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NSCAD

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Casey House 1

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Walter Phillips

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Ontario Craft

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Momenta

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Est-Nord-Est

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Casey House 2

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

Reviews Editor

Joy Xiang is a writer and editor based in Toronto, where she is currently Editor of _C Magazine_. 

Editor

Publisher

Designer

This issue expands on codes as ethical, social, political, and legal boundaries—considering them as sets of visible and invisible instructions moving within and beyond the digital imaginary. Through features, interviews, and experimental texts, artists and writers probe how developments in AI and coding are products of existing mechanics of the world, and how else codes are constituted. From programming languages as poetry to paranormal readings with the land against settler ideas of an inanimate wilderness, contributors ask how the material consequences of an array of codes might be re-inscribed to understand or lay form to (alternate) conditions of life.


Codes

Review

Angel Callander is a writer, curator, and editor in Toronto. She holds a BA in Art History from the University of Guelph (2014) and an MA in Art History and Visual Culture from the Humboldt University of Berlin (2018). Her writing can be found in publications such as _C Magazine, BlackFlash, Canadian Art, Public Parking,_ and _Cornelia,_ as well as in _Interface Critique_ (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2016) and _Architecture and the Smart City_ (Routledge, 2019).

Traditionally, the Gothic creates an efficient discourse of the irrational, as it acts upon narratives of realism in regard to human subjectivity and consciousness. In fact, it is not just about monsters and metaphors for puritanical fear, but rather, it is a fluid and malleable genre for scrutinizing the binaries that often organize our world. It tends to re-emerge in times of cultural stress to give form to our anxieties about crisis and transformation. Literature and its influences on human experience play a pivotal role in the work of Maja Klaassens. For her, the Gothic manifests in the spaces between dichotomies of romance and violence, transience and permanence, contamination and purity, human and nature. 

In her recent exhibition at Joys in Toronto, “The view is total sea,” Klaassens uses sculpture, video, and photography to weave an elaborate narrative around our relationship to water. Specifically, Klaassens grapples with the sea as simultaneously hostile and a vital resource for survival. _Villette_ (2023), her debut video piece, resembles a meditation video with aerial shots and sounds of softly crashing waves, bookended by a harrowing tale in subtitles of an unknown narrator’s encounter with orcas while swimming in open water. In the main room is _Little Saga_ (2023), a photo print of a sandcastle echoing a Gothic ruin, at once a romantic but ephemeral notion of a day at the beach and a motif of an eternally haunted fortress. 

_The Sea, the Sea_ (2023) is a central piece consisting of a stainless-steel faucet with a large epoxy resin water droplet at its end, touching on Klaassens’s research into water contamination by tributyltin, a toxic chemical in ship paint to prevent marine growths, and a known endocrine disruptor. By emphasizing water’s vulnerability to contamination, she also draws attention to the many things we have done throughout history to harm it, to our own detriment. 

Conjuring feelings of dread and nostalgia in her work, Klaassens reveals the fundamental nature of the Gothic to reflect and adapt to contemporary concerns. The long history of Gothic literature has much to say about the relationship humans have with their natural environments, and to technological/scientific development. There is often just as much distress as there is respite, or at least an opportunity to find a way through. Her penchant for narrative structure is entwined with her exceptional craftsmanship and attention to detail, opening up questions about whether we give just as much as we take. 


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“The view is total sea” ran at Joys Project Space in Toronto from 13 May to 24 June 2023. 


“The view is total sea” — Maja Klaassens

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A true benchmark of contemporary art, MOMENTA is back under the title _Masquerades: Drawn to Metamorphosis_. Bringing together 23 artists whose projects activate living processes of transformation, mimicry, and mutation, the biennale welcomes all audiences from 7 September to 22 October, 2023. 


MOMENTA is Back for its 18th Edition!

MOMENTA BIENNALE— _Masquerades: Drawn to Metamorphosis_


Becca Taylor (Cree/Irish/Scottish) is an artist and curator. She is a registered member of Fisher River Cree Nation, MB, and was born
and raised in amiskwacîwâskahikan/Edmonton, AB.


When I think about receiving teachings, I think about the power of transmitting knowledge through voice. In some of my strongest childhood memories, I am sitting on a blanket among the trees, staring into the sky, and allowing the voices and teachings of the elders to wash over my body. Their laughter creates a calming effect, lulling me into a reflective space that connects my body to my ancestors, and to the cool earth below me. In “kisikayastew ᑭᓯᑲᔭᐢᑌᐤ...when the night shines like the day,” I was back among the trees. I was listening. Curated by MJ Belcourt Moses, the solo exhibition by iskwew scholar and artist Dr. Lana Whiskeyjack explores the 13 sacred moons, an astral system of time-keeping connected to seasonal cycles. Each moon and season brings new teachings and ceremonies designed to connect individuals with the natural world, life and death, and all living beings on mother earth.

