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Joy Xiang (she/her) is a writer and editor, born in Shanghai and based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Her work and life engages erotics, migration, material flows, and media nostalgia and futurity. She is currently Editor at _C Magazine_. 

Editor

Maandeeq Mohamed is a writer and researcher. Engaging Black Studies and related cultural production, her writing is featured in _Real Life_, _C Magazine_, and _Canadian Art_. 

Associate Editor

Publisher

Designer

This issue of C Magazine looks through the mirror as a bleeding surface—a metaphor for acts of seeing, thinking, and creating that return your gaze. We recognize that the way we look in a mirror is also the way we tell a story, as a reflection of value systems and the stakes of lucidity and distortion, especially under colonial systems that would twist their subjects’ humanity. Many texts here, between artists and writers, take the form of dialogues, and think through persistent possibilities of visual revelation, language, and mourning. Formal and symbolic fractures are reflected through chimerical imagery, Hong Kong cinemas of resistance, Puerto-Rican space-time, physical and spiritual intertwining, and a real place to land for both joy and grief—the end of a rainbow, or its burning.

Mirror Mirror

Review

**Alex Turgeon** is an artist and educator currently in residence at the Cité internationale des arts, Paris. Usually, he is based in Toronto, Canada. 

Originally conceptualized as a performance and now reimagined as an animated short film, _Organza’s Revenge_  by Walter Scott depicts a failed interplanetary protagonist struggling to navigate a life of artistic precarity in a galaxy far far away. Organza, the film’s troubled namesake, travels between the stars, intent on confronting her elusive ex Duke, a non-binary no-face and “the galaxy’s hottest art star,” in hopes of resolving the mysterious illness causing her ongoing IBS. Organza sets off on the kind of hero’s journey that is quintessentially Scott, whose work is revered for its wit and deprecating comedic parody. Her worldview reflects the codified systems in which artistic production is managed and disseminated through the institutional management of identity politics, the objectification of Indigeneity, and the social hierarchies associated with main-character ego. 

Premiering at the 2024 Vancouver International Film Festival, the film is an eclectic combination of stop-motion puppetry, green-screen masking, and greeble sculpture, which speaks as a love letter to the lost art of cult sci-fi filmmaking as a form of material invention. Produced in collaboration with Lindsay Allikas, a filmmaker, editor, and long-time friend of the artist, with sets sourced from curb refuse, dollar-store shopping sprees, and upcycling, _Organza’s Revenge_’s universe is a treasure-trove of millennial aesthetic influences, from MuchMusic’s Ed the Sock to YTV programming of the ’90s. It’s a nostalgic approach that is intentionally awkward, labour-intensive, and raw. In a world where the slick, blemish-free surfaces of Midjourney AI and the hyper-definition of computer-generated imagery are seemingly the norm in artistic filmmaking practices of the last decade, _Organza’s Revenge_ is a welcome return to origins of DIY punk attitudes often lost within the commercialization of contemporary image production.  

The narrative eerily recalls Scott’s beloved anti-hero Wendy, the artist’s famed graphic novel series that was recently put to rest in _The Wendy Award_ (2024). This time, our dishevelled hung-over heroine is hopping between interplanetary systems rather than art-world metropolises. While animation seems like a transition for the artist, _Organza's Revenge_ stays close to Scott’s familiar narrative. Scott’s protagonists are often perceived as being overtly autobiographical, a thinly veiled projection of self onto caricature to critically reflect the contexts and circumstances specific to personal narrative. Historically, queer artists have often used the personal as an entry point for creation. However, allowing for a critical distance to occur between maker and audience is an artistry unto itself. In enabling the opportunity for the viewer to see themselves within these alien yet strikingly familiar worlds, Scott’s poignant writing operates as a mirror for the viewer, instead of as an explicit reflection of the artist himself (in fact, it was the queer 19th-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud who penned “Je es un autre,” or “I is another,” in 1871). _Organza’s Revenge_ is an exploration into the kind of multiverse sourced from Scott’s cynical imagination: a great, dark, humoured expanse into which a generation like mine finds comfort in knowing that, ultimately, we are not alone. 

Writer

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_Organza’s Revenge_ was published in 2024.

_C Magazine solicits online review pitches for publication in C Online on an ongoing basis. We welcome reviews from across Canada and internationally, and are especially keen on reviews that engage with art outside of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. C Magazine offers competitive compensation to our writers. Email your review pitches to pitches@cmagazine.com._

_Organza’s Revenge_ — Walter Scott 

Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross is a writer and editor based on the traditional, unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, and səlilwətaɬ nations. Her fiction, poetry, essays, and art criticism have appeared in _BOMB, The Ex-Puritan, Fence, Mousse,_ and elsewhere, and she is currently the Art Editor at _The Capilano Review_. Her debut fiction collection, _The Longest Way to Eat a Melon_, is forthcoming from Sarabande Books in 2025.


