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The New Gallery

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Varley

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Capilano

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Bracy Appeikumoh was the Editorial and Programs Assistant at _C Magazine_ in 2024, in partnership with OCAD U Career Launcher. She is a writer and mixed media artist whose work centres reimagining desire and pleasure wholly divested from the diktats of empire and all of its baggage. Her erotic fiction takes place in queer futures embodying queer pre-colonial pasts; her non-fiction ponders how we get there. She is burdened by the urgent need to restore, preserve, and disseminate Indigenous ways of being and knowing. Octavia E. Butler, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, June Jordan, Lorraine Hansberry, Maya Angelou, Claudia Jones.

Editorial Conception

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

Editor

Maandeeq Mohamed is a writer and researcher and the Associate Editor of _C Magazine_. 

Associate Editor

Designer

Publisher

In this issue’s extended editorial note, Bracy Appeikumoh asks, “Was utopia, like extra lives, envisioned as a means of escaping death?” Among the haunting contradictions of living in the imperial core, whose violences seek their own immortality, to seize a different kind of “extra life” takes an extra real imagination. Across virtual game worlds, ancestral inheritances, unfinished revolutionary histories, artists’ data storage, and more, contributors to C160 reflect on extra life as a state both surplus and sacred—what persists in age-old cycles of decay.


Extra Life

Review

Maya Burns lives in Montreal. She has an MA in Contemporary Art, Design, and New Media Art Histories from OCAD University and a job at _C Magazine_.


“Three” occupied the first of two rooms at Eli Kerr gallery, and left no shortage
of space. In a satisfying arrangement of one, two, and three objects, the exhibition
includes one painting by Liza Lacroix, a pair of photos by Geneviève Cadieux, and a
triptych of metal plaques by Maggy Hamel-Metsos. Beneath the tidy math, though, is
a strange triangulation of works (the affiliation of artists offering little explanation). Too
awkward to be slick, too sparing to dismiss as random, “Three” seems motivated by
what exists in the space between works, and curiously intent on the project of exhibiting
it. In that space, the sum _three_ rattles around like a non-theme, stressing the absence of
curatorial mediation and narration—functions that an intelligent, proclamation-like
exhibition text questions both ethically and aesthetically. Left to speak for themselves,
Lacroix’s, Cadieux’s, and Hamel-Metsos’s works punctuate “Three” with abrupt shifts in
tone that approached a rhythm. Styled with the cadence of _One and Three Chairs_
(1965), it suggests three different shows and works with the effect of a single piece in
three parts.

“Three” cedes to the independence of each individual work. Installed on separate and
centrally facing walls, viewing one means that the others fall away. Lacroix’s painting, _a
failure_ (2025), hangs at the head of the room. The singular painting is brooding, bruise-
like, and abstract. On the wall to its left, Cadieux’s monumental black-and-white photos
depict, from respectively sidelong angles, a penis and what is only recognizable as body
hair. Titled Fiction (2025), both frames move toward an abstracted expanse of form and
shadow. The two larger works hang low in the room, recalling the weight of both
Cadieux’s legacy and the traditions in painting that Lacroix’s psychically charged field of
gesture and light evoke. This gravity also renders their pieces more familiarly
distinct—characters of a trio in which Hamel-Metsos’s _One Life_ (2025) plays the jester.
On the third wall, _One Life_ spans three plaques—one brass, one pewter, one
bronze—stamped with the sources of their metal: “one cradle,” “one clock,” “one urn.”

Dwelling in and _on_ paint, pictures, and words (among other things) _a failure, Fiction,_ and
_One Life_ turn in on their own artistic devices and histories, investing surface differences
with the depth of incompatible sign systems. Rather than translate or make sense of
their private worlds with language, the exhibition text instead casts doubt on this
inclination. Unmoved to speak by a common prompt, facing each other, “Three”
presents its works as though stuck on the brink of conversation, adding emotional
resonance to a shared drama; each contends with the abstractions of communication.
The same grappling plays across the barest suggestion of representation in Lacroix’s frustrated marks, the camera’s inventive perspective, as demonstrated by Cadieux, and
the layers of false equivalency—numbers, words, objects, time, scale, monetary
value—that Hamel-Metsos builds up around a “life.” In simply reiterating the inevitable
wrongness of attempting to “speak for” these concerns, the exhibition at once
honours and mirrors them. Although it is the image of this quiet entanglement that
sticks, I also recognize in “Three” a revolt against overdetermination and a desire to
allow the collision between works to remain charged with ambiguous, shifting
significance. Pared down to three works and their sum, “Three” works against any more
elaborately conceived exhibition with the self-justifying simplicity of a haiku, ready with
the answer to my furrowed brow: “Yes, this is more than enough.”

