CONTACT Gallery

Sin Wai Kin, The Time of Our Lives (film still), 2024. Initiated by Accelerator and co-produced with Kunsthall Trondheim, Canal Projects, and Blindspot Gallery, supported by Vince Guo. Image courtesy the artist.

Experience CONTACT’s 30th Edition, taking place May 1 – 31, 2026 throughout greater Toronto. Visit contactphoto.com for information on 150+ exhibitions and programs in this year’s Festival.

Sin Wai Kin
CLOSER THAN IT’S EVER BEEN

May 1 – June 13, 2026
Reception: Friday, May 1, 6 – 9pm
CONTACT Gallery, Toronto

CONTACT Photography Festival and Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival, both celebrating their 30th anniversary, present a multi-site project at CONTACT Gallery, Sankofa Square and Billboards on College by artist Sin Wai Kin. Curated by Kelly Lui.

“My better half! My world! What has brought about your inevitable end?” CLOSER THAN IT’S EVER BEEN invites you to enter Toronto-born, UK-based artist Sin Wai Kin’s multiverse of characters who embody thematic areas of research, ranging from science fiction and non-dualistic philosophies to Peking opera and theoretical physics. In interrelated presentations at three locations across the city, this curation features the Canadian premiere of Sin’s video work The Time of Our Lives (2024) and their advertising campaign, Essence (2024).

Starting with the stories we tell, the parts and the whole, Sin subverts the constructed narratives that re/iterate who we are and who we can become, re/informing the shape of our world. In doing so, their practice takes us closer to metaphorical and literal ends, suspending us in a holding space just before we reach them. In that very moment, what sense of wholeness might exist? What parts might be revealed to be possible?

In the two-channel-video installation The Time of Our Lives presented at CONTACT Gallery, viewers can choose to sit or move around the space, their experience oscillating between lived and imaginary realities. In a projection at one end of the gallery, a speculative sitcom of the same title plays in back-to-back episodes, while a recording of a studio audience plays at the opposite end. Through the sitcom we are brought into the daily lives of our on-screen couple, “V Sin” and “Wai King,” two of the artist’s recurring characters, whose galactic world is about to reach doomsday, or maybe it already has. Performing in relation to one another amidst a collapsing reality where time and space move differently as told to us by “The Storyteller”, we watch the characters develop and come apart as they question the distinction of past, future and present.

Sin Wai Kin, The Time of Our Lives (film still), 2024. Initiated by Accelerator and co-produced with Kunsthall Trondheim, Canal Projects, and Blindspot Gallery, supported by Vince Guo. Image courtesy the artist.

We are not alone in our spectatorship; in the video’s second channel the studio audience is being prompted to react. In this recording, words take on instructional meaning, the audience performing emotions from delight to sympathy in relation to the events occurring in the show—a supposed cause-and-effect. In the role of an actor or observer, on the set or in the gallery, The Time of Our Lives places us between truth and reality, challenging the assumptions and dichotomies that we live with and which exist within us.

The end may be nigh, but there is no escaping a commercial break. Inserted between episodes are advertisements for Essence, a men’s cologne whose slogan promises that “your true self awaits.” “Wai King” is featured again as the cologne’s brand ambassador, a hero seeking “something you can’t see,” but something he can possibly already feel. The marketing campaign permeates the city—we encounter ads upon entering the gallery, playing on screens in Toronto’s heavily populated Sankofa Square, and posted on a billboard on College Street. Shaping our perceptions of what we might be lacking, Essence plays into the production of desire and anxiety within hegemonic systems.

Screening of The Fortress by Sin Wai Kin
Tuesday, May 5, 6pm (Doors open at 5:30pm)
Bachir/Yerex Presentation Space, The Commons (Suite 440)
401 Richmond Street West, Toronto

Join us for a special screening of Sin’s film The Fortress (2024) followed by an extended Q&A session with the artist in-attendance. In The Fortress, we encounter Sin’s character “Wai King” as he rehearses for the role of ‘Man’ at Alfalah Theatre in Lahore, Pakistan. In the witness of the rehearsals, we confront the constructions of ‘Man’ as the archetype and in turn the possibilities for its unraveling and reconstruction.

This multi-site presentation is supported by the Ontario Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, Sankofa Square and Pattison Outdoor Advertising.

Suzy Lake, from the series The Natural Way to Draw, 1975. From the Artexte archives. Used with the kind permission of the artist.

Women’s Image Library

May 1 – June 6, 2026
Panel Discussion: Thursday, April 30, 6:30 – 8pm
Reception: Friday, May 1, 6 – 9pm
CONTACT Photobook Lab, Toronto

Founded in Montreal in 1981 by art historian Francine Périnet and photographers Angela Grauerholz and Anne Ramsden, Artexte is a library, research centre and exhibition space whose mission is to preserve and promote research and experimentation in contemporary visual art. Drawing on its collection of 36,000+ documents and ephemera spanning 1965 to the present day, the curators of Women’s Image Library activated its archives to reveal women photographers’ significant and often overlooked contributions to the Canadian art scene. Curated by Manon Tourigny and Amed Aroche. Join us for a panel discussion with the curators and artists Maude Arsenault, Anne-Marie Proulx, and Eve Tagny on April 30.

CONTACT Photography Festival
80 Spadina Ave, Suite 205
Toronto, ON M5V 2J4
416 539 9595
info@contactphoto.com
contactphoto.com | @contactphoto

CONTACT Photography Festival is a Toronto-based charitable organization dedicated to exhibiting, analyzing, and celebrating lens-based media, rooted in an annual festival that takes place throughout the month of May and beyond.

Established in 2022, CONTACT Photobook Lab is a shop, reading room, and community meeting place for photobook makers, collectors, and enthusiasts.