where this discussion is relevant.