md_BANNER 2_SIZE B_AUG 15_OCT 15.jpg

sm_BANNER 2_SIZE B_AUG 15_OCT 15.jpg

thumbnail_BANNER 2_SIZE B_AUG 15_OCT 15.jpg

BANNER 2_SIZE B_AUG 15_OCT 15.jpg

lg_BANNER 2_SIZE A_AUG 15-OCT 15.jpg

md_BANNER 2_SIZE A_AUG 15-OCT 15.jpg

sm_BANNER 2_SIZE A_AUG 15-OCT 15.jpg

thumbnail_BANNER 2_SIZE A_AUG 15-OCT 15.jpg

BANNER 2_SIZE A_AUG 15-OCT 15.jpg

Casey House

md_Capilano_Web1_JulyJuly2025_Size B.jpg

sm_Capilano_Web1_JulyJuly2025_Size B.jpg

thumbnail_Capilano_Web1_JulyJuly2025_Size B.jpg

Capilano_Web1_JulyJuly2025_Size B.jpg

lg_Capilano_Web1_JuneJuly_SizeA.jpeg

md_Capilano_Web1_JuneJuly_SizeA.jpeg

sm_Capilano_Web1_JuneJuly_SizeA.jpeg

thumbnail_Capilano_Web1_JuneJuly_SizeA.jpeg

Capilano_Web1_JuneJuly_SizeA.jpeg

Capilano

lg_161_Cover.jpg

md_161_Cover.jpg

sm_161_Cover.jpg

thumbnail_161_Cover.jpg

161_Cover.jpg

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 and the Associate Editor of _C Magazine_. 

Associate Editor

Designer

Publisher

This issue of C Magazine considers what it might mean to stop. Rather than denote absence, the stop offers an opening for something else to emerge. Across these pages, contributors explore stopping in: forms of rest, blockades, town halls, and critiques of the temporality and archives of empire. From blockades on Wet’suwet’en land to an underground hub in Jakarta, from moccasins cradling lichen to Lebanon’s El-Mina port, each work gathers its own form of interruption. 


With contributors: Whess Harman, Hung Duong and Grace Samboh, Svetlana Romanova, Fan Wu, Meagan Christou, Mitra Fakhrashrafi, Emma Steen, Charlene K. Lau, Dot Tuer, Joyce Joumaa, Ali El-Darsa, Kay Rangel, Jasmine Sihra.

This issue considers what it might mean to stop. Rather than denote absence, the stop offers an opening for something else to emerge. Across these pages, contributors explore stopping in: forms of rest, blockades, town halls, and critiques of the temporality and archives of empire. From blockades on Wet’suwet’en land to an underground hub in Jakarta, from moccasins cradling lichen to Lebanon’s El-Mina port, each work gathers its own form of interruption.

With contributors: Whess Harman, Hung Duong and Grace Samboh, Svetlana Romanova, Fan Wu, Meagan Christou, Mitra Fakhrashrafi, Emma Steen, Charlene K. Lau, Dot Tuer, Joyce Joumaa, Ali El-Darsa, Kay Rangel, Jasmine Sihra.

Stop

Review

eva birhanu is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and arts administrator. She is from a family of immigrants and refugees from Denmark and Ethiopia respectively, and was born and raised in Mohkínstsis, the Blackfoot name for Calgary, AB. She is currently the Co-Director at Stride Gallery, and has been with the organization since 2020, transitioning through different roles while continually focusing on representing marginalized communities in all facets of the organization. birhanu holds a BFA with distinction in Fibre from Alberta University of the Arts (2020). She has attended international artist residencies in Denmark and the USA, exhibiting nationally and internationally.

Red brick dust is expertly sprinkled over a series of found
and manipulated objects of historic and personal significance to June Clark. This series, _The Perseverance Suite_
(2021–2024), combines farm tools with domestic keepsakes, juxtaposing the objects to create a new meaning
for each recognizable element in the sculptures. Many
of these objects were passed down to Clark as family
heirlooms. I was particularly drawn to a rusted metal
bucket that held three silver thimbles, gently covered in brick dust. According to the didactic adjacent to
the work, red brick dust offers spiritual protection and
cleansing. I wonder what or who Clark is protecting.
Us as viewers? The exhibited objects, and the unrelinquished histories that they may hold?

Manipulated and extracted American memorabilia is
highlighted throughout “Witness”—Clark’s solo exhibition at Contemporary Calgary. The series _Unrequited
Love_ brings together Clark’s various versions of the American flag replicated with unorthodox materials, from
over the past three decades. Some flags are painted,
torn, burned, or composed of rusted metal or yarn. Clark
dedicated the two-decades-long ongoing series to the former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick. During the 2016
NFL season, Kaepernick knelt during the American
national anthem to protest police violence in America. Clark also references the American flag in _Harlem
Quilt_ (1997), _The Perseverance Suite_, and _Keepers_ (2004–2023). Nostalgia and hostility ring with each repetition
of the flag.

Spanning the length of a hallway is _44 Thursdays in
Paris_ (2024)—a series of enlarged scans of pages from
Clark’s diary. The diary entries document each Thursday Clark spent in Paris, over the course of 44 weeks.
Every scan includes a self-portrait taken in a photo
booth, alongside an account of her day. One entry reads,
“I did fuck-all today and wasn’t very happy about it.” Access into these candid moments is playful and relatable, offering an intimate look into Clark’s thoughts.
Clark engages with such relentless repetitive practices
throughout the exhibition. 

