2027 Capture Photography Festival – MPMG Media Relations Campaigns

PRESS RELEASE

First Look: 2027 Capture Photography Festival Previews Three
Landmark Featured Projects Ahead of Full Program Announcement

From an internationally renowned Cree artist to a Guggenheim Fellow,
Western Canada’s largest lens-based art festival shares three featured projects
ahead of its full program announcement in February

Vancouver, BC — Capture Photography Festival, Western Canada’s largest celebration of lens-based art, today announces three significant projects as part of its 14th annual edition, taking place April 1–30, 2027. Founded in 2013 to celebrate the legacy of Vancouver’s internationally renowned photographers, Capture connects Vancouver to the world through lens-based art in public spaces, galleries, and museums across the city. This year’s featured projects bring together local, national, and international artists in a new public artwork at the BC Hydro Dal Grauer Substation, a rotating billboard series at the GreyChurch public art installation site at Fraser Street and East 15th Avenue, and a group exhibition at Pendulum Gallery, inviting audiences to consider how images are made, circulated, and remembered.

“We are thrilled to announce this first look at three accessible art projects as part of Capture’s 2027 festival programming,” says Emmy Lee Wall, Executive Director and Chief Curator of Capture Photography Festival. “Since its inception, Capture’s vision has been to connect Vancouver to the world through photography and film, which bears a unique capacity to share someone’s singular perspective. Through Joi T. Arcand’s tender portrait of kinship, Carrie Schneider’s examination of three renowned women under our constant gaze, and the seven local and international artists of our commissioned group exhibition, Embodying Archives, who reinterpret historical archives through a personalized, embodied lens, we invite audiences to experience a sense of discovery and explore different points of view as they interact with these larger-than-life works on public display across Vancouver.”

The full festival program, including the Capture Photography Festival Speaker Series, artist talks, film screenings, and participating exhibitions and tours, will be announced in February 2027.

The 2027 Capture Photography Festival featured projects include:

Joi T. Arcand: Party Line
BC Hydro Dal Grauer Substation Public Art Project
April 2027 – March 2028 | 944 Burrard Street

Curated by Emmy Lee Wall, Joi T. Arcand’s Party Line (2027) is a new public artwork drawn from the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation artist’s childhood memory of a shared telephone line between her home and her kôhkom’s. While taught not to eavesdrop, snippets of laughter and gossip spoken between Arcand’s kôhkom and her friends in their nêhiyawêwin language were captured, cementing a sense of identity and belonging. Today, the party line has become group chats––a different kind of lifeline that sustains relationships and language across geography.

In Party Line (2027), a pair of hands simultaneously answer and end a call. Suspended between these gestures, there’s trepidation and a realization that they are interrupting the very connection they long to maintain. Blurring the line between lived memory and manufactured nostalgia, Party Line reflects the everyday rituals of communication that sustain kinship, memory, and nêhiyawêwin across generations and technological shifts.

Joi T. Arcand (b. 1982, Muskeg Lake Cree Nation, SK) is an internationally renowned nēhiyaw artist who lives and works in Ottawa, ON. Her practice reclaims and indigenizes public space through the use of nēhiyawēwin and cahkipēhikana. She was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2018, has exhibited at the National Gallery of Canada, the National Gallery of Victoria Triennial and the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, and received the Ohpinamake Award for Indigenous artists in 2024. The BC Hydro Dal Grauer Substation Public Art Project is generously supported by Presthaya Fixter and Conrad Whelan.

Carrie Schneider: Veronica
GreyChurch Billboard Public Art Project
March 13, 2027 – March 5, 2028 | Corner of Fraser Street and East 15th Avenue

Veronica is a rotating exhibition of three photographs that feature the faces of iconic women, each drawn from a recent 16mm film by New York-based artist Carrie Schneider, and curated by Emmy Lee Wall. By presenting images of women writ large in the public sphere, Schneider reclaims the power of the feminine face and asks how a woman might maintain autonomy and control when her persona is the subject of public consumption.

The public art project will open on March 13, 2027 with a photographic still from Schneider’s Sphinx (The Answer Isn’t Man), 2023, featuring 316 stills of French and Austrian actress Romy Schneider staring directly into the camera from the 1974 film L’Important C’est d’Aimer. Beginning July 17, 2027, the project will feature a still from Schneider’s I don’t know her, 2023, which features Mariah Carey in a viral 2003 German television interview, shaking and nodding her head as she refuses the reporter’s line of questioning. The project will conclude with its third iteration from November 13, 2027 – March 5, 2028 of a still from Schneider’s First Living Woman, 2026, featuring French translator, filmmaker, and actress Hélène Châtelain awakening as “The Woman” in Chris Marker’s 1962 film La Jetée.

Carrie Schneider (b. 1979, Chicago, IL) lives and works between Brooklyn and Hudson, NY. Her solo exhibitions include MASS MoCA (2023), the California Museum of Photography (2015) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2009), and her work is held in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, among others. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2024, and her monumental one-kilometre work was included in the 61st La Biennale di Venezia, In Minor Keys, in 2026. The GreyChurch Billboard is generously supported by Jane Irwin and Ross Hill.

Embodying Archives
Featured Exhibition at Pendulum Gallery
March 29 – April 30, 2027 | Pendulum Gallery, 885 W Georgia Street

Featuring works by local, national, and international artists, Embodying Archives focuses on the ways artists expand and inhabit the spaces between history, memory, and place to discern what is remembered and forgotten beyond the bounds of institutional structures. In Embodying Archives, participating artists interact directly with institutional archives to reclaim cultural agency, imagine stories that have been historically silenced, and reinterpret the notion of official records as a means of resisting the systems that seek to classify, categorize, and dominate society’s understanding of knowledge and history.

The exhibition includes works by: multidisciplinary artist Nour Bishouty, whose work attends to fragmentation in history; Vancouver-based artist Stephanie Gagne, whose work explores the relationship between memory and collective narratives, with an emphasis on the role of media in shaping personal experience; German-American artist Francesca Hummler, who explores identity, the archive, and generational trauma through photo therapy; Montreal-based and Algonquin member of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinaabeg First Nation, Nadia Myre, whose beadwork-based practice explores identity, language, longing and loss; Belgian-Cameroonian artist Mallory Lowe Mpoka, whose multidisciplinary practice explores place, memory, and environmental colonialism; Oakland-based Filipina-American artist Stephanie Syjuco, whose research-driven projects attempt to reframe and “talk back” to the archive; and London-based deaf British Mauritian visual artist Sabrina Tirvengadum, who explores identity, diaspora, and colonial legacies through hidden and silenced histories.

Embodying Archives is organized by Capture Photography Festival and co-curated by Emmy Lee Wall, Executive Director and Chief Curator, and Anna Luth, Assistant Curator.

About Capture Photography Festival (capturephotofest.com)
Launched in 2013, Capture Photography Festival is Western Canada’s largest lens-based art festival. Held annually in April, lens-based art is exhibited at dozens of galleries and other venues throughout Metro Vancouver, alongside an extensive public art program, and an events program that spans tours, films, artist talks, and community events. Capture’s vision is to connect Vancouver to the world through lens-based art. We aim to connect communities and to incite meaningful dialogue between artists, curators, audiences, organizations, and institutions. Capture is committed to presenting perspectives from diverse backgrounds and members of underrepresented groups.

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