There’s an electric charge in the room. A metallic energy, intensity. Silver-coated wands, vanity mirrors, and blunt-tipped baguettes—objects that might, in some other time and place, appear whimsical or fairytale-like— are balanced and strung along metal wires that run in rows over my head like power lines. On the floor, _Partial View_ and _Obstructed View_ (both 2023) take the form of twinned busts of a broken and suggestively pregnant Marilyn Monroe. The busts are cast crudely in fragmented slabs of bronze and rest atop aluminum-cast tin cans, the icon’s skin and eyes violently imprinted with the diamond-barbed exteriors of crystal punch bowls.

I wonder if it’s these figures or the total absence of shadows that most unnerves me. The whole room is bathed in an even, fluorescent light, lending the space and its mirrored and silver-encrusted objects a wondrous but disturbing stillness. One has the impression one has stumbled upon a hidden theatrical set—some parallel, hypothetical environment in which both actor and prop have the overwhelming capacity to change the course of the play. “Sun Moon Stars” draws its narrative symbolism from the artist’s ongoing fascination with Mary of Egypt, a lesser-known Mary and patron saint of penitents, whose remorse for a lifetime of sexual deviation results in her fabled disappearance into the desert with only three loaves of bread. The installation’s sculptural motifs, figures, and forms imaginatively extend from this parable, recasting Mary of Egypt as a kind of model transgressor and heroic minor character whose speculative subtext, for Goldberg, proves as artistically generative as it is productively withholding. For despite the illusion of a lesson to be had here, just beyond it, there’s only a feeling.

Of energy and exile. Of bodies and decay. Of sex and predation. Of desert and corpse. These things, while not all monstrous, become so in their stillness, grouping, and sterile arrangements. There is a deep material language at work in the exhibition’s charged compositions of weighted and weightless leaden objects and casts: the deliberate sharpening of a certain aesthetic vocabulary and effect. Goldberg’s language is one of implied violence, of morbidity, of grief. It is a language of aftershocks, of alienation and estrangement. It is a language of apocalypse—microscopic or totalizing, singular or synchronous, here or approaching—and of the creeping recognition and even banality that has accumulated around these new shared conditions. To experience this sculptural language and its intricate networks of power and powerlessness at work is therefore to quite literally spend time inside its dark logic. I do so in a kind of spell, uncomfortable with my own complicity.

It is said that Mary of Egypt subsisted ferally in the desert for a year and subsequently perished, her corpse later found perfectly preserved in the sand. I still don’t know what to make of this ending—her miraculous embalmment; her suspended, but no less real, death. In the gallery, I witness Mary’s refragmentation, mutilation, and (attempt at) reconstitution, and struggle with the secondary violence of these symbolic deployments. If the function of this art is to shock and disorient us into another kind of awakeness and corporality, what are we to do with the toxic by-products of this transformation?
 
In a 2016 conversation with Elena Tavecchia published in _Mousse_, Goldberg describes her interest in nature as “a confusing of what is alive or not.” “I am a living corpse,” Goldberg says, highlighting the sterile essence of this contradiction. I think of her 2016 exhibition _The Plastic Thirsty_ and its oversized steel fish skeletons breaking apart into exaggerated modernist armatures, or of the uncanny, oil slick–like pelican sculptures sitting atop a carpet of sprouting chia seeds in _No Where, Now Here_ (2016). There has always been something falsely illustrative about Goldberg’s use of metaphor that I instinctively distrust, and yet it is this straightforwardness that also most disarms me. Out of place against the ambiguity so present in her sculptural language, I have only to wonder whether this didactic function has something to do with the totalizing pursuit of ugliness—as tactlessness, as moral project, as value, as aesthetic. Throughout Goldberg’s oeuvre, life and death collide with an attitude of apparent indifference, and yet it is not the artist’s indifference, but the visceral wonderment that the viewer experiences in response to it, that raises the most alarming and morally ambiguous stakes. It is possible, I suppose, that the artist is just telling us an ugly parable about ourselves.

I am drawn to the work of Goldberg not because I like what I see, but because I recognize in it the very real conditions of our abjection and perversion. If art is a mirror, then these objects are not just objects, and these symbols are not just symbols, but rather, manipulated evidence of a society’s innermost values, fears, and sensibilities. In summoning Mary of Egypt’s transgressive corporality within the exhibition space, Goldberg exposes the affective charge of implied, rather than enacted, violence—what is actually a very frightening but real form of magic. 


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“Sun Moon Stars” ran from 7 June to 8 September 2024 at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver.