Tucked away at the back of the exhibition is a private
room that utterly stuns with four walls covered in warm
string lights. Each light hangs above photo transfers on
various cuts of fabric that collectively make up the installation _Harlem Quilt_. The room acts as a life-size photo album, with the personal intimacy of each memory emphasized by the use of fabric scraps. A red, white, and blue
plaid fabric used in several photo transfers throughout
the installation catches my eye. I’m drawn to this plaid
as I recall the recurring Americana imagery from _Unrequited Love_. Each of these plaid pieces boast portraits
of familiar faces and loved spaces dear to Clark. The intimacy of this space among the memories of Clark’s life
contrasts the violences evoked by the American flag that
linger throughout the show.

I’m circling 18 repurposed washboards that have been
painted, printed on, layered in fabrics, and adorned with
keepsakes, in the installation called _Keepers_. Taken together, the washboards invoke longer histories of gendered and racialized labour. The consistency of the wood-
en frame and corrugated washing surface creates striking harmony. One of the washboards is draped with a red
velvet fabric, expertly clinging to each ridge. Embedded
in the centre of the board, and peeking through the velvet, is a photograph of a woman’s eyes. Her gaze is soft
and relaxed, and I wonder who the woman is to Clark.

On the back wall of this room is _Family Secrets_ (1992),
which features 18 ajar cigar boxes, all holding trinkets
and symbols of significance to Clark. Handmade dolls,
hair, Lux Beauty Soap, Christian iconography, bones,
and more red brick dust are among the memorabilia
collected within the cigar boxes. Also sprinkled throughout the entire exhibition are scraps of text cut from books,
hidden in the work for viewers to find like Easter eggs.
Once you notice the first of these hidden sentences,
you’re compelled to find these quotes throughout the
show. One statement stands out, glued atop _Homage
to Kiefer (Memory Retention)_ (2019), and solidifies the
feeling of the exhibition. It’s collaged together and,
in an invocation of Maya Angelou, reads, “… and still,
WE rise.” The inclusion of the quote echoes the rest
of “Witness,” where Clark smoothly references history, all while pulling in her own familial references and
personal experiences.


Writer

lg_C161_BIRHANU.jpg

md_C161_BIRHANU.jpg

sm_C161_BIRHANU.jpg

thumbnail_C161_BIRHANU.jpg

C161_BIRHANU.jpg

C161_birhanu.pdf

“Witness” ran from 3 April to 31 August 2025 at Contemporary Calgary.

“Witness” — June Clark

Editorial

We were initially drawn to the force of an
utter “NO!” and all that stopping might
include, out of our own frustration with
how cultural labour exists between aesthetics and material reality. In conversation with C’s incredible editorial advisory, a member brought up that the “stop”
does not only mark an absence. More
than a refusal of this untenable world,
to stop—as Kay Rangel unfurls in her
Composition—is also to strike, rest, disrupt, organize, and create. Beginning
at a past childhood moment and ending
at the present time, Rangel’s text traces
the logics of power so as to demystify it.

This issue’s cover image, _Blockade Rider_ (2019) by Lacie Burning, shows artist M.V. Williams straddling a concrete
barrier on their territory (X̱wemelch'stn),
as if on horseback. That kind of improvisational riff on an urban built environment, otherwise meant to control public
movement, is stark. What other disruptions of settler organizations of space
are possible? Burning’s image was part
of the “LAND BACK” exhibition at
Open Space (2020–2021), which also included work by Whess Harman who is
featured in this issue. In “Body as Blockade,” Harman writes about the importance of culturally competent art spaces
like grunt gallery—where he was the inhouse curator—that recognize when it’s
more valuable to someone’s personhood
to be elsewhere, in service of other work.
For Harman, the necessity to protest
with Wetʼsuwetʼen land defenders to obstruct the Coastal Gaslink pipeline meant
that “[m]y work at the gallery stopped as
ports, rails, and highways were stopped
across so-called canada.”

The temporality of stopping is also explored by Hung Duong in his conversation with curator Grace Samboh. Based
between Yogyakarta and Jakarta, Samboh discusses the importance of creating
public spaces that invite rest, and even
spaces that actually feel safe enough to
sleep in. Samboh is also careful to qualify the success of such spaces, and identifies the institutional limits placed on sites
of leisure. Using the example of the _OK Studio_ (2020–) jam space project by Julian Abraham “Togar,” Samboh explores
how a more fluid iteration was possible
at the experimental RUBANAH Underground Hub in Jakarta. The One Thing
column looks deeply at Natalie Ashley’s
_resting my moccasins_ (2024), which features a pair of beaded moccasins filled with
bearded lichen. Jasmine Sihra observes
how “[i]f you glance too quickly, you might miss the lichen peeking out. But the
work insists on slowness and curiosity.”

