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Griffin

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Luminato

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

Editor

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

Associate Editor

Designer

Publisher

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

Tidal

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

Harrington’s Important Canadian & International Art Auction 2026

Column

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

Writer

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Language

Memory

Colonialism

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

Composition: on the edges of a mother tongue

Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Feature

Alvin Luong works with videos, photographs, and sculptures to express stories of human migration, land, and dialogues from diasporic working-class communities. He has shown and screened artworks in places including the Images Festival (Toronto), Boers-Li Gallery (Beijing), Gudskul (Jakarta), and The Polygon Gallery (Vancouver). Luong has held research and resident artist appointments at the Inside-Out Art Museum (Beijing), HB Station Contemporary Art Research Center (Guangzhou), the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), and Gallery TPW (Toronto). Luong was longlisted for the 2023 Sobey Art Award (Canada). The artist’s works have been acquired and shown by The Rockefeller Foundation (New York City).

**Tak Pham** is a is a contemporary art curator and
writer. He is currently the Curator of the Illingworth Kerr Gallery at Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary, Treaty 7 territory. He holds an MFA in criticism and curatorial practice from OCAD University. In 2023, he received the Hnatyshyn Foundation-Fogo Island Arts Young Curator Residency. His writings and reviews have appeared in _Canadian Art_, _C Magazine_, _ESPACE art actuel_, _esse arts + opinions_, _Galleries West_, _The Brooklyn Rail_, _ArtAsiaPacific_, and _Hyperallergic_.

Through artistic and critical investigations of human migration, land, and stories from diasporic communities, Alvin Luong creates artworks that reveal connections between past and present. As a friend and supporter of Luong’s work, I have developed a deep appreciation for how he approaches complex questions of diaspora in today’s world, which is marked by the incessantness of empire. The following conversation between Luong and me focuses on his latest work in the solo exhibition “Calcium Breather” (2025) at Toronto’s Hunt Gallery. It examines Luong’s practice, traces how his interests have evolved, and follows how his exploration of his family’s refugee journey—from Vietnam to Canada via Malaysia—and diasporic experience have changed over the years.

>**Tak Pham: Could you discuss how earlier video works like _Bidding War_ (2017), _Turbo_ (2019), _The Young Comrade_ (2019), and _Workers’ Dance (Young Workers, 2021)_ (2021), which satirize capitalism or explore state ideology, led to your research on Vietnamese boat refugees?**

**Alvin Luong:** The subtext behind these projects is a desire to understand a site and its occupants, both materially and politically. These earlier projects span engagements with a contemporary strip mall in Scarborough (_Bidding War_), my parents’ home during the Great Recession of 2008 (_Turbo_), Civil War–era Beijing (_The Young Comrade_), and Toronto during the COVID-19 pandemic (_Workers’ Dance_). These are sites that I am intimately connected with, and they compelled me to probe questions in relation to class and subjugation.

Specifically, my interest in understanding the experiences of Vietnamese refugees stems from my own family. If they had not survived their sea voyage from Vietnam to an island in Malaysia following the end of the American-Vietnam War in 1975, then I would not have been born or at least not exist on this side of the world.

In 2023, I visited Bidong Island in Malaysia to write about my experience through field notes. Located off the coast of Terengganu, Malaysia, it became a major refugee camp from 1978 to 1991, sheltering Vietnamese “boat people” fleeing persecution. When the peak of the refugee crisis on Bidong occurred in 1979, [1] Bidong was widely considered the most densely populated islands on the planet, [2] with an estimated 40,000 people. [3] On Bidong, many refugees like my father gained visas to resettle in Canada.

Bidong now hosts two opposing initiatives: a research facility for the study and conservation of coral operated by the Universiti Malaysia Terengganu (UMT), and a commercial coral farm operated by Yayasan Coral Malaysia with sponsorship from Telekom Malaysia. In June 2024, I was invited by Dr. Muhammad Hafiz Borkhanuddin, head of marine biology at UMT, to join him and his students on their monthly diving excursion to inspect the corals below the waters of Bidong. During this second visit, I connected refugee histories to the island’s corals.

>**TP: Your installation _Ration Market_ (2022) is another work that poetically highlights how the aftermath of the American-Vietnam War, which caused the Vietnamese refugee crisis in the ’70s, has evolved and continues to threaten the livelihood of Vietnamese peoples. The installation features items like dehydrated morning glory, disposable SIM cards, and congee-ready bags in a mobile cart—common street imagery in Vietnam. While referencing history, you have remarked that the installation is a response to what you call a “near-future crisis” with rising water threatening livelihoods. Can you discuss how you connect these timelines and how this influences your view on current climate issues?**

**AL:** In 2020, I began incorporating analogies into my practice, to draw parallels between the historical and the contemporary, after I visited family in Bình Chánh. This was a rural district located on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, where flooding now occurs daily.

The lack of robust infrastructure on the land allowed for the naked observation of where groundwater sat relative to the terrestrial surface. During the dry season, flooding occurs when the gravitational pull of the moon draws groundwater to the surface. The water then recedes as the day breaks, leaving behind muddy footprints that dry in the afternoon sun. During the wet season, the land floods to knee height almost daily. The flooding becomes more severe every year as the water table continues to rise, and the monsoons become more intense and frequent.

