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Luminato

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Griffin

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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, researcher and the Associate Editor of _C Magazine_. 

Associate Editor

Designer

Publisher

This issue begins from the tidal as literal image and metaphor for ceaseless movement and its force. We think alongside the inseparability of ocean and land, inspired by Barbadian poet and scholar Kamau Brathwaite’s idea of tidalectics that moves away from easy binaries—the ones that continually justify colonial and capital expansion. From Turtle Island to the Caribbean archipelago, Palestine, Central America, and Bidong Island in Malaysia, artists wade through interconnected and overlapping struggles across multiple shores, times, and material inheritances.

Tidal

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Harrington’s Important Canadian & International Art Auction opens online Friday January 23, featuring artwork by notable artists from all over the globe. 

Harrington’s Important Canadian & International Art Auction 2026

Column

kimi malka hanauer is an artist, writer, and publisher. They are a founding collective member of the publishing initiative Press Press, steward of nomadic education initiative Ungovernable Study, and an assistant professor at Pratt Institute.

Writer

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Language

Memory

Colonialism

kimi malka hanauer’s image-text moves through a pre-partition Jerusalem, Palestine, and al-Andalus, the Muslim-governed society that covered much of the Iberian Peninsula from 711-1492. hanauer writes from the unspoken relational and linguistic excess that seeps through empire's hold.  

Composition: on the edges of a mother tongue

Feature

Suzanne Morrissette is a Red River Métis artist, curator, and writer from Winnipeg who is currently based in Toronto where she teaches at OCAD University. 

There is a slipperiness with which ideas about myth enter into common parlance, particularly within the arts. By definition, myth is representative of untruths, often considered synonymous with folk-tales, legends, or fables. In the realm of myths and legends, fictitious subjects act in ways that demonstrate morals through allegory while existing psychically and spiritually outside of everyday lived experience, where their morals are either proven or fumbled. 

Yet, the myths and beliefs that a culture hands down through time are also the fabric of a worldview, and contain within them implicit understandings of truth. Myths can be considered the arena of play wherein we learn what we cannot afford to test in reality, or where abstract concepts from history are jettisoned into the present moment in ways that illustrate their ongoing relevance. 

All of this is to say that the application of myth today [^1] appears to have been naturalized to indicate falsehoods when it is, in reality, not so simple. I’d like to suggest that the drive to separate untruth from truth, the fanciful from reality, and fiction from non-fiction are ontological gestures that centre a Western normative worldview. These gestures not only allow appropriative myths to proliferate but also reinforce the divide between truth and fancy that factors Western and Indigenous knowledge into dominant (universal history) and subordinate (story within universal history) roles. Enacting myth today is a complex gesture that serves to disappear peoples outside of universal history. 

Coming up as an artist in Winnipeg in the early aughts, I was surrounded by art steeped in myth. This was in the last years of activity of The Royal Art Lodge, an artist collective that worked through collage and collaboration, often around fables and folklore with a tinge of the surreal. Comprising members Michael Dumontier, Marcel Dzama, Neil Farber, Drue Langlois, Jon Pylypchuk, and Adrian Williams, the group has influenced the representation of Winnipeg as a city many love to hate (and mythologize), and my sense is this influence has rippled, and continues to ripple, outward. For example, The Weakerthan’s 2003 album _Reconstruction Site_, which featured album art by Dzama, was and continues to stand in as a cultural signpost for Winnipeg as a place of undeniable tragedy and nostalgia—just listen to the track “One Great City!” with its refrain of “I hate Winnipeg” and you’ll know what I mean. 

[^1]: This essay takes its cue from the essay “Myth Today” by French literary theorist and semiotician Roland Barthes, from his 1957 book _Mythologies_. 


The methods and mark-making styles of The Royal Art Lodge resonated in the halls of the University of Manitoba School of Art, which I attended from 2005 to 2007. When I visited Dzama’s solo exhibition “Ghosts of Canoe Lake” [^2] at Plug In ICA in early 2025, it all seemed very familiar. A “darling” in a small city where it is widely known that one does not critique darlings, Dzama and his work initially felt impervious to criticism. Yet, sitting in his black-and-white polka-dot canvas tent on a low stool while watching the video work _To live on the Moon (For Lorca)_ (2023), I felt compelled to write. I watched as figures—some in clown costumes, others dressed as animals (judging by their coverings of hide), and still others donning pseudo-regalia-type coverings—danced and paraded through vacant industrial settings. In the room adjacent to the tent hung Dzama’s drawings inspired by the Group of Seven, artists whose own work has been scrutinized for its cultivation of Canadian nationalism while contributing to the theft of Indigenous lands deemed terra nullius. [^3] I felt the workings of myth at play, and wondered about the ways that myth enters into arts and culture without critical reception. 