Filmmaker Svetlana Romanova, the
2023 recipient of the Indigenous Art
Writing Award co-organized by C and
the Indigenous Curatorial Collective /
Collectif des commissaires autochtones,
frames contemporaneity as colonial time,
marked perversely by the economics of
“discovery” in Soviet/Russian imaginaries
of the Arctic and “Far East.” Through
moving prose, past and present contexts
of extraction, and an experimental script, Romanova approaches a visual language-in-formation of Sakha and Even
cinema. Romanova’s writing on the importance of “reformulating and unpacking the mechanisms of colonial perception” resonates with wider critiques of
empire in this issue’s Artist Project. This
issue opens with previously unreleased
film stills from Ali El-Darsa’s _The Image Remains the Same_ (2024), which depict
Lebanon’s El-Mina port as it overlooks
the Mediterranean Sea. In the accompanying essay, guest curator Joyce Joumaa
writes: “The same Mediterranean that
once brought European colonizers, traders, and armies to our shores now carries
populations displaced by the enduring effects of that same imperial intervention.”
Joumaa further offers that “Ali’s investigation goes deeper than documentation,”
as he interrogates how memory crystallizes into document, and how lived experience becomes archived imagery.

We also introduce the first of three installments on “Open Hearing: Dreaming
in Dark Times,” a town hall event initiated by the in-flux working group EMILIA-AMALIA and inspired in form by the Art
Workers’ Coalition’s “Open Hearing” in
New York (1969). In March 2025, more
than 200 people gathered in Toronto to
hear their peers speak about connected
urgencies in our cultural work, including organizing against the genocide in Gaza amidst censorship and other long-standing labour issues that have been laid
bare. As Fan Wu writes in response to
the open forum, “We can no longer repress the material conditions of our own
livelihoods. Under a previous liberal order we could just about afford to ignore
the institution’s bloody foundations, when
its violence was more invisible.”


Multimedia

Editors Maandeeq Mohamed and Joy Xiang reflect on the issue’s theme, _Stop!_ and its contributions.

md_editorial.png

sm_editorial.png

thumbnail_editorial.png

editorial.png

Editorial: STOP!

Letter

##### Dear C,

I just read Steph Wong Ken’s “The House
Edge,” and I’m still reeling: partly from
awe, and partly from the absurdity of it all.
Reading her deep dive into Alberta’s arts
funding programs was like stumbling into
a Kafka novel where the plot revolves around casinos and grant applications.

Wong Ken’s take on the grant grind
hit home. I’ve bent my brain trying to fit
big, messy dreams into neat little grant
application boxes labelled “innovative yet
realistic.” It’s like speed-dating a panel
of strangers. Her take is hilarious, painful, and way too real for my inbox.

The article also reminds me of those
moments where I’m churning out applications, wondering if I should just buy
a lottery ticket and call it a day. Then
comes the rejection. Wong Ken understands how artists keep leaping through
hoops for scraps, hoping for something
that sticks.

This piece left me cackling, reflecting, and oddly hopeful. It’s a wake-up
call: we need to rethink arts funding. No more casino side gigs or bureaucratic hunger games. Thanks for publishing
this. It made me laugh, it made me think,
and, most importantly, it made me _hope._

##### Sincerely,

##### Emmah Ngugi


##### Dear C,

While reading your latest issue, I appreciated how you adapted the concept of an “extra life” from video games. Kai
Trotz-Motayne’s interview with Camille
Turner offered an illuminating account of
Turner’s practice. The article gave me
another way of looking at Camille Turner
and Yaniya Lee’s _Black History Navigational Toolkit_ (2021), which I recently encountered in the exhibition “Archives by
Artists” at Galerie UQO in Gatineau.

Curated by Jim Drobnick and Jennifer Fisher, the exhibition gathered together works by 29 contemporary artists.
Derived from multiples and artists’ books
held in the personal collection of the curators, the exhibition proposed six categories through which the collection could
be approached: biography/autobiography,
conceptual processes, art world controversies, fiction, atypical archives, and interventions that address the gaps in official
archives. Turner and Lee’s toolkit, comprised of a box of 22 cards addressing aspects of Black history in Toronto, was
presented as an example of the latter.

Tellingly, the toolkit includes a blank
card for engaged navigators to add their
own material. Spurring critical thinking
and the production of knowledge, this
particular project may in fact be the perfect avatar for the extra life conjured up
by the pages of your magazine, as the
blank cards allow for the toolkit to live
on beyond the gallery space.

##### Sincerely,

##### Michael Davidge


##### Dear C,

In “Extra Life,” Bracy Appeikumoh asks if
utopia, like the extra lives of video games,
was ever truly about dodging death. I
haven’t stopped thinking about that question. I found myself returning not to the
digital world you explored, but to the low-tech, often invisible sanctuaries I grew
up around: the whispered prayers of elders, the secret gardens between tenements, the makeshift shrines made from
plastic flowers and broken radios. They
were both absurd and sacred.

What if we interpreted “extra life”
not only as longevity or power-ups, but
also as the ability to pause? To refuse
the imperial tempo of acceleration? Because maybe utopia was never about running toward something shinier, but
rather, refusing to run at all. Maybe the
true glitch is not immortality, but rest.
Silence. Stillness. Refusal.

Reading “extra life” as sacred surplus
resonated deeply with me. In my Luhya
community, funerals are often the most
vibrant celebrations. Death doesn’t get
the final say. Life insists. Through laughter. Through music. Through the child
born nine months after a burial. 

Your issue surfaces a critical discomfort: that empire longs to live forever. It
hoards data, mummifies its statues, and
exports its myths of permanence. But
maybe the true extra life lies in our willingness to live beyond empire, in soft
rebellion, in slow rituals, and in care that
cannot be commodified or coded.

##### Warmly,

##### Mark Kibet


Colonialism

Environment

Letters reflecting on issue 160 Extra Life.