Within this drenched landscape, the morning glory vegetable (also known as rau muống or kangkung) has proliferated around my family’s home. This aquatic plant has taken over the land that was once a battlefield during the American-Vietnam War. Morning glory was a staple food in the aftermath of the war. It is a hardy plant that endured nearly a decade of biological and chemical weapons, as well as bombings by the United States that blighted Vietnam’s rural land for agriculture.

I could see that this former spectre of war had returned as a spectre for the contemporary crisis of climate change. I think about how my family in Canada became refugees due to the cascading effects of the war and how my family that remain in Vietnam may soon be refugees because of the rising sea. Analogy in my practice enables the past to serve as a framework for engaging with our contemporary condition.

>**TP: All the discussed threads seem to converge in your new work, “Calcium Breather” (2025), exhibited at Hunt Gallery. It revisits Bidong Island to recount Vietnamese refugee camp memories, Malaysia’s post-1991 rehabilitation efforts, and the coral smuggling industry. What similarities do you see between Vietnamese refugees and the coral
cultivated around Bidong Island?**

**AL:** I struggled to find an appropriate form or methodology to create artworks about Bidong until I discovered that the coral farm operating on the island had made its inaugural commercial export in 2016 to Canada. Since then, my guide Alex Lee, who has guided refugees to Bidong since the early aughts, has informed me that the coral farm has made shipments of live corals to places including the United States, Luxembourg, and Australia. Thinking through analogy, the corals cultivated in Bidong are being shipped to the same places that the refugees of Bidong resettled in. It was this discovery that allowed me to create artworks where corals and refugees could serve as analogies for each other, yet still remain autonomous from one another.

The video _Corals of Bidong_ (2023–2025) reimagines a drowning at sea while attempting to reach Bidong from a point-of-view camera perspective. Through a magic realist narration spoken in Vietnamese, the video then imagines the transformation of human refugees, who have sunk to the sea-floor, into the corals that are now farmed on the same sea-floor. The video then follows the farming of corals beneath the waters of Bidong.

Historically speaking, the corals disappeared when the Vietnamese refugee crisis was unfolding on Bidong. The intense human pollution and overfishing severely damaged the marine ecosystem surrounding the island. In 1991, the refugee camp was shut down and the island itself was officially closed off from public access [4] to recover the bio- diversity of the marine and terrestrial ecosystems, [5] only to reopen to the public in 2017. [6] The corals re-emerged with- in this nearly two-decade-long period.

The exhibition “Calcium Breather” imagines an alternative to watery death for refugees by envisioning the transformation of humans into corals, which are now headed to the same destinations as the refugees who managed to survive the journey.

In the exhibition, a second video titled _Camp Atlanta_ (2025) depicts a closed-door facility at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta. The facility houses corals transported into the United States on dubious grounds. The video uses a deadpan documentary approach to depict how corals are cared for in state-of-the-art aquarium tanks, as they await the conclusion of legal proceedings between their importer and the United States Customs and Border Protection agency. If the legal proceedings conclude in favour of the importer, then the corals re-enter commercial circulation in the United States. If the legal proceedings rule against the importer, then the corals will find their new permanent homes in the public-view displays of the Georgia Aquarium or its partner institutions. Through a dialectical pairing with _Corals of Bidong_, _Camp Atlanta_ becomes contextualized as a new refugee camp or migrant detention centre for corals. The pairing creates an intertextual relationship in which the refugees-turned-corals find entry to the United States through Atlanta.

>**TP: As you have mentioned above, analogy links human migration with environmental phenomena like coral propagation and flooding. Do you face specific challenges translating these complex analogies into tangible artworks for viewers?**

**AL:** A constant challenge is how to inform the viewer about the specific environmental phenomena of a place or object that is being used in an analogy. I am referring to how elements of a site or object, such as the morning glory plant, which was a food of necessity after the American-Vietnam War, can now be a spectre of climate change. Concepts related to the war and climate change are materially embedded in a sculpture like _Ration Market_, which uses morning glory as a material that is further processed into the shelf-stable rations that constitute the artwork. The labels on these rations contain a clue, in the form of a graphic of the plant and a faded hammer and sickle, a political symbol of communism, in the background.

The idea of materially embodying migration is also something I am developing through a series of frottage drawings called _The Drowned Can Speak Again_ (2024–ongoing). The drawings are made by rubbing over a tombstone belonging to a mass grave of Vietnamese people who drowned on their sea voyage to Bidong. The tombstone marks over 400 people whose bodies, recovered by local Malay fishermen, remain unidentified in a cemetery with many hundreds more. The grave is in the town of Kuala Terengganu, across the waters from Bidong Island. I am drawn to the potential of frottage to both physically witness the tombstone through tactile interaction, and to recontextualize the deaths through prose. The letters that constitute the names of the deceased are traced to produce new texts.