“Sun Moon Stars” — Rochelle Goldberg

Artist Project

Christian Vistan is an artist from the peninsular province Bataan, Philippines, living on unceded xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territories, colonially known as Vancouver. In their artworks, they translate experiences of distance and diaspora into hybrid forms that fold together memory, place, poetry, and abstraction. They make paintings and texts, organize exhibitions and publications, and often collaborate with other artists, writers, curators, and their relatives.

I 
I 
I 
 

> —Joan Didion, “Why I Write,” 1976 

 
 
 

> bright read extent of our 

reach beyond grasping 
 
 
is what abstraction is supposed to give, what imaginary numbers give 

> in how we work through 
> little play 
> complexities 
> by obstruction, 
 

so we get to 

> go through someplace else 
 

> —Fred Moten, “the red sheaves,” 2023 


 
In her text “Why I Write,” Joan Didion writes, “Of course I stole the title for this talk, from George Orwell. One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words.” [^1] She liked the “I” sound in _why; I; write; eye; eye; eye_. Didion lists the three I’s down a column. It looks like a formalist drawing or a concrete poem of that isolated sound in canon. Each “I” a new line and the beginning of a new sentence in first person. They look like three cursors waiting—from even before the moment “I” materializes on the page, before the moment of writing. Aubin appropriates this phrase from Didion, using it as the starting point for a poem that opens his _Floor Drawing Series_ (2024). 

Aubin adapts and responds to Didion’s question, and drawing, as a kind of architecture for his own inquiry into _writing_. For Aubin, writing is personal, embodied, and abstract: writing is a means to communicate and express oneself and one’s desires and wishes to another; writing is a physical act; writing is a means to make marks on a surface. 

In poetic response to Didion, Aubin italicizes the “I” in his poem, transforming it into a: /. Ironically, de-emphasizing the slanted subject of the sentence. Conflating the linguistic act with the physical one and writing’s material consequence on a surface, Aubin alters Didion’s stolen title and makes an addition: “Why / write / draw.” “I” dissolves and no longer asserts itself in “the reader’s most private space.” [^2] Here, “I” or / is an enigmatic mark, a porous distinction between the interrogative and the act(s). The phrase becomes a self-reflexive question addressed to the person writing and expressing. “I” is writing, reading, drawing, asking itself into existence on the page.

 
*** 
 

Writing is a hand on a surface. Once, the hand held a pen and made marks and lines on paper. Here, it is extending a finger. The finger is touching an iPhone screen. It drags its touch across an abstract virtual distance. It is drawing.

Alongside, another hand is typing. 

 
*** 
 

Aubin writes and draws to reflect on his dad’s digital gestures drawn on an iPhone screen, on the Notes app, and his physical struggles to write and communicate late in his life. It is a kind of writing that is recognizable as partial script, marks and lines that make up part of a language, but are indecipherable as words. Words are written, but are unutterable. They remain on the tip of the tongue, failing to successfully communicate themselves and reach their intended reader.

Instead, the reader reaches beyond their grasp [^3] and attunes to another register of the gesture: the written marks’ aesthetic and expressive qualities, as opposed to linguistic ones, closer to drawing as opposed to writing, a feeling as opposed to a meaning. In the gap between the marks and their expression, and his reading and understanding, Aubin reads the distance in between. 

 
*** 
 

Accompanying Aubin’s poem are a series of drawings that move away from language and toward gesture. Aubin’s haptic line-work colours much of these pages. Lines loop and curl around the shimmering edge of a cloud; scratches and scribbles pile and tangle into each other in the gridded depths underneath a bathtub. They coalesce distinct scenes, images, and memories that appear simultaneously mundane and spectacular. 

They are a collection of Aubin’s own diaristic digital drawings and notes from his glassy phone translated into physical artworks. He renders his digital drawings and notes into a series of physical outlines cut in vinyl to make stencils. Momentarily, vinyl usurps his gestures while the negative spaces are weeded out. Later, on paper, paint fills in these newly created gaps. In the transfer of these gestures from one surface to another and the inversions and reversals this material translation necessitates, a distance happens between the initial touch from the act of drawing with his finger on the screen and the final physical drawing. These drawings are halves of a material correspondence. Each drawing, a lone translation. 

Looking at Aubin’s digitally hand-drawn line-work, his touch is mediated across many different surfaces and processes, but still, his touch comes to the fore in my reading of these works. There is a sense of closeness and intimacy that I get as I engage and view them tactilely. There is also an inherent distance and abstraction that is part of reading and deciphering another’s gestures. I trace them with my finger on my computer screen. 