Throughout the show, each moon is represented with a painting. Paintings like _Paskowipîsim – Moulting Moon_ (2021), which features two women resting against one another underneath a tree, with buckets of blueberries at their feet, focus on the natural world. Others depict shifting landscapes. In _Pinâskowi-pîsim – Leaf-Falling Moon_ (2021), familiar sight-lines of the amiskwacîwâskahikan/Edmonton horizon provide the backdrop for the figure of a woman scraping a hide on the south side of the North Saskatchewan River, with the River Valley and the Walterdale Bridge in front of her. The name of each moon is rendered in glowing Cree syllabics that form neon signage above each painting. The syllabics shine like the moon in a night sky, but are also reflective of constellations, a reminder of how language, teachings, and relations make up our communities. Whiskeyjack, a fluent nêhiyawêwin speaker, often uses language within her art practice. Across the exhibition, Whiskeyjack highlights the importance of land, body, speech, intergenerational learning, and traditional practices. 

I walk into the exhibition, and I am surrounded by cobalt-blue walls as Whiskeyjack’s voice fills the air. The sound comes from her animated film _nohkom tîpiskaw pîsim kîsikwan – Grandmother Moon_ (2022). In English and nêhiyawêwin, Whiskeyjack shares the teachings of the 13 moons. Beginning with a description of _Sâkipakâwipîsim – Leaf Budding Moon_ (2020), she tells us of new growth, budding leaves and plants that replenish our food, water, and air. During this moon, Whiskeyjack tells us, we will be able to hear the pecks from a woodpecker who is perhaps calling a mate, but is more likely quenching their thirst with sweet birch-water. We know when it’s time to collect and prepare for a new season when we see the woodpecker drink water. In Whiskeyjack’s animation of the exhibited paintings, movements like a gentle breeze through a woman’s hair and rippling water bring the images to life. An animation of _Mitêhimin-pîsim – Heart Berry (Strawberry) Moon_ (2021) references a menstruation cycle through the image of rippling red water on the earth. Mitêhimna-pîsim calls us to return to our moon lodges, where we can sit and share in the knowledges and love of our grandmothers. 

The gentleness of Whiskeyjack’s voice permits the viewer to slowly reflect on the seasonal changes depicted across the paintings. Considered together, the collected paintings take us through an entire lunar year. In _Kisêpîsim – Kind Compassionate Elder Moon_ (2021), we see kokom laughing at a table covered in medicine, tea, cards, and a crib table. This is the moon of the winter months, when the cold prairie landscape keeps us indoors. Here, Whiskeyjack reminds us of the importance of gathering, laughter as medicine, and the kind of intergenerational learning that happens around a table. As viewers, we are urged to consider our bodies, histories, and relations to each moon cycle.
 
In the exhibition didactic, Whiskeyjack is careful to acknowledge that while each depicted figure is a “womb-carrier and/or womb-nurturer,” not all of them would necessarily identify as women, like in _Sâkipakâwipîsim – Leaf Budding Moon_ (2020), where a masculine figure stands among birch trees. These paintings recognize gender and sexuality as fluid. In a vinyl reproduction of _Mikisiwpîsim – Eagle Moon_ (2020), a woman seductively poses against the red-orange background of a city horizon, alongside two eagles in the sky. The woman is dressed in a crop top and a bikini bottom, with knee-high stilettos adorned in the style of moccasins. She appears to be applying lipstick as she leans to the side, balancing on the toes of her shoes. The seductive image is charged with what the exhibition didactics refer to as “erotic sovereignty.” The woman’s sensual pose against a city backdrop invokes eroticism and sex work, while Whiskeyjack’s use of the colour red is reminiscent of not only desire, but also blood, violence, and power. In this painting, Whiskeyjack foregrounds the sexual energy of Indigenous women, and the right to embrace our bodies and eroticism without shame, or the harm of the colonial gaze. 

“kisikayastew ᑭᓯᑲᔭᐢᑌᐤ...when the night shines like the day” is rich in its storytelling—I learn something new each time I view it. The collected paintings offer glimpses of our relationships to the land, to each other, and to the four-legged and winged creatures that nourish our bodies. To view them together is to witness the pleasure of our depicted rest, warmth, and erotic sovereignties. Whiskeyjack’s potent exhibition cultivates in us a permission to love ourselves as iskwewak, to love our bodies, and all the connections held within them. 