The Group of Seven still remains alluring to many, possibly due to the naturalized narratives of settlement that their work quietly supports. I wondered in that moment and have wondered ever since: **how might the prevalence of myth as “untruth” in art support the ongoing projects of colonization, which seek to bolster a white settler political imaginary while simultaneously serving to diminish or disappear the perspectives and knowledge of Indigenous and otherwise racialized peoples?**

[^2]: Dzama’s solo exhibition “Ghosts of Canoe Lake” circulated in collaboration between the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and Contemporary Calgary. Plug In ICA was the final stop in an exhibition tour that began in Kleinburg, ON, in late 2023 and ended in Winnipeg in 2025. I attended the exhibition both in Kleinburg and in Winnipeg.
[^3]: I am reminded of the words spoken by the unnamed narrator from Cree author Billy-Ray Belcourt’s recent book of short stories _coexistence_: “Throughout the twentieth century, Canadian poets were writing pastoral poems that celebrated country life and the glory of nature. The ability to aestheticize the pasture is presupposed by dispossession, by colonization. One could argue, then, that Indigenous life fell out of these poets’ frames of ethical consideration. […] Indigenous suffering had to continue unabated in order for their work to cohere.” Billy-Ray Belcourt, _coexistence: stories_ (Hamish Hamilton, 2024), 45.

I am based in Toronto, though I am in Winnipeg a lot these days, and I think often about the role of myth in Winnipeg’s art history. Looking back on the city where I came of age as an artist, I recall how The Royal Art Lodge and Dzama were not alone in engaging with myth, and wonder whether there is something here that prefers to look to the fantastical rather than reckon with its own histories, particularly those of race and racialization that have shaped it. [^4] 

Some of Winnipeg’s most heralded artists of the past and present occupy psychic and physical spaces that reinforce narratives in which Indigenous presence within Treaty 1 territory are secondary, a source of inspiration and appropriation, or absented. [^5] I am curious about the ways in which the city has been psychically made and remade within a context of Indigenous invisibility. Take for example, Guy Maddin’s acclaimed 2007 film _My Winnipeg_, which, through Maddin’s self-described genre of “docu-fantasia,” develops a record of the city against black-and-white dreamscapes wherein the differentiation between history and fiction and the locus of truth are often unclear. The film’s lasting influence as a document of Winnipeg’s identity creates space for concern. While the unnamed narrator’s version of Winnipeg only briefly mentions Indigenous presence and past, this version has nevertheless been upheld in the imaginations of many. The narrator recounts, “We Winnipeggers are so steeped in nostalgia it is hard to know what is truth.” In one scene, the narrator describes how a herd of horses were frozen in the river ice one winter. I heard from a friend who had toured the Winnipeg Film Group’s offices that one of the horse heads was still in storage. A month or so later, it appeared at PLATFORM centre for photographic + digital arts in an exhibition called “We’re Still Here: 50 Years of the Winnipeg Film Group” (2024). I’ll admit, for what it is worth, that I love that horse head. 

More myths enacted against the backdrop of Winnipeg lie in the work of artist and self-proclaimed “cultural engineer” Michael Dudeck. In a practice formed through his invention of a religion, Dudeck treads treacherous waters by drawing on existing forms of Indigenous cultural expression. I met Dudeck when he was a teaching assistant for my first-year basic design course at the University of Manitoba. A few years later, his exhibition “Amygdala” (2011) opened at Aceartinc. with a group performance led by Dudeck—who embodied a shaman-like character—which animated part of his religion’s origin story. In her response to this exhibition, then-director of Urban Shaman Gallery Amber-Dawn Bear Robe attributed Dudeck’s appropriation of cultural signs to a broader problem wherein “the nation’s identity crisis, mirror[s] the reasons behind western society’s disposable attitudes towards cultural diversity and iconography.” [^6] 

I tend to agree with Bear Robe, and am curious to further probe the particular manifestation toward the fantastical in Winnipeg contemporary art. I am concerned what these examples reveal about the priorities of a community that encourages and reveres such forms of representation. It might be easy to write these examples off as vestiges of the past if they weren’t also made by “Winnipeg Darlings.” Dzama’s show at Plug In ICA continued to indulge in myths as untruths, while also drawing upon the cultural signifiers of living and embodied forms of Indigenous knowledge today. The practice of myth-making produces untruths from what little cultural knowledge may be apparent inside of a white centre. 

Are these examples of appropriation? Some are. Are they examples of artists taking up space that could be occupied by more diverse artists? This could be true. Is there historical amnesia at play? Very much so. However, these realities are less concerning questions for me than the fact that there is an unchecked willingness to accept darlings for what they serve to accomplish for our world—artistically, and beyond. 

