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Western Front

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Mercer Union 1

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New Gallery

Mercer Union 2

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

Editor

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

Associate Editor

Publisher

Designer

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

Mirror Mirror

Review

Ella den Elzen is an artist and curator based in New York. She was a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2023–2024.


Produced between 2023 and 2024, the majority of works within Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill’s “M∗∗∗∗∗” employ found materials ranging from the keratinous to the botanical to the industrially produced, in order to explore notions of value, labour, extraction, and production—ongoing interests within the artist’s practice. My first sense to be stimulated upon entering the exhibition was scent —specifically the saccharine smell of rotting strawberries hanging from a structure of skeletal, disassembled umbrellas. As sculptures, _Site Parasite Dice Paradise_ and _Octom∗∗_ (both 2023) conjure notions of spawning through rhizomatic wire structures that branch repeatedly, with each arm holding a mobile of strawberries and found magazine clippings. This ready-made imagery, specifically consisting of photographs of fish eggs, tentacles, and the face of Nadya Suleman (an American woman who became famous in the media for being pregnant with octuplets, birthing them in 2009), conflates concepts of pregnancy with the parasitic and parasocial. Hill’s interest in the figure of the octopus is significant conceptually; the octopus, after all, only produces a child once in her life, subsequently dying after giving birth. Suleman’s image connotes notions of both social and physical injury, as her fame emerged alongside the public ridicule and scrutiny cast by her pregnancy.

Placed in conversation with the sculpture are a series of works on silk tissue, hand-dyed in blackberry ink. _Curtains and Fadeout_ (both 2023) are overlaid with pencil drawing and collaged xeroxed photographs of parasites, open-mouthed organisms, spores, and eggs. At first glance, I think the small clippings might be berries, but upon closer inspection, I am struck by how abject the found imagery is. The scans merge suckling with sucking, hinting at ideas of postpartum physical and psychological depletion. Fleshy and viscous collaged clippings are made more unsettling through the olfactory experience of moving through the exhibition space. The discomfort this produces intentionally speaks to larger parasitic structures of colonialism. In the accompanying exhibition text, Tania Willard writes: “Himalayan blackberries are one of the most invasive and widespread plants in the Vancouver area, in xwməθkwəyə̓m, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ territories. Some naturalize, some continue to threaten native species.” For Hill, who is of Cree and English heritage, the blackberry ink as material holds multiple potential meanings, gesturing both to the specificity of her own autobiography and to the larger context in which she grew up. In a 2023 profile for the Sobey Art Award, Hill asks, “What circumstances brought blackberries here? Because they are from England, they were an invasive plant that came here with British people, but they are also a plant I used growing up. Me, my mom, my kokum, my brothers and my dad, we would go berry picking. And that was something my grandmother had grown up doing and passed down to us.” 

This relationship to the land contrasts the private property and dispossession central to the formation of what is now known as British Columbia, the homeland of the xwməθkwəyə̓m, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Nations where Hill currently lives. Notably, this was where Joseph Trutch served as the first lieutenant governor of British Columbia, after a career as a land surveyor and chief commissioner of land and works in the newly formed colony. His hostile and genocidal policies, such as a memorandum he issued in 1870, denied Indigenous presence on the land by asserting that settlers were entitled to the territory through their “productive” use of land—policies that continue to impact Indigenous land claims today. To Trutch, Indigenous peoples’ relationship to the land did not fall under a British conceptualization of property use. Hill challenges this legal paradigm of property through the evocation of blackberry ink—a trace that is embedded with forms of embodied and ancestral knowledge, and an assertion that berry picking is a kind of land use. These works on paper are part of a larger series of works including _Out of Time_ (2023), _Echo Body (2023), Shadow_ (2024), and _Project_ (2024), which integrate repetitious burn marks, 16mm splicing tape, hair, hair ash, and glue into their material vocabulary. Hill conjures notions of the corporeal and decay, using debris-like materials that are deigned to be of little value, conversely supported by silk tissue substrate. Silk, a precious fabric, is produced by moth larvae who are also killed in the process of the material’s making, further hinting at the cyclical processes of birth, hatching, and death.

In particular, the 16mm splicing tape as material is also used in the artist’s eponymous two-channel video work, _M∗∗∗∗∗_ (2023), the most evocative work within the space of the exhibition. Created by repeatedly burning holes and layering hair over 16mm tape, Hill produces a diptych of imageless video works. Abstracted through this process of enlargement and projection, the burns and hair can be read as moving drawings. The images themselves almost look like organic cells under a microscope, recursively appearing in the projection. Each tape is played through a 16mm projector placed atop a stack of institutional chairs, resting upon four running shoes at the corners of the chair legs. Hill often incorporates pieces of her own clothing in her sculptures, such as in _Counterblaste_ (2021), an earlier work gesturing to sustenance. Here, the presence of these personal articles animates the assembled materials. The projection machines are devices for infinite production and self-replication, yet the forms of extraction she references feel more sinister than those in Hill’s previous work. In particular, the absence of a camera refutes the extractive legacy of image making. Photographs, alongside maps and surveys, enabled the circulation of imagery of “uninhabited” land ready to be delineated into parcels and settled.
 
Hill combines her own autobiography with familial and colonial histories to interrogate the forms of extraction that occur throughout processes of artistic labour. In censoring a word associated with birthing and caring for children from the title of the exhibition, Hill contextualizes this subjecthood—“Mother”—as one that remains entirely unuttered, especially within the context of the art world, and one’s career. This is perhaps the most direct understanding that the title suggests, although the diverse constellation of materials and media that Hill engages allows for a porous set of interpretations to emerge, prompting one to consider: how much is one willing to give and to give up, for the sake of production?

Writer

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“M∗∗∗∗∗” ran from 6 July to 31 August 2024 at Mercer Union, Toronto.

“M∗∗∗∗∗” — Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill

Feature

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.

The following is an edited conversation with the filmmaker and writer Tiffany Sia, whose short film _The Sojourn_ (2024) had its Canadian première at this year's Toronto International Film Festival, as a part of the “Wavelengths” program. Our conversation considers Hong Kong cinema’s relationship to resistance, history, and place in and through the experience of exile—themes Sia explores in her most recent book, _On and Off-Screen Imaginaries_ (2024).

> **Joshua Segun-Lean:** In “Phantasms of Dissent,” the second essay in your recent book _On and Off-Screen Imaginaries_, you discuss two films by the Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers— a filmmaking collective that has stayed anonymous since 2019, in resistance to the Chinese government’s censorship. These two films, _Inside the Red Brick Wall_ (2020) and _Taking Back the Legislature_ (2020), document the 2019 Hong Kong protests. In your analysis, you emphasize the affective and somatic dimensions of the protests, highlighting the moment when the sense of collective power generated by occupying The Hong Kong Polytechnic University—as seen in _Inside the Red Brick Wall_—becomes one of collective vulnerability, as protesters suspect that they’re being trapped. I’ve been thinking about this scene in relation to political theorist Hagar Kotef’s writing on the relationship between mobility and political spaces—specifically how “the moving individual body often serves as a metaphor, a symbol, and a substitute for the body politic.” [^1]

**Tiffany Sia:** “Phantasms of Dissent” points less to the body as a collective symbol, representative of a nation or ethnic identity, and more to how bodies become animated by the spirit of politics and History (with a big H), through their spatial relations to state power. It is what these bodies do and where they are. It is in halls of governance and legislative spaces where sovereignty expresses its power through ritual, pageantry, and performance, and how the protest attempts to derive its power by taking back such architecture, interrupting public order and radically deforming state rituals. In describing this, I am referencing the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who, in _The Invention of Tradition_ (1983), writes about how so much of revolution, in its inversion of political pageantry, is itself part of the political ritual of state power.