Letters

Artist Project

Joyce Joumaa is a Lebanese Canadian visual artist and writer based between Beirut, Montreal, and Amsterdam. Working primarily with video, her work focuses on microhistories within Lebanon, as a way to understand how past structures inform the present moment. Central to her practice is an interest toward the political charge inscribed in space and the social psychology that unfolds out of this tension. She has exhibited at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, e-flux Screening Room, Galerie d’art Stewart Hall, the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, the 60th Venice Biennale and the 35th edition of Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Plein sud art actuel, and Galerie Eli Kerr. She is the recipient of the Hnatyshyn Foundation Prize for Emerging Artists and the 2023 Plein Sud award. Joumaa is a 2024–2026 participant in the De Ateliers program in Amsterdam.

Writing from Tripoli, where the smell
of salt and diesel intermingles with the
weight of forgotten departures, I find
myself drawn to Ali El-Darsa’s 2024 film
_The Image Remains the Same_, with the
intimacy that comes from shared friendship and geography. It’s a work that has
evolved through multiple iterations:
from its origins as a film, to its manifestation as a large-scale gallery installation. For this Artist Project, Ali selected
a sequence of previously unreleased stills
from his film. These are images that capture the suspended moments between departure and arrival that define so much of
our shared experience. I met Ali back in
2015, during a screening in Ras Maska, a
small village 20 minutes from Tripoli, just
before my own emigration to Canada. We
were two artists from Lebanon navigating
the impossible calculus of staying versus
leaving. These are our waters: the Mediterranean that stretches beyond El-Mina
port. There, our families still gather each
evening, not for sunset, but for better signal reception to make phone calls to relatives who may or may not be navigating
the waters somewhere between the here
of Lebanon and the there of the West.
Years later, as I watched Ali’s work unfold
across screens and gallery walls, I recognized the intimate mapping of our two
lives, shaped by the same departures. In
curating this particular sequence of stills,
we sought to trace the visual grammar of
the way light catches on water, the gestures that remain constant across distances, and the fragments that persist when
everything else shifts.

Ali grasps something essential about
contemporary displacement: it operates
as much through digital circulation as
it does through physical movement. Born
from conversations in Tripoli and contemplation in Los Angeles, in _The Image Remains the Same_, certain images—of
overcrowded boats, GPS coordinates, final WhatsApp messages from loved ones—repeat with haunting consistency across different shores. The image
remains the same not only because the colonial systems that produce displacement remain unchanged, but because
Lebanese migration carries its own recursive logic. Our narratives of departure repeat across generations, with each
iteration reformatted for new technologies, yet anchored in the same fundamental image: the boat, the horizon, and
the impossible choice between staying
and leaving. This visual grammar of exodus has become part of our collective
memory, with each new wave of migration adding layers to an archive of longing that spans decades.

Ali’s work on _The Image Remains the Same_ began at the Villa Aurora artist residency in Los Angeles during the
fall of 2022, in a house overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Marta and Lion Feuchtwanger, German Jewish writers in exile,
bought the mansion in 1943. The residence’s history wasn’t lost on Ali. At Villa Aurora, he viewed one body of water
while thinking about another, as he found sanctuary while contemplating those denied such refuge. The Pacific’s distant
stillness became a mirror for the Mediterranean’s violent yet close promise of some semblance of stability—both waters offered horizons that may never
be reached.

But Ali’s oceanic meditation refuses the luxury of metaphor divorced from
material reality. His conversations with
locals in El-Mina revealed the brutal reality behind each departure: homes liquidated for boat tickets, futures mortgaged
for passage on vessels designed to fail.
This isn’t a poetic allegory but economic
fact. Water becomes currency in the global market of desperation.

A previous iteration of Ali’s film,
_The Color Remains the Same_ (2015),
took the form of a publication and video. In _The Image Remains the Same_,
Ali’s continued project is one that understands how displacement can’t be contained within a singular account. His collage of personal and public accounts
emerges from Lebanon’s perpetual cycles of conflict and exodus, with each
wave of unrest pushing new generations
toward the sea. Yet Ali’s investigation
goes deeper than documentation. The
subtle shift in his titles, from “the color” to “the image,” while “remains the
same” persists, suggests an artist interrogating the very nature of how memory crystallizes into document, how lived
experience becomes archived imagery. Each iteration probes the same fundamental questions through different media: what endures? What transforms?
How do we remember what we’re forced
to leave behind?

In Ali’s work, the Mediterranean
operates as both a geographical feature
and technological interface. Families
track loved ones through their phone
locations until signals disappear. Social
media posts document journeys until
batteries die or waters rise. Digital messages travel across the sea before bodies do.

This technological dimension becomes particularly urgent when we consider Gaza’s proximity to these same
waters. The Mediterranean that offers
escape routes for Lebanese migrants simultaneously enforces the siege that
traps Palestinians. The ongoing genocide of Palestinians reminds us of the
sea’s contradictions: simultaneously offering freedom and demise.

The routes traced by contemporary migration follow pathways carved by historical conquest, though the direction of
flow has reversed. The same Mediterranean that once brought European colonizers, traders, and armies to our shores
now carries populations displaced by the enduring effects of that same imperial intervention. Ali’s artistic practice maps these continuities through personal experience: he sought refuge in Montreal at 17, alone, and part of a generation
forced to leave not by choice but by necessity. This compulsion reflects the
colonial power and proxy politics that
continue to render Lebanon uninhabitable for many of its people. My own
migratory history mirrors his: I also
sought refuge in Montreal at 17. Such
departures often masquerade as opportunity when they are actually driven by
survival. And Montreal, too, is a settler
colony. Ali reveals how colonial logics
persist in supposedly post-colonial arrangements, where the violence of displacement gets repackaged as individual choice rather than acknowledged as
structural compulsion.

