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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

Publisher

Designer

C’s Chorus issue marks the beginning of our new print look, shaped by Hwa-Jin Jun, where we also ask what becomes possible if we embrace changing physical formats and materials as an ethos. We think of chorus as a collective noun: for voices, noises, expressions (of rage, solidarity, and otherwise). This issue embraces polyphony, or simultaneity, a chorus that does not dissolve distinction within the collective. From voice as infrastructure, a way of rehearsing coordination and collective power amidst spreading fascist logics, to the dispersal of seeds, anti-colonial cosmologies, melancholic sound in the colour blue, attuning to ancestors in museum collections, and the subtle accumulations in working-class time, we bring a cacophony of grievance and desire.


Chorus

Review

Jayne Wilkinson is an art writer, freelance editor, and occasional curator based in Toronto and Berlin.

My first impression of “Starmirror” was that it was patently, and even earnestly, church-like. The installation occupying KW’s main hall is an immersive sound work featuring shifting compositions of organ recordings and choral singing, sung by humans but produced by AI in a form of technological collaboration that continually reforms itself in sonic swells. Seating is organized concentrically, like wooden pews around a central pulpit (here, a wooden tower sturdy enough to climb) with enough space to encourage ambulatory contemplation. At one end is _The Hearth_ (2024), a wall-sized installation of speakers, hand-painted and 3D-printed ornamental sculptures, and an etched-aluminum plate featuring a Jesus-like child playing a fantastical horned instrument amid radiating light. Set up to resemble an altarpiece, the work is also described as an acoustic organ, powered by fans normally used to cool the graphics-processing units required to run AI models. With vibey lighting and subwoofers with club capabilities, the environment parallels how I imagine the interiors of American megachurches: updated ecclesiastical spaces for younger generations to collectively experience sound and vision in ways that are designed to make religion seem cool.

The overt subject of Herndon and Dryhurst’s work is not religious ideology per se, but rather, the technological protocols that shape contemporary life. They are well-known for inventive explorations of voice, sound, and machine learning that cross genres of music, performance, and art. Herndon’s album PROTO (2019) featured “Spawn,” an AI vocal model trained through live community sessions to explore how collective singing is impacted by machine learning. Over the past several years they have presented these experiments in gallery contexts, including the recent exhibition “The Call” (2024) at the Serpentine. “Starmirror” continues this trajectory. For the audio components, human voices are source material that is continually recomposed using an AI model the artists built and trained on _Ordo Virtutum_ (1151)—a medieval morality play by Benedictine abbess, visionary religious scholar, and composer Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179), in which a soul must choose between good and evil. “Angels appear as what you fear, devils appear as what you desire,” write the artists. Over the course of several Sundays, local choirs were invited to lead group sessions in the gallery, open to all who wanted to participate in collective song but with the caveat that their voices would be used to train future versions of the work.

Herndon grew up in the American South, singing in the church choir and developing a deep understanding of music as a component of ritual and communion, so it’s a logical expansion of her practice to correlate the spiritual dimensions of AI-driven technologies. Silicon Valley has already established strong religious ideology in its drive to market consumer technologies, including AI, as necessary and inevitable. Fascination with the “magical” or ineffable qualities of computational devices makes the messianic an easy comparison, but Herndon and Dryhurst also demonstrate how deeply embedded Christian ideologies are, not only in the tech world but across secular society. In contemporary art, questions of Christian worship are rarely addressed directly, and here the references (collective Sunday programs, Catholic sources, spatial design to mimic the church) are easy to overlook in lieu of an otherworldly sonic installation that encourages slow listening and contemplation, not unlike the rituals of spiritual gathering. If contemplation is the motive, what is it that we are being asked to believe in?

The artists are explicit about designing their AI models in ethical ways, especially regarding the use of artists’ images, and they often draw upon the language of the archive as a net social benefit. Regardless of what constitutes an ethical approach to computational tools, one thing that AI-produced, group-sourced choral singing doesn’t allow for is mistakes. The work is so smooth, so precise, so perfect. There is nothing of the messiness of off-key singing, the endearing awkwardness of people who may not know each other sharing rituals of vocalizing in public. Collective singing is special because it allows for the discordant, the out of time, and the unsyncopated. When there is a moment of unity, it feels that much stronger.

The same week “Starmirror” opened, Erykah Badu played in a venue across the city to a few thousand people. For one of her best-known songs, she hardly sang at all, and instead let the audience take over, with the entire crowd carrying the melody through chorus and verse. The two are incomparable experiences, but their coinciding occurrence underscored the power of collective voice as a political form—a discourse that Herndon and Dryhurst implicitly take up—and the continual urgency of demanding change through protest songs, chants, and collective speech. I’m not convinced those forms benefit from computational input, but since the machines are already here, can the spiritual or even psychedelic intersections of voice, music, and machine learning be integrated in a way that retains the friction that spurs collective voice into collective action? To interpolate the power of voice through computational processes and the suggestive aesthetics of religious histories risks complicity with an increasingly fascist sphere, where the capacity for one’s own thinking feels ever diminished by the addictive “slop” of online scrolling. If art is a mirror of its time, and if humans manage to continue living on the planet we’re burning beyond this century, then my guess is that this work will persist as a reflection of how desperately we want to remain optimistic about collective power, despite the dominance of the tech industry and its stranglehold of consolidated wealth.

Writer

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“Starmirror” ran from 31 October 2025 to 18 January 2026 at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.

“Starmirror” — Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst

Feature

Daniella Sanader is a writer and reader who lives in Toronto. 

This past October, nine Toronto art spaces collaborated to present “Everything & Nothing,” a retrospective survey honouring the work of Kelly Mark, who received medical assistance in dying some eight months prior. Having lived in this city since the late ’90s, Mark became known for her wry sense of humour and her exacting view on the everyday labour of having a practice, both central features of her conceptually driven work. At the core of the retrospective was an exhibition of Mark’s video, sculpture, text-based pieces, and works on paper at Olga Korper Gallery, but beyond it, Mark’s work was widely dispersed across Toronto. (Other participating galleries included Art Metropole, the plumb, Joys, The Goldfarb Gallery at York University, goodwater gallery, MOCA Toronto, Vtape, and Pumice Raft.) As I moved across the city trying to take it all in, Mark’s practice began to expand and contract: finding its home across spaces large and small, commercial and artist-run, central and peripheral, physical and virtual, singular and multiple, indoors, outdoors, dispersed in the mail. Everything and nothing all at once.

I’ve been struggling to trace a clear line through all these contexts, through all of Mark’s varied modes of working, but perhaps that’s the point. With her own focus on repetitive accumulation and circular logics—take the text-based work _It’s Just One God Damn Thing After Another_ (2009) at Olga Korper, which arranges the titular phrase in a never-ending loop—Mark’s own thinking rarely marched in a straightforward line. Instead, she returned, again and again, to questions of time, labour, and valuation—to what it means to build a life through your work, and vice versa—particularly from a working-class standpoint.