In _Taking Back the Legislature_—as protesters occupied Hong Kong’s Legislative Council Complex—these spatial relations are extended virtually, captured on camera and circulated to a live audience. Similarly, in _Inside the Red Brick Wall_, images of dissent become powerful sites of public memory. Yet, as you mentioned, a fundamental paradox takes place—one that is perhaps inherent to postcolonial history and its deadlocked futures. Even in taking back these legislative halls and other spaces of state power, after arriving at a necessary and hard-fought turning point, the group is left to question, “What now in a place like this?” They realize they are trapped. These same halls—and the fortress of the university campus—hold colonial legacies and become the very architecture that ensnares them into the asphyxiating embrace of a police kettle. While such acts enter a repertoire of revolution, the protesters’ siege is used against them.

Remaining masked and anonymous, the Hong Kong protesters appear as a phantasmic, collective protagonist. When captured on video, their “porousness” (to use Marshall McLuhan’s term for thinking about the mediated body in the digital age) only heightens their vulnerability, as evidenced in the risk of revealed faces, and the broader concern over the films’ circulation under the gaze of the surveillance state. These images live on to haunt their subjects. What lives on in state narratives co-opts and perverts their legacy.

The theme of revolution at the heart of state rituals reveals the construction of national memory. As policies and lawfare globally target dissent and repress social movements, national anthems like those of the US and China are paradoxically premised on revolutionary change and civic engagement from the battlefield to the streets. Such restless pasts are not easily put to rest. If revolution is cyclical, perhaps it mainly returns in an attempt to resolve itself over and over again. Put differently, revolution’s indeterminacy, its history of failure, lull, retreat, creates the conditions for its recurrence.

> **JS:** Further on in your book, your interest in how revolutionary pasts become foundational to state narratives is worked through cinema’s own relationship to pastness—to the encumbrances and escapes nostalgia makes possible—as well as cinema’s often complex relationship with the state. But you also show how, specifically in the context of contemporary Hong Kong cinema, both the past and the state as seemingly stable phenomena are brought closer to, and complicated by, “minor” histories. These histories, marked by synthesis, diffusion, and impermanence, reveal “aftermaths and recollections that cannot be put to rest.” [^2] To what extent are these residues a function of, on the one hand, the desire to mourn Hong Kong (as you explore in your 2019 publication _Salty Wet_) and, on the other, the inability to locate the exact moment in which Hong Kong, either as abstraction or concrete reality, became an object of loss? You also take up the latter function in your _Too Salty Too Wet_ (2020) publication.

**TS:** Part of this desire to escape from a past-bound, or even object-bound, position is a desire to cease mourning a place as lost, to stop being undone by it all, and to no longer be caught in the dead ends of looking back. Instead, for _On and Off- Screen Imaginaries_, I became interested in what historical events and cinema share: contingency. This contingency forces a reckoning with multiplicity and contradiction, with the unstoppable and complicated flow of events. While this interest may be born from a sense of personal loss, it gestures to broad political realities, and how politics and history are never discretely compartmentalized in how we live them. These shapes of loss appear in one’s personal life or one’s family history, though I do not really go into any of that in my work—save for a few recent exceptions. I will not even touch the personal publicly (at least not until I’m older).

These emotional currents surrounding my work guide their sensibilities and their ethics, but I also don’t think the personal needs to be explicit to properly elucidate its relationship to politics. I think we need to go further than merely accepting the aphorism that the personal is political. We need to demonstrate the different forms this relationship takes. So many of my aesthetic decisions arrive at the modulation of what is shown and what isn’t, but despite this obscuring and exposing, it’s amazing how much certain motifs and feelings are absolutely undeniable, and are felt no matter how hard I might try to stop myself from communicating them. They find their way. They are always informing the stakes of the political, atomizing and shaping our lives in difficult ways. As an artist interested in visual rendition as a kind of historiography, I am interested in tracing what affect accompanies events and histories—this is the most elusive yet perhaps most critical project of rendering historical time in aesthetic form.

Cinema as a context and a form became an interesting way for me to think about the cathection of desire, of politics, and of the personal, as an at-once shared feeling, projected image, and political unconscious. It is on-screen that nostalgia is at its most convenient. Consider, for instance, Hong Kong through its golden age of cinema, which (depending on the generation you ask) spans the distinct eras of the ’80s to ’90s, or the ’60s to ’70s. These periods are the most coherent and cohesive in film—tragically and tantalizingly calcified. Looking back upon them will not change our present, nor will it help us understand that time. In reality, history’s shapes are harder to pin down, and its events elude any single telling. It is as film theorist Bill Nichols— via Fredric Jameson—elaborates regarding the use of re-enactment in documentary and non-fiction filmmaking:

> Questions of magnitude are always questions that run not so much against the grain as beyond it. […] They signal, through hysteria on the one hand and bureaucratic numbness on the other, the radical difference between discursive system (language) and experience, or its aggregation, history. “History is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise. […] History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis.” A magnitude of excess remains. It is a specter haunting what can be said or written. [^3]

There is a tendency to turn to aesthetic forms to rediscover the spirit of a period, as we often do when we look back at Hong Kong cinema’s golden age(s)—or to draw on a more widely known example, French cinema of 1968. We seek, in these, a historiography that fulfils our desire for narrative cohesion. A cohesion that idealizes the past and obscures its continuity in the present. But, as Nichols says, there is a magnitude of excess that remains. It will always resist the tropes ready-made through nostalgia. This is at the very core of my practice and was certainly at the heart of _On and Off-Screen Imaginaries_.

> **JS:** I’m reminded of a few passages early in the book in which you describe the immediate aftermath of the passing of Hong Kong’s National Security Law in 2020. Intended to curtail forms of expression deemed “threatening” by the state, the law creates an increasingly unnerving climate of suspicion and panic among cultural workers, many of whom are your peers. You go on to describe how in order to determine levels of personal exposure to surveillance and criminalization, artists and filmmakers keep tabs on each other, judging their relative safety by the relative safety of others. There is a sense here of how exceptional circumstances sometimes demand new modes of assessing and sharing risk, and of communicating with each other when everyday speech becomes fraught. Strange, portentous gaps appear between what is said and what is understood. Language is displaced by, to return to Nichols, a magnitude of excess. I wonder if this displacement, and perhaps a distrust in what can be conveyed in language and in acts of translation, informed your decision to leave much of the Mandarin in your recent film, _The Sojourn_, without subtitles?

**TS:** Two nights ago, I went to the cinema. Johnnie To was there in person to introduce _Exiled_ (2006), the first film in his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. He spoke in Cantonese and was accompanied by a translator. Upon stepping up to the podium to introduce his films, To said something along the lines of: “These films are a testament to my immense affection and respect for cinema.” I went to the cinema alone, the way I like it. And though it was full, it felt incredibly intimate to share the open secret of a common dialect within an English-language space. In a joke, he alluded to the possibility that there were state informants likely present among the audience that evening. That observation—in its sardonic nuance, at once warning and mocking—went over the heads of most of the New York audience once translated into English.

Something came over me when I heard him speak on-stage in Cantonese—I wept. Accompanying him in the room was this sense of a place that I knew, of a Hong Kong that is either painfully distant to me or does not exist anymore. That notion suddenly felt palpable in the cinema. And it was through language, and his physical presence as one of the most important auteurs of cinema (and especially of Hong Kong cinema), that in that moment, I became overwhelmed.

Despite its title, To’s _Exiled_ is not a political film. But perhaps true to that generation of Hong Kong filmmakers, To speaks volumes through euphemism and allusion. He is also more direct than the peers of his generation (especially when speaking in person). And the decision to open a retrospective of his through a film titled _Exiled_ says more than he could or was able to explain in words on-stage or even on-screen.

I had a similar experience when I watched Chan Tze-woon’s _Blue Island_ (2022) in the same theatre. Tze-woon and I are friends, and when I saw him outside the cinema, I burst into tears and walked away because I couldn’t face him. I don’t cry often! But perhaps in the absence of return, Hong Kong has remained vivid, or perhaps was only ever vivid, in cinema. I feel most connected to it in the cinema.