 
*** 
 

Aubin’s writing and drawings are stencilled on panels of hanji jangpan, a kind of traditionally crafted floor panel found in Korean homes, made by laminating sheets of mulberry paper with oil and lacquer until the layers are strong enough to stand on. Aubin marks up and paints the flooring material, transposing his gestures and their negatives onto domestic grounds. Compared to a sheet of glass, a screen, paper, or plywood (other surfaces and materials that resonate throughout Aubin’s practice), the floor is a fundamental surface. A surface that facilitates the essential activities of our lives and habitation. On the other hand, mulberry paper is traditionally used in printmaking, Eastern painting, and calligraphy. Hanji jangpan, in its material processing, fuses these contexts. Inscribed on this layered surface, the diaristic, the artistic, and the domestic meet in Aubin’s writing and drawings. 

Where there were once daily gestures from Aubin’s iPhone screen, this touch now exists as hollowed-out gestures that reveal their surface. 

 
*** 
 

_Floor Drawing Series_ accumulates moments from Aubin’s life and practice. Like Didion, he _writes_ “entirely to find out what [he’s] thinking, what [he’s] looking at, what [he sees] and what it means. What [he wants] and what [he fears] [...] What is going on in these pictures in [his] mind?” [^4] They contain gestures, memories, and postures that were first lived, and then drawn and written. Perhaps, the act of putting words and marks on a page itself creates distance, reorienting one’s relationship with one’s own experience, and making room to find ways to express and understand what was unutterable and undecipherable, but lived and felt. 


[^1]: Joan Didion, “Why I Write,” originally published in _The New York Times_, December 5, 1976, https://www.are.na/block/14515853 
[^2]: This phrase is borrowed from Didion’s “Why I Write.”
[^3]: This phrase is adapted from a line in Fred Moten’s poem “the red sheaves” (2023), originally written in response to the abstract minimalist paintings of Jennie C. Jones, and appearing in his book _perennial fashion presence falling_ (2023). Fred Moten, “the red sheaves,” in _CONSTANT STRUCTURE_ (Chicago: The Arts Club of Chicago, 2023), 2–4, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5526ca35e4b02b6cae98841c/t/5e8644ec1b100 8571750e24e/158585 7789526/FINAL+Constant+Structure+Moten.pdf 
[^4]: Didion, “Why I Write.”

_Note: this text, and in particular its epigraphs, have an intentional print layout that cannot be replicated here. [The original is available as a pdf](https://strapi-uploads-c-mag-prod.s3.ca-central-1.amazonaws.com/C159_Vistan_K_fe437c54d9.pdf)_


Curator

Aubin Soonhwan K is an artist working across painting, making, hosting, and researching around ideas of material curiosity, automatic labour, and formal affinity. Born in Seoul, Korea, he grew up in the suburbs of Alberta and currently divides his time living near the West Coast and the Great Lakes. He has co-founded a gallery space, dreams comma delta (2022, Vancouver), and ran a speakeasy project, Epiphyte Epilogue (2021, Vancouver).


Artist

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Drawing

Language

Guest curated by Christian Vistan, Aubin Soonhwan K’s drawings engage writing as a physical act, in the spectrum between script and drawing that moves toward gesture rather than linguistic marks.

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Floor Drawing Series by Aubin Soonhwan K: Text

Owen Kosmala is a writer, artist, and curator born in Portland, United States, and based in Tkaronto/Toronto. He is passionate about DIY scenes, specifically their overlap and influence within North American fine art.

Sam Lipp challenges notions of property ownership and authority through the appropriation of digital assets. Lipp explores camp as an aesthetic and as an occupation of space. He displays four paintings and one video work at his debut Canadian solo show at Bonny Poons/Conditions gallery. Each oil painting depicts Parisian mug shots from the 1890s, licensed by Getty Images, overlapped with spray-painted watermarks and corresponding serial numbers. The Getty watermarks exaggerate the overarching themes of the exhibition, emphasizing the paintings’ origins as licensed digital property, now occupied by the artist. Each subject is anonymous, with the paintings revealing only the age, occupation, and crimes that the subjects were accused of committing. Lipp conveys this information bluntly through the titles of his paintings, two of which include _29 years. Day Laborer. Anarchist. Vagabond._ (2024) and _19 years. Sculptor. Criminal association._ (2024). This use of impersonal language in relation to incarceration highlights the relationship between authority, imprisonment, and property. By occupying licensed digital properties, Lipp challenges how structures of power disregard human life, while also highlighting a state of exception outside of the law: the grey area of copyright infringement that the artist occupies.

_Copyrights of Man_ (2024) plays repeatedly on the floor of a bedroom attached to the gallery space. Placed next to an unmade mattress on the floor, the video is displayed on a CRT TV connected to two pairs of headphones. Clips of crucifixion scenes from the _Passion of the Christ_ (2004) are overlaid with audio from Lady Gaga’s “Do What U Want” (2013). It almost looks like Christ is lip-syncing to Gaga’s upbeat sarcastic music, resulting in a juxtaposition that is, if anything, aesthetically camp. Overall, the exaggerated contrast of the two copyrighted digital assets Lipp repurposes is emblematic of how “Camp as Paradigm” incites an apprehension in viewers regarding property relations.

