Contact Fest Q&A Out Today

The Contact photography festival officially kicks off tomorrow in Toronto, with what they say is 1,000+ artists participating. It also looks like it could be one of Contact's most socially conscious years ever. Today the National Post ran my Q&A with festival director Bonnie Rubenstein. Here's an excerpt:

Q The theme for this year's festival is "Still Revolution." What does that mean?

A We make our themes quite broad so they can mean different things to different people. What we're looking at on one side are the revolutions in photography itself, in its technologies. And on the other side, we're looking at photography and its ability to document transformation and massive change in social and political realms.

Q You've helped organize a central exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art on this theme. How does Still Revolution come across in actual artworks?

A The exhibition at MOCCA deals primarily with the social and political meanings of revolution. We have eight different artists with works that are very different, from documentary to completely abstract.

Mikhael Subotzky, for instance, did a documentary project on Pollsmoor Prison in South Africa, where Nelson Mandela spent some time. It's notorious for very difficult, overcrowded conditions, and he did 360-degree panoramas of certain cells. For me, it's dealing with a result of the apartheid era, even though there was such a revolution around apartheid in the nation as a whole.

Image of Martha Rosler's Home Invasion from artnet.de