Writer

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 “Three” included work by Geneviève Cadieux, Maggy Hamel-Metsos, and Liza Lacroix and ran from 6 March to 4 April 2025 at Galerie Eli Kerr, Montreal.

“Three” — Geneviève Cadieux, Maggy Hamel-Metsos, Liza Lacroix 

Feature

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


Among the stacks of a library or adrift in a digital archive, I feel immersed in death. The accumulated pasts that I wade through are thick and they place me in time. There are many ways to trace the wake of others and ourselves, but I choose to focus on this textual anterior. Sometimes reading, writing, speech, and text are made mundane through use. They are so easily glossed over in constant cycles of desire and fulfilment, but through attention [^1]—long, slow looking in tandem with long, slow thinking—I want to make them strange again, restoring their jagged edges.

 

#### Yes, Dorotea. It was the murmuring that killed me.
> —Juan Rulfo, _Pedro Páramo_, 1955

About halfway through Juan Rulfo’s _Pedro Páramo_
(1955), the central narrator, Juan Preciado, dies. Much
of the book is ostensibly narrated from the grave he
shares with Dorotea, whom he encounters upon arriving
in Comala, a fictionalized version of a town in Mexico.
He was sent by his mother to that ghost town, as she lay
dying, to find his eponymous father. In a more conventional text, the death of the narrator would be equated
with the death of the story, but here, in the shared grave,
Preciado encounters a past in dreamlike remnants that
are hard to place in a linear understanding of time. Rulfo
uses multiple forms of punctuation (‘’, “”, «», —) to
indicate shifts in voice and time. Different characters’
voices emerge from stories of others. In the text, death
is a portal. It leads him out of his body and into the past
with Dorotea as one of his many co-narrators. It is here
that one voice bleeds into many.

The book is awash in spooky conundrums that entwine questions about life, time, order, and the ambiguity
and relativity that pervades them. It begins with a strong
declaration of place: “I came to Comala because I was
told my father lived here, a man named Pedro Páramo.” [^2]
On the level of language, the reader is given a location
that also gestures toward both an individual and a social
identity, as “I” is often taken as the ultimate declaration
of personhood and autonomy. It is the foundation of a
self that we grow into.

In _Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing_ (1993),
Hélène Cixous writes, “We need to lose the world […]
to discover that there is more than one world and
that the world isn’t what we think it is. Without that, we
know nothing about the mortality and immortality
that we carry.” [^3] The acts and results of making are often aligned with birth and new life, but the fingerprints
of death rest on them as well. Like the concepts of new
and old or time and space, the dyad of life and death
are inseparable. You can’t speak about the beginning
of something without invoking the concept of its end. Any invocation of life holds the trace of death looming like a silent letter.

One of the reasons I keep returning to text and writing is the possibilities they provide for questioning
the boundaries that construct the space between self
and other, along with concomitant boundaries between
life and death. Writing is a form that recognizes the
failings (or perhaps the contingencies) of an idea of the
“self” as an entity contained to a discrete body. It can
be a place of non-division from which many questions
and declarations of separation and clarification can be
unwound, demolished, or left to decompose.
 
 

#### Writing is learning to die […] to live at the extremity of life…

> —Hélène Cixous, _Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing_, 1993

Visual artist and writer Sarah Tripp’s _You Are of
Vital Importance_ (2014) takes on scenarios I rarely
encounter in literary fiction. These vignettes dramatize the events of an experimental spatial workshop
and chart the history of a restaurant that has become
a social hub in the arts community of a city. One piece
in particular, “Studies of practice,” documents the experience of a person who steps into the working methods
of various artists as if these constellations of materials,
times, and locations were a glove that one could don
and shed. The unnamed narrator sits in a small, dark
cupboard and paints with their fingers, following the
casual guidelines of its usual inhabitant. They also poke
around in the word processor of an anxious writer. [^4]

These studies offer the impression of time spent
outside of oneself. Through the patterning of experiences, the narrator flickers between possible selves,
possible days in the studio; they imagine through research, and the strange social guises art can take on,
how their life could be just a bit different. A reader
is guided into that mundane empathetic space.

I take “Studies” as documentation of a series of
actions that, while they may or may not have happened,
dwell in a small and secretive space not usually known
to an audience. Any artist can tell you that most of the
work of practice is private or, at least, happens in a cascade of private spaces: homes, bedrooms, studios, notebooks, computers, headphones, web browsers, etc. Part of what ignites Tripp’s “Studies” is the possibility of
climbing into the driver’s seat of another person’s practice and performing a kind of possession.

In horror, possession is often characterized as the
worst type of violation—a forcible evacuation of the
self in order to control a person’s body—but the fantasy
of seeing from another’s perspective can be seen here
as a far more familiar and benign longing. Though it can
be regarded as naive, sentimental, or spurious, the ability to induce empathy in a viewer upon encounter, even
across great physical and temporal distance, is a central fascination in art-making.

 

#### The earlier culture will become a heap of rubble and finally a heap of ashes, but spirits will hover over the ashes.

> —Ludwig Wittgenstein, _Culture and Value_, 1970

For nearly a decade, Ron Terada worked on a series of paintings based on the book _Jack Goldstein
and the CalArts Mafia_ (2003), [^5] comprising dramatized first-person accounts by Goldstein and a long list of his
peers from the California Institute of the Arts in the ’70s. The book documents the rise and fall of Goldstein’s career in the rapidly commercializing art world of the ’80s. Each of Terada’s canvases in the _Jack series_ (2009–2018) presents a facsimile of the text with obvious visual allusions to book pages, but also to stone
tablets and, by the end of the series, large memorial slabs embedded into the floors of cathedrals.

These canvases perform several circuitous plays—
commenting on the position that Goldstein (along with many other members of the so-called Pictures Generation) holds in art history, marked by a shift in global attention from the conceptual work of the ’60s (often
emphasizing the use of text) to the pictorial work of
the ’70s and ’80s (often invoking mass media forms). Terada cheekily turns this relationship on its head, reframing the biting text into the medium of large-format painting—one of the golden calves that propelled some of Goldstein’s peers into the post-conceptual, globalized art market.

I encountered part of the _Jack_ series in a large gallery, shifting from one aching foot to another, slowly
circling the room. The text is consumed by discussions
of money, rivalry, and backstabbing: all concepts that
I knew were part of art-making, but ones that are not
usually brought up in the glossy, sublime image of
“creativity” presented by art institutions. This seemed
like the dirt—the bits that you hear in a cab on the
way to drinks after an opening—which felt somehow
at odds with the slow, slightly monastic mental image
I had of the work’s construction. It implied a layer of
melding between this already polyvocal text and Terada, through the act of transcription.

The effect is a series of nested quotations that are obscured by Richard Hertz’s dramatization in the source
text, but also by Terada’s deadpan delivery. The intimacy
of voices blending, and the ambiguity of who is speaking
and what is said, quietly disturbs the expectation of art as
an individual pursuit. After years of working on the series, Terada said, “I catch myself repeating [Goldstein’s]
phrases.” [^6] This messy relationship is one in which all
parties are shaped by contact with one another, even if
that contact is across great leaps in time and space. At
least that is my hope. I can’t think of a life without the
company of the dead.

 

#### I think about my own practice—my installations—as a series of unfinished sentences with commas that lead to the next part or that remind us that there is no full stop in this conversation…

> —Kameelah Janan Rasheed, _No New Theories_, 2019

I used to spend time with the office administrator whenever I was visiting my father’s work. She would take
me to the photocopier and help me improvise compositions on the scanner bed that usually involved the palm
of my hand and scrap from the recycling bin. I liked to
hold the warm paper after it was spat out of the machine.
I kept these compositions in an empty office beside my
father’s. As he worked on editing a journal for scholars
of military history, my own research into the phenomenology of childhood developed next door.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed often works in the vernacular of copy toner, a material I often think of as
a bridge between spaces of research and the cultures of DIY music, art, and politics. In Rasheed’s _No New
Theories_ (2019), this material erodes many myths
about the aesthetics of knowledge and punctures the
neatness of theoretical speculation. Throughout the
publication, Rasheed builds texts from fragments and
layers of annotation, citation, revision, and accumulated voices she has invited or invoked. [^7] The black-and-white pages unfold as grainy, smeared sets of interstitial spaces connected by graphic elements that bare diagrammatic qualities as well as allusions to punctuation
and Arabic calligraphy.

Along with underlining the porous and unfinished
nature of writing, _No New Theories_ stands as a reminder
that “[w]riting and reading are not separate, reading is
a part of writing.” [^8] The core of the publication is a conversation between Rasheed and Jessica Lynne, which is
expanded, both conceptually and graphically, through
various interventions that fill in the background of
the exchange with quotations and annotations. These
layers of thought remind me of my own intellectual
development, slashing hurried and emphatic lines under the words of others and jotting half-formed sentences in the margins that would go on to underpin a
new piece.

Writing is always gesturing at the ineffable, the unsayable, the unpronounced parts of itself. Punctuation that controls clauses and sentences. “I can’t be A
comprehensive sentence,” says _No New Theories_. The
work seems to demand that language be left open and
that we take up the work of that language. One page is
adapted from the Wikipedia article for the term “Hapax legomenon,” describing a word or idiom that occurs
only once in a given context, such as in an author’s body
of work or a specific language. The concept gestures toward the emergence of words or language used in novel ways to express particular phenomena. The shadow of this emergence is the chipping away at experience that
used to belong to the ineffable, and this brings with it a
small amount of grief.

In “11 Statements Around Art Writing” (2011),
Maria Fusco, Yve Lomax, Michael Newman, and Adrian Rifkin imagine a space of “non-division” where
assumedly discrete activities (like of practice and theory) can collapse and commingle. [^9] It may have one
foot in the realm of fantasy, but I like to think through
non-division when it comes to life and death. I think
about myself as inhabiting the afterlife of so many people who have lived and died before me. Text can be a
link to the world of the dead, but more often it is what
allows the smear of non-division between self and other, living and dead. Reading and writing give a sense
of transcending the boundaries of the corporal self
that is bound in time. Cixous says that “[w]hen I write
I escape myself, I uproot myself,” [^10] and that uprootedness is a small death, in a small neighbourhood of the
self and of language, that allows people to flow into
each other.

Endnotes
[^1]: “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.” Simone Weil, _Gravity and Grace_ (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116.
[^2]: Juan Rulfo and Gabriel García Márquez, _Pedro Páramo_, trans. Douglas J. Weatherford (New York: Grove Atlantic, 2023), 1.
[^3]: Hélène Cixous, _Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing_, trans. Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 10.
[^4]: Sarah Tripp, _You are of vital importance_ (London: Book Works, 2014), 74.
[^5]: Richard Hertz et al., _Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia_, 1st ed. (Ojai: Minneola Press, 2003).
[^6]: Tom McDonough and Ron Terada, “Time Is Different Now,” _Canadian Art_, March 9, 2020, https://canadianart.ca/features/ron-terada-time-is-different-now
[^7]: On her website, Rasheed describes “citation as a practice of deep lineage storytelling that centres knowledge production as a dynamic, interspecies and interdisciplinary process → this is not about ownership or authority.” Kameelah Janan Rasheed, “Colophon,” https://kameelahr.com/Colophon
[^8]: Cixous, _Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing_, 21. 
[^9]: Maria Fusco, Yve Lomax, Michael Newman, and Adrian Rifkin, “11 Statements Around Art Writing,” _Frieze_, October 10, 2011, https://www.frieze.com/article/11-statements-around-art-writing
[^10]: Cixous, _Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing_, 20.

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Language

Nic Wilson’s essay attends to the afterlife of writing in the visual arts, and how text is taken by artists who want to question the boundaries between the self and other, between past and present lives. 

The Afterlife of Writing

Column

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.

There’s a hole that I’m always compelled
to fill. This hole is the memory-card slot
on my childhood video-game consoles
(N64, PS1, GameCube). This hole is the
literal hole at the centre of optical discs.
This hole is the space on hard drives that
isn’t filled with memory yet. The fruits
of my compulsion can be observed in the
pile of storage units I’ve accumulated
over my lifetime. What I have gathered
here is not much at all, but it is a precious pile that holds all the digital copies of my memories, desires, dreams,
and anxieties. Copies that prove I existed once, even if in stagnated, fragmented, and abstracted pieces.

It was in the summer of 1998 that
I first experienced death. It wasn’t the
death of a family member or friend;
it was the death of a video-game save
file. Housed in a translucent rectangle, I was confronted with the corruption of my unfinished journey in a PS1
video-game world. Video games were
places that I could retreat into and use
as a foil for my experiences in the real
world. My parents were largely absent
due to work, and I was an overly anxious child who didn’t have many friends.
Video games were places where I felt
I could assert my existence with some
amount of agency. It didn’t matter that
the games were predetermined and
lacked true choice. The nuances of how
I experienced them made these games
feel so alive, like another life in its own
universe. When I saw the corrupted file,
I felt the dread you feel when something
bad has happened. All I could do was
delete it and start again. I thought memory cards were meant to hold our memories. As a six-year-old, I grieved what
felt like the loss of life I helped to create. It’s silly how dramatic I made it to
be, but because of that silliness, it was
an unresolved grief that manifested
into a compulsion for an obsessive and
borderline ritualistic preservation of
data. I promised to never let it happen
again. I didn’t know what caused the
initial corruption, but I concluded that
making copies of data was going to be
my way to fight back against the (digital) death of the precious things in my
life. So, I came up with this file-saving
routine: have one main file that I only
play, make a copy when an important
story moment happens, continue to play
on the main file, and repeat until the
game is finished.

_For my project_ Season’s End: Liquidation Shop (2022), [^1] _as a parallel to the
physical storefront installation, I created
a website [^2] to commemorate all the objects
I was about to ritualistically part with. I
made low-poly 3D-modelled versions
of these objects, which were accrued (or,
more accurately, hoarded) and used over
eight years in various art projects. Even
though my intention was to give away the
objects to become a part of other people’s
lives, I couldn’t help but still hold on to
a digital version of them, no matter how
crude or inaccurate the 3D model copy
might be._

When I gained access to writable optical discs as a fifteen-year-old, my compulsion to save video-game data crossed
into general computer files, resulting in
the multiple spindles of discs you see in
the photo. My coming-of-age existential
dilemma manifested as the fear of being forgotten. This existential fear that
the universe will forget me as soon as any
trace of me fades away fuelled the need
to make more copies of data that felt fundamentally tied to my existence, like the
photos I took and pirated songs I resonated with. The act of copying and never
altering the files is like a suspension of
time, and without time, there is no loss,
and no loss means no forgetting. What
I liked about the discs was that my preservation efforts were visually comprehensible and each copy was separate from
other discs, in case something happened
to the original one. However, disc-burning was unreliable, as the data-corruption
rate was high. This unreliability resulted
in a new addition to my saving routine:
make extra copies of the copies in case
the initial copy is corrupted. But the
problem was I never deleted anything,
creating ever-increasing stagnated copied states of paused existence.

_In_ Good Job Arcade (2023–present), [^3] _there are no save states, at least not in
any way we understand saving game files
these days. The project was built to replicate typical arcades, where the games
only save your efforts as abstracted high
scores, though this data is temporary
and gets deleted the moment the game
closes. The actual saved data here are the
games themselves. Each game acts as
storage space for the digital data of things
I want to preserve, but this time it can also
live on by being shared with others. I’ll
likely never escape this compulsion to
endlessly save and copy, forever seeking
assurance I’ve existed. Instead, I’ll continue to find different ways, like this Arcade, to hopefully fill that existential hole._

Back in 2016, a friend gifted me an authentic data tape that contains 1TB of
proton-proton collision events recorded
by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. [^4] It’s noted that there could be a chance
the data contains a Higgs boson event, [^5] but there’s no indication of what that
chance could be. I’ll never know because I don’t have the means to access the
data, even if I could understand what I’m
looking at. This data tape is like a peek
into the future for the pile of data I’ve
saved over the past two decades. One day
what I’ve obsessively preserved will be
inaccessible in hardware and cultural
understanding, but it will contain recordings, suspensions of a moment in time
when something happened, like my life
and the people and world that filled it.
If it ends up being true that information is a fundamental matter in the universe, [^6] then maybe I’ll continue to live
on even when my body fades away, but
I know that eventually, time will finally
erase what I couldn’t.


[^1]: Teresa Tam, “Seasons End Liquidation Shop,” https://teresatam.net/project/seasons-end-liquidation-shop
[^2]: “little memories zone,” https://littlememories.zone
[^3]: “Good Job Arcade,” https://goodjob.zone
[^4]: “LHC Tapes,” CERN & Society Foundation, https://cernandsocietyfoundation.cern/lhc-tapes
[^5]: “The Higgs boson,” CERN, https://home.web.cern.ch/science/physics/higgs-boson
[^6]: Melvin M. Vopson, “The _mass-energy-information_ equivalence principle,” _AIP Advances_ 9, no. 9 (September 2019): 095206, accessed January 17, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5123794


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Exploring the existential questions of finding ways to be remembered, Teresa Tam investigates artistic and personal storage devices and how they can become tangible proof of existence.

One Thing: In Search of an Incorruptible Life

Leah Triplett is a writer and curator currently serving as Curator of Contemporary Art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, PA.

In _Biennial Boom: Making Contemporary Art Global _,
Paloma Checa-Gismero historicizes the explosion of
biennial exhibitions since the ’80s, and the related networks of making, displaying, collecting, and supporting contemporary art that manifest in these temporary exhibitions. Checa-Gismero argues that despite how such exhibitions aspire to be the most radical stage for new ideas and modes of making, their structures are indebted
to those of North Atlantic modernism, and ultimately risk homogenizing the host city’s local cultures in relation to internationalism.

Checa-Gismero proposes the concept of “aesthetic conversions,” or the process through which artworks
evolve in meaning according to the context and politics
of how they are displayed (including domestic spaces,
museums, or temporary exhibitions). If seemingly objective, expository rationales of display informed the modern encyclopaedic museum of the 19th century;
in postmodern exhibition-making, audiences assume the
position of power, “converting” the meaning of artworks
through a confluence of subjectivities. However, these
new meanings, Checa-Gismero argues, are still shaped
by Eurocentrism.

Checa-Gismero explores these aesthetic conversions
through case studies of what she terms “early boom biennials,” which took place throughout the ’80s and ’90s
—a period that saw the demise of the Soviet Union, the
formation of treaties like NAFTA, and the creation of
the European Union. This new porousness of borders
and capital enabled a newfound mobility and internationalist tastes for elite networks of artists, dealers, collectors, curators, and audiences, as well as the subsequent coalescence of particular local aesthetics into a
category that came to be known as “global contemporary art.” For example, the planning and implementation of the Bienal de La Habana from 1984 to 1991, organized by Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam, featured organizing committees composed of _especialistas_ who engaged artists and projects that might
have an international reach but could also activate local aesthetics. Argentinian artist Julio Le Parc’s 1986 festival of kinetic art was, for instance, an interactive,
convivial sculptural event in which an ordinary Havana
park became the site for publics to envision new possibilities in their everyday surroundings. Le Parc’s work
(exhibited throughout South America, the US, and
Europe) was legible to a specific kind of art audience
that understood itself as global.

