Isabelle Hayeur : Borderlands
May 2 – July 26, 2025
Curated by Scott McLeod
Urbanspace Gallery, Toronto
As part of Contact Photography Festival
contactphoto.com/festival/2025/core

In early 2024, Isabelle Hayeur began documenting border areas of the United States, focusing mainly on southern California. At that time, the country was seeing a record number of illegal border crossings; the border patrols were clearly overwhelmed and the detention centres were inundated by the flood of migrants. Designed for an orderly migration process, the American system was folding under the weight of so many illegal entries, leaving the new arrivals in a dehumanizing limbo. Humanitarian groups observed that there was a lack of water, food and medical services in the overcrowded improvised camps.

These migrants are forced to flee violent situations and conditions of scarcity, sometimes at the same time. To reach the U.S. border they set out on perilous voyages across deserts, rivers and forbidding terrain. By the time they set foot on U.S. soil, they are often exhausted and traumatised. There have been many deaths along the border, particularly from drowning in the Rio Grande, heatstroke and, again, exhaustion. Drug cartels take advantage of the situation, kidnapping migrants for ransom or forcing them to act as drug mules, which only makes an already precarious situation worse. People smugglers demand exorbitant payments and often abandon migrants in hazardous conditions, exposing them to increased risks of death, disappearance and rape.

These border territories have rich histories but these do not all belong to the same narrative. The real situation is a surrealist mashup in which Mexicans and Americans, legality and illegality, sacred and profane are all jumbled together. The land here looks more like a Martian landscape than a terrestrial one, sculpted as it is by the extreme climate and the winds that sweep across the vast, empty expanses. Natural desolation and the signs of human presence come together here, imparting to both a strange, almost obsessive beauty. The air is thick with a heavy silence, imbued with both expectation and loss. The land is haunted by these “escapees” who have slipped by unnoticed, leaving only their footprints or lost children’s shoes. The air fleetingly ripples with their passing, before the earth swallows up all traces of them.

Isabelle Hayeur is known for her photographs and her experimental videos. Her work is situated within a critical approach to the environment, urban development and to social conditions. Since the late 1990s, she has been probing the territories she goes through to understand how our contemporary civilizations take over and fashion their environments. She is concerned about the evolution of places and communities in the neoliberal sociopolitical context we currently live in. Her works have been shown at the National Gallery of Canada, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein in Berlin, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, Tampa Museum of Art, Bruce Silverstein Gallery in New York, Casino Luxembourg Forum d’art contemporain, Today Art Museum in Beijing and Les Rencontres internationales de la photographie à Arles.