Video art challenges me to deliver information without sacrificing form or prose. Intertextual readings between artworks inform an approach that was implemented with _Corals of Bidong_ to transform interpretations of _Camp Atlanta_, and vice versa. Intertextuality drives the constellation of artworks I am continuing to develop by focusing on the migration and environmental phenomena in Bidong. The videos present an illusory image where an alternative to death can be imagined, while the frottage drawings bring forth the reality of the deaths.

>**TP: You previously presented the work in a different format, including a bedframe sculpture and several drawings (_The Drowned Can Speak_). I understand this was part of your MFA thesis exhibition at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn). When presenting it again in your hometown of Toronto shortly afterward, did you observe any differences in how audiences in Philadelphia and Toronto responded to the work?**

**AL:** The reception of the work in Philadelphia, among an academic-adjacent audience, changed how discourse was exchanged between artworks, viewers, and the institution. The artworks required less context in Philadelphia because the city has one of the largest diasporic Vietnamese populations on the East Coast, with roots dating back to the refugee crisis. The engagement with the history of the American-Vietnam War is much more of a lived reality in Philadelphia due to the societal rupture and blowback from the war in the United States. Everyone was either impacted or knew someone who was impacted by the war. There is a massive mural depicting the sea voyage of the refugees on the Bồ Đề Buddhist Temple near the city’s core.

In Philadelphia, the exhibition opened on May 1, 2025—one day after the 50th anniversary of the end of the American-Vietnam War on April 30th, 1975. I gave a speech at the exhibition opening, remarking that May 1st was also the unofficial anniversary of the Vietnamese refugee crisis that followed the end of the war. In the speech, I also highlighted Penn’s role in developing biological and chemical weapons for use in Vietnam, to connect the violence enacted by the site of the exhibition to the artworks that would be created and exhibited at the university 50 years later. Furthermore, the historical legacy of campus activism in the United States against the American-Vietnam War by students and faculty, and their repression by the university, remains relevant today for many students and faculty as an analogy for the crisis currently faced by college campuses in the United States. A crisis that includes the suppression of solidarity with Palestine, the dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and the reversal of trans inclusion. This level of significance made the exhibition highly urgent and unique to Penn and Philadelphia.

The legacy of the war carries a fog of mystery shared by many people in my generation and younger. I was touched to know that an undergraduate student, in a class taught by Ken Lum that I had served as a teaching assistant for, attended the Philadelphia opening and revealed to me that her parents were also refugees from Bidong. In Toronto, a few people also attended the opening at Hunt Gallery because they too had familial connections to Bidong. For both cities, the exhibitions offered a rare in-depth engagement with Bidong, a place that remains understudied and undertheorized.

>**TP: How have diasporic Vietnamese communities, former refugees, or coral-conservation researchers responded to your projects? I’m especially curious about responses to the analogy between coral movement and refugee experience. Have these responses influenced your future work?**

**AL:** When I worked with the marine biologists and students at the Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, they were unaware of the refugee history of Bidong. Yet, they have research facilities on the same island where the refugees once lived, and dive in the same waters where the Vietnamese had drowned. The work I am producing, beyond the poetic encounter, fills a gap in a history that is suppressed in Malaysia. As I mentioned before, my work also begins to fill a gap for a younger generation of the Vietnamese diaspora. For people like me, with refugee roots, the history is in amnesia due to the psychic burdens of reliving trauma. For a newer generation of diaspora from a liberated Vietnam, the history of the refugees is suppressed.

The responses of these communities to the discovery of the island’s history and its contemporary status led me to a realization that this work operates within an ontology of movement. Essentially, it is crucial to acknowledge that the refugee does not choose where they may end up—whether it be the water or a distant country. They only choose a trajectory. My father told me how his boat first aimed for the shores of Thailand, before changing course to Malaysia. Their last resort was Indonesia, before the boat gave out. Evidence of their movement is left in the temporary wake of the water.

This realization has influenced the direction of my work by identifying qualities that cannot be produced without a wide, and perhaps watery, perspective that links distant sites and temporalities together. Something new can be created if the process becomes unspecific to the site and instead becomes specific to motion.

[^1]: Norhayati Ab Manaf et al., “Historic Vietnamese Settlement of Bidong Island,” in _Bidong Island: Natural History and Resources_, ed. Ong Meng Chuan et al. (Cham: Springer, 2021), 33.
[^2]: Abdulmaula Hamza et al., “Diversity of Birds in Bidong Island,” in Ong et al., 106.
[^3]: Ab Manaf et al., 33.
[^4]: Ibid.
[^5]: Iqbal Harith Abd. Razak et al., “Decapoda Crustaceans at the South China Sea Repository and Reference Centre in Terengganu, Peninsular Malaysia,” in Ong et al., 61.
[^6]: Ab Manaf et al., 34.

Artist

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Migration

Environment

In his interview with Alvin Luong, curator Tak Pham discusses Luong’s video work Corals of Bidong (2023–2025). Their con­versation reflects on the history of Bidong Island, previously a refugee camp for displaced Vietnamese peoples from 1978–1991, and now a site where corals are cultivated. 

Calcifying Bodies: An Interview With Alvin Luong

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


COnline_MORRISSETTE_mythdiagram.jpg

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

MYTH, TODAY

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.
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```````````````````To Return

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