So, in response to this citywide project for Kelly Mark, I’ve written a text that scatters along with her. It’s divided into separate fragments, nested in between other features of and contributions to this issue of _C_. Or, you can call it five essays for the price of one. Maybe that’s a deal she could have gotten behind.


##### TWICE AS BORING 

I’m standing in the dark enclosure of Joys, the lane-way project space off Lansdowne Avenue, watching Kelly Mark’s video _Trying to Remember, Sometimes Wishing I Could Forget_ (1996/2016). The split-screen video was made as a 20-year update to her earlier _33 Minute Stare_ (1996), and features two versions of Mark’s face, shown in tight parallel. In 1996, the artist stares directly, uncompromising, into the camera, as long as her eyes will allow; whereas in 2016, she seems to do everything but. Of the later iteration, Mark described that she was prompted by the effort of trying to recall details of how the earlier video was made: “I start off trying to remember where I got that camera from [in 1996] and then for 33 minutes, I try to remember everything else I may have forgotten since then.” [^¹] As her eyes flit back and forth, the work of remembering becomes laced with other unforeseen textures: “I was a little surprised by the amount of regret I experienced in response to some of the things I did remember.”

In Mark’s characteristically simple visual means, both works court inevitable failure, but in strikingly opposite ways. In 1996, she was bound to lose her staring contest with her recording device, regardless of how blank, how impassive she attempted to be. In 2016, Mark’s lack of emotion was replaced with an abundance of it—seemingly surprising, for her—as she worked through 20 years of memory. For viewers, the differences are subtle, impenetrable on her otherwise static face(s), but if you’re patient, they start to make their presence known. Given that “Everything & Nothing” offered a survey of Mark’s prolific, decades-long career across multiple mediums and forms, _Trying to Remember_ is a fitting microcosm for that collective curatorial effort: a seemingly direct view on her practice, but one that can only gesture at how much more there is to say.

During my visit, Joys curator Danica Pinteric tells me an anecdote about the two videos, shared with her by artist Anthony Cooper—Mark’s long-time friend and the primary organizer of “Everything & Nothing”—one he would corroborate later. Cooper came to know Mark while working at Diaz Contemporary, and on one such workday, she told him about the early stages of planning _Trying to Remember_ as a follow-up to _33 Minute Stare_. His response: “So, you want to make it twice as boring?” Someone else might have been bruised by his dry humour, but Mark loved it so much she incorporated the comment into the gallery’s wall didactic.


##### HOMER SIMPSON EPIPHANY
In a 2000 interview with Eileen Sommerman, Kelly Mark described the act of counting salt grains in a thimble. (There’s 423,628, if you’re curious.) “That was a Homer Simpson epiphany,” she explained, claiming she felt like god counting the stars. “That’s what I live for.” [^²] Finding meaning in the diligent (or, foolish) accumulation of mundane things was a central feature of the artist’s practice. Take  _Knife Collection _ (1995–2002), which consists of some 100 unique butter knives, each “collected” (as in, stolen) from various restaurants and homes. (Mark began the piece while working as a server after the culmination of her BFA.) At Olga Korper, the knives are carefully arranged in groups of 10 on magnetic strips, coming to resemble the ubiquitous tally marks (four vertical lines, one horizontal) the artist would tattoo on herself, adding one line for each year of life—time passing as another mundane form of accumulation.

Other works in “Everything & Nothing” also find their logic in the build-up of seemingly disparate parts. The meandering epic montage film  _REM_ (2007), screened at the plumb, was produced by collecting clips from 170 movies and TV episodes, pulled from four months of Mark channel surfing through the offerings of Canadian cable. Its dreamlike plot—which loosely follows a mysterious hitchhiker navigating various states of pursuit, confusion, and confrontation—feels held together by the associative will of both Mark and her viewers, our shared need to trace a narrative thread between otherwise unrelated faces, gestures, and locales.

The video documentation of Mark’s month-long performance  _Hiccup #1_ (2000), shown at Joys, seems to apply the same thinking in reverse: shared causality becoming obscured, private, somehow random once again. Seven video channels show the same scene on different days. Mark is across the street, sitting on the front steps of Central Tech high school in downtown Toronto, from 8:45 to 9am. She looks around, sips a coffee, smokes a cigarette, underlines a passage in a novel. On any given day these gestures would feel ordinary, unremarkable, but Mark carefully choreographed them, responding to precise cues from an accompanying audio track in her ear. Seven days shown side by side in video form, the world around her changes, but Mark—her movements, her rhythms—remains the same.

This exacting performance of the mundane connects to Mark’s other dictum, “Everything is interesting,” which was distributed on postcards and buttons throughout the city of Birmingham for her 2003 exhibition at Ikon Gallery. It’s another Homer-like epiphany, caught in its own perpetual cycle of negation and justification. If everything is interesting, then of course, nothing can be: the distinction implied in the term is flattened out. But if nothing is interesting, then, as your mind begins to wander, you might be surprised by the otherwise ordinary details—a solitary woman lighting a smoke, the gleam on the handle of a butter knife—that catch your attention.




##### GOOD NEIGHBOURS 
I’ve also been looking for Kelly Mark’s presence elsewhere. Take this magazine. Alongside the numerous times that Mark’s work was reviewed and discussed in  _C_, she also participated in a curatorial project organized by Claire Christie showcased in issue 75, from Fall 2002. Inspired by the 1985 Absolut Vodka ad by Andy Warhol, Christie prompted Mark (alongside artists Tom Dean and Marcel Dzama) to produce advertisements for businesses and products of their choice. The results were scattered among _C_’s typical ad revenue—nested between the usual promotions for galleries, museums, and arts-related enterprises. Mark’s ad featured a full-page image of the façade of Toronto’s Quality Meat Packers Ltd., all greyscale and somewhat ominous, shot from behind the industrial building’s chain-link fence. “Good Neighbors…” the copy announced, introducing the meat-processing facility located just a few steps away from Mark’s Niagara Street studio, “still better than another CONDO!”

Another version of the story of Mark’s practice could be structured according to the indignities of Toronto real estate. People will often reference her beloved, semi-legal space in the Coffin Factory—one of the city’s rare affordable loft complexes for artists, adjacent to the galleries at Niagara and Tecumseth streets—where she lived for two decades, its lack of windows contributing to her idiosyncratic working hours. Mark moved to Scarborough in 2012, anticipating the city’s redevelopment of the Coffin Factory into a condo. (Its final tenants were evicted in 2019.) The neighbouring abattoir building—which once suffused the surrounding streets with the “sad smell of shit-scared pigs,” [^³] according to one 2014  _blogTO_ article—was also announced for condo redevelopment in 2017 and demolished in 2022. There’s a bitter joke to be made here, about Toronto’s increasing hostility to the living and working conditions of its artists, but of course Mark already made it. The sarcastic enthusiasm of her “ad” for the abattoir, where she announced her preference for the stinky industrial building over the encroaching landscape of luxury condos, feels all the more biting in today’s housing crisis.

