In a new addition to the series of protests in light of the Israel-Palestine conflict all over North America, would-be exhibitors and artists for Toronto's annual, month-long Contact Photography Festival have backed out.
The boycott sees damage to the numbers of some 130 exhibitions and 250 artists that were originally expected to participate in this year's iteration this May.
The flames of the outrage were fanned by a grassroots campaign initiated earlier this year, encouraging constituents of the event to withdraw due to its long-standing sponsor, Scotiabank, having ties with the Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems.
About the Protest Against Scotiabank and the Festival
The movement was organized by the groups No Arms in the Arts, which was formed specifically to demand the divestment of Scotiabank from Elbit, and Artists Against Artwashing, an organization focusing on demanding Canadian cultural institutions to move away from "settler colonialism and genocide."
Since the start of this year, the protests have already yielded devastating results for the month-long event, with over a dozen exhibitors removing themselves from Contact's roster this year. In the early part of this week, Scotiabank said that it halved its investments in Elbit.
Brooklyn-based artist Umber Majeed is one of the artists originally slated to hold an exhibition in Contact before she decided to wholly transfer her show, "Dil Dil Trans-Pakistan (Heart, Heart Trans-Pakistan)," virtually.
In a statement to The Art Newspaper regarding her decision, she said: "If I'm talking about land-grabbing and class warfare by large corporations, ethically and morally as an artist, it doesn't make sense to take money from people who are contributing to that process elsewhere."
Members of both NAITA and AAA have considered these recent developments as a win, as apparent in a post on the Writers Against the War on Gaza Instagram account, saying that Scotiabank's stake in Elbit has dropped "from 5.1 percent to 2.5 percent" since October 2023.
This divestment represents around $250 million, according to the post.
As for Contact, CEO Darcy Killeen expressed her sadness for the whole fiasco that the 28-year-old festival has been experiencing, 15 years of which sees Scotiabank as its title sponsor and main funder.
Killeen added that he was "shocked" to know Scotiabank had $440 million at stake in Elbit when it was revealed to the public last November, especially because he looks at the event as a "a community-based organisation" sharing many of the "same values" as the campaigners.