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"Camp as Paradigm" ran from 26 September to 16 November 2024 at Bonny Poon/Conditions, Toronto.

_C Magazine solicits online review pitches for publication in C Online on an ongoing basis. We welcome reviews from across Canada and internationally, and are especially keen on reviews that engage with art outside of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. C Magazine offers competitive compensation to our writers. Email your review pitches to pitches@cmagazine.com._

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“Camp as Paradigm” — Sam Lipp

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Feature

Bhenji Ra and I met in Vancouver in mid-July of 2024 while she was in town to present her newly commissioned film and first solo exhibition in Canada, _Biraddali Dancing on the Horizon_ (2024), at Western Front. The film weaves together ancestral spirit and cultural dance through the ghostly lens of 16mm film transferred to 4K. It explores the history of the mythical Biraddali creature through the Pangalay, the traditional “fingernail” dance of the Tausūg people of the Sulu Archipelago in the Philippines. Bhenji reinterprets the story through her own matriarchal lineages, personal histories, and lived experiences as a transfeminine person. The following text weaves together a script of our conversation on the experiences behind the imagining and creation of the film.

[_Bhenji relaxes into her chair, dropping her shoulders. She sits in front of a banner with palm trees and ghostly figures dancing in the foreground, and drinks sparkly water out of a glass._] 

 

> **James Albers: Hi!**

**Bhenji Ra:** Hii booooo.
 
> **JA: Do you want to introduce yourself?**

**BR:** Sure, I’m an artist. I’m not based anywhere right now. I spent a lot of time in Sydney, that being the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and I’ve cultivated a practice from being rooted in community there. That practice has since grown, mostly to the Philippines. I’m back and forth between Manila and Sydney a lot. I grew up in this really sweet village in New South Wales, about six hours from Sydney. It’s a very small town, around 5,000 people at the time. There was always the smell of salty water, long and deep rivers, mountains, bush, eucalyptus, and a lot of green pastures and farmland.

> **JA: Would you say that you were a creative child?**

**BR:** Super creative! Very inspired by everything I would touch and see. I would always grab my family’s video camera, filming something or setting up a scene with my Barbie dolls or with me and my sister. I was always directing things or performing or endlessly drawing, cartoons and characters, and working with aesthetics.

> **JA: I always like to hear about people’s childhoods. As I’m getting older, I find myself wanting to reintegrate play into my practice as much as possible. Would you agree for yourself?**

**BR:** Definitely. The improvisational aspect of my work is so important to me because it refuses to be captured by a type of academia or technical aspect. My work’s always about feeling, you know?

> **JA: From my understanding, you’re a multimedia artist who plays around with a lot of different material, but there’s definitely narrative threads through it all, like spirituality, gender fluidity, folklore, performativity, embodiment, and play.**

**BR:** It’s true. I always ask myself, what is the necessary form this thing needs to take in order to be fleshed out and manifested into the physical world?

> **JA: Is there a certain reason that you gravitated toward making films and imagery?**

**BR:** I would say that my practice mostly has to do with the body, actually. It’s dominated most of my work and performances. I think it’s only been in the last decade that I’ve been working with film. Well, I feel film is easier to share.

> **JA: There’s also the ephemerality of live performance... Are there some kinds of performances that you would never want to film?**

**BR:** I think so... Some folks that watch my live performances say, “This is not a film, it needs to stay like this,” and I trust that from my community. I would usually create a film based on the performance being a type of storyboard. I can’t really think about a film without performing it in life first. Everything has to be ritualized. I need to feel it in my body before I can know what it feels like on film. I need to be able to embody something so I know how it needs to be retrieved through the lens. That’s my way of working through this idea of the “anthropological lens,” or this colonial lens of capture that a lot of our bodies as cultural dancers have been subjected to throughout history.

> **JA: I was reading an interview that you did in 2018, “Bhenji Ra on embodying future forms”—there’s one part where you specifically talk about your parents. You described your mother as having an “urbanness about her that’s vibrant and longing to be somewhere else,” [^1] and this was accompanied by a slight bitterness in her character. [_Bhenji cries out, “Oof!”_]**

> **And you described your father as a “very soft, quiet, white-Australian man who was happy to be in a country town.” [^2] I loved these quotes because I feel similarly about my parents. I feel that this reality challenges the typical racialized tropes and power dynamics applied to interracial marriages. Considering these descriptions of your parents, how do you see this dynamic being explored within yourself and your practice?**

**BR:** I think we as folx of the diaspora with white dads have this relationship to the patriarchal figure standing in as symbols of colonialization and empire, but at the same time we share an intimacy with the father figure. But, I don’t have any answers to what it means for us to be in that dynamic. At times when I was younger, I felt like I had to be in opposition to what my father represented, and not be in a relationship with it. From a very young age I felt that my father opposed me, in a way that just didn’t make sense to me and what I liked. I guess he thought I was quite jarring to be around, and vice versa.

I do feel we typically use the matrilineal line to find our way back to self and back to our cultural identity. It’s a spiritual connection that we have through the womb, through our mother’s womb, our grandmother’s womb, that connective tissue that’s within our DNA, which just isn’t there in the patrilineal line. 

We don’t necessarily need to hear more about Wasians; we’re often overrepresented, over-celebrated. But I feel like if we can tap into that spiritual connectedness between the two bloodlines, it can be a strategic way to think about the fall of the empire, and even to decolonize our minds, selves, and bodies.

> **JA: Can you expand on that?**

**BR:** Well, now, I don’t see my father as a white-Australian man, I see him as an Irish-Scottish settler who has a history of his own, and a land and soil that he comes from. As I get older, the binary between us starts to dissolve and I’m finding more ways to be in relationship to him instead of in opposition. His blood is within my blood and I can’t ignore that. [She says with conviction.] It’s the same with my mom. For so long, she was my only window into my culture, and now I have become the door for her to come back into hers. It’s not necessarily like she’s the one teaching me about being Filipina. It’s more that I’m leading her back to decolonial space that also recognizes her as a settler in Australia. 

> **JA: That’s a much more expansive way of thinking about race than just existing within a clear binary of “us and other.” I really resonate with that. Thank you for sharing. The first thing I encountered about your new work was the title, _Biraddali Dancing on the Horizon_, which I love. Any time a horizon is mentioned in a work about the body, queerness, or gender, I am reminded of the late José Esteban Muñoz and his book _Cruising Utopia_ (2009). The introductory paragraph contains this gorgeous line: “We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.” [^3] The idea that queerness exists as a more desirable imagination of a future, slightly out of reach, resonated with me deeply. Do you know the quote?**

**BR:** Yeah, I do. I feel like that quote has marked my body for such a long time. I’m always thinking about this idea of the horizon, futurity, possibility. How I came to the title comes from when I was with my family on a boat in the Sulu Sea, going back to the mainland. We had just made it through a storm and my cousin said, “Oh my god you’re gonna see the Biraddali! You’re gonna see the Biraddali in the morning!” and I was like, “What is that?” They said, “It’s a rainbow! You're gonna see the rainbow and it’s gonna be on the horizon!” I was like, “Wait, didn’t you say that the Biraddali is a mythical creature?” And they told me that it was one and the same. The Biraddali is this non-gendered feminine figure that is a bird-human hybrid from the Tausūg culture. She’s fallen from heaven and sits at the bottom of the rainbow, but she’s also called the rainbow.

After hearing this, I stared at the horizon for two days in that boat. It made me think about what it meant to be in that place: in the Sulu Sea, guided by the stars and celestial navigation. Looking out toward the horizon was a way of mapping our direction back to home. And as trans folx, we aren’t just sitting on the horizon, we’re actually dancing on it. I see this distinction as a gesture of joy and celebration. 

> **JA: That’s a really beautiful story. Can you share a little more about your research process?**

**BR:** I like to give myself time with family and land, before I go and open up a book, so I wanted my research to be going back to the region where my Pangalay dance mentor was from, whom I called my auntie. Going back to this island was really important; she hasn’t been there for 49 years. It's very remote and often stereotyped as a dangerous place that tourists don't really go to.

I wanted to look for archival footage of her mother, which apparently exists but she doesn’t know who has it. When we got there, a bunch of stuff happened that I don’t want to get into, but we had to leave four hours after arriving, and that’s why we spent the next two days on the boat. That was our deepest form of research, because as a people, we are seafarers. We’ve always been seafarers. Our connection to land has been a nomadic connection, and so we spent so much time on the water following the stars and horizon back. It was there where Auntie just opened up about stories growing up on this island, about her mother. We also had these big dreams together, like we were dreaming under the same sky, under the same map... 

I would say the time on the boat was more an embodiment of the research. When I got back to the mainland, I had two days to shoot the rest of the film. It was hard to say that I had a strategy, because I wanted to treat my footage as an archive, as something that I found and was uncovering, reframing. It’s ironic that we never found anything about her mother, since her name had also related back to a bird, one that’s very rare to see in the Philippines. We never saw a Biraddali either.

> **JA: How poetic. Do you think there should be academic writing about this?**

**BR:** I think there should be writing about our folklore and cultural traditions, but from our own people. That would help minimize the violence of the capture. I do want to honour the refusal of the capture of the Biraddali form; maybe she isn’t meant to be found. When you academicize something, it allows anybody to access it, and then, I guess, imitate it, or feel like they can. I think that the academic approach to archiving other cultural practices can be very misguided, skewed, and extractive. 