[^4]: For more on this, see: Owen Toews, _STOLEN CITY: Racial Capitalism and the Making of Winnipeg_ (ARP Books, 2018). Toews describes with astute attention to detail the ways in which settler colonialism has operated uniquely within the city of Winnipeg through expressions of racial capitalism, which have informed and continue to inflect contemporary lived experiences.
[^5]: This is not to say that this was intentional. Even today, land acknowledgements (as a form of recognition of Indigenous history and presence) have only recently become common in the public sphere, and are arguably still more often performed than enacted.  
[^6]: Amber-Dawn Bear Robe, “Everything in My Life Is Appropriated: A Look Through the Witchdoctor,” _PaperWait_ 13 (2010/11), 14–19.


Given the tendency for _myths_ to circulate in contemporary art as _untruths_, I find it helpful to look back to the origins of collective myth-making in the work of surrealist thinkers. Although an uncritical read of surrealism’s fantastical visual sensibilities might evoke untruths, it bears noting that its representations of the absurd responded conceptually to World War I by rejecting reason and, with it, whatever sense of truth led to these brutalities. These activities may be perceived now as an unproblematic or even valiant inversion of universal truth. However, by turning to the absurd, some of which was found in the appropriation of cultural forms from outside Western hegemonic art and historical knowledge, surrealist thought bolstered the idea that outside cultural knowledge can function purely as fringe source material. 

Dominant knowledge from Western thought has historically constrained the realities of certain peoples in ways that relegate them to the margins of humanity while centring itself. Notably, this is also a practice of engaging with dominant knowledge that is supported by ideas of race. For instance, when German Enlightenment thinker Immanuel Kant wrote about the differences between the human races in the 18th century, he did so while regarding the “white” race as the only “non-deficient” race. [^7] In other words, Kant’s ideas (and those of many others) demonstrate how, as American journalist, author, and activist Ta-Nehisi Coates has written, “[R]ace is the child of racism, not the father.” [^8] The ideas of race that underlie racism are instrumental to the ways in which the knowledge of other cultures gets relegated to myths and untruths. 
 
Race-thinking has deeply influenced the ways racialized cultures (Indigenous peoples included) and their knowledges are perceived to this day, particularly as myth. Even in a culturally plural society such as Canada, knowledge of cultural others remains at the limits of Western perceptive possibility. For example, reflecting on German anthropologist Franz Boas’s invented image of the Kwakwaka’wakw of Alert Bay, BC, Tlingit curator Candice Hopkins writes how the Kwakwaka’wakw “were not only at Europe’s outer edge, but […] at the very boundary of European knowledge itself.” [^9] In colonial contexts, racism informs the view of a people as inferior and deficient, and thus renders them conquerable or disposable. At the time, the fabricated image of those Boas photographed arose from a centre with defined and unquestioned margins that were considered universally true from within. Scholars of Indigenous representation have shown that the proliferation of these and other images of northern life have and continue to give rise to perspectives that justify—implicitly or not—the ongoing marginalization of a people and their knowledge. My critique of the aforementioned artworks by The Royal Art Lodge is a broadly applied criticism that implicates artistic institutions and their audiences for perpetuating narratives that fail to address historical and ongoing issues in our communities. 

Therefore, myth is not only of material consequence for the lessons it affords us for our lived realities (like “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”). When the lessons we are granted offer us new vantage points on life, myth is also deeply political in that it supports the permeation of ideology and worldview, like through a representation of a city’s history.  

[^7]: Immanuel Kant, “Of the Different Human Races [1777],” in _The Idea of Race_, eds. Robert Bernasconi and Tommy L. Lott (Hackett Publishing, 2000), 8–22.
[^8]: Ta-Nehisi Coates, _Between the World and Me_ (Spiegal & Grau, 2015), 7.
[^9]: Candice Hopkins, “Outlawed Social Life,” documenta 14, 2017, https://www.documenta14.de/en/south/685_outlawed_social_life


To understand how myth perpetuates ideology, it is helpful to consider French essayist and literary critic Roland Barthes’s lens on myth as “_a second-order system of signification_.” [^10]  For Barthes, myth is a process within semiotics in which a set of ideas is universally accepted or naturalized. Barthes famously provided the example of an image of a young Black boy dressed in French nationalist clothing on a 1955 cover of _Paris Match_ magazine. In this image, French nationalism appears reconciled with its colonial history, as represented by the racialized boy’s allegiance to France. In the first order of signification (or language), the boy (the signifier) signals French nationalism or political allegiance (the signified). However, Barthes argues that the young boy’s Blackness can be seen to further signify the benevolence of French imperialism, and the completeness or inevitability of colonial conquest. This latter point is the second order signification, known as myth.

[^10]: Roland Barthes, “Myth Today,” in _Mythologies_, trans. Annette Lavers (Hill and Wang, 1972), 223.

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Barthes’s analysis affords an important vantage point from which to articulate the influence of signs, and the interpolation of publics into the ideas and messages that they contain. It also provides a convenient frame to view the constructedness of signs and symbols constrained by worldview—however naturalized they might appear. For instance, if we appropriate Barthes’s diagram, replacing “Language” with the cultural knowledge contained within _Indigenous thought_, we can see how, for example, an engagement with Indigenous thought outside of Indigenous worldview and knowledge can lead to the proliferation of cultural knowledge as untruth. In Indigenous thought, where the land can act as a mnemonic container (or signifier) for cultural knowledge (the signified), the production of knowledge is relational and tied to Indigenous experiences and history of place. In a second order of signification, where Indigenous knowledge is known only through a Western-informed worldview, Indigenous knowledge gets signified through disembodied practices, such as the practice of land acknowledgement. It is convenient for me in making this argument to demonstrate how Indigenous thought gets caught up in the production of meaning to perpetuate myths as untruths (though I mean no guff to Barthes in reworking his diagram). 

**This leaves the question: when ideas of a culture’s myth develop inside a worldview where its definition as untruths runs rampant, what happens to the ideas and knowledge of racialized others in the present?** Without context, perspective, and a willingness to engage with Indigenous thought, labelling racialized cultural knowledge as myth forecloses one’s ability to see other truths. It is precisely because of this question that the prevalence of myth in contemporary art warrants further critical attention.

When I began this line of thinking, I had imagined that the question would ultimately become: what is the lure of untruths, and can the contemporary surreal be extricated from its lineage along the continuum of art history? However, presented with these examples and the revealing nature of Barthes’s frame for mapping the creation of signs, I wonder if there is instead an argument to be made for making this frame more apparent. 

...when ideas of a culture’s myth develop inside a worldview where its definition as untruths runs rampant, what happens to the ideas and knowledge of racialized others in the present?

I gather these examples and share them here because the stakes are and have always been high. Despite the presentation of their own testimony, the lived realities of Indigenous peoples in this country have historically been met with doubt. When, in 2021, preliminary findings at the Kamloops residential school led to reports of unmarked graves of 215 Indigenous children, and then that number grew as unmarked graves were located across the nation, Canadians woke up to a reality that they had long ignored. However, for those families whose children did not return home, the truth was always clear. It was never a myth. When four women went missing in Winnipeg in early 2022, and were later found to have been murdered by a serial killer, despite the fact that police had strongly suspected their whereabouts in the Prairie Green Landfill as early as June 2022, their families faced challenges to bring their loved ones home due to political infighting about the feasibility of a landfill search. [^11] This issue became a major platform item in the 2023 provincial election in Manitoba—although the elected and current Premier Wab Kinew supported the landfill search in his campaign, Heather Stefanson, premier at the time, went so far as to state her party’s firm stance not to search the landfill in her election campaign posters. 

[^11]: Caitlyn Gowriluk, “A Timeline of What We Know About 4 Slain Winnipeg Women and Serial Killer Jeremy Skibicki,” _CBC News_, December 11, 2022, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/jeremy-skibicki-winnipeg-serial-killer-timeline-1.6681433

The disappearance of Indigenous peoples is real and takes many forms, which in turn can fabricate caricatures from actual lived realities. The implicit ideas of truth here stem from long-held beliefs that discredit those who speak up for Indigenous women and children. Subsequently, those ideas of truth can then reinforce material conditions under which Indigenous peoples are brought to live. That drive to separate untruth from truth, the fanciful from reality, and fiction from non-fiction not only is proven to relegate Indigenous peoples and histories to the world of myth, but can then also be brought to justify their ongoing disappearance as a project fuelled by racism. 

In this sense, this argument about the things that myth perpetuates is not so much a matter of Dzama’s appropriative subjects amid an uncritical backdrop informed by the Group of Seven. It is also not a matter of Maddin’s perspective, and those absented from the history conjured by _My Winnipeg_. Nor is it a question of Dudeck’s appropriation of cultures in crafting a religion. I am not even suggesting that it is individual racism that contributes to this issue. Rather, it is a matter of the context in which these voices are able to stand up as representative of a city’s artistic energy. Instead, what I would like to suggest is that the attention that these artists and their narratives have received remains indicative of a greater unwillingness to reckon with the white settler political imaginary and the truths that lie beneath the myths, which scaffolds the city in its current form. While the redistribution of opportunity and resources and recognition of Indigenous brilliance can support change, it is also apparent that broader societal reckonings are needed to bring into perspective the ways in which contemporary artistic networks mirror societal norms, and how societal norms in turn also permeate the art world’s priorities.

<br>
<br>
_The author acknowledges and thanks Julian Haladyn for his feedback on an early draft._


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Critique

Relational Colonialism

Indigenous

Suzanne Morrissette probes the stakes of what is called myth in contemporary art-making: where settler imaginaries render Indigenous and other cultural knowledges as “untruths.” Moving through Winnipeg mythologies, historical amnesia, and Roland Barthes ‘s ideas of how myths are naturalized, Morrissette lays bare the unchecked framing of fiction and fact, the fantastical and lived reality.