I grew up in a multi-dialect home, a fact that perhaps marks the “no place”- ness of my family. Besides Cantonese and Mandarin, which I understand, my parents speak Shanghainese and Hokkien but never taught them to me. These were the dialects my parents used to shield their adult secrets. Unlike Mandarin and Cantonese, Shanghainese and Hokkien are colloquial and have no standard written forms. They are alive mostly in sound. Even when these dialects are written with Chinese characters, their distinct patterns can only be approximated, leaving out an excess of meaning that instead persists in the domains of flirting, hustling, clever quips, sarcastic one-liners, whining, or other forms of casual conversation. It is difficult to translate all their tone, humour, and nuance. Dialect, and its ongoing improvisations and customs, resists formal rendition.

_The Sojourn_, in its idiosyncratic subtitling, pushes toward this unknowing and ambiguity. I wanted the viewer to rely on the sound of someone’s voice, to watch for hand movements and small shifts in facial expressions. The English intertitles burned upon the image offer only a translation that emphasizes its own partiality.

> **JS:** Do you think cinema’s capacity to preserve these forms of familial and cultural memory—that are, for many displaced peoples, bound up with vanished or disjointed pasts—is related to its capacity to hold, or conjure, imagined futures? In other words, does cinema have, for you, a utopic quality?

**TS:** It’s so interesting you brought up utopia—this came up in a separate conversation just a week ago. I think the promise of utopia is dangerous, and often about concealment, diversion, and obfuscation. For the diaspora, the draw of the return to the homeland is a constant fantasy: a vessel for belonging, unification, and restoration that is fraught, and whose tacit implications obscure the violence of willing that vision into reality. It’s no coincidence that the fantasy of the homeland is often materialized as an ethnonational political project. This impossibility of return can only realize itself through violent means. Cinema’s utopic quality should also be approached with caution, for different reasons. Sure, it is a place for a kind of collectivity that sutures loss and memory, but these moving images are temporary. They are projected. They remain as light. We can orient ourselves to them, but we do not enter them. This—the tantalizing nearness of film’s utopian promise, its elusive political horizon—is the tragic irony of cinema. Yet, in contrast to nostalgia or utopia, it is the ineffable and the elusive already present in vernacular forms, in dialect, and in everyday life that I am interested in getting closer to.

[^1]: Hagar Kotef, _Movement and the Ordering of Freedom_ (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).
[^2]: Tiffany Sia, _On and Off-Screen Imaginaries_ (New York: Primary Information, 2024), 110.
[^3]: Bill Nichols, _Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary_ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 231.

Speaker

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Memory

Politics

Film

Joshua Segun-Lean and Tiffany Sia discuss a Hong Kong cinema of dissent against the paradox of state narratives that use nostalgic cinema to project revolutionary pasts at the same time as they brutally surveil protestors’ images and bodies in the present. 

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

Yasmina Price a New York–based writer and film curator completing a PhD at Yale University. Her work centers Black Cinema, anti-colonial visual culture, and the experimental practices of women artists.


Even where the earth has been rewritten with the colonizing texts of extraction and ownership, its first poems are still visible. Although reading them requires the work of unearthing, this is not the palimpsest legible to a geologist. In a scene from Cauleen Smith’s new film _The Deep West Assembly_ (2024), a Black woman sits on a shoreline of greyish sand, her legs stretched out, tossing shells or perhaps pebbles at the waves. Loosely dressed as a North American pilgrim, she lists geology’s siblings and cousins—anthropology, archeology, gynecology, ethnography, cinematography, botany, economics, criminology. A chronicle of disciplines, a record of impositions of order. Grounded in the telluric, her new solo exhibition of the same name, curated by Rhea Anastas and Mia Locks, further elasticizes the artist’s mercurial practice, built on touchstones of Afro-diasporic knowledge systems, radical film movements, the inherited communal teachings of Black women, and fabulatory imaginaries. 

The archipelagos of the exhibition include several multi-scalar screening and installation spaces, a banner gallery, a wax room, as well as a verdant cocoon for reading and listening. Here, two walls bear a visual bibliography of book covers, indexing the devotion to study that animates Smith’s practice. The other walls are covered with her wallpaper of jaggedly joyful drawings of the candelabrum tree, titled _The Panadus Matrix_ (2024). Principally found in Liberia, this sculptural plant is currently threatened because of its natural placement on kimberlite rocks, which signal the presence of diamonds, making the plant collateral damage to mercenary mining. Jamaican writer and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter informs Smith’s aesthetic challenges to Western humanism, indicting its allied redesignation of nature as the plundered object of capital. As a space, the cushy couches in the study room have the feeling of a summons to collectively participate in the instruction laid out in the title of one of Wynter’s essays, “We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk About a Little Culture: Reflections on West Indian Writing and Criticism” (1968). An urgent call for relational cultural work is interwoven with the show’s ecological concerns. Smith is careful to not lay claim to inventing new ways to expose colonial violations of the Earth. Instead, she approaches slowly, with curiosity and an understanding that these are occasions to join already rooted efforts, not reinvent them. An essential dimension of the exhibition was a series of public programs and collaborations with Black women culture workers already based in Norway, such as the notable contributions of Ayesha Jordan, reflected in the leafy room of book covers and records. 

As the artist explained at the Oslo opening, the “Deep West” of the title was drawn from the writings of a guiding compass, the late undaunted, bluesy poet of Black Los Angeles, Wanda Coleman. Under this banner, the exhibition articulates a California constructed through the same logics as the South, unearthing the reality of settler-colonial empire barely concealed under the nominal veneer “United States of America.” The delinking of the purportedly liberal, emancipatory regions of the Californian west (and for that matter, the Northeast) from southern areas branded as the unique sites of enslavement and horrors relegated to the past conveniently functions to limit contemporary understandings of their fundamental interdependence. The westward expansion that created California converged the ideological architecture of manifest destiny and the ongoing genocides of Indigenous peoples with the conjugations of labour, finance, and warmongering—all of these, of course, imbricated with plantation economies in the southern states. This rhetorical reassembly bridges the West Coast and Deep South to expose the co-constructed foundational violences that are strategically disavowed in the liberal myth of an exceptional democracy. Smith enters the scene of a covered-up crime to show how it came to be. 

A volcanic element that has been iterated through her more recent work reappears in the objects of “The Deep West Assembly,” with banners and sculptural elements calling on eruptions that are not only a tear in the Earth but an interruption in anthropocentric time. Although it is the most subdued part of the show, the wax room features _NONCONFORMITY 1–5_ (2024), a serialized set of five cake-like rectangular landscapes whose sides reveal their multicoloured layers, dotted with burning tea lights that supply an additional sensorial, olfactory experience. With their jewel-bright colours, tassels, and dimensional cursive writing, the banners in the adjacent space might most evidently carry Smith’s aesthetic signature. Communicating a range of tones, the textile statements here are sweetly tricky (“your rock my world”), lucid or accusatory (“your past made my future”), intentionally citational (“...we must become a menace to our enemies,” from June Jordan), or unsettling or encouraging (“you survived”), mobilizing a tenor of militancy with poetic flair. 

A prosthetic space reached via a walkway houses the new video work that titles the exhibition. The aforementioned Black woman in pilgrim guise, actor Dionne Audain, is the main figure in _The Deep West Assembly_, an MC, narrator, and performer in a theatre of temporal crossings, unevenly imperiled life, and refusals to comply. Formally, the video unravels a pluralistic spool of landscapes and timescapes—painted backdrops of a land violently transferred from Indigenous caretakers to colonizing landowners; 16mm footage of two Black femmes holding a banner inscribed with “BLACK STUDIES IS EARTH STUDIES” in front of the once slave market now federal courthouse of Los Angeles; photographs of geological phenomena; the ecstatic formations of a room of Black people doing the electric slide; fiery footage conjuring the rebellions of summer 2020, which includes a glimpse of a protestor’s keffiyeh creating a thematic link to the two large flags at the entrance of the show. This duo of welcoming sentinels, piercingly titled _The Limits of Hospitality_ (2023) and _Swallowtail Seven Never Surrenders_ (2023), chromatically and symbolically index the history and present of Black-Palestinian liberatory kinship. 