The conversations we were having
over the last month about European migration that Ali documents in _The Image Remains the Same_ emerge from policies implemented in distant cities (such
as anti-immigration laws) that render
certain territories uninhabitable, while
others remain sanctuaries. His focus on
El-Mina port grounds this analysis in
concrete specificities while revealing the
global dimensions of local experience.
The work’s structure as collage reflects
the necessarily fragmentary nature of
contemporary witness. Under such conditions of violence, coherent narrative
becomes impossible; truth emerges only
through accumulated fragments and
testimonies that resist integration into
comfortable stories with clear beginnings and endings.
_The Image Remains the Same_ functions as both artistic practice and political intervention, making visible the
connections between supposedly separate generations of violence. Ali also
suggests possibilities beyond these contradictions. By insisting on the persistence of certain images, and by creating
large-scale installations that refuse to let
us look away, he transforms the Mediterranean from a site of forgetting into
an archive of witnessing. The water
that drowns also preserves, carrying
stories across distances that no passport can traverse.

Standing in El-Mina port, where
conversations about Europe carry the
weight of elegies, I recognize in Ali’s
practice something essential: the insistence that art must engage with the
material conditions of its own production. His oceanic meditation doesn’t offer solutions but makes visible the structures that any genuine solution must
address, reminding us that the Mediterranean’s contradictions reflect not inevitable tragedy but political choices, and
that other choices remain possible.


Ali El-Darsa lives and works in Berlin, and is a 2025–2026 fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. He works across moving image, installation, performance, and sound. His practice examines structures of belonging in transnational contexts, foregrounding the specificity of time-based media in creating networked, mediated memories and cultural imaginaries. His interdisciplinary research in performance engages with the fields of text, word, sign, and language, questioning—often collaboratively—how language shapes movement, systems of thought, and, by extension, the discourse surrounding the interpretation of a work of art, both materially and metaphorically. alieldarsa.com

Artist

lg_C161_Joumaa.jpg

md_C161_Joumaa.jpg

sm_C161_Joumaa.jpg

thumbnail_C161_Joumaa.jpg

C161_Joumaa.jpg

C161_Jouma.pdf

Migration

Guest curated by Joyce Joumaa, this issue’s artist project features unreleased stills from Ali El-Darsa’s _The Image Remains the Same_ (2024), which depicts El-Mina port and the Mediterranean as a site of colonial displacement. In her accompanying curatorial text, Joumaa reflects on how El-Darsa attempts to translate diasporic memory into a contested historical archive.

lg_C161_Joumaa_th.jpg

md_C161_Joumaa_th.jpg

sm_C161_Joumaa_th.jpg

thumbnail_C161_Joumaa_th.jpg

C161_Joumaa_th.jpg

_The Image Remains the Same_ by Ali El-Darsa: Text

Print and Digital subscriptions are available for individuals and institutions

C Magazine

Subscribe to

What is _Asian_ about Asian diasporic art? Working across fashion, sculpture, and
installation, the collective CFGNY explores an aesthetic form they call “vaguely Asian.”
Encoding this generative ambiguity in its self-stylization, the group adopts a new
expansion of the acronym for each project. Most recently, it is “Continuous Fractures Generating New Yields” at Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery. 

At first glance, the works in the current exhibit suggest that “Asianness” is produced via
consumption, as an accumulation of Orientalist fantasies and projections. Eight porcelain sculptures, each titled _Skins_ (2025), render in skeletal forms a pre-arranged ensemble of cheap household wares like cups, jars, and vases, all made in China (the full title of each piece captures these various objects). Cast from moulds shaped in the
negative space of this ensemble, the porcelains enflesh not the mass-manufactured
objects themselves but, rather, their ghostly imprints. Their material reinforces the association with chinoiserie, that delirious decorative style once coveted by Euro-American aristocracy, emblematic of a libidinal economy structured through violence
and colonization.

Spray-painted in neon colours and exuding gooey epoxy, the porcelains shed light on
the artificiality of “Asianness,” as seen through a white imperialist lens, while also indulging in the pleasures of performing and being misrecognized. The porcelains are displayed with mirrors, one or more each, that create a duplicity of surfaces and a recursive loop of perspectives, as the viewer winds their way through the installation. The sculptures are placed within a labyrinthine architectural structure with translucent
panels, teasing the possibility of visual access and denying it at once.

Yet, even in this world of sensuous illusions, a conspicuous absence reveals itself. As
embodiments of an obscured relation—the gulf between “Asian” and “diaspora”—
the porcelains crucially give form to a self-effacing infrastructure. This economic structure concretized by the global supply chain links, on the one hand, the Asian factory worker who produces everyday commodities and, on the other hand, the transnational Asian art worker who reproduces capital by transforming those commodities into art objects for a different kind of market. Any rigorous articulation of an Asian diasporic identity today necessarily confronts this dynamic as a process of class formation, rather than reproduce Asia as a mere reservoir of signs, anxieties, and gestures toward illegibility from a western standpoint.