> **JA: I’d love to see how you’d archive these cultural practices in your own ways.**

**BR:** I’m an artist after all, and that’s an archive in its own way. [_She laughs._]

> **JA: I want to talk about the visual language of the film—it’s filmed completely on 16mm film, which gives it an archival feel. For me, the visuals were very blue and green. There’s a lot of overlaying, duplicate images, which also suggests a ghostly quality. Can you talk about some of these creative choices?**

**BR:** I wanted to work with 16mm because I feel like there’s more space to collaborate with spirit when dealing with physical film as opposed to digital cameras. I was also interested in referring back to this violence of capture; the instrument used to shoot 16mm is huge and heavy to carry around the village. War films from WWII were also filmed on these cameras.

> **JA: Oh true, that’s a haunting thought.**

**BR:** Yeah, and I wanted it to feel like I was given material, not that I was producing it. I told the cameraman to film and I would work with what I was given. There was even a time when I had to get the film through a small airport’s security and they had no idea what this film was. They thought it was a bomb and had to take the film into a dark room and physically touch it instead of putting it through the X-ray, which would damage the film. I was crying and pleading the whole time, but those rolls got ruined and I just decided to work with this instance. What will be will be. After that we just had to slice and dice and create a space for the footage to really be activated. 

> **JA: I really love how you talk about the footage as something given to you, something gifted to you. That’s an interesting angle to look at your own work with.** 

**BR:** I feel like a lot of the times when I’m making a work, I get lost in all the choices of where it can start and where it can go. I guess that was my way of forcing something to just happen, giving it restrictions to let it fly elsewhere. There’s that push-and-pull of it all. 

> **JA: What’s next for you?**

**BR:** I think that I’m entering a time of just making things! I think it’s important for artists my age to just create so that we can sit with our bodies of work. I really want to return to that place of play that we talked about at the beginning. I want to create from that curious place of childlike wonder, instead of only creating for, you know, exhibitions that are based on funding. I want to think more strategically about how my work and life can contribute to the fall of empire and the liberation of queer and trans bodies. 

> **JA: Like a warm horizon imbued with potentiality, or finding the end of the rainbow, right?**

**BR:** Yeah, something like that. [_Bhenji takes one last sip of her sparkly water and leaves her glass empty_.] 

_This text was updated on December 19, 2024, with slight adjustments from the print version._

[^1]: Eugenia Lim, “Bhenji Ra on embodying future forms,” _Assemble Papers_, March 29, 2018, https://assemblepapers.com.au/2018/03/29/embodying-future-forms-bhenji-ra
[^2]: Ibid.
[^3]: José Esteban Muñoz, _Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity_, 10th anniversary ed. (New York City: NYU Press, 2009), 1.

C159_ALBERS.jpg

James Albers speaks to artist Bhenji Ra about her moving image commission _Biraddali Dancing on the Horizon_ (2024). Ra makes connections between horizons, queer and trans liberation, and collaborating with spirit using the medium of physical film. 

Bhenji Ra Dances at the End of the Rainbow

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Bhenji Ra is a Filipina-Australian artist based on Gadigal land, Eora Nation. Ra’s projects combine choreography and video and are deeply rooted in social justice practices. Her practice combines dance, video, illustration, and community activation. Her work dissects cultural theory and identity, centralizing her own personal histories as a tool to reframe performance. She is the mother of Western Sydney–based collective and ballroom house SLÉ.

Aman Sandhu is an artist and writer working between Montreal and Glasgow. His installations often include drawing, moving image, sculpture, and text. He considers them as ensembles of objects that come into view through improvisation.

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Our Third Sun

Emma-Kate Guimond is a performance artist and writer based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. She has published essays in _Espace art actuel_ (2023) and _Inter, art actuel_ (2024), and works as a creative ally for the theatre company Joe Jack et John. Her recent exhibition and short film _The Plot_ (2024) was presented at Centre CLARK in Montreal.

Gui B.B’s Performances and the Erotics of Debt

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Adrien Crossman is a queer and non-binary white settler artist and curator currently residing on the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe in so-called Hamilton, ON. They are interested in the affective qualities of queerness: how queerness can be felt through specific aesthetics and sensibilities. Crossman cofounded and co-runs the online arts publication off centre and is an Assistant Professor in the School of the Arts at McMaster University.

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One Thing: Tracing Fragments of Queer Desire


Erica N. Cardwell is a writer, critic, and educator currently based in Toronto. She is the recipient of a 2021 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Her writing has appeared in _ARTS.BLACK_, _Art in America_, _Frieze_, _BOMB_, _The Believer_, _The Brooklyn Rail_, _C Magazine_, _Studio Magazine_, and other publications. She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Toronto Scarborough and a Terra Foundation Research Fellow for _Threewalls_, a Chicago-based arts organization. Her book, _Wrong Is Not My Name: Notes on (Black) Art_ will be published by _The Feminist Press_ in March 2024.