As is often the case in Smith’s moving-image creations, the video’s script is a rich, polyvocal intertext, citing Black thinkers from W. E. B. Du Bois to Katherine McKittrick, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Orlando Patterson. The call of Black Study diagnoses and seeks to see beyond the terms of a world order shaped by the interlinkages of white supremacy, coloniality, and empire. With _The Deep West Assembly_, Smith considers an alternative global choreography through an older clock than theirs, a buried geological time. The video ends with a long stretch of darkness, timed to the arc of Nina Simone’s “22nd Century” (1971), beautifully and unbearably prescient: 

There is no oxygen in the air 
Men and women have lost their hair 
Ashen faces, legs that stand 
Ghost and goblins walk in this land 
When tomorrow becomes yesterday 
And tomorrow becomes eternity.

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“The Deep West Assembly” ran from 14 June to 15 September 2024 at the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo.


“The Deep West Assembly” — Cauleen Smith

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).

###### Dear Nasrin,

In prose and verses, I began writing to you, grieving from the shoreside of Harling Point and Haro Strait on Vancouver Island, petrified about the impossibility of returning. Behind me sits a graveyard turned heritage site; the graves and I, all facing the waterway that brought my ancestors to this land from the other side of the Pacific. From the swamps of the provincial archives, I learned that in colonial regimes, the reality of displacement and dispossession has not disappeared, even in death: the bones and ashes in the cemetery initially migrated from another cemetery in Ross Bay, which uprooted Indigenous, Black, Mongolian, and Chinese graves to make room for more, mainly white, graves. The remains were dug up, with bones left in plain sight, unattended, with seasonal currents washing ashore, eroding parts of the cemetery, carrying the ashes and bones into the sea. To avoid continual desecration, the remaining Chinese bones were dug up from the Ross Bay Cemetery and transferred to the cemetery at Harling Point after 1909. The vacant site can still be seen today from Ross Bay.

Graves are channels to attend to our ancestors’ work, with vitalities and spiritual bonds that cross generational ties through rituals of mourning. Like angels of history that flap their wings, each grave, when well attended to, becomes a rearview mirror that carries the weight of history while we move forward. Beneath the rubble of coloniality, it seems that the lost graves only gain their spectre through a stroll among swamps of archives. The unending replicas of textual materials, photographs, and distributed film reels have become reminders of the impossible return of the lost graves, bones, ashes, rituals, and bonds that will forever be carried through the oceanic currents and seasonal winds, with nowhere to land… I can’t help but think of whether, in the enduring struggle to return, there can be alternative channels of mourning and strategies of relationality that emerge to contest the colonial regime’s perpetual impulse to choreograph our life cycles?

> Each desecrated grave is a bond broken.
> Each desecrated body is a bond broken.
> The archive is cruel,
> an exhausting stroll,
> moving from one grave to another.

Eduardo Cadava describes photography, or in some ways, the nature of archives, as a mode of bereavement that speaks to us of mortification. He interprets the process of eternal return as a celestial graveyard, reflecting on the ways in which technological reproducibility had turned history into a mass-(re)produced event. The fragments of each circulated photograph are like stars and meteorites shot from the universe’s birth, as replicas of (the moment of) dying. Photographs and archives possess a certain cruelty that makes our sky a celestial cemetery that requires the eternal work of mourning. Every passing image disperses time and space in an infinite collision that sheds light on the impossible return of the passing, perpetuated through the replication of fidelitous documentation of loss:

> The world of the eternal return is a world that incessantly fixes and returns to the event of a vanishing, and what vanishes in this return is not only the finite subject matter before the cosmic camera in which the world begins but the possibility of returning itself. A return without return… [^1]

I recently came across Taysir Batniji’s photobook _Disruptions_ (2024), a collection of over 86 screenshots from 2015 to 2017 of WhatsApp video calls with his mother and family in Gaza. The screenshots are all disrupted signals that turn moments of intimacy into complete abstraction, with each heightened pixelation revealing the materiality of exile and the reality of occupation and genocide that seeps into the everyday. The work, at least for me, is also an invitation to reflect on our attachment to the fidelity of visual representation and the reliance on accurate portrayal of violence to garner solidarity in moments of conflict. The body of work is almost an active refusal of transparency, yet it speaks more about the precarity of occupation that rids kin. Aruna D’Souza, in her most recent book, _Imperfect Solidarities_, warns us about the destructiveness of empathy as passivity. To me, it is an uncanny danger that images of fidelity evoke, which turns us into passive voyeurs of violence until our need to understand and relate to others’ pain is satisfied. [^2] In the media outlets, almost every image of Gaza, of the occupation and unfolding genocide, forms a fidelitous archive of death, a celestial graveyard that builds on the eternal return of displacement and dispossession. Batniji’s works require acts of activation and ask for attentiveness and reaching in for us to understand the context that perpetuates the abstraction of violence.

> We live inside a celestial grave,
> One image atop another.
> Yet, we mourn, reflexively.

What is the texture of relation that we form as light, as stars? When we reinterpret the night sky as constellations of perpetual becoming, we begin to transform a celestial graveyard of reflexive mourning into a site where acts of grieving can activate something more. I think of meteors, the moments when stars burn before they return to from whence they came: the night, the dark, the binding texture of the night sky. It is a moment where the cosmic fire engulfs us in liberation, when the celestial forces can no longer suppress our vitality. It is a moment when destruction and resurrection collide, shining across the eternal sky. How can we not just bear witness to the fire but bear it? When we mourn the burning stars, who and what do we become? How do we witness the phantom traces of the cosmic fire and carry it within us?

I was walking across the King’s College Circle on the University of Toronto campus the other day, where the reverberations of the student encampments can still be seen and felt. I can still see the marks left by the OccupyUofT movement, the spectral afterlives that still mark, mow, and “burn” the lawn in parts where the grass almost refuses to grow. Maybe these are the phantom traces I am discussing, the marks left by our comrades, martyrs, and all those who are in active refusal in order to undo the oppressive and complicit regime of death, brutality, and violence that is built on the continuous logic of extraction and destruction that denies us of peace, even in our afterlife. Perhaps the traces of the passing are also traces of resurrections that launch us into imaginaries of another world in this world. Fred Moten’s words resonate with me deeply; perhaps they also resonate with those of us who still have faith, not in regimes of coloniality, but in each other:

> I believe in the world and want to be in it. I want to be in it all the way to the end of it because I believe in another world in the world, and I want to be in that. And I plan to stay a believer, like Curtis Mayfield. But that’s beyond me, […] and out into the world, the other thing, the other world, the joyful noise of the scattered, scatted eschaton, the undercommon refual of the academy of misery. [^3]

I wonder about the channels through which this fire can be passed on.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, in her book _As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance_, uses constellation as a concept of relation that grounds purposeful opacity as a form of fugitive intervention. These constellated relations, as Simpson calls them, invent a dimension where mobilization and movement weave interrelational webs of co-resistance. [^4] As creatures of light and people of stars, how can we learn from Nishnaabewin? I wonder, what relation can we form across the night sky, across darkness?