None of these landmarks exist anymore. From my vantage point in 2025, Mark’s characteristically wry tone in the 2002 ad feels tempered by the cheeky resignation of her light box displayed outside the plumb, the artist’s final work. Its red text reads, “I DON’T WANNA PLAY THIS GAME ANYMORE I’M TAKING MY BALL AND I’M GOING HOME.”

The game of living in this city does, at times, feel exhausting, impossible. Mark chose to withdraw from this game on her own terms. It feels tempting, as a writer, to lapse into a romantic view of this earlier era of artistic life in Toronto, when rents were cheap(er), council grants were plentiful, downtown living was possible. It feels just as tempting to equivocate about the hard times had, both _then_ and _now_—as if nothing structural has changed in between. Neither stance is quite accurate; neither gets at the nuance of Mark’s relationship to this city, and the ways her practice continues to resonate with new audiences today. Instead, with her characteristic no-bullshit attitude, Mark brought a clear and uncompromising view of Toronto into her work, making visible the forms of precarity and the corporatized flattening out of culture she observed around her, conditions which would only continue to accelerate. _It’s just one god damn thing after another._


##### THANKFULLY IDEAS ARE FREE
Cumulatively, I have spent 34 hours and 41 minutes working on this text. I was thinking about Kelly Mark’s major work In & Out (1997–2025)—shown in a print-based version at Olga Korper as _Day In & Day Out_ (2018)—and I downloaded a timekeeping app on my phone. Some eight hours and 58 minutes were spent visiting the works at the various sites, another six hours and 33 minutes were spent researching, planning, writing emails, talking on the phone. I spent 19 hours and 10 minutes writing, seeking feedback, and revising drafts for publication. Once I forgot to turn the app off after a writing session, and inadvertently accumulated some extra 44 hours and 19 minutes of recorded time: walking back and forth, waiting for the subway, buying groceries, sleeping.

My timekeeping is a bit of a flat gesture, though—it doesn’t get at the real work of her work, its ongoing, structural influence on her life and practice. For _In & Out_, Mark used a factory punch clock to chart the eight-hour shifts of her studio labour, the time cards accumulating as a record of a life spent on the job. Studio work as shift work. The piece was originally expected to conclude in 2032, when the artist would have reached the retirement age of 65.

Mark was certainly fastidious about the value of her time. On more than one occasion, she negotiated with galleries to forgo her artist fee in favour of the province in question’s minimum hourly wage—calculated for the duration of the exhibition—which consistently amounted to more than the CARFAC-mandated rate. (This would result in her work _Minimum Wage_, from 2008.) Anthony Cooper also spoke to me with fondness about Mark’s arts council grants, which routinely allocated time in a project’s development schedule for less directly “productive” things like watching television. Her notebooks, a selection of which are shown at Pumice Raft, [^⁴] frequently feature lists of sums attributed to various collectors and art spaces, as she calculated the amounts she required to get by. The journals expose the administrative landscape of a working (and working-class) artist—handwritten iterations of her residency and grad school applications, supply lists, and to-do items—along with lecture notes from her undergrad days at NSCAD, and countless iterative plans for future projects. (And, of course, there is the occasional smart-ass detail, like a page of art world–related punny equations featuring the truly inspired “FART + BOREDOM = ARTFORUM.”)

I’m left thinking about what Mark needed in order to live, to work. Time spent with her journals shows that this was an ever-shifting concept—certainly financial but also structural, social, imaginative—but she knew exactly what it was; she was constantly reasserting its shape. “Thankfully Ideas Are Free,” she declared in 2008, the text printed on a series of square buttons. That being said, they were produced on the occasion of the Toronto International Art Fair (now called Art Toronto) and riffed on the initials of the event’s name—one where vast amounts of money exchange hands, where many artists’ livelihoods hang in the balance. More sarcasm on the underside of all that gratitude.

##### NOTHING WITHOUT YOU
In the aftermath of Kelly Mark’s death, memorial accounts published by her friends and extended community described her variously as cantankerous, loving, difficult, sentimental, social, withdrawn, sarcastic. There’s an affectionate tension of contradiction in remembering her; of course, these opposites can be found within her work too.

It would be impossible to write about _“Everything & Nothing”_ without touching on _108 Leyton Ave_ (2014), the 10-minute video Mark made after leaving her downtown studio and moving to Scarborough. Shown at Olga Korper, it’s a precisely rendered performance in duplicate: two versions of Mark sit facing one another, each playing solitaire, smoking, drinking bourbon (Maker’s Mark, obviously), and conversing via a long list of aphorisms and other clichéd phrases, each rooted with _everything_ or _nothing_. Once described by Mark as “just two old people living together,” [^⁵] these two versions of herself move variously through expressions of pathos, antagonism, pettiness, curiosity. “Everything could have been different between us,” Mark muses. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” Mark responds. The clock between them doesn’t move, its hands set to the perfect mirrored image of half past 12.

Of _108 Leyton Ave_, Mark has also observed, “[A]t some point I’m hitting on myself.” [^⁶] Alongside all her snarky humour, the romance of her work is undeniable. The aphorisms exchanged between both versions of the artist are ubiquitous and emptied of specificity, to be sure, but they are also open-ended: capable of absorbing our needs, worries, and desires for the future. “Everything will be worth it in the end,” she says. “Nothing ends well, that’s why it ends.” Depending on your stance, there’s a version of Mark willing to counterbalance your regret, your nostalgia, your optimism, your defensiveness with a quip of her own. Across the multiple venues of “Everything & Nothing,” these different versions of the artist accumulate and repeat, refracted through the specificity of each given location: both established institutions that share long histories with Mark, histories worth honouring; and newer, younger artist-run spaces, those negotiating with her work for the first time.

I’m still struck by _Hiccup #1_, Mark’s month-long performance of the mundane, where even more copies of the artist proliferate across the work’s seven video channels. Her gestures aim for sameness, but of course, little wrinkles of difference become all the more striking as you watch. While her practice has been in my worldview for close to 15 years, I never knew Kelly Mark, not really. Moving through “Everything & Nothing,” I know I’m watching her from a distance. Call it my own Homer Simpson epiphany—stupidly obvious, vaguely profound, and a dash sentimental—but I’m also standing across the street, feeling the time pass, noticing what changes and what stays exactly the same.

[^1]: Kelly Mark, Trying to Remember, Sometimes Wishing I Could Forget, 2:09, https://kellymark.com/V_TryingToRemember1.html

[^2]: Kelly Mark, interview with Eileen Sommerman, “Don’t Let the Truth Stand in the Way of a Good Story,” in Kelly Mark, exh. cat. (Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hamilton Artists’ Inc. and Contemporary Art Gallery, 2000), 30.

[^3]: Chris Bateman, “The 10 Most Notorious Smells in Toronto,” blogTO, November 18, 2014, https://www.blogto.com/city/2014/11/the_10_most_notorious_smells_in_toronto

[^4]: This corresponds with a massive digitization effort by Parker Kay, Pumice Raft’s founder and curator, who is working to organize her archives for possible institutional acquisition. The effort is being facilitated by Anthony Cooper and Olga Korper Gallery, who represent Mark’s estate.

[^5]: Kelly Mark, interview with Robert Enright, “Tough Love,” Border Crossings (March 2018), https://bordercrossingsmag.com/article/tough-love


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Site-specific

Cities

Dispersed through the magazine like the artist’s posthumous show was across physical locations in Toronto, Daniella Sanader captures the subtle folds of labour, working-class time, and accumulation at the heart of Kelly Mark’s work.

FIVE ESSAYS FOR KELLY MARK

Gladys Lou is a Hong Kong–Canadian curator and
writer completing an MA in Curatorial Studies at
the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.
Her critical writing and journalism have been published by _ArtReview_, _MUBI Notebook_, _Public Parking_, _Studio Magazine_, _photoED_, _Femme Art Review_, _Ornamentum_, _The AMP_, and _Impulse Magazine_.


Lu Yang employs the logics of gaming and Buddhist reincarnation to examine existentialism in a post-human, virtual context—one in which identities can be created and selected like game characters, yet alienation persists despite seemingly infinite freedom. “DOKU! DOKU! DOKU!: samsara.exe” at Amant, the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in New York, unfolds as an exploration of the self through the genderless digital avatar DOKU, named after the Japanese Buddhist phrase _dokusho dokushi_, meaning “we are born alone, and we die alone.” The exhibition brings together three video installations—_DOKU the Self_ (2022), _DOKU the Flow_ (2024), and _DOKU the Creator_ (2025)—where a darker inquiry into the meaning of life lies behind the avatar’s flamboyant costumes, funky dance moves, and funny facial expressions.

Viewers follow DOKU, modelled after the artist’s own body and face, through imaginary and cinematic landscapes that remix the aesthetics of ancient mythologies, temple architecture, science fiction, video games, Japanese anime, and immersive 3D environments. DOKU emerges within these universes as an immortal, quasi-divine icon positioned at the nexus of digital spirituality. Yang references _samsara_ in the exhibition’s title as an executable program for the cycle of rebirth in the material world, defined by aimless wandering. In Buddhist terms, nirvana, the end of this cycle—which represents spiritual aspiration toward wisdom, freedom, and happiness—seems perpetually out of reach for DOKU. Guided by the Wheel of Life in the video works, DOKU travels the six realms of samsara in Buddhist cosmology: gods, demigods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts, and hell beings. Identity functions here like character selection; gender, appearance, costumes, and personality operate as adjustable parameters without fixed traits. In one scene in _DOKU the Flow_, DOKU walks through a valley strewn with piles of skeletons as eagles circle overhead, hinting at innumerable deaths and reincarnations. The insignificance of a single being in the vast landscape provokes a profound sense of solitude in the process of infinite becoming. If everything is impermanent and death offers no finality, Yang asks, what are we searching for in our lifetime?

At Amant, the large video screen looping _DOKU the Self and DOKU the Flow_ is surrounded by _Galsang Aspiration Prayer (Dzogchen Pema Tashi Rinpoche)_ (2024), a series of seven hanging calligraphy scrolls. The prayer, “May I become a refuge and guide for all sentient beings […] a friend to the lonely, a helper to the helpless,” initially appears to stand in contrast to DOKU’s solitary journey. Extending beyond the screen, the prayers address visitors directly, serving as a spiritual accompaniment that brings DOKU’s spirit from the virtual to the physical world. Their monumental scale, together with the reflective silver mylar lining the walls and floor, transforms the installation into a space of blessing and protection to those who travel alone.

The motif of a cairn-like stone pile recurs within the video works, as well as physically inside the gallery and in the outside garden. In _DOKU the Flow_, a near-death experience at the shore amid rain and crashing waves prompts the avatar to converse with a stone pile, which narrates its countless past lives through a dialogue box on-screen and expresses exhaustion and isolation, reflecting DOKU’s own enduring cycles. In the gallery, functioning as navigational markers, these stone piles serve as _memento mori_, declarations of existence as well as memorials to DOKU’s and visitors’ past lives. Meanwhile, voice-overs introduce a continuous stream of questions about the nature of humanity: “Where can ‘the self’ be found? What is the difference between game and reality?”

DOKU’s condition of entrapment reminds me of Jean-Paul Sartre’s assertion that “man is condemned to be free”; just as humans must be responsible for making meaning out of their choices, DOKU must continually reinvent themselves in a world devoid of stable purpose. Yang echoes an existential estrangement, but ultimately adopts a more affirmative coping strategy, using virtuality as a space to probe otherwise foreclosed modes of being. Yang and DOKU might understand solitude as an opportunity for soul-searching, made explicit when DOKU appears wearing a hoodie printed with “To live fully is to be always in no-man’s land.”

Yang shifts attention away from external regimes of exploitation toward the internal, experiential consequences of self-destruction. Moving through snow, mountains, deserts, forests, and outer space, each functioning like a level in an open-ended game, DOKU repeatedly subjects themselves to extreme physical conditions. From hanging on a cliff to shooting enemies on a battlefield, DOKU’s virtual body is unconstrained by biological limits. The body becomes something to be destroyed and remade, with pain and suffering becoming the means for testing alternative forms of selfhood and existence. (As a OneRepublic lyric suggests, “Everything that kills me makes me feel alive.”)

In _DOKU the Flow_, DOKU boards a luxury cruise ship called _Desire_. Slot machines clatter in casinos, spilling money onto the floor, while guests indulge in a sumptuous buffet of fine cuisine—scenes that reflect human pleasures built on capitalist excess, spectacle, and the compulsive, addictive logic of gaming and gambling. On the rooftop, DOKU sits alone in a theatre, watching footage from _DOKU the Self_ where multiple versions of themselves flash by, described in the narration: “each ‘I’ appears in the scene according to the script.” The meta-screen transitions to DOKU skateboarding through a neon-lit cityscape at night, sliding between two billboards that read “pain” and “boredom,” echoing the repetitiveness and persistence of everyday emotions across iterated lives.

As Yang extends the metaphor of the illusion of cinema into the 3D-animated realm, the self becomes an orchestrated entity that can be edited, cut, and stitched together. Introducing themselves as both a spectator and a performer, Yang creates a continuous feedback loop where reality and simulation blur: the observer becomes observed, the subject becomes object, and identity is fabricated, rehearsed, and endlessly remade. In _DOKU the Self_, the Wheel of Life literally transforms into a casino roulette, reminding viewers that the conditions of birth are matters of chance, or systems and algorithms beyond individual control. While we cannot choose the circumstances we are born into, Yang suggests that we can decide how we act, whom we become, and how we define our destiny. Using the virtual world as an extension of reality, “DOKU! DOKU! DOKU!: samsara.exe” proposes that the meaning of life is not in winning or escaping the system, but in the journey itself—in playing a role, or a game, again and again.


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“DOKU! DOKU! DOKU!: samsara.exe” ran from 18 September 2025 to 15 February 2026 at Amant, New York City.

“DOKU! DOKU! DOKU!: samsara. exe” — Lu Yang

Column

Christina Battle is an artist based in amiskwacîwâskahikan (also known as Edmonton, Alberta), within the Aspen Parkland: the transition zone where prairie and forest meet. Her practice focuses on thinking deeply about the concept of disaster: its complexity, and the intricacies that are entwined
within it.


**Api’soomaahka (Running Coyote) – William Singer III** is a member of the Kainai Nation of the Blackfoot Confederacy. His main profession is as an artist/illustrator with more than 40 years of experience. As an educator, entrepreneur, and environmental and political activist utilizing Niitsitapi (Blackfoot) ecological knowledge, he currently operates Naapi’s Garden and Katoyiss Seed Bank.


**Artists Api’soomaahka and Christina Battle each engage with seeds through a restorative environmental framework, including circulating seeds of regionally native plants like sweetgrass. Deeply invested in climate action through their practices, both artists work with their communities, rural and urban ones respectively, to reflect on the universal lesson that the land is key to our collective survival.**

**This piece builds from their conversation at the MacKenzie Art Gallery on November 15, 2025, moderated by associate curator Lillian O’Brien Davis, as part of _Gathering the Great Plains_. While Treaty and colonial geographies carve up the Prairies, the growth patterns of sweetgrass trace an alternative map of the Plains region, offering a glimpse of an alternative geography grounded in healing for people and the land. Centred on themes of movement, borders, and migration, the _Gathering the Great Plains_ series positions the Great Plains as a gathering force—a witness and participant shaped by the stories the region holds. This program was formed in partnership between the MacKenzie Art Gallery and Remai Modern.**

 
##### PROPOGATION 
##### Naapi’s Garden and Katoyiss Seed Bank are joint projects led by Blackfoot artist and land-based educator Api’soomaahka (Running Coyote). The initiatives originated as a project to regenerate native grasslands and restore the presence of Blackfoot plants on Kainai First Nation. Naapi’s Garden works to grow plants that have traditionally played an important role in the lives of Indigenous people. The garden propagates plants such as sweetgrass, licorice root, and wild onions. The plants are used for both nourishment as part of a traditional regional diet and their medicinal properties.

**Api’soomaahka:** Most First Nation communities in the western Prairies would only plant tobacco for ceremonial and medicinal uses. In my community, the last tobacco ceremony was held on Blackfoot Territory in the mid-’50s and consisted of 230 songs. This type of planting involved making a small hole with a digging stick without disturbing the soil. This is the main method we utilize at Naapi’s Garden, as it was transferred and adapted in various propagation methods. Due to the decline of native grass and flowers in my community, this project came to be one of the ways to regain our food security and sovereignty. It’s also preparing our children for the future by teaching them to become horticulturalists and herbalists. They are the seeds who will grow, thrive, and further the culture.

##### “connecting thru grasses” was an exhibition by Battle first presented at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba in 2020; curated by Alyssa Fearon, it toured to the MacKenzie Art Gallery in 2021. The exhibition considered how we might both map and define Prairie boundaries anew. The show was accompanied by a participatory project that included the circulation of grass seed packs.

**Christina Battle:** “connecting thru grasses” looks closer to the prairie habitat. One of the most endangered in Canada, only a small fraction of the original tallgrass prairie remains post-colonization. The project tries not only to draw attention to this grim fact but to take inspiration from the vast root systems of prairie grasses that, despite it all, continue to help hold the land together. While the gallery work also considers technologies that continually monitor and generate images of this diminishing biome, the participatory project aims to spread vital prairie grasses across the region. Open to those living across three Prairie provinces (Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba), participants are sent a pack of three prairie grass seeds: little bluestem, Canada wild rye, and sideoats grama. Across one month, they are sent prompts via email and invited to think more deeply about the prairie biome before planting their grasses and marking them on a collective map that documents the project and the grasses growing on into the future.

 
##### CIRCULATION 
**CB:** _seeds are meant to disperse_ (2015–ongoing) is an ongoing project where I grow, save, and share seeds. The seeds are offered as a trade or gift, in an attempt to encourage and support alternative systems of exchange. After they’ve planted their seeds (usually the following season), participants are asked to send a response in return: a story, image, or reflection after the seeds have been planted. The responses are then shared through the project website and archive as a resource for others. A number of offshoots from this take the form of publications, how-to guides, and participatory projects. All are meant to share knowledge around particular seeds and are available as a resource through the website.

With this seed-saving project, I think a lot about responsibility—and how to shape circumstances for gifting and receiving seeds in responsible ways, from sharing information to providing opportunities to participate on people’s own time and terms. When participants reach out wanting seeds, I try to first find out more about where and how they grow to make sure I’m being responsible with the seeds I send—that the seeds are native to the region where they are planting, or that care will be taken in how they plant them. Often, participatory projects extending from _seeds are meant to disperse_ are region-specific, for example with “connecting thru grasses.”

One of the conversations I had with Api’soomaahka leading up to the gathering in Regina was about sweetgrass seeds and my hesitation to share them with just anyone. Because the plants have such important cultural value, and because growing them from seed can be complicated for novice growers, I wasn’t always comfortable sending them to just anyone who would take part in the project. I always want to make sure that the seeds and by extension the plants grown from them will be cared for in responsible ways, and I’m continually working to find strategies for doing so with the project.
 

##### POLLUTION 
##### What have you observed about the environmental impact of the increasingly extreme climate events on your respective communities (e.g., water levels on the Kainai Nation or urban air pollution concentration in certain areas of Edmonton)?

CB: Over the past few years, I have been thinking more deeply about the impacts of air pollution on our physical bodies and mental well-being. It’s a known problem that is well ignored in most cities where I’ve lived, but quite profoundly so in Edmonton where we have some of the worst air-quality levels in the province year-round. There’s been renewed interest in air quality because of the extreme wildfires many communities faced in recent years, but the reality of bad air is that, most often, it isn’t visible to us. The toxins and pollutants in the air don’t always look as obvious as wildfire smoke, yet they have the same impacts on our bodies and minds. As pipelines are approved and extraction lauded, we continue to ignore the impacts these decisions have on all of us.

A: Water and air quality from current and future strip mining and cultivation are having a negative effect on flora and fauna. Our watersheds are under threat and is quite noticeable from creeks and lakes drying up. Winds are becoming a daily issue as they are strong and blow away topsoil. Planting native species is a great way to heal the land from erosion, development, and cultivation. Joining individuals and groups who advocate for the land is a great way to amplify your voice. You build allies to help and work together as a team. Growing native plants is a great alternative as they are hardy and drought tolerant.
 

##### RESTORATION 
##### The environment’s impact on the body is a concern in both your work, whether it’s through the restorative effects of a traditional diet or the negative impacts of proximity to pollutants. Could you speak more to this?

**CB:** _seeds are meant to disperse_ came out of a need and want to secure sustainable, fresh, and organic food that was also affordable. When the impetus of the project began, I had been living in a known food desert in North Denver, and the connections between how this overlapped with other issues of environmental racism were readily apparent (a historically Black neighbourhood, the area was also one where industry and large traffic-infrastructure projects were continually approved without regard for the communities who lived there). Over the years, as vegetable prices have been steadily increasing, not to mention the lack of dialogue around pesticides used on our foodstuff, I wanted to find ways to increase my access to affordable organic vegetables.

**A:** Being an educator for preschool offers a great advantage in teaching land-based knowledge, as it was in our past where children were taught at an early age. Utilizing Traditional knowledge as opposed to colonial education at an early age regains and strengthens the future for young horticulturalists. It’s also to combine Traditional with Western knowledge.

My hope is that future generations will have lower rates of disease and longer lives by adhering to our continued traditions of plant and food as medicines. Medicine from the land helps your body to flush out impurities from your kidneys, liver, and respiratory system. Having and using traditional medicines early in life can help your body move to a healthier state. A future with less health issues is the goal.

Sweetgrass is the plant they will carry into the future.

##### Can you talk about your work on sweetgrass restoration between Saskatchewan and Alberta?

**A:** Sweetgrass is one of the plants that are important to the First Nation communities. It is an edible plant with many uses for the body and mental health. Using sweetgrass in smudging makes the connection to the spirits of the land; it helps connect to the sky beings, or star people.

In the past 10 years, there has been a steady decline, and only through human efforts can we save this important grass. The proposed joint project for the Prairie region biospheres will take a multifaceted approach to investigate and develop ways to enhance sweetgrass supply for First Nation partners across Beaver Hills and Waterton biospheres, AB, and Redberry Lake and Riding Mountain biospheres, SK. This is a long-term project to unite the communities to help the land and save our culture. [^1]

The combination of Traditional knowledge and Western knowledge contributes to the expansion of propagation by using plant tissue culture to speed up the process of nature. One seed and its root can produce up to 150 or more plants as opposed to the one seed, one plant method. This increases the outcome by tenfold and increases the possibility of more seed production. Sweetgrass has been added to the other plants that are currently being researched for the plant tissue culture, such as the wild turnip (also known as Indian breadroot), wild carrot, and tobacco.
 

##### PROPAGATION 
##### Through the lens of your artist practices and environmental advocacy, how do you think about the future in your work?

**CB:** As seeds are shared, they are meant to help others imagine building a world different from the trajectory we’re currently on—I see it as a sort of practicing (for) the future. My hope is that the project helps draw attention to a number of critical issues like food security and sustainability, species diversification, seed copyright, climate change, urban renewal, and anti-capitalist forms of exchange; and that it shares information and ideas for new ways forward. I think a lot about distributed models and look to both plant systems and systems of technology to think more about notions of “spread.” One goal of _seeds are meant to disperse_ is to engage with this notion by disseminating ideas outward from the garden as a form of community-building.

**A:** My vision for my work is to regain food security and sovereignty for our future generations as it relates to the land and all that grows. It’s to introduce how being a good steward of the land protects all. After all, a warrior’s responsibility was to protect the land and thus protect the people.

Art and the land work together in many ways; the land offers a wealth of earth pigments, from various berries and roots, to acquire colour. It’s also a non-toxic form of art.

As for the future, I most likely will not see the outcome of my work as I will be long gone from this land. Learning about the land is key to survival.

[^1]: These biospheres are recognized by UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere (MAB) program as sites to model sustainable futures. Often, these designations were possible because of local communities. Learn more at: https://www.redberrylake.ca; https://www.beaverhills.ca; https://www.waterton-biosphere.com; https://rmbr.ca

Lillian O'Brien Davis (she/her) is a curator and writer based in Treaty 4, Regina, SK.



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Environment

Storytelling

Education

Api’soomaahka and Christina Battle engage seeds as tools of ecological restoration, cultural continuity, and community exchange. Through a dialogic format extending from their panel at MacKenzie Art Gallery in partnership with Remai Modern, their practices situate seed work within broader discussions of climate change, Indigenous knowledge, and environmental justice across the Prairie region.


Sharing Seeds

Sharing Seeds (with Lillian O'Brien Davis)

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Artist Project

Along with the text, we’re pleased to further feature this expansive artist project by sharing Waheed's images online. The remaining magazine spreads are viewable below. We also invite you to [access the project as a pdf.](https://strapi-uploads-c-mag-prod.s3.ca-central-1.amazonaws.com/C163_Artist_Project_Full_48f1fdddd9.pdf)

##### _HUM_, which translates to “We” in Urdu, is a trilogy of multichannel sound installations composed of songs of resistance sung both on and off the streets—performed with lips sealed shut. Conceived in late 2019 and developed over years marked by mass uprisings, pandemic conditions, accelerating repression, and the normalization of state violence, the work responds to the present tense of authoritarianism.

##### The first volume, _HUM_ (2020), centres political prisoners as leaders of liberation struggles, tracing how collective voice persists under conditions of incarceration. _HUM II_ (2023) foregrounds the leadership of women and mothers, whose labour of transmission—singing, remembering, carrying struggle across generations—has sustained movements despite ongoing attempts at erasure. The final volume, _HUM III_, turns to labour movements, focusing on dock workers and coastal communities whose collective refusals interrupt the material flows that sustain apartheid regimes, imperial warfare, and extractive global capital. In tracing the material leverage of labour in confronting genocide and war, the work, involving almost three years of research and collaboration, aligns with a longer history of internationalist struggle that understands the port not only as a site of exchange, but as a point of intervention. Shaped by longstanding engagement with militarized and extractive geographies, and informed in part by over two decades of lived experience in the Persian Gulf region, Hajra Waheed’s practice approaches these systems as interlocking sites of power, extraction, and resistance.

##### Together, the trilogy insists that voice is not only expression but infrastructure: a way of rehearsing coordination, care, and collective power under conditions where public speech is increasingly regulated, surveilled, and criminalized. _HUM_ emerges in a moment when organizing is reframed as extremism, solidarity is staged rather than practiced, and cultural institutions retreat into risk management as machineries of war and repression accelerate globally. Against this tightening horizon, the work asks what it might mean to practice collective voicing when speaking can get you arrested, and how sound might move through public space without permission.

##### This conversation between Waheed and _HUM_ collaborator (arranger and vocalist) Laurel Sprengelmeyer was recorded between February and early March 2026, at the start of the US-Israel war on Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and amidst Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine and invasion of Lebanon—interlocking crises that have killed hundreds of thousands, displaced millions, and deepened humanitarian catastrophe alongside rising authoritarianism and resurgent fascist logics globally. The conversation reflects on _HUM_’s genesis, its methods of making and listening, and the urgent need to build and sustain practices of collective voice that can move across borders, withstand repression, and remain materially connected to struggles for liberation now.

**LS:** I’m thinking back to that moment you shared Nûdem Durak’s story with me more than six years ago. The Kurdish musician has been imprisoned on a 19-year sentence in Turkey for singing in her native language. You’d received two recordings of her from her brother that had somehow escaped confiscation by officials. As we listened together in your studio in Montreal, you explained that she’d been thrown into solitary confinement for rallying inmates through song, and that even as she remained in deep isolation, others could hear her humming in defiance. I couldn’t help but cry. Her story informed the genesis of _HUM_ with these two songs bookending the first volume.

**HW:** Nûdem was arrested in 2015 at the age of 27 and charged with promoting propaganda for teaching Kurdish folk songs to youth groups. The project was conceived in response to her courage and is a tribute to her daily acts of refusal and resistance sustained under incarceration, with the first volume squarely centring the role of political prisoners as leaders in liberation struggles. All of the singers and songwriters featured in it, at some point, have been imprisoned—their work censored, they themselves tortured and/or forced into exile for mobilizing collective voice. It’s from this shared condition of silencing that the work turns to humming.

Created by the resonance of air in the passages of the head and throat, humming is a defiant utterance we’re all capable of making, even when our lips have been sealed shut, and it is known to heal our vocal cords when we’ve lost our voice altogether. We hum when we first try to memorize a song and, later, when we want to remember it. Often passed down maternally, it’s ancestral—prelinguistic yet deeply intentional. With no grammar, no syntax, and no formal address, it functions as a lexicon: an infra-language that precedes speech and survives its collapse. It rises from deep within the body and takes root beyond the systems and structures that govern, authorize, discipline, and police us. Its form endures, and through it the work persists—irrepressible—asserting itself even as language is denied, silenced, or weaponized.

Our collective voice is radically regenerative, and it can be produced in a multiplicity of ways—not only as expression, but as infrastructure. _HUM_ is meant to operate within this register: as a practice of collective voicing that trains attention, builds relational capacity, and rehearses forms of coordination under conditions where public speech is increasingly regulated, mediated, and criminalized. In this present moment of intensifying authoritarianism and resurgent fascist logics, the work isn’t meant to merely preserve voice but render collective voicing legible, repeatable, and capable of producing effects beyond borders.

**LS:** I remember you speaking about using the form as a tool for street action in places where singing lyrics can get you arrested—an act of collective voicing that could move through public space without permission. When you first approached Sam (Osama Shalabi) and I about creating hummed renditions of songs you’d chosen, you asked us to imagine 1,000 people walking shoulder to shoulder down the street and to consider what it would take to teach them how to hum a song, familiar or not, within the span of a couple minutes. From there, we worked to create arrangements of source material that vocalists could use as guides. It took some experimentation to find the right balance between fidelity to the original material and the simplification the form necessitates. The most successful arrangements seemed to marry the intuitive spontaneity of a remembered tune with the powerful intentionality of what we might imagine Nûdem’s humming in solitary to sound like.

**HW:** It would have been far simpler to record a choral arrangement collectively in a single session, but conceiving the work spatially, as a roving multichannel sound installation, carried the responsibility of preserving an acute sense of the individual within the collective. We’ve always recorded each vocalist separately in four-hour sessions, resulting in more than 1,000 tracks to mix per volume. Over the course of the trilogy, we have recorded nearly 50 anonymous vocalists from around the globe, sifting through and mixing thousands of sessions to weave together what has become a massive entanglement of comrade voices—a true labour of love.

**LS:** But your work doesn’t end here! Something that has become a defining distinction between your and other sound works is that this is not plug-and-play, and this is unmistakably felt upon entry into _HUM_.

**HW:** Also true. The final, granular sculpting takes place on-site each time the work is presented. After determining how the voices will move through my sound-chamber designs, Pietro Amato (creative technical director) and I always mix on-site. It is painstaking work, listening to the architecture of the spaces _HUM_ inhabits, intuiting placement, but the power of _HUM_ lies in the visceral feeling of being able to gather and be intimately held by unique sound-chamber environments, be they indoor or outdoor. Every inhale, every exhale, every moment of collective silence or individual vocalization is intentional and essential to the full, somatic, enveloping experience of listening in physical space.

**LS:** Often one of us with “musical” training would push an arrangement in a conventional tonal direction, but your instinct was to resist making _HUM_ “music.” You had a hairline trigger for anything that veered toward the conventionally pretty, which might have turned the work into forgettable sonic wallpaper. Instead, the volumes are disarmingly human.

There’s something inherently curative about the sonic experience of _HUM_: humming stimulates the vagal nerve, activating the parasympathetic nervous system, and within minutes can return the body to a soft, grounded state. I was recovering from a vocal injury when we recorded the first volume, and by the end of the session my vocal plasticity had returned—it was physiologically healing. But as we experienced in the recording sessions, the work’s power lies in the stories woven through the compositions. On-site, you provide educational booklets that offer deeper context on the historical and political significance of the songs. The somatic impact of the sonic material, coupled with the invitation to engage directly with these struggles, is what is most uniquely affecting. So, I haven’t been surprised to learn that visitors stay an average of about one and a half hours, listening to the works almost three times in a single sitting.

**HW:** _HUM_ is meant to function as a reading room as much as a listening experience. At its heart are two commitments: the desire for people to connect to and learn from important social movements that take on power directly, and the understanding that liberation struggles are not isolated but fundamentally interconnected. In recent years, large-scale collective mobilization for Palestinian liberation, secured in part through rigorous student-led organizing, has once again been recoded from civic participation into a threat to institutional stability. Being the state of exception Palestine has always been, this shift has sharpened as mobilizing moves beyond symbolic protest to materially consequential strategies: boycotts, labour actions, and coordinated refusals that intervene directly in circuits of global capital. When collective action exerts material leverage and interrupts flows of capital, labour, and legitimacy, institutions (including cultural) respond through containment, regulation, and withdrawal, while the state narrows the conditions of public life itself: restricting assembly, collapsing dissent into “extremism,” expanding surveillance regimes, and normalizing punitive control and state violence.

**LS:** I understood the first volume as emerging from a backdrop of student-led movements in late 2019 on either side of the Line of Control separating India and Pakistan. Though not in direct communication, students on both sides took to the streets reciting the same poetry and songs by revolutionary poets and political prisoners from a previous generation, in Urdu, your mother tongue—a language highly politicized and subject to political erasure in India. With the second volume, what became legible to me was how consistently women and mothers not only appear as carriers but leaders on the forefront of these histories of struggle.
You have always been insistent that solidarity is not enough, and that _HUM_ must be coupled with a focus on practices of direct action. _HUM III_ does this in such a powerfully human way, connecting us across oceans and between shorelines with the political, emotional, and even spiritual desire to enact positive change for the global majority.

**HW:** The third and final volume shifts its focus to dock workers and coastal communities and their central role in liberation struggles. By refusing to load or unload goods tied to apartheid regimes, colonial powers, and imperialist military operations, dock workers have disrupted the flow of resources that sustain these systems of power and increased pressure on governments and corporations to acquiesce to the demands of movements. Over the years, the importance of major ports as choke points of global capitalism has only grown, and today, dock workers and coastal communities perhaps hold more potential than ever to challenge entrenched systems of power and fuel international movements for justice.

Most recently, on February 6th, dock workers shut down 21 major ports across Europe and the Mediterranean in a coordinated day of action, blocking arms shipments and demanding a full trade and arms embargo on Israel. This represents a significant escalation of organized labour’s direct intervention against imperialism and genocide. In a statement issued by the World Federation of Trade Unions on January 30 as part of this international call, the demands outlined include bringing Israel’s genocide in Palestine, backed by the U.S., NATO, and the EU, to an immediate end; stopping weapons transfers from their ports to Palestine and other war zones; securing a sustained humanitarian corridor; rejecting the EU’s ReArm initiative; and abandoning efforts to further militarize ports and strategic infrastructure. As the unions have stated, their ultimate goal is “ensuring that European and Mediterranean ports remain places of peace, free from any involvement in war.” [^1] History offers powerful examples of coordinated and sustained dock-worker actions, supported by mass public solidarity, that have shifted the course of political struggles. _HUM III_ sheds light on eight ports and eight such transformative interventions.

What continues to unfold in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran, and across strategic port cities in the region, alongside the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, brings into sharp focus the urgency of a collective anti-war struggle that involves sustained support for dock workers’ actions. Elsewhere, dock workers and coastal communities are already taking extraordinary measures: refusing military shipments, halting arms transfers, and asserting control over the material flows that sustain imperial and extractive violence. These interventions are not symbolic—they materially disrupt the machinery of war and reveal the power of organized labour and collective refusal.

Arundhati Roy once wrote that fighting fascism begins by putting your ear to the ground and listening for the whispers of the truly powerless, the majority. What we’re living through now is not accidental. The attacks on universities, on minorities, on citizenship itself; the militarization of police; the hollowing out of public life under the banners of “national pride” and “national security”—this is coordinated. Corporate media has helped normalize a lynch-mob politics, laundering violence into common sense. And the most dangerous part is that it no longer feels new. It feels ordinary. Meanwhile, the left fractures itself.

No one survives this alone. We have to learn to make room for one another, to accept imperfect allies, to practice standing up for each other even when it’s uncomfortable. The right understands culture as infrastructure; they are producing it relentlessly. If we abandon that terrain, we abandon the future.

**LS:** Solidarity, as you’ve insisted, is imperfect, and if it remains only symbolic, it fails. But imperfect solidarity is still the only ground we have to stand on. The real battleground is the popular imagination: once cruelty becomes normal, once repression becomes “reasonable,” it is brutally hard to undo.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how courage and cowardice are both contagious. We’re witnessing a wave of institutional cowardice right now. But we’re also seeing its opposite, in people and in institutions willing to make space for works like _HUM_. Your insistence on bringing this work into the world, in this climate of fear, is not just brave—it’s contagious. And that, to me, is the quiet, stubborn force that keeps open the possibility of another future.

[^1]: World Federation of Trade Unions, “WFTU solidarity message with the International Day of Action for Ports,” WFTU Central, January 30, 2026, accessed February 6, 2026, www.wftucentral.org/wftu-solidarity-message-with-the-international-day-of-action-for-ports


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Hajra Waheed’s globally-staged and ongoing trilogy is based on hummed compositions of songs of resistance from international solidarity movements. Sources include political prisoners like Kurdish musician Nûdem Durak, the leadership of women and mothers carrying struggle across generations, and labour movements, like that of dock workers in Europe shutting down Israeli weapons shipments. In conversation with collaborator Laurel Sprengelmeyer between February and early March 2026, at the start of the US-Israel war on Iran and closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Waheed reiterates the urgent need to build and sustain practices of collective voice that can move across borders.

_HUM:_ FROM PRISON TO PORT by Hajra Waheed

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

Composition: We Return

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

When Play Confronts Power

**Nic Wilson** (they/he) is an artist and writer living and working between the Prairies and the Maritimes. Their most recent book, The ‘Ayin, was published in the summer of 2025.


The Afterlife of Writing

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

One Thing: In Search of an Incorruptible Life

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

The House Edge

Kai Trotz-Motayne is a Guyanese-Canadian researcher and writer from Tkaronto/Toronto, whose work takes inspiration from the many Caribbean people that raised her. She spends most days reminiscing about family gatherings that would end with tales of her family’s
Caribbean past. Inspired by their imaginative retellings, her mind now wonders what stories she will one day tell. Her work now explores how storytelling practices, like identities, evolve and transform through movement.

For Those Who Visit Us in Our Dreams

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

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

To Enshrine an Ululation

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

The _KISSSSS_ of Yong Soon Min

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

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

In the Lacuna

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

A Vampire Walks Into a Funhouse

Innas Tsuroiya is a writer living in Indonesia who works across poetry, criticism, translation, fiction, and divination. She has written for _C Magazine_, _e-flux Criticism_, _TANK_, _The Stinging Fly_, _Poetry Wales_, _Protean Magazine_, _ArtReview_, _Artforum_, _ArtAsiaPacific_, and more.


One Thing: Kamala Ibrahim Ishag’s Zar Paintings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bhenji Ra Dances at the End of the Rainbow

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

Floor Drawing Series by Aubin Soonhwan K: Text

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

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

Our Third Sun

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

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

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

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

Hard Limits, Soft Landing

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

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

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

One Thing: Tracing Fragments of Queer Desire


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


Sinister Pleasure: Interview with Ja'Tovia Gary

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

A Good Animal on Wet Sheets: Disobedient Gasps in Subspace

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

Composition: give up your own

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

What is the Safe Word?

You’re invited to submit a letter in response to _C Magazine_ Issue 163 Chorus **by October 12.**

We want to know what you think—about the new issue, its themes, specific meaty content, relevance or irrelevance, _and_ about _C_’s new look. C163 Chorus introduced a different format and a re-invisioned design that hopes to remain dynamic and responsive to content. We’re embracing the possibility of changing physical formats and materials as an ethos. It’s an ongoing consideration and your experience of the magazine has to be a part of it. How did it feel to hold? How did it feel to read? Did it engage differently with texts? With visuals? Let us know what worked and what didn’t.

Or tell us what matters to you in critical art publishing in Canada. What do you love, and what is there a lack of? What should publications like _C_ lean into? Send us your informal, critical, inquisitive, or irreverent responses in prose—creativity welcome. A $100 honorarium is paid to each contribution selected for print. 

Selected letters will be published in C164 Filth (Fall 2026).

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


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