The text’s remaining case studies, “inSITE94” and
“inSITE97” (held in Tijuana and San Diego), as well as
“Manifesta 1” (1996) in Rotterdam, consider why and
how socio-political conflict conciliation came to inform
the respective biennials’ curatorial strategies. Checa-Gismero suggests that the rise of site-specificity and relational aesthetics in the ’90s cast history, contemporary politics, and geography as contextual backdrops for engaging the exhibited artworks. These biennials
placed artworks, provocative to a general audience but
recognizable to the art world, within socially charged
public spaces to attempt to effect social change. For example, Terry Allen’s _Cross the Razor/Cruzar la navaja_ (1994) installation for “inSITE94” facilitated conversations between people on both sides of the US-Mexico
border using sound systems and translators. But the
idea that this public installation could materially change
the world seems startlingly naive in the context of America’s militarized border with Mexico, until you remember the neoliberal politics that underwrite socially
engaged artworks. Checa-Gismero references art historian Claire Bishop, who contextualized how artists working in an austere milieu were pressured to address
social issues through their work in exchange for funding. Many such socially driven works only yield publicity for the artists, or for a particular issue, instead of leading to material change. An example of this phenomenon might be found in Ronald Rael and Virginia San _Fratello’s Teeter-Totter Wall_ (2019), in which the designers placed hot pink see-saws through either side of the border wall between Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas. Despite its notoriety and accolades, did this
artwork materially change the dynamic at the border?

While throughout her case studies Checa-Gismero exhaustively appraises these biennials’ respective politics and effects, how biennials are instrumentalized for neoliberal means isn’t as assiduously or clearly critiqued until the book’s conclusion. There, she writes that cultural or political aspirations of early boom biennials with altruistic intentions ultimately unintentionally caused harm to the communities they sought
to serve the most, as they began catering to moneyed,
mobile individuals seeking to boost their social capital.
Checa-Gismero’s careful consideration of the myriad
political, social, and economic shifts of the post–Cold
War neoliberal world order positions biennials as critical to the construction of what is referred to as “global contemporary art,” laying the groundwork for future
study. Her study is a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of exhibition histories, through its critical examination of the politics of display. With it, artists and curators can be cognizant of how their work might be operationalized on a global stage, to envision more equitable art worlds.

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Biennial Boom: Making Contemporary Art Global was published by Duke University Press in 2024.

_Biennial Boom: Making Contemporary Art Global_ — Paloma Checa-Gismero

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When I walk into Alize Zorlutuna’s solo exhibition
on a hot summer’s day, I run headlong into curator
Suzanne Carte, a pair of garden pruners in one hand,
a cluster of pink hydrangea blooms in the other. The
flowers have come from the gallery’s greenhouse,
just down the hall, and are destined for the many vases, vessels, and incense holders scattered throughout “We Who Have Known Many Shores,” an ambitious,
textured, multimedia installation that spans textiles,
papermaking, ceramics, collage, sculpture, and video.
Over the course of the show’s four-month run, Zorlutuna’s container technologies were host to an ever-changing cast of seasonal guests, from tulips and flowering Solomon’s seal, to roses, marigolds, astilbe, and lavender. Many of these flowers have their origins in Asia and North Africa, but have been brought to Europe,
and then North America, through the trade routes of
modern colonialism. Hydrangea, in particular, is native
to Asia and the Americas, first cultivated in Japan, and
was imported to Europe and North America in the 18th
century by a colonist. Named for their voracious consumption of water, and for their seed pods’ resemblance to water pitchers, the etymology of “hydrangea” is from the
Greek, meaning “water vessel.” The history of the flower is representative of Zorlutuna’s wider practice, which investigates—with remarkable subtlety and intimacy through the artist's materials—experiences of diaspora,
cultural loss, and intergenerational memory.

Anchoring the exhibition is a sculptural installation
that extends Zorlutuna’s ongoing collaborative work,
_leaving the table_ (2019–ongoing), in which the artist serves
sumac tea to invited guests. They write in their artist
statement of this “as a gesture of hospitality and a way to
contend with our relationship as treaty people in Canada.”
Sumac has been an essential material in Zorlutuna’s work
since 2011, when they attempted to locate a lost rock
carving made by the late Cuban American artist Ana
Mendieta along the Scarborough Bluffs in Toronto.
In the course of their research, Zorlutuna learned that
North American sumac is the cousin plant of sumac
found in Turkey: the plant, the artist reflects in _Akimbo_,
“has become a kind of material bridge between my homelands, a way to materialize diasporic grief and longing, and the complex responsibility of living on occupied territories as a settler and descendent of immigrants.” Positioned between a low plywood bench and a handmade ceramic fountain (made in collaboration with the collective Waard Ward and art historian Reza Nik), the tea service is surrounded by plush pillows, ottomans, and
bean bag chairs, and grounded by a series of hand-tufted
carpets, made in collaboration with SF Ho, that depict
important waterways in Ontario intermixed with motifs
from Egyptian and Anatolian rugs (_Su Yolu Bulur: Water
Finds Their Way_, 2022). Evoking the arched shape of the
mihrab (as depicted on prayer rugs), the carpets act as
portals, inviting the viewer to imagine the trade networks
that bring tea, water, and people together while also providing a soft place to land, rest, and plan for the future. On an adjacent wall, the word “belong” appears as white
text stretched out to an absurd length against an azure background, spelled out in rings of handmade lace collected from women in the artist’s familial and social circle (_Belooooooooooooooooooooong_, 2024). Together,
the works invite viewers to contemplate what it means
to “leave the table” of promised multicultural belonging and inclusion in Canada, and to invent different facilitating environments better equipped to support
collective rest and collective action.