Dealing in an aesthetic of playfulness, “Continuous Fractures Generating New Yields”
makes ornaments of Asia’s material and imaginative presence in the West. But should
its “vaguely Asian” sensibility enact something other than a hide-and-seek game of
meaning-making, it is a deep ambivalence about turning to Asia—substantively, with
humility—as a project of self-knowledge for the diaspora.

C_OR_Zhou_1 

"Continuous Fractures Generating New Yields" runs from 4 April to 7 September 2025 at Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver.

C_OR_Zhou_1

 “Continuous Fractures Generating New Yields” — CFGNY

Wanda Nanibush is an Anishinaabe-kwe image and word warrior, curator, and community organizer from Beausoleil First Nation. She recently won the Toronto Book Award for her coauthored book Moving the Museum. She is the 2025 Helen Frankenthaler Visiting Professor in Curating in the PhD Program in Art History at CUNY. She is also part of the curatorial team for Counterpublic 2026, a triennial civic exhibition in St.
Louis. In 2024, Nanibush was awarded The Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for
Curatorial Excellence. Nanibush founded aabaakwad, an international yearly gathering of over 80 Indigenous curators writers, and artists.

Composition: We Return

Amanda Boulos (she/her) is a visual artist and educator. Boulos engages with fragmented oral national narratives from Palestine, Lebanon, and Canada to explore how those histories can morph into a future Palestinian diaspora. She is an Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at OCAD University, a member of the plumb, and a programmer for the Toronto Palestine Film Festival.

When Play Confronts Power

Nic Wilson (they/he) is an artist and writer who was born in the Wolastoqiyik territory known as Fredericton, NB in 1988. They are now based on Treaty Four Land in Regina, SK.


The Afterlife of Writing

Teresa Tam is an artist from and based in Calgary. She doesn’t specialize in anything, but likes to work with digital processes, functional installations, all things shaped in paper, excessive labour, and collections of mildly niche objects. She graduated from AUArts in 2014 and is the other half of Yolkless Press.

One Thing: In Search of an Incorruptible Life

Steph Wong Ken is a writer currently based in Tkaronto, near a forest of black oak. [stephwongken.com](http://stephwongken.com)

The House Edge

Kai Trotz-Motayne is a Guyanese-Canadian researcher and writer from Tkaronto/Toronto. As a child, gatherings would end with tales of her family’s Caribbean past. Inspired by their imaginative retellings, these nights often left her wondering what stories she would one day tell. Her work now explores how storytelling practices, like identities, evolve and transform through movement.

For Those Who Visit Us in Our Dreams

Shalaka Jadhav is based between Block 2 of the Haldimand Tract (Kitchener, ON) and Treaty 1 (Winnipeg, MB). Their research interests on spatial positionality and critical geographies of grief and public memory can be evidenced in exhibitions and programs they have curated in Halifax, Winnipeg, Kitchener, and Toronto. Shalaka has held roles at OCAD University and Blackwood Gallery, and is the Co-Director of Textile, a hyperlocal arts collective in Waterloo Region that supports writers and artists through mentorship, publishing, and curation. Trained as an urban planner, Shalaka took the advice of an aptitude test to pursue curatorial studies, and practices as a researcher, curator, and writer.

Yasmeen Nematt Alla is an Egyptian immigrant and settler on the unceded and stolen lands of Tkaronto and Waawiyatanong, Turtle Island. Her practice creates machinations that attest to the existence of the Brown Disabled Queer Self, resisting systems programmed to forget us. She has most recently exhibited at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Bronx River Art Center, Heaven Gallery in Chicago, and Xpace Cultural Centre in Toronto.

To Enshrine an Ululation

TJ Shin is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Their writing has been published in Active Cultures, Asia Art Archive, _Mousse Magazine_, Vera List Center for Art and Politics, and more.

The _KISSSSS_ of Yong Soon Min

Lara Mimosa Montes is a writer, editor, and teaching artist whose practice and experiences span the fields of alternative publishing and experimental writing. She was born in the Bronx.

Sofía Gallisá Muriente is a Puerto Rican visual artist and cultural organizer. Her work employs text, image, and archive as medium and subject, exploring their poetic and political implications.

In the Lacuna

Christiana Myers is a curator, writer, educator, and cultural policy analyst based in Menahqesk/Saint John, NB. Her practice often explores physical, environmental, or institutional systems, and her PhD research in Art History through the University of Glasgow examines representations of contagion in contemporary artistic and curatorial practice.

A Vampire Walks Into a Funhouse

Innas Tsuroiya is a writer living in Indonesia who works across poetry, criticism, translation, fiction, and divination. Her work can be found in _Poetry Wales, MOLD Magazine, C Magazine, Protean Magazine, ArtReview Asia,_ and _Artforum_, among others.

One Thing: Kamala Ibrahim Ishag’s Zar Paintings

Furqan Mohamed is a writer and educator from Tkaronto interested in all things culture, kinship, and abolition. Her work has been featured in publications such as _Canthius, This Magazine, Maisonneuve,_ and _The Local_. She is presently a graduate student at the University of Toronto.

Karice Mitchell is a photo-based artist whose practice seeks to situate the vintage erotic publication _Players_ as a crucial marker of Black cultural production. Concerned with how the Black female body has been historically and colonially exploited, Mitchell is invested in finding restorative ways to engage with and respond to archival erotic material. She received her BFA at York University in 2019 and her MFA at the University of Waterloo in 2021. She resides on the unceded and traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations where she is a Black Scholar Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia.