Nasrin, being your student has been a privilege, and what you have said stuck with me. You spoke of _writing as a form of relational act_. Perhaps in a way, letter writing, correspondence, and exchange through poetics are our own lingua franca in times of collective grievance, a gesture of reaching in without the burdens of disclosure. It is a form of relation-building that occupies the space in-between, and a form of active listening that binds the fabrics of the night sky that weave us together without the need to make ourselves in each other’s image. When we use opacity as a ground for building relation, I believe we begin to render a language untranslatable to the mind of the colonizer. Like what D’Souza writes, it formulates a generous space for communication through the thickets of mistranslation, and an alliance built not on empathy, but on imperfect understanding of each other’s desires, motivations, values, and struggles. [^5] It is a form of relationality through mobilization, about existing _beside_ each other’s struggle. I return to the bones and ashes of my ancestors that became part of the Pacific currents. Their afterlives in the ocean teach me to mourn differently, to embody the oceanic as the texture that forms diasporic thought, to adapt exilic movement as channels of relationality, mistranslation shared as embodied struggle. Maybe these are gateways for us to depart from the logic of coloniality built on occupation, fixated on the contradiction of permanence and death. I don’t have answers to these questions yet, but perhaps these are spaces where we can begin to genuinely mourn and grieve, together…

As I write to you, I also must be aware of the margins we are given. It is never enough to express the love, struggles, and care we all share with each other, which may be precisely why these exchanges must be in constant motion through and with each other, as a form of ritual… There is always so little time, so little space to convene, yet so much more to be done.

###### With love,
###### Yantong
 
 
###### Dear Yantong,

Writing feels incredibly hard these days. I find myself without words, and yet, I’ve never been as busy with so many writing commissions. Somehow, I push through and arrive at a place that feels close to the ache and pain in my bones. As you know, those of us who come from a lineage of the dispossessed carry grief and longing for our land, no matter where we are or where we go. But since October 7th, I’ve been feeling something else— something for which no word exists yet. I believe there are many words we haven’t found because of what we’ve been made to witness. It’s beyond grief, beyond embodiment. It exists both within and outside of our bones. It reminds me of Ojibwe artist Andrea Carlson, who speaks of how “colonial tactics sever us from ourselves.” [^6] In a way, bearing witness to this violence forces us to distance ourselves from our bodies. My question is: how do we continually find our way back to stay centred, focused, and clear?

Before October 7th, I would have said that grief, for me, is generative. It shapes forms of life that include dreams, relationships, connectivity, solidarity, poetry, visions, and imaginings. To me, there is no life force more powerful than grief, because its depth in the body knows no bounds. Grief creates the conditions for transformation— for hope, for anger, for new languages, and utterances. Most importantly, grief generates an ethic of love. You’ve heard me say this before, in my introduction to the “dreamworlds” [^7] screening at Images: “How we mourn is how we love.” Grief connects us in profound ways to those who have passed and to our lands. Yet, since October 7th, I’m no longer certain of anything. My entire centre has been shaken. My deepest concern, as always, is with language: how will we come to understand the traumas emerging from this horror? What new words will be created for someone who found a fetus under the rubble? What dreams can come when the sound of drones is constant? As I write this, I think of Marcellus Williams, murdered by the US state. Before his death in prison, he witnessed the atrocities by Israel, writing and observing. In one of his poems, he expressed astonishment that the children of Palestine still smile: “and somehow you are able to smile / O resilient Children of Palestine!” [^8] Even amid this other horror—the horror of capital punishment—connections can still be forged: through prison walls, across borders, and through the same mechanisms of violence that seek to separate our bodies from ourselves, our bodies from our kin, and our bodies from our lands. 

In our initial conversation about this exchange, you spoke to me of mourning and loss and their cycles of manifestation through ritual, resistance, and relation. Reading your letter now, I find myself freezing up at every sentence, taking a breath each time to sit with the stories of gravesites of ancestors denied proper burial, evoking to me the image of Palestinian gravesites dug up by Israeli soldiers, the tanks repeatedly rolling over and crushing bones. Even in the afterlife, the violence of erasure and unrest endure. Many of us understand this, but it is the learning of these stories—in detail, location, and context—that provides insight into the land as a carrier of histories and the untold stories that remain. 

When I read your letter, I was reminded of Brandon Shimoda’s poetry reading at UC Berkeley in April. [^9] I wasn’t there, I watched it on my screen. He titled it _Oranges_, and said he’d never titled his readings before, which I thought was so moving. He began with the most beautiful line, an image I won’t ever forget: “I had a dream last night that a rainbow was burning.” He continued: 

> I had a dream last night that the war fit on the tip of a finger. I had a dream last night that a scream did not need a hill to gather speed to reach the people. I had a dream last night that a shrine burned down and was replaced with a shrine, identical but empty. Photographs of the dead grimacing from the walls, and the aura of a tree in the shape of smoke, keeping cool the dead, a perfect instrument. 

For the reading, Shimoda altered the original poem, published in his recent book _Hydra Medusa_, to evoke the image and spirit of Refaat Alareer. As we listened, he spoke of Alareer, describing how he had sat “right there,” at that very desk, reading—reading many books, including _The Autobiography of Malcolm X_ “three times.” We could feel his presence, imagine him, and sense that he is still with us. In this reading, Shimoda evoked many images, conjuring visions that flowed through the poem, now transformed for the present moment, continuing to mark and archive dreams. An instant took my breath away: “Do not situate, before the gaze of one particular stranger, the dead were not ‘gazing.’ They wanted it to be over, their reflection to be stronger, like a lunar sound materializing a hymn of thanksgiving to the missing.”

The transition from “they wanted it to be over” to “their reflection to be stronger” demonstrates the power of language in action, giving us an image of those who have passed as deeply resonant and enduring—an overwhelming force that had already decided “they wanted it to be over.” This shift moves us away from the colonial narrative, where death is often manipulated from the colonizer’s perspective: “Do not situate before the gaze of one particular stranger, the dead were not gazing.” Shimoda’s poetry, through his dreams, breaks open language, shattering the normalization of its use to deaden the story of those already dead. Here, they are instead given presence and life—life beyond death. Their bodies return to them, they return to their spirit, to the land, moon, and sky: “their reflection to be stronger, like a lunar sound materializing…”

When you write about Batniji’s work, saying it requires “acts of activation and ask for attentiveness and acts of reaching in for us to understand the context that perpetuates the abstraction of violence.” I think of this act of writing through and alongside dreams—of writing through and recording what we dream as an act of activation and recovery by reaching inward. As my dear friend Maiko Tanaka expressed after hearing Shimoda’s reading, “It opens up spaces I couldn’t reach on my own, just to feel, and to feel things within the dynamic constellation of what is happening now alongside our ancestors... I hear poetry like this, and what else is there to do but feel?” 

When October 7th happened, I stopped listening to the news in the mornings. For the first few weeks, I only listened to June Jordan. One recording I returned to often was from The Poetry Center in 1993. [^10] I thought of her uncompromising strength, her ability to live and engage with the world relationally. Reading and listening to her reminds me not only of the powerful ways poetry transforms our imaginings—keeping the past and future alive in the present—but also of how it empowers our positionalities as it demonstrates the material force of language. It calls us to _return_, it calls us to return to ourselves, as we return to sound the call for collective responsibility, and with the words of June Jordan, “I believe that you cannot claim a people and not assume responsibility for what that people do or don’t do. You cannot claim to be human and not assume responsibility for the value of all human life.” [^11] 

I’ll leave it here for now, as I am off to another screening of “dreamworlds,” here, in sunny Minneapolis.