MYTH, TODAY

Review

Isha Musampa is interested in how curation can act as a bridge between cultural nuance and market reality. Holding a Master’s in marketing communications from Westminster University and a Bachelor’s in political science from Concordia University, her writing has explored themes such as the restitution of the Benin Bronzes for _Art-icle_, the editorial arm of Connect Art. She has advised the Jara-Michel Collection of Haitian popular art and the Saint-Soleil movement. She guides her clients toward acquisitions that preserve cultural heritage while engaging with contemporary discourse.

>**_C Magazine_ congratulates Isha Musampa, winner of the 2025 C New Critics Award, held annually to support the work of promising new writers. We also extend honourable mentions to Amanda Blake and Madison Beale for their critical texts, and thank all participants as well as this year’s jury: Christina Battle, Dr. Andrew Gayed, and _C_ editor Joy Xiang.**

At the heart of “The past tense is always longer,” curated by Anaïs Castro, lies a quiet but potent proposition: that memory is not merely stored in the mind but impressed upon the world, encoded in wood, metal, and fibre. The exhibition seeps into the layered history of the Grand Quay, occupying the port-side space in an uncanny manner. Artworks unsettle stillness like breath caught in a cold room. A reminder that memory binds identity before splintering into forms shaped by perception.

Drawing from Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation—speculative storytelling that attends to archival gaps—Castro gathers artists whose materials speak where records fall silent. In a conversation we had after the show, Anaïs Castro compared the method to restoration: “The objective cannot be to take the voice of the artist, but to reinstate its intention.” Here, matter speaks in place of the body; the imprint of memory on physicality is often more eloquent than its psychic fragment. Each work defines what it means to remember, when the archive is partial and the loss is intimate. The essayist Elaine Scarry once wrote in her text _The Body in Pain_ (1985) that “the human body is the original site
of pain, and thus the original site of meaning-making.” Memory here doesn’t settle; it accumulates in dust, in gesture, in what is whispered or withheld.

The exhibition greets visitors before they even step inside. A large window and stream of natural light guide the gaze like a current moving through water. What strikes me first is the space between artworks: generous, charged. They seem to rise from fertile ground. There’s an outer and inner perimeter, a pulse moving through the gallery. On the outer edge, visitors and artists gather, echoing a centuries-old tradition of meeting at the river’s mouth. As Dionne Brand reflects in _A Map to the
Door of No Return_ (2002), memory moves like weather—shifting, returning, obscuring. This gathering performs that very movement. The outer perimeter begins with Kyle Alden Martens’s _Long Knots_ (2025), which appears as a curtain of dark leather arms that end in childlike hands, predicting the exhibition’s intimacy. The weight of the hanging arms conceals the softness of its materials. Nearby, a pair of marble slip-ons invites visitors to remove their shoes—a gesture at once absurd and ritualistic and in my view a metaphor for queerness as both threshold
and sanctuary.

Berirouche Feddal’s _Les Veilleuses / The Watchers / Thafthilin_ (2025) loops directly to the exhibition’s opening question. Three coral-hued kardoune ribbons, used to straighten hair, hang suspended, each knotted with henna-dyed strands. They watch from behind Nadia Belerique’s _Holdings_ (2020–ongoing), swaying softly like memories scented by wind. The warmth in each loop suggests memory not told, but threaded through care and intimacy. Belerique sharpens this interplay; _Holdings_ inherits meaning from the shipments between the Azores and Canada. A pyramid of white plastic barrels reveals photographs, objects, and clothing inside, their circular openings closed off with coloured glass that
both conceals and exposes the contents. What appears playful reveals its rigour: mirrored contents and opaque textures deny penetration. Memory becomes a series of glimpses, distortions, fragments held in suspension. Across the wall, Michaëlle Sergile’s sculptural tapestry _Carrefour, kafou, crossroad_ (2025) echoes like a worn VHS tape. Known for her archive-driven practice, Sergile weaves not to explain history, but to mark it. She resists erasure, pursuing presence over legibility.

Inside the inner perimeter, things turn illusionary. The tether between fantasy and memory has long healed and divided. The artists do not tame that space—they inhabit it. An L-shaped wall draws the visitor in, veiling what lies behind. Turning the corner, Sheilah ReStack’s _Tether_ (2022) offers domestic scenes. A cartoonish pump shoe catches the eye—familiar but uncanny. In her work, the memento of touch becomes architecture. Her compositions echo how memory lives in the body: held in fabrics and illusions, the corners of rooms. Even in works without fabric, textile lingers. Ingrid Syage Tremblay’s _Le paysage à mes pieds (The Landscape at My Feet)_ (2024) assembles wooden sculptures that resemble fossilized folds. Their grain reads like a line of poetry etched by
grief or breath. These are infrastructures of memory. Wood on wood. Which part is sculpture? Which part of the wall? The layering unsettles perception—a trick of the mind, a joke played by memory.

Where Tremblay’s work fractures perception through illusion, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill’s _Laundry_ (2025) grounds memory in residue of the land. Hill crafts assemblages from tobacco-infused Crisco, pigment, paper, dried flowers, and blackberries. Each surface glistens—with evidence of land, care, offerings half-consumed. In Canada’s early colonial economy, tobacco was currency; here it is testimony. Hill’s materials remember the land not as backdrop, but as accomplice. Even colour remembers.

If textile carries tenderness, and wood provides structure, then metal arrives as resistance. Lotus L. Kang’s copper mesh bowls oxidize over time, breathing with the room. Even in the partial presentation of _Mother_ (2021), the work flows with ritual. Each vessel recalls purification, maybe confession. Castro places them at the end, as if to cleanse. Metal here is not armature but skin—blistering, vulnerable. In _Doris_ (2024), Jeneen Frei Njootli transforms steel and epoxy into something intimate. The dark surface bears the imprint of cloth, a shimmer where contact occurred. Njootli allows matter to breathe and collide. Steel becomes a shield for memory, glinting softly with what was once held close, then released.

Across the exhibition, works do not explain the past—they inhabit its textures. Textile breathes. Wood absorbs. Metal maintains. “The past tense is always longer” resists conclusion. In a time when memory is demanded to serve as proof or closure, this exhibition holds space for what flickers in between: the warmth in a knot of hair, the strain in a bent form, the rust in a quiet frame. Memory, it suggests, is not what we carry—but what carries us.

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“The past tense is always longer” ran from 11 April to 13 April 2025 at the Plural Contemporary Art Fair at The Pavilion, Grand Quay of the Port of Montreal. Curated by Anaïs Castro.


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“The past tense is always longer” — Nadia Belerique, Myriam Dion, Joyce Joumaa, Lotus L. Kang, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Berirouche Feddal, Kyle Alden Martens, Jeneen Frei Njootli, Sheilah ReStack, Michaëlle Sergile, Ingrid Syage Tremblay

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In November 2024, Chipo Chipaziwa debuted her performance _Slipping Into Slipping Away_ (2024–ongoing) during the launch for her first artist book _My Mother, My Home_ (2024) at Western Front. These works together present a dialectic between the presence and absence of the body, rooted in strategies of citation and archival agency, which Chipaziwa grapples with in her larger performance practice.

Through deep personal reflections and tactical censorship, Chipaziwa questions the boundaries of legibility in both physical and psychic space. _My Mother, My Home_ archives Chipaziwa’s practice while avoiding bodily representation, instead centring community accounts as primary documentation. For _Slipping Into Slipping Away_, Chipaziwa (re)searched for Black artists in Western Front’s records, and simultaneously developed a series of gestural scores from observations during her weekly gallery-sitting shifts. Reflecting common physical actions in the space, Chipaziwa stretched their duration
and warped their rhythms. Viewers sought references among her restricted and exaggerated repetitions, like pulling a cadence of walking from the motion of stepping on
a garbage-bin foot pedal. In this abridged version of our conversation, we speak about Chipaziwa’s conduits of citation that also serve as ways to locate the self, further echoed through presentations of this work across Canada (Plug In ICA, Art Metropole, DARE-DARE) and European sites (SixtyEight at Det Lilla Rum, Copenhagen; rile*books, Brussels; Index, Stockholm; Hopscotch Reading Room, Berlin; San Serriffe, Amsterdam; and REFERENCE. POINT, London) in 2025.

>**Yasmine Whaley-Kalaora: We’ve spoken about how _My Mother, My Home_ began out of a mentorship with Denise Ferreira da Silva as an experiment to both introduce writing into your practice and explore how this record might be an alternative to lens-based documentation for performance art. Can you expand on how the book came to be?**

**Chipo Chipaziwa:** I had completed my undergrad degree at UBC in 2019, and I started to crave mentorship outside of the constructs of a university model. At the time, I didn’t have any Black female instructors at UBC, so I found that I was making art from a place of exploring pain and trauma rather than from joy and levity. I knew I wanted to work with Ferreira da Silva after reading her _e-flux_ article “1 (life) ÷ 0 (blackness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞
/ ∞: On Matter Beyond the Equation of Value.” [^1] I was in awe of how she wrote, how what she proposed led me to think in new and expansive ways, and the responses it conjured from my body. The act of writing eliciting a response from the body was a new challenge for me. So, I approached her to work together, and through a series of successful grants, we ended up writing _My Mother, My Home_.