Black, Alive, and Looking Back at You: In Conversation With Karice Mitchell

Joshua Segun-Lean’s writing has appeared in _Republic Journal, The Brooklyn Rail_, and elsewhere.

Tiffany Sia is an artist, filmmaker, and writer who was born in Hong Kong and currently lives and works in New York. Her films have screened at TIFF Toronto International Film Festival, MoMA Doc Fortnight, New York Film Festival, Flaherty Film Seminar and elsewhere. Her essays have appeared in _Film Quarterly, October_ and _LUX Moving Image_. Sia’s first collection of essays _On and Off-Screen Imaginaries_ was published by Primary Information in 2024.

Cinema, Nostalgia, and the Excess That Remains: A Conversation With Tiffany Sia

Nasrin Himada is a Palestinian writer and curator from Montreal. Their practice is heavily influenced by their long-term friendships and by their many ongoing collaborations with artists, filmmakers, and poets. Nasrin’s recent project _For Many Returns_ experiments with writing as an act dictated by love, and typifies their current curatorial interests, which foreground desire as transformation and liberation through many forms. Nasrin currently holds the position of Associate Curator at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University in Kingston (ON).

Yantong Li (b. 1998, Dali, China) is a curator and artist based in Toronto. He is a Master of Visual Studies (curatorial) candidate at the University of Toronto. Li works at the intersection of global infrastructure, Sinophone and trans-Pacific diaspora, regional folklore, and decolonization. His recent works and curatorial projects have been shown internationally, which include the Curatorial Awards at Jimei x Arles International Photography Festival, Xiamen (2022); Durian-Durian: The First Trans–Southeast Asia Triennial, Guangzhou (2023); Trinity Square Video, Toronto (2023); The New Gallery, Calgary (2024); Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto (2024).

```````````````````To Return

James Albers is an emerging artist, writer, and cultural worker situated on the unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. They are interested in the magic of fiction and believe in the truth of a perfect lie. Recently, they’ve been exploring hidden folklores, intimacy, and uninhibited dancing.

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.

Bhenji Ra Dances at the End of the Rainbow

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.

Floor Drawing Series by Aubin Soonhwan K: Text

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.

Sahar Te is an artist and writer whose practice exists at the intersection of text, installation, and time-based media. Her interest in media, politics, literature, theatre, and acoustics inform her work. Te’s engagements span language and poetics, aesthetics and semiotics, social dynamics and inter-species, and oral histories.

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

Raven Davis is an Anishinaabe, 2-Spirit artist and educator, born in Michi Saagiig Territory, Toronto, ON. Davis investigates land-based and archival research, with calls to action, healing, and works authenticized by lived and intergenerational experience. Davis utilizes movement, visuals, and sound/media in their practice. For over 30 years, Davis has advocated for equitable, IBPOGM art and liberated futures.

Cara Tierney (they/them) is a transdisciplinary artist and educator who lives/works on unceded Anishinaabe Algonquin land. A settler of Scottish-Irish-Italian descent, their work investigates the way meaning is structured in, around, and through the body. They are oriented toward building more equitable and sustainable futures.

Hard Limits, Soft Landing

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.

Fetish Aesthetics and Fan Fiction in Dana Buzzee's Philosophically Pornographic Practice

Andrea Dávila is a researcher, writer, and museum professional interested in the cultural and disciplinary intersections within art history, focusing on the visual dialogues and continuities within contemporary Latin American art. She graduated from Barnard College, and has held curatorial internships at the Dallas Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

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.


Sinister Pleasure: Interview with Ja'Tovia Gary

Alexa Bunnell is an emerging artist, writer, and fermenter based in Mohkinstsís.

A Good Animal on Wet Sheets: Disobedient Gasps in Subspace

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_.

Composition: give up your own

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.

What is the Safe Word?

C the Visual Arts Foundation, with the support of its board of directors and staff, re-articulates the [public commitment we made to the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) in 2021](https://www.instagram.com/p/CPeJinntzMy/). In line with PACBI guidelines, we will (as paraphrased by Writers Against the War On Gaza): 

1)	Boycott all cultural products and events that are funded, commissioned, or sponsored by 
an official Israeli body. 
2)	Boycott complicit Israeli institutions. 
3)	Boycott normalization projects. 

We do this because, as Shiv Kotecha and Rainer Diana Hamilton write in [“PACBI Now,”](https://thenewinquiry.com/pacbi-now/) “boycotts shorten the perceived distances between moral actors.” The Canadian state is deeply complicit in providing military and political support to Israel. In the period since October 2023, we have seen Palestinian solidarity across Turtle Island—including in our cultural sectors—increasingly censored and criminalized. Meanwhile, as Rana Nazzal Hamadeh and Alia Hijaab write in [“Art as a Mirror: How Canadian Institutions Are Complicit in Silencing Palestinian Voices,”](https://cmagazine.com/articles/art-as-a-mirror-how-canadian-institutions-are-complicit-in-silencing-palestinian-voices) nearly “200 historical and cultural landmarks have been damaged or destroyed, and two of the four museums in Gaza have been levelled entirely.” We witness this colonial violence and identify its analogues within so-called Canada, from Wet'suwet'en land defenders who are fighting off the Coastal GasLink pipeline, to Six Nations of the Grand River’s ongoing defense of their unceded land across the Haldimand Tract, to Grassy Narrows First Nation’s fight against the government-sanctioned mercury poisoning of their homes, to the implementation of Bill C-5, which prioritizes extractive industries. The settler colonial project across the Americas is deeply imbricated with global imperialism: the maintenance of both structures relies on ongoing violence here on Turtle Island and abroad. As a cultural institution situated in so-called Canada, by participating in PACBI, we hope to, alongside our peers, be a part of a cultural formation that refuses complicity not only with routinized violence against the Palestinian people but also all Indigenous life.