The works that orbit the central axis of the exhibition extend these themes through experiments with mediation between and across materials. Ebru, the traditional Turkish practice of paper marbling, and sumac are central characters across the tableaux Zorlutuna creates throughout the gallery, and attest to the artist’s commitment to relearning and reviving craft technologies from the Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) region, while filtering them through the experiences of diaspora. In one corner, long swathes of pink satin, ornamented with blue marbling, cascade from the ceiling into ceramic vessels and onto the floor in _Spill_ (2024), while in another,
a headscarf belonging to Zorlutuna’s grandmother provides a hammock for a branch of sumac flowers, suspended above a hammam bowl filled with water balanced
atop a buoy: together, the composition suggests the risks
of containment under transnational migration (_Re-membering how to hold what we carry_, 2024). Nearby, a series of screen-printed graphics (drawn from kilim patterns)
and texts set atop Ebru patterns evoke the absurdities of
borders for non-human agents: “The inconceivability /
of a border / to a river / to a seed,” they read.

The role of borders as both imaginary and projective
continues in a series of videos installed on the opposite wall, in which Zorlutuna traces the contours of the landscape with their outstretched hand, caressing its folds, ridges, and waterways, sometimes literally making contact with its features, creating a queer embodied intimacy with geography that disrupts any notion of the land as a blank slate for colonial occupation. Across two vitrines, _An index of Inheritances_ (2024) combines textiles (a spread of ikat fabric as well as ancestral el işi: hooked handwork used to make doilies, handkerchiefs, and place settings), hand-marbled paper, and natural materials (including rose water, dried jasmine flowers, eucalyptus and olive leaves) to frame and obscure photographs drawn from _National Geographic_ and from family albums that depict figures that Zorlutuna describes as ancestors, ascribing an inheritance to these (sometimes Orientalist) images that surpasses the intentions of their creators. Covering the faces of the subjects with dried rosebuds and licorice leaves, the artist returns the right to opacity (in Édouard Glissant’s terms) to these historical actors, drawing the viewer’s attention to their clothing, jewellery, and head coverings as signs of cultural continuance in the Anatolian region. Much like Mendieta’s work, which has inspired
Zorlutuna’s practice for the past decade, “We Who Have Known Many Shores” figures the body and the land as sites of vulnerability but also of cultural sovereignty, creating a space of containment where the viewer might contemplate the precarity of memory and cultural transmission.

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 “We Who Have Known Many Shores” ran from 10 May to 1 September 2024 at the Art Gallery of Burlington.

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“We Who Have Known Many Shores” — Alize Zorlutuna

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

The House Edge

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

For Those Who Visit Us in Our Dreams

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

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

To Enshrine an Ululation

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

The _KISSSSS_ of Yong Soon Min

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

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

In the Lacuna

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

A Vampire Walks Into a Funhouse

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

One Thing: Kamala Ibrahim Ishag’s Zar Paintings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bhenji Ra Dances at the End of the Rainbow

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

Floor Drawing Series by Aubin Soonhwan K: Text

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

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

Our Third Sun

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

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

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

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

Hard Limits, Soft Landing

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

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

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

One Thing: Tracing Fragments of Queer Desire


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


Sinister Pleasure: Interview with Ja'Tovia Gary

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

A Good Animal on Wet Sheets: Disobedient Gasps in Subspace

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

Composition: give up your own

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

What is the Safe Word?

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

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