Given how the gaze of the camera can be perceived as both imperialist and capitalist, I wanted to use the book format to exemplify an alternative, perhaps a more cohesive, understanding of how performance art can be archived. I was thinking about how this book can go on to exist independent of my physical presence. I really wanted to work with a group of people whom I could trust to speak on behalf of my practice, to visually present me whether it be through the paintings, prints, drawings, and book design, or to complete various rounds of editing up until the last second. In the end, it became a collective effort to see whether I can archive my performances with/in the absence of my physical body.
And to be quite frank, I am not so interested in that answer anymore as perhaps better questions have arisen.

For the title, I was reading Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Jacques Derrida—and there’s a section in Derrida’s Archive Fever (1995) where one of the various ways he defines _en mal d’archive_ is “an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement.” [^2]  Still having this in mind, I wondered if a womb could be one’s first home, one’s first archive.

>**YW-K: Your writing style is quite personal, a self-reflection in (and on) the first person—the form feels akin to some of the embodied performance-art practices we learned while studying under Guadalupe Martinez at UBC and, later, with artists like Luciana Freire D'Anunciação while performing in CUERPO, Martinez’s collective. Yet, your process
is not one of full disclosure, but of self-editing through revisitation, revision, redaction. How did you come to this approach that both platforms and restricts readers’ access to you and your work? Especially in relation to performance, in which your body is the main medium, was there a dialogue between the two practices?**

**CC:** I landed on this approach because I wanted to reconsider what it means to write for the sake of writing, as a way of preserving myselves: the past, present, and future versions of Chipo. But then, you know, I realize my eyes won’t be the only eyes. The question came up of how I can be vulnerable with those who engage with my practice, but still keep their engagement at a distance, and that’s still a through line for me.

And absolutely there is a connection between the two. Ultimately, what I want my performances to do is translate and contextualize my observations. In that sense, performances conduct bodily translations whereas writings demystify gestures—they go hand in hand.

>**YW-K: Ferreira da Silva poses a beautiful question in her “Afterword” in the book: “[W]hat becomes of the writing of a person, and as such a personal writing, when the sole function of the ‘I’ that drives the text is to absent (Itself!) that which it is about?” [^3] There’s a tension between revelling in and (re)locating the self in this work, between the personal writing style and the restriction of bodily representation. What compelled you to put the “I” in tension?**

**CC:** The driving force was ultimately my interest in pushing what constitutes a memory. I have a difficult time recalling the past because it’s not a constant thing—it presents itself as quite fluid. In my opinion, the act of remembering is an elusive process, and a photo-based reconjuring of a performance would be an antithesis to that.

_My Mother, My Home_ is all about re-counting, retracing, recording, reprocess-ing—with the prefix re-, there’s a strong suggestion that I am doing something again to try and grasp what I did the first time. But perhaps what I am really asking those around me is: “Did you see that, did you see what I just did there? I did it alone the first time, could you accompany me this time around?” Sharing that responsibility of witnessing, holding a moment that is otherwise heavy or difficult to hold alone.

>**YW-K: Beautiful, re- as an invitation for accompaniment. In parts of the book, your self-reflections—journaling after a performance or rewriting/redacting old writings, [^4] “reliving” past performances [^5]—in tandem with other artists’ reflections makes space for non-linear methods of becoming and the embrace of a continuous subject. Is there a relationship between performing, archiving, and a kind of self-location in your practice?**

**CC:** I think so, I mean I view performing as a way to place myself in relation to external/internal stimuli. I then consider archiving as a means of holding that relationship, without having to totally dissect it. From that point, I am then curious about how this re- work can become a sort of self-locating. In that sense, the archiving of the performance and the performance itself aren’t mutually exclusive—they’re connected to one another, interwoven.

>**YW-K: I currently work with arts and performance-art archives, and I think about this a lot, when a medium is so situated or circumstance dependent. It becomes less about “capturing” the work and more about offering entry points for activation and remembering.
And, if a body is also an archive that encounters others’ living bodies daily—in a lot of ways, you’re acting as a conduit during a live work, a contact zone for your own embodied landscape and those of the viewers.**

>**This citational conduit runs through your work, like the piece from the book, “Chipo Suthani Joanne Chipaziwa Is a Performance Artist”—where half the text consists of footnotes that expand on each of your names and how you came to performance art as a medium that allows you to work with and through your personhood. [^6] In _Slipping Into Slipping Away_, I felt your movements and scores were imbued with the wide breadth of citations from your archival and observational research. What was that research like?**

**CC:** At the very beginning of my residency at Western Front, I was looking through their archive with the preliminary question: how many Black artists have presented work at Western Front since it was founded in 1973? I consulted their chronological and alphabetized record of everyone who has ever presented there and went down this layered and fraught rabbit hole as I began cross-referencing names in an attempt to determine identity with limited information —often just a name, a year, and a title.

Feelings of discomfort started to form as deeper questions about the politics of classification arose: who gets to decide how artists are identified in an archive? Is it ethical for me to categorize artists based on their race? What does it mean to search for Blackness through institutional records that weren’t built with self-identification in mind?

