For the CONTACT Photography Festival, this Flânerie Billboards Toronto invites you to rediscover public space through photographic installations displayed on billboards. These omnipresent supports become the ground for artistic interventions that subvert commercial codes and encourage a critical reading of the urban landscape.
Before the omnipresence of screens, billboards imposed their large-scale images. Today, they continue to shape our collective imagination, while artists appropriate them to question power, memory, and representation.
The exhibition unfolds in two stages, between Wallace Emerson, Dovercourt Village, and West Queen West, offering a sensitive journey through Toronto. As one walks, the encountered artworks open a dialogue on the place of personal narratives in public space and the capacity of images to resist their erasure.
The curated works bring together Buck Ellison, Kiri Dalena, Suneil Sanzgiri, Anu Kumar, Alanna Fields, and Jordan King, whose practices explore memory, diaspora, identity, and the power of images. The flânerie concludes with a convivial moment, extending the discussions initiated during the journey.
The Curated Works
Dupont Billboards
The hyper-aesthetic still lifes of Buck Ellison are not what they seem: beneath their apparent elegance, they reveal how fabrics and everyday objects contribute to the construction of narratives of power, wealth, and social hierarchies. Curated by Emmy Lee Wall, this series subverts the codes of commercial photography to better question aesthetics as a tool of domination, even in public space.
Lansdowne Billboards
In Erased Slogans and Birds of Prey, Filipino artist Kiri Dalena revisits archives from contexts of dictatorship and colonization to reactivate narratives of resistance and question imposed representations. Curated by Su-Ying Lee, this double installation presented in Junction explores collective memory, censorship, and how images can serve – or counter – power dynamics.
Dundas West Billboard
By blending poetry, archives, and moving images, artist and filmmaker Suneil Sanzgiri questions dominant narratives related to memory, diaspora, and colonial legacies. Curated by Aamna Muzaffar, his public space work revolves around verses by poet Agha Shahid Ali, inscribed on two mirror panels, to evoke the tensions between intimate memory and official history.
College St and Clinton St Billboards
In Ghar, photographer Anu Kumar explores her quest for cultural identity after returning to India as an adult, documenting the intimate life of her family in Kavi Nagar for five years. Curated by Elias Redstone, this series of sensitive portraits – including two poignant images of her grandmother exhibited in Toronto – evokes memory, migration, and the deep ties that shape our idea of “home.”
Strachan Ave Billboard
Drawing on old photographs from the 19th and early 20th centuries, American artist Alanna Fields reveals, in her series Unveiling, gestures and gazes often silenced in dominant narratives. Curated by Luther Konadu, this work makes visible marginalized Black and queer presences, affirming their pride and intimacy through a resolutely political art of reappearance.
Queen St W and Augusta Ave Billboard
Canadian artist Jordan King presents a series of Polaroids taken between 1999 and 2004, then reactivated in 2020 in homage to International Chrysis, a trans figure from the 70s–80s with whom she shared a former living space in New York. Curated by Sameen Mahboubi, this work questions queer memory, photographic intimacy, and how personal archives can inhabit public space.