###### With love,
###### Nasrin

[^1]: Eduardo Cadava, _Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History_ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 42.
[^2]: Aruna D’Souza, _Imperfect Solidarities_ (New York City: Columbia University Press, 2024), 23.
[^3]: Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, _The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study_ (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013), 118.
[^4]: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, _As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 211–231.
[^5]: D’Souza, _Imperfect Solidarities_, 36–37.
[^6]: Andrea Carlson, artist talk (Penny Stamps Speaker Series, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, October 20, 2022).
[^7]: “dreamworlds” is a program of short films I curated for Images Festival in Toronto, April 2024; it later screened at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, September 2024.
[^8]: Marcellus Williams’s “The Perplexing Smiles of the Children of Palestine” was circulated much online; also see: [https://tempestmag.org/2024/10/the-perplexing-smiles-of-the-children-of-palestine](https://tempestmag.org/2024/10/the-perplexing-smiles-of-the-children-of-palestine)
[^9]: Brandon Shimoda,“Oranges,” poetry reading (Lunch Poems, University of California, Berkeley, April 4, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZvi78rFyWg&t=560s
[^10]: June Jordan, poetry reading (The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University, April 15, 1993), [https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/poetrycenter/bundles/238553] (https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/poetrycenter/bundles/238553)
[^11]: June Jordan, “On Israel and Lebanon: A Response to Adrienne Rich from One Black Woman,” _The New York War Crimes_, September 11, 2024, [https://newyorkwarcrimes.com/june-jordan-on-israel-and-lebanon-a-response-to-adrienne-rich] (https://newyorkwarcrimes.com/june-jordan-on-israel-and-lebanon-a-response-to-adrienne-rich)

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Dialogue

Nasrin Himada and Yantong Li’s moving letter exchange takes us through the constellations of mourning unseen by colonial regimes that deny peace to numerous deceased kins.

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

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I do not need an invitation to invoke June Jordan, but Karice Mitchell’s works as part of “Please be gentle,” a 2023 group exhibition curated by Laura Carusi at the plumb in Toronto, served as the perfect kind. Playing with visibility and obstruction, the images, lustrous and even insolent, beckon to us. I wasn’t aware of _Players_, the softcore magazine nicknamed “the Black _Playboy_,” which ran from 1973 to 2005, until seeing Mitchell’s work, much of which is rooted in this archive. But I was familiar with the wink and nod coming from Mitchell in “Please be gentle,” and throughout her work; the “iykyk” that stems from representations of Black women appearing as their authentic selves. They are Black, alive, and looking back at us. [^1] The work is both a mirror and a portal, and part of that lies in Mitchell’s invitation of the “glitch” during different stages of working with found images, providing opportunities for meaning and re-meaning to enter these photos. Using a combination of scanning, cropping, and digital effects, as both the artist and sometimes subject in the work, Mitchell refuses restrictive and shallow interpretations of Black femininity and sexuality and invites us to consider and rejoice in self-expression, reclamation, and acts of adornment and self-care.

Mitchell, now an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, discovered the flatbed scanner toward the end of her undergraduate studies and, while developing her own Black feminist politic, was taken by the fact that a seemingly mundane office object could be the bed of so much possibility. We chatted over Zoom, with Mitchell in Vancouver and me in Toronto, and discussed her process, sourcing her archive, the work and power dynamics of looking and consuming, especially when there are competing translations of an image, and seeing ourselves in public.

**Karice Mitchell:** I used to make trips to the BMV at Dundas Square [in Toronto]. I’d go to the back, where it’s all 18+ stuff, and go through vintage magazines, thinking a lot about collage and how I could integrate that into my work. I stumbled across this one particular magazine, _Players_, and started cutting them up. I wasn’t aware of the historical significance of this publication in particular, until the tail-end of my master’s. I had been conscious of the rhetoric around the dangerous hypersexualization of the Black female body, and something within this publication was challenging me to think more broadly about representation, about what a Black feminine sexuality could look like. I was intrigued. Flipping through the pages, the images felt familiar and familial. There was amazing beauty, and this kind of agency that felt alive in this publication.

> **Furqan Mohamed:** During my visit to the plumb, _Untitled (Woman in Gold)_ (2022) evoked that familial quality for me. She looks like my aunties, comfortable in her living room. It appeared to me as though she had a child in her lap, with your signature digital manipulation perhaps inviting me to see what I wanted.

**KM:** _[Gently corrects with a small, knowing smile.]_ It’s a doll! That’s an image that surprises people. They’re like, “That’s an image from an erotic magazine?” She was a centrefold model in one of the issues. She has her natural hair in this bun. The pearls, the gold. And there’s something about the interior design in some of these images, the gaudy, tacky furniture in the back that’s comforting. I was [also] thinking a lot about how blurring could be this device to disrupt a particular gaze.

> **FM:** Do you arrive at an image first and think, “I want to play around with this,” or is it the tool of the scanner that drives you, and you want to see what you can do with it?

**KM:** I think it’s a combination of both. Whatever I’m considering at the time will probably yield a particular methodology. With the work specifically at the plumb, I was motivated by ideas of adornment and beauty. So looking through images, I was trying to isolate these moments: cropping as a device to make something small, or to—theoretically or conceptually—make it really, really big. With _Intimacy Is_ (2023) [my installation at BAF Gallery, Vancouver], glitch and process were more at the forefront of my mind. “I like this tool, how can I, materially, play around with it?” So it’s a dance of both. What does this body of work require? What am I thinking about?

> **FM:** _Intimacy Is_, to me, exemplifies this, and all the considerations you’re making when exhibiting these images. In terms of methodology, I’m really intrigued by using blurring as a kind of refusal, as a tool of disruption. How did you move from more defined outlines or close-ups of a body to more illegible images?

**KM:** I was having difficulties in my practice, and I think that body of work was a way to negotiate some of the concerns that were being voiced intra-communally. I was thinking a lot about who was in the gallery space. Who is looking at these women? We know that [art] institutions are historically colonial, white spaces. I had this level of anxiety about these images sitting in Vancouver, where there aren’t as many Black people to receive them. What are the ethics of a found image? When you’re making these women anonymous, are you maybe reinforcing something, or is that working against some of your ideas around agency? Can you even negotiate agency within the field of image-making?

> **FM:** Your questions were in some way answered last year, when you faced a level of censorship during the 2023 Capture Photography Festival. You’re also acutely aware of the limitations of photography in representing Black life, like with Kodak, for example, and the origins of film and its relationship to Black skin.

**KM:** The site that I was originally meant to show at [for Capture] is owned by BC Hydro, and they didn’t want to do it. While that was happening, I was thinking about my motivations and being drawn to _Players_, to this archive of images.

I took images of myself using a lens filter attached to my [film] camera, replicating some of the mediation and process- driven work that I do with my digital work. I thought, using my own body as a means to deflect gaze, or implicating my body in a similar process, what potential does that have? That filter, for me, provided the opportunity for intervention. I was being censored while putting my own body into my work. So I thought, “Well, you know what, I’m not going to give you anything then. I’m going to abstract these images so you get nothing.” I think that was a way to take up some agency within image-making and have some sort of control, maybe, over the way that people are receiving the imagery; whether you are able to make out anything, that’s all you’re going to get. I was reading _Glitch Feminism_ by Legacy Russell at the time and was heavily influenced by this work, and wanted to establish visual “failure” as an aesthetic praxis and methodology. [^2]

> **FM:** _take care_ (2021–2022), another public installation, is one of your only works to feature any text, which you thought necessary given its prominent placement on the side of the Hamilton Artists Inc. building. The image, featuring red nails against dark skin with a kind of red under-garment to match, feels intimate.

**KM:** I can’t just put these images in public without underscoring my intention of what I’m trying to do. I thought, well, what if I use text to be that tool to call in people. It is an intimate image. Having darker skin in a public space was really important to me.

> **FM:** I always come back to the nails. And that emphasis on care just had me thinking, you know, whenever I’m not feeling like myself, I just need to get my nails done. I’m not depressed… I just need my hair done.

**KM:** Beauty… it’s not without cultural or political significance. As a Black woman, it’s crucial for my sense of being, and I do think about what certain visual cues signal, when I’m in certain spaces. I’m the only Black woman in my department. I dress in all black and my go-to is these loud, click-clacky nails. Visually, I do take up a particular space. It does something for me. And it does something to people.

Around the beginning of the pandemic, there were conversations around isolation. We were separated from each other, and it was important to me to have this call to Black people, Black women and femmes. To ask how communal care translates to care for the self, intimacy for the self. Audre Lorde says self-preservation is a political tool, an act of political warfare. [^3] We’re in these systems that literally don’t want to see us alive, that don’t value our lives. We need to reclaim these narratives, to be very intentional in our sensibilities around care.

> **FM:** Beauty is not this frivolous thing. I think because we’re used to capitalism narrowing our scope and our view of what’s possible, people often reduce beauty and beauty practices to an individual practice, but they’re linked to this collective history. It’s not a luxury, as Saidiya Hartman says, “it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical act of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of _too much_.” [^4]

**KM:** That will to adorn… Adornment is a way to exercise subjectivity, to reclaim agency. [^5] It’s deep and it goes beyond superficiality. We feel it, and when we encounter some of these images, we recognize it. I think a lot of other Black women can look at these images and recognize the significance—what it means to adorn oneself, but also to see the range of skin tone, texture, and hair.

They felt like my grandmother, my mother, my aunties. These women [in _Players_] would wear really long acrylic nails, that would curve, and pearl jewelry, gold, bamboo earrings. And that always stuck out to me, this authentic way of Black women adorning themselves.

My grandparents were born and raised in Jamaica, and they moved to the UK. When a lot of our people are displaced, or move, gold is the thing they pass down. My grandmother kept her gold jewellery. Black babies are born into these rituals of adornment, of affirmation. When you’re born, you get a necklace with your name on it. I was thinking a lot about these rituals when looking at and responding to these images.

> **FM:** When I was at the plumb, I was taking photos of the work and realized I could fully, literally see myself reflected in the frame. And I thought about the more figurative ways I saw myself, in the close-ups of these women. As someone who veils, who wears a hijab, I’m also playing with access, I think. You don’t see me all of the time. I looked at some of the women in the images and thought, “Oh my god… twin!” Which may be a little funny to some, a hijabi identifying with the art whose source material is a softcore magazine. But the frame that holds that close-up is an extension of the work. And like a hijab, it’s a limit, a boundary. It says, “You can’t go any further than this,” which invites some questions, naturally. “Where is the rest of her? Am I entitled to that? Why?”

> Tina Campt, who also approaches images with a level of intimacy in her writing, tells us in _Listening to Images_ (2017) that we can’t ignore the context in which images are produced, and to think about what’s happening outside the frame. [^6] Your diptychs, like _Untitled Diptych (Woman in Pink Bikini)_ (2022), especially with the brightly-coloured frame, suggest these questions for me.

**KM:** I love that invoking of the hijab. These are the considerations I’m making with the frame, or the way the images exist in space. Plexiglass is shiny; it has a kind of seductive quality. I want the images to take on a visual seduction, and plexiglass has this commercial quality too. The frame is coloured, and along with the glass, it serves as a means of redirecting and disrupting gaze. I’m always thinking about access, and access to these images, because they’re no longer in production. There is a scarcity, but I’m not sharing the entire image. That’s a way to mitigate consumption, and to maybe try to dictate the way that these images are being consumed. You can have this image, but only so much. That’s what we’re willing to give within this institution or in this gallery space. The diptych form, for me, did come from thinking about what you said, and about “the emptiness” between two images. What is the potential there? What could be read between them? With my exhibition last April, [“matter of becoming”] at Franz Kaka in Toronto, I set out to consider diptychs more, thinking about what pairing images could do, particularly bodies and landscapes.

An image of a body paired with [an image of] a body of water may not immediately make you think they should be placed together, but by doing this, I am calling to and referencing a particular history. A lot of the spreads in _Players_ happen in these public, natural spaces. On a beach or in a forest landscape, with the natural world positioned as a background for forging a kind of subjectivity. I was drawn to these images, thinking about landscape and the role it plays in my life, being here on the West Coast and close to a body of water and again, what potential that has to do with my own subjectivity.

> **FM:** Black people and water…

**KM:** Black people and water! It’s a site that is so fraught, right? It’s filled with this horror, and at the same time, because UBC is right on the coast, there’s a beach that I’d go to after being in my studio. I would go for a swim and just float in the water. When I first started, I had this anxiety, and then it would sort of fizzle out, eventually, and there would be this peaceful moment. Being within this vast sea of water was kind of hypnotizing. Being in Vancouver, there aren’t a lot of us Black folks here, but there is something keeping us here. It’s made me curious, and a lot of people have mentioned the landscape, access to the coastline, to water.

When I was in Los Angeles recently, I saw this one exhibition at the California African American Museum (CAAM) that used archives to trace Black people’s history partaking in leisure at the beach. There are these historical all-Black beach clubs, and archival images of Black people just having a good time on the beach. These communities were essentially policed out and pushed out. Access to leisure, access to taking up this kind of space, on coastlines, by bodies of water, is a political thing. And tracing those histories are really important, so going to Los Angeles and seeing that exhibition confirmed that for me. There will always be this call to the water—it’s fraught but it’s also healing.

> **FM:** My family is from Somalia, and back home, water is a part of everyday life. You see yourself in it all the time, but here, water or access to water is a treat or vacation. It’s often pricey, very policed, or there are tickets, permits, rules, and regulations. So we’re separated from it, and there is this foreignness or exoticness attached to it.

> Some of the work you exhibited at Franz Kaka features frames that are pitch black, and other works are close-ups of women’s bodies between or beside bodies of water. We know that land is often reflected back to us as feminized. Black women, Black feminine bodies are also often portrayed as “exotic.”

**KM:** Coming off my work for Capture, after facing censorship, I was sitting with these messages, that Black women needed to be policed out of public space, that Black women showing up for the sake of themselves does not belong in public space. Even though we did end up with an alternative venue for the work, it still left me with this worry that people would continue to respond to the work in that way. But there’s no other way for me to exist. Looking at these images, Black women were existing in this almost utopic, beautiful way in public spaces and their subjectivity isn’t hindered by the fact that they’re in public.

> **FM:** The one work with the woman in a pair of pleasers, paired with the concrete building and tree, is my favourite from “matter of becoming.” You can make her out, wearing those shoes, of course, but it’s clear it’s also just as much about the cityscape she’s in.

**KM:** I was thinking about the “glitch” and legibility, about the Black form emerging and retreating, and emerging again within public space while considering my own role within the institution. We often negotiate, as Black people, how much you emerge, through things like code-switching in the way you speak and dress, in order to survive. Featuring a body that is emerging, through this glitch, to me, is a visual example of this negotiation.

Glitch and legibility, in my mind, work together. There are so many images and caricatures of Black people that have no depth, no substance. What’s really important about the “glitch” is that it’s an opportunity to have a multiplicity of self as it relates to marginalized bodies, [^7] and is so crucial in countering historical contexts that try to flatten marginalized bodies.

With the handheld scanner, you don’t know what the result is going to be. You’re working a little with the unknown, doing this kind of experimental thing, and you have to fail. You sometimes get error codes that pop up, and I was leaning into that, playing within those moments of error. You roll the scanner over something, and then have to go back and forth, but that suggests something, too. It’s that “failure” that allows for images to be read within other framings, other possibilities.

[^1]: June Jordan, “Who Look at Me,” in _Who Look at Me_ (New York City: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1969); see also: https://www.junejordan.net/from-who-look-at-me.html
[^2]: Legacy Russell, _Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto_ (London: Verso Books, 2020), 17–37.
[^3]: Audre Lorde, _A Burst of Light and Other Essays_ (Ithaca: Firebrand Books, 1988).
[^4]: Saidiya Hartman quoted in Christina Sharpe, “Beauty Is a Method,” _e-flux_ 105, December 2019, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/105/303916/beautyis-a-method
[^5]: Library of Congress and sponsoring body American Folklife Center, “The Will to Adorn: Reflections on African American Identity and the Aesthetics of Dress,” recorded on January 30, 2013, video, 1:01:20, https://www.loc.gov/item/2021689026
[^6]: Tina M. Campt, _Listening to Images_ (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).
[^7]: Russell, _Glitch Feminism_, 17–37.