I can only speak on my own experiences, but I also found myself in this grey area, asking what do I consider to be signifiers of Blackness? Are those signifiers present within my own self, and what happens if my understanding of Blackness is different from someone else’s
—does that negate my own experience of being Black?

I am aware that there is quite a bit of discourse about how being Black is not a singular experience, but what if my own lived experience of being Black still didn’t fit within the agreed polylith of Blackness?

I also considered looking for signifiers of Blackness in the metadata itself, but even that approach felt speculative. I sort of had to admit defeat as the whole process took almost four months, and I struggled with the discomfort of possibly overlooking someone. I kept on thinking, “Sorry I missed you. I tried to find you.” But upon further reflection, perhaps what I really meant to say is “Sorry I missed you, I did try to locate and acknowledge you.”

>**YW-K: How did that fold together with your observational research for _Slipping Into Slipping Away_?**

**CC:** The observational research showed me that the archive doesn’t have to have a capital A—it can be in other spaces beyond a physical library, textbook, or computer screen. The archive can include encounters that take place in everyday life—it’s actually quite porous.

The question of where the movement vocabulary for this new performance would come from became really daunting. My mentors encouraged me to look at what was happening in Western Front’s foyer as a source of material. The interactions I was having as a gallery attendant sort of became a meditation on the visible and invisible labour that an art worker has to take on to serve the visiting public. That got me thinking about the archivist’s labour in serving the archived, and the performer’s labour in serving the audience.

Once I took note of what was at stake, composing the performance became really fun and exciting—what would it do to take the action of removing one’s coat, but carry that out with my back toward the audience? What would it do to take that movement of a patron pointing to their name on a guest list, and raise that pointing gesture toward various bodies
and objects in a space?

What was surreal was that when I performed the work three nights in a row, the work landed differently every time. The first night felt comedic, the second night felt emotionally charged, and the third night felt like a warm embrace.

>**YW-K: _Slipping Into Slipping Away_ was imbued with a fine attention to visible, semi-visible, and invisible gestures and labours, which lent itself to a kind of live archiving including those who have passed through Western Front. Since the initial performances and book launch, you’ve been travelling the works across Canada, and internationally this fall. Has the change of location affected the scores?**

**CC:** Yes, and no. Since the work was developed with Western Front in mind,
its entire sequence of gestures remains true to its original form. There are still 10 acts of the piece, but I have adapted them to the different realities of each location. For instance, the first act is an exploration of how the worker opens up that space, and so I have had conversations with each person about what their opening routines consist of. The second
act is a tracing of the common pathways taken in each location, and so that always changes.

>**YW-K: As we were going back and forth during this conversation, our mutual friend asked, if _My Mother, My Home_ and _Slipping Into Slipping Away_ offer a dialectic, what is the synthesis? I wonder if the synthesis comes from the re- work, the rewriting in the book and physical repetition, both during and of the performance in other places?**

**CC:** I actually think that the synthesis is to stop navel-gazing so much—haha! But in all seriousness, I did learn that there are so many relations waiting to be drawn upon around me. I don’t have to go looking very far. Even with the title, the word “slip” first clearly presented itself during a session with my psychoanalyst, and it stayed with me since. But yet slip means to “go quickly,” right, and that kind of movement feels familiar to my upbringing—I moved to a different country every couple of years, I quite literally slipped across the world.

If I, Chipo, am accustomed to being in slippage—never quite fixed in one place, always a bit slippery—then maybe the synthesis lies in learning how to be an observant visitor.

[^1]: Denise Ferreira da Silva, “1 (life) ÷ 0 (blackness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞ / ∞: On Matter Beyond the Equation of Value,” _e-flux Journal_, February 2017, https://www.e-flux.com/ journal/79/94686/1-life-0-blackness-or-on-matter-beyond-the-equation-of-value

[^2]: Jacques Derrida, _Archive Fever_ (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 91.

[^3]: Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Afterword,” in _My Mother, My Home_ (Berlin: Archive Books, 2024), 86.

[^4]: Chipo Chipaziwa, “Reconsidering, ‘Chipo Chipaziwa’s Artist Statement’ (2019),” in _My Mother, My Home_, 25–28.

[^5]: Chipo Chipaziwa, “Reliving ‘Notes on Beauty’ (2022),” in _My Mother, My Home_, 41–44.

[^6]: Chipo Chipaziwa, “Chipo Suthani Joanne Chipaziwa Is a Performance Artist,” in _My Mother, My Home_, 19.

C162_WHALEY-KALAORA.jpg

Yasmine Whaley-Kalaora and Chipo Chipaziwa speak about Chipaziw’'s “conduits of citation” that document the artist's performance practice with/in the absence of her physical body, including through collaborators’ writing. They explore how the self is in tension with its own representation, and what it might mean to share the responsibility of witnessing.

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