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Born in Kjipuktuk (Halifax) and currently living in Tkaronto, traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples, Trish Salah is the author of the Lambda award-winning poetry collection _Wanting in Arabic_, and of _Lyric Sexology Vol. 1_. Her writing is widely published in journals and anthologies, and translations of her work have appeared in French, Greek, and Arabic. She has co-edited special issues of _TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly_, on cultural production, and of _Arc Poetry Magazine_, showcasing trans, Two-Spirit, and non-binary writers. She is also an Associate Professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University, and Editor at the _Journal of Critical Race Inquiry_.

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eunice bélidor is a curator, researcher, and writer born and based in Montreal. Her current curatorial research focuses on letter writing as creating affective archives; she is interested in the intersection of epistolary writing with care, feminism, anti-capitalism, and racial issues.

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The Board of Directors and staff are thrilled to announce Bryne McLaughlin as the new Executive Director and Publisher of C The Visual Arts Foundation and _C Magazine_. Bryne began in the role last week, taking over from Interim Executive Director and Publisher Jonathan Middleton, and will oversee the long-term success of _C Magazine_. He brings a wealth of experience in art publishing to his role, as well as a strong familiarity with the non-profit arts landscape in Canada. We are confident in Bryne’s leadership and his ability to manage the organization's operations, finances, and publishing program, while also ensuring that _C_ fulfills its mandate and continues to evolve in the interest of contemporary art communities.

**Bryne McLaughlin** is an editor and writer based in Sarnia, Ontario. He is the former Deputy Editor at _Canadian Art_, where he served as an editor, writer, and manager from 1997 to 2021. As a freelance art critic, he has written for national and international art publications such as _Artforum_, _Art in America_, and _C Magazine_, as well as for the _Globe and Mail_. For the past fifteen years he has worked as a freelance editor for major national and international art publishers and institutions as well as for independent organizations that specialize in artist books and printed matter. He is the recipient of a Canada Council for the Arts Research and Creation grant on the history of artist book publishing and independent presses in Canada, with a specific focus on the Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design circa 1970s and ’80s. He currently serves as a board member for the Halifax Art Book Fair.

Welcome Bryne! 


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Announcing Executive Director / Publisher Bryne McLaughlin

News

The Board of Directors and staff are pleased to announce Bryne McLaughlin as the new Executive Director and Publisher of C the Visual Arts Foundation and _C Magazine._

##### Call for Pitches for STOP!

##### C161—Autumn 2025

##### Accepted until: January 15, 2025


 In _Experiments in Imagining Otherwise_, Lola Olufemi writes of a will to live differently as “that thing which keeps you alive, or the ferocity with which you detest this world.” After Olufemi, this issue asks: What must be stopped, in an untenable world, so that we arrive elsewhere? To stop—as act, strategy, and sign—counters the relentless, forward pace of progress myths. “STOP!” is a wish, a call, an imperative.  

For this issue, we invite pitches that consider “STOP!” in relation to the aesthetic and political. This encompasses the limitations and possibilities of failure, silence, slow time, and so much more. What role, if any, might cultural production, or even the withholding of cultural labour, have in placing the genres of empire under pressure? The stop is the gum in the machine: a pipeline blockade by Wet'suwet'en land defenders, the labour strike, disrupting the flow of weapons killing Palestinians, the refrain of “shut it down,” and ultimately, the end of this world—and all of its attendant violences—as we know it.

Thematic feature, artist project, and column pitches accepted until January 15. Review pitches, not required to be on theme, are accepted on a rolling basis.
 
Send pitches to [pitch@cmagazine.com](mailto:pitch@cmagazine.com), with a subject line that starts with the word PITCH and indicates the submission type (review, essay, interview, One Thing, for example). 
 
Please include ~150 words about your subject and how you’ll approach it, including hyperlinks wherever relevant. An estimated word count is appreciated. If you have not written for us recently, include a link to your website—or a copy of CV—and one or two writing samples (ideally ones in a style similar to your pitched piece). We do not publish reprints or previously written pieces. Please see our [writer’s guidelines](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://cmagazine.com/about/submissions&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1697147081646416&usg=AOvVaw2LThVx84yWvZVSHyA0KeCG) for more information.

Thank you for understanding that due to capacity, we are unable to reply to all pitches. 

Note about conflicts of interest: we do not accept pitches from platforms regarding their own programming.



Call for Pitches for STOP!

Call

Thematic feature, artist project, and column pitches accepted until January 15, 2025.

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Bhenji Ra Dances at the End of the Rainbow

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