More than 160 exhibitions open across Toronto on Friday as the Contact Photography Festival launches its 2026 edition, running May 1–31 without the corporate lead sponsor it lost in 2024. The festival shed Scotiabank's backing two years ago, and the reduced budget has trimmed its public programming — but Contact is betting that scale, strangeness and sheer citywide dispersal will carry the month.

The most visible statement towers above Spadina Ave.: Thandiwe Muriu's An Abundance of Plenty (2025), a towering portrait of a masked woman whose patterned blouse dissolves into a backdrop of the same riotous geometric print. She is effectively camouflaged. The image is too sensational to ignore. If you didn't know a photography festival had taken over the downtown, you might reasonably ask why it is there.

Tara Smith, Contact's programs director, says installations that meld into the architecture of the street have long been central to the festival's method. "It's a really lovely way to bring art to the city," she says. Venues this year range from artist-run centres and commercial galleries to cafes and a laundromat.

What survives the loss of a title sponsor?

Plenty, judging by the 2026 program. Smith says the organization remains committed to championing lens-based art, and the breadth of the lineup reflects as much. "People are always asking how do we navigate? What do we see?" she says.

The headline name this May is Sin Wai Kin, the Toronto-born, Turner Prize-nominated artist known for a multiverse of alter egos in which time, language and identity spin through a kaleidoscope. Contact and the Reel Asian International Film Festival have jointly organized the artist's presence across three sites.

At Contact's namesake gallery on Spadina Ave., the exhibition Closer Than It's Ever Been is anchored by The Time of Our Lives, a two-channel apocalyptic twist on a retro sitcom starring the alter egos V Sin and Wai King — interrupted, like real television, by satirical messages from a sponsor. Those ads feed a larger fictional campaign: billboards for the perfume Essence, fronted by spokesmodel Wai King, go up at Sankofa Square and at College St. and Delaware Ave.

Kelly Lui, Reel Asian's associate director and the exhibition's curator, says Sin's worldbuilding suits far-flung locations — and expects mild confusion. "Maybe people will be like … that cologne looks interesting. I want to know if it's coming to Shoppers Drug Mart," she says with a laugh. A public screening of Sin's 2024 film The Fortress follows on May 5 at the Bachir/Yerex Presentation Space at 401 Richmond, with the artist attending a Q&A.

Where else does the art spill outdoors?

Everywhere, if the program is any guide. Delali Cofie, a recent OCAD University graduate, opens A Place of Ours — an autobiographical show of photographs made in his home country of Ghana — at United Contemporary. As a bridge between sites, Contact will install his cinematic Independence Square II (2021), a black-and-white image of a barefoot rider on a rearing white horse, on a billboard at Queen St. W and Augusta Ave.

Prefix Prize-winner Yann Pocreau's new window installation A Light Kiss occupies street-level glazing at 650 Dupont St. — a Loblaws grocery store — and doubles as a stop on Contact's official bike tour. Smith notes the outdoor format has been "a great format for getting work outside the galleries," and suggests checking whether billboard artists also show indoors.

Below street level, Leala Hewak's Headquarters appears in Bay Station. The project documents a lesser-known TTC property, the William C. McBrien Building connected to the Davisville stop — a Mad Men-era time capsule of wood-panelled offices and pink-tiled bathroom stalls that serves as an eerie backdrop for a corporate character Hewak calls the Chairman.

For those who prefer water to pavement, Julie Pasila's Island Obscura at Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts on the Toronto Islands offers a camera obscura large enough to sit inside — and visitors are welcome to do so. From May 1 to 31, the walk-in apparatus will project a dreamy inverse image of the park, with a series of Pasila's solargraphs tracing the sun's daily path mounted on the structure.

Which galleries anchor the festival?

MOCA Toronto joins the program when its new season opens May 15 with Sara Cwynar's Baby Blue Benzo, named for the Vancouver-born artist's 2024 film — never before shown in Canada — described as a meditation on value and the elusive power of images. Its opening shot reveals a sleek image of the most expensive car in the world, a vintage Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé.

The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University concentrates four Contact exhibitions under one roof from May 6, including a retrospective devoted to Dawit L. Petros, the most recent winner of the Scotiabank Photography Prize. Curator Gaëlle Morel says the festival delivers an annual jolt of energy. "It's this feeling of being part of something bigger," she says.

Larry Fink: Social Graces and Runway gathers black-and-white selections from two of the photographer's best-known series on the glamorous highs and lows of 20th-century America. Montreal artist Jessica Slipp's two-channel video Becoming Rock (2018–ongoing) shows the performer disguising herself, sheet by sheet of paper, as a grey rock in successive industrial locations.

Kenna Robinson's With My Whole Body pushes printmaking into sculpture. Robinson makes cyanotypes by applying her own body to UV-sensitive fabric, then builds hanging sculptures from the prints. "They're almost like mannequins," says Morel. "Just the shape of the body is perceptible. … It's stunning."

How Contact fares beyond 2026 — a major festival operating without a corporate title sponsor — may say as much about Canada's cultural economy as about photography. This month, at least, the work is everywhere: on a billboard, in a bathroom stall, inside a camera the size of a shed.