C159_MOHAMED.jpg

C159_Mohamed.pdf

Furqan Mohamed writes of Karice Mitchell’s photographs as both a “mirror and a portal”—in conversation, the two consider how Mitchell’s tools of formal intervention, like flatbed scanning, cropping, blurring, filters, and digital effects, seize the visual negotiation of Black femininity, sexuality, and adornment, to disrupt consumptive and censoring gazes.

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

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.

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?

Liliona Quarmyne is a dancer, choreographer, actor, singer, and organizer based in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, on the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Mi’kmaq people. From Ghana and the Philippines, she has an eclectic background that has taken her through many performance styles on four different continents. She performs and creates both as a solo artist and with various companies, facilitates community programming, and is an experienced curator and artistic director. The scope of Liliona’s artistic work is broad, but is particularly focused on the relationship between art and social justice, on the body’s ability to carry ancestral memory, and on the role the performing arts can play in creating change. Liliona loves to work in collaboration and community, and is mom to two wonderful kids.


_proxy_ by Mo Glitch: Text

Salena Barry is a writer from Toronto, Canada, who is currently based in London, UK. She was a 2021 Frieze New Writer and a 2022 Jerwood Writer in Residence. She has written for institutions including Delfina Foundation and Site Gallery as well as for publications including _Frieze, ArtReview,_ and _Emergent Magazine._

Weaving Through the Binary: Qualeasha Wood's Textile Inheritances

EJ Kneifel is a friend of a twin of a twin, author of _VIO-LETS_, co-creator of _P8s, ORANGING, CATCH_. Their ekphrasis: (_Exclaim!, Adroit, mRB, PRISM_); their poetry: (_Canthius, Peach, Malahat, Arc, TIMBER, Vallum_). EJ loves to host, and most recently hosted ALL THE BIRDS WE HEAR IN TREES BUT NEVER SEE. Next, they will host Nivi.

Composition: The Hardest Part Is Getting to the Beginning: On Lily Wang's _Silver Repetitions_

Jasmine Gui is a Singaporean-born interdisciplinary artist, arts programmer, and PhD student based in Tkaronto/Toronto. She works in paper, ceramics, tea, and experimental book formats through the inter-arts and publishing space Teh Studio. 


Different Things in Different Scenes: Encountering Ichi-go Ichi-e in Tea

D. St-Amour (they/she) is a writer, book-maker, and recovering arts worker. Since 2011, St-Amour has held curatorial, administrative, and research positions at a range of institutions, including the AGO, the Walter Phillips Gallery, Art Metropole, and Galerie SBC. St-Amour regularly writes about artists’ books and publishing practices through the lens of visual arts and media history, and is slowly publishing a series of queer sci-fi and speculative fiction books through their slow-press project, specific. place (with co-editor S F Ho). Recently, St-Amour completed an MA in Art History/Visual Cultures at York University, and is currently an MLIS candidate at Western University in London. 


Anni Araújo Spadafora (she/ her) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto. Her work spans performance, music and sound, and textiles. She regularly studies at the Marshfield School of Weaving (Vermont). Recent project and performance sites include Extrapool (Nijmegen, NL), Milieux Institute (Montreal), Gardiner Museum (Toronto), The Khyber Centre for the Arts (Halifax), and the Art Gallery of Ontario. She is also a founding member of the band New Fries, who have released music with Telephone Explosion Records (Toronto) and Soul Jazz Records (London, UK). New Fries has toured across Canada and internationally and opened for The Pop Group, Neil Hagerty, The Ex, and Xiu Xiu (among others).


Marking Time Spent Absurdly

Amanda Shore is a white-settler arts worker, critic, and curator based in K’jipuktuk (Halifax, NS). 


Love Made Object

matt lambert is a non-binary, trans, multidisciplinary collaborator and co-conspirator working toward equity, inclusion, and reparation. Their practice is based in polydisciplinamory, entangling making, writing, curating, collaborating, and performing. lambert is currently a PhD Researcher at Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden, in Artistic Practice in Visual, Applied, and Spatial Arts. Their research focuses on mapping collaborative movements with craft through a developed methodology of cruising. They have published, curated, exhibited, and been collected internationally. 


_Exploratory Touch_ by Trevor Novak: Text

Holly Chang is an artist, curator, researcher, and writer living in Toronto who has recently completed her MA in Communication and Culture at TMU/York University. Her overall artistic work explores the themes of her second-generation mixed-race identity. She maintains cultural ties with her cross-cultural identity and draws on her hybrid background for inspiration. 


The Moon and Material Kin: Interview with Akash Inbakumar

Suzanne Morrissette is an artist, curator, and scholar from Winnipeg. Her father’s parents were Michif- and Cree-speaking Métis with family histories tied to the Interlake and Red River regions and Scrip in the area now known as Manitoba. Her mother’s parents came from Canadian-born farming families descended from United Empire Loyalists and Mennonites expelled from Russia. 


Shalaka Jadhav is based between Block 2 of the Haldimand Tract (Kitchener, ON) and Treaty 1 (Winnipeg, MB). Trained as an urban planner, they took the advice of an aptitude test to pursue curatorial studies and currently practice as an independent curator, writer, and service designer. Shalaka curates projects for Textile, a hyperlocal project on the Haldimand Tract, and is a Visiting Curator at the University of Manitoba’s School of Art Gallery. They currently hold roles at OCAD University and, more recently, at the Blackwood. 


Tilling: The Centre for Cultural and Artistic Practice: In Conversation with Luther Konadu

Hannah Hanski (b. 1985) is a Canadian neo-folk artist blending textile and digital media. With a deep belief in the power of narrative, she pursued her studies in Folklore and completed her MFA at Carnegie Mellon in 2017. She currently resides in a church in rural Nova Scotia with her dog, Moshe.


Cat Bluemke (b. 1993) makes art about work and play. She graduated with an MFA in Design for Emerging Technologies at SAIC, and is currently Digital Exhibitions Consultant at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina. Recently, her practice has spanned augmented reality, game design, performance, and risographic prints.



Jonathan Carroll (b. 1990) is an artist and programmer creating games, software, and performances. His work unfolds as a dynamic collaboration between artists, audiences, and their interactive digital interfaces. He lives in rural Nova Scotia where he creates digital-art tools.

From Algorithms to Aesthetics: Unlocking the Mind of CritBot.AI, Pioneering Critic

Stevie Ada Klaark is an interdisciplinary artist, adjunct professor, and writer. She holds an MFA in Visual Art from Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. Their work appears in _Paprika!_ (Yale University), _Chicago Review_, and _Mn Artists _(Walker Art Center). Klaark lives on unceded Anishinaabe lands in Michigan. 



Untangling Beauty from the Elite

You’re invited to submit a letter in response to _C Magazine_ Issue 159 MIRROR MIRROR by February 25.

Selected letters will be published in C160 Extra Life (Spring 2025).

The Letters column features a selection of 100-400 word letters to our editors, contributors and readers, and is printed at the front of every issue. A $100 honorarium is paid to each writer whose letter is selected for print. Published letters may be edited lightly for length and clarity.

Letters should engage the previous issue—its theme, articles, images—and related ideas beyond the magazine’s pages. They may be informal, informative, creative, inquisitive, speculative, critical, or any other number of things imaginable in the epistolary form. The column is intended to create space for dialogue on and around contemporary art and to continue conversations between issues, themes, and writers.

Read the [Call for Pitches](https://cmagazine.com/events/call-for-pitches-for-mirror-mirror) for this issue.

**Send letters to [pitch@cmagazine.com](mailto:pitch@cmagazine.com) with LETTERS in the subject line.**

Call for Letters: Mirror Mirror

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The Letters column features a selection of 100-400 word letters to our editors, contributors and readers, and is printed at the front of every issue.

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

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