PACBI targets institutions, not individuals, complicity, not identity, and is endorsed by the absolute majority of Palestinian cultural and mass movement organizations. According to PACBI guidelines, the boycott [“subscribes to the internationally-accepted definition of freedom of expression as stipulated in the United Nations’ International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).”](https://bdsmovement.net/pacbi/cultural-boycott-guidelines)
 
With this reaffirmation, we align our organizational and existing publishing values. We are honoured to be part of the groundswell of peer cultural organizations in Canada who recognize that PACBI is the floor, not the ceiling. This provides a starting point for our cultural sectors to be part of a horizon of change oriented towards a free Palestine. 
 
The full guidelines for PACBI can be found [here.](https://bdsmovement.net/pacbi/cultural-boycott-guidelines)
 
In solidarity,
 
C The Visual Arts Foundation

Comments and questions may be directed to [board@cmagazine.com](mailto:board@cmagazine.com)

Support for the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel 

Announcement

C the Visual Arts Foundation, with the support of its board of directors and staff, re-articulates the public commitment we made to the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) in 2021.

C The Visual Arts Foundation Recommits to PACBI

Presented by the [Indigenous Curatorial Collective / Collectif des commissaires autochtones (ICCA)](https://icca.art/) and _C Magazine_.

We’re excited to launch the 4th annual Indigenous Art Writing Award, an initiative created to support, compensate, and platform three standout individuals who are advancing critical and creative thought about Indigenous contemporary art. 

Indigenous writers are invited to submit a single non-fiction text about an artist, project, exhibition, performance, event, initiative, theme, or other art-adjacent subject. Suggested length for submissions is between 1,000-2,000 words.

The winner will receive $1,500 CAD; editorial support to prepare their article for publication in a future issue of _C Magazine_ and to be shared across ICCA’s platforms; and a two-year _C_ subscription. Two runners-up will receive $1,000 CAD; an open invitation to develop a pitch for a different text to be published in _C Magazine_; and a two-year subscription. All participants can request feedback on their submitted work, and will receive a one-year subscription.

Applicants must identify as an Indigenous person. Given the resonances of Indigenous sovereignty and colonial realities across the globe, there are no geographical restrictions, though for the context of where we are located, we strongly encourage those based in Canada to apply. Submissions should primarily be in English, but may include non-English words or phrases. For submissions entirely in another language, we kindly ask for translations. The award will be adjudicated by ICCA staff, _C Magazine_ editors, and an external juror. 

There is one submission per applicant. Please note that submissions must not be previously published or slated for future publication elsewhere. Complete the [submission form](https://forms.gle/wBGeNxC3R4vxRAke9) by **November 24, 2025.**

Please write to [editor@cmagazine.com](mailto:editor@cmagazine.com) if you require any accommodation during the application process. Note that measures will be taken to ensure that the identity of entrants remains unknown to adjudicators. More information about the kind of writing _C Magazine_ publishes can be found on our [Submissions page.](https://cmagazine.com/about/submissions)


Partners

Call for the 4th Annual Indigenous Art Writing Award

Call

The Indigenous Art Writing Award is an initiative created to support, compensate, and platform standout individuals who are advancing critical and creative thought about Indigenous contemporary art. The award is presented by _C Magazine_ and the [Indigenous Curatorial Collective / Collectif des commissaires autochtones ](link)(ICCA).

Indigenous writers in the first decade of their career are invited to submit a single text up to 2,000 words in length about an artist, project, exhibition, performance, event, initiative, theme, and/or phenomenon therein.

Applicants must identify as an Indigenous person. There are no geographical restrictions, although we strongly encourage those based in Canada to apply. Submissions should be primarily in English, but may include non-English words or phrases. For submissions entirely in another language, we require translations. It is free to make a submission. Please note for the purposes of this award, submissions must not be previously published or slated for future publication elsewhere.

The award is adjudicated by ICCA staff, _C Magazine_ editors, and an external juror. The winner receives a cash award and editorial support to prepare their article for publication in _C Magazine_, and the runner receives a cash award. All participants receive a subscription to _C Magazine_.

The 2022 winner was awarded the Momus Emerging Critics Residency, supported in part by [Momus](https://momus.ca/), together with the presenting partners.

Submission

Indigenous Art Writing Award

Program

Presented by _C Magazine_ and the Indigenous Curatorial Collective / Collectif des commissaires autochtones. The Indigenous Art Writing Award is an initiative created to support, compensate, and platform standout individuals who are advancing critical and creative thought about Indigenous contemporary art. 

In partnership with the Indigenous Curatorial Collective / Collectif des commissaires autochtones, we are now accepting applications for the 2nd annual Indigenous Art Writing Award.

Header

“Continuous Fractures Generating New Yields” — CFGNY

C Mag

The Latest

“Witness” — June Clark

Editorial: STOP!

Letters

The Image Remains the Same by Ali El-Darsa: Text

Issue 161

Stop

Subscribe to

Upcoming

C The Visual Arts Foundation Recommits to PACBI

Call for Indigenous Art Writing Award