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“kisikayastewᑭᓯᑲᔭᐢᑌᐤ...when the night shines like the day” 
ran from 7 April to 13 August, 2023 at the Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton.



“kisikayastew ᑭᓯᑲᔭᐢᑌᐤ...when the night shines like the day” — Lana Whiskeyjack

Marcin Kędzior is a writer, teacher, dancer, “rhythmanalyst,” and co-founder of the journal _Scapegoat: Architecture | Landscape | Political Economy_. His work focuses on habits of thought, feeling, and perception and on psychic, literary, and improvisatory modes of collective life. 

Taking predator-prey relations as an eloquent and startling starting point, “Eyespots” mingles foreground and background to weirdly work on our perceptual habits.

Suggestions of strange creatures, horns, feet, eggs with legs (Welch’s phrase), petals, pistils, quills, fur, and flowery forms flow, emerge, and disappear from the picture plane. The works on display play with the way a drawing practice entails processes of delineation, individuation, spotting, and camouflage in a pictorial field of action. Paintings like _3 eggs_ (2023) crop details from larger works, portraying the intimate interactions between abstracted egg forms that seem to be “kissing” or congealing via prominent lines. Energetic red lines work their way through all the compositions in the exhibition, evoking optic nerves and flows of matter that compel us to read the work not with our eyes—darting around—but with our nervous system.   

Swarm-like and aqueous, _Brood_ and _Molting_ (both 2023) use abstraction as a form of evasion, with suggestions of floral, arachnid, and insect-like creatures in a state of becoming. The exhibition title, “Eyespots,” refers to rounded eye-like markings on the wings of butterflies. By evoking species that collectively hide, dissolve, or deceive, abstraction is used to generate surprising possibilities, readings, and relations. Exceeding formal composition, Welch’s bodily compositions attend to the various enfoldings, antagonisms, collective groupings, formations, creative permutations, and energy flows between organisms, exceeding the paradigmatic predator-prey responses to: 

 _fight,_
 
 _flight,_
 
_fool,_ 

_foil,_ 

 _feed,_ 
 
_fuel,_ 

_fantasize,_ 

_familiarize,_ 

_fornicate,_ 

_and ferment._

Hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary history entailing the composition of our perceptual apparatus flash before our eyes. We close our eyes and see Welch’s work as an absolutely contemporary after-image and are drawn into its ecology, the polyrhythmic, simultaneous, superimposition of environments: 

_Shadows layer upon shadows. Collective bodies erupt, improvising, augmenting themselves, dissipating into their surroundings as forms of biological expression. New kinds of fuzzy, writhing bodies emerge out of playful, sober reconfigurations. The mathematical transposition of templates does battle with the sheer material of the linen texture. Wax pastel colours vibrate—honey-gold, owl-eye, orchid-airport, silky-lilac, wasp-warning-sign, and inscrutable velvet black that seems to look back at us. Backgrounds and foregrounds cross-bite. We become other creatures through drawing in a poetic dance-battle, the piercing, unceasing, breathing, seething vitality of nature._

Writer

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“Eyespots” ran at Hunt Gallery, Toronto, from 9 June to July 15 2023. 


“Eyespots” — Emma Welch

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“How to image an ethics with/out the subject?”[^1] This is the question that organizes the art collaboration between Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva. Since 2015, they have been developing an experimental practice called Poethical Readings, using tarot and astrology to break apart the constitutive elements of the modern subject. During a reading, participants give up any attempt to resolve their questions and collectively perform a manner of existence that refuses separation between subject and world—a rehearsal of living in what Ferreira da Silva calls “implicancy.” 

While preparing for our conversation, I did what any student of tarot would do: I pulled cards. I used a three-card spread devised by Desideri and Ferreira da Silva, which gives one image for each of the following positions: the Virtual, an image of what is present but not readily apparent; the Actual, that which is immediately perceived; and the Unfolding, what happens when the Virtual is brought into Actualization.[^2] In that order, I drew The World, Nine of Pentacles, and Eight of Cups. The complete spread tells a story about all that has existed and will ever exist, the sensuality of grounded presence, and the often painful process of unlearning required for recognizing the contingency of history: precisely the themes that Desideri and Ferreira da Silva discuss below. 

> ###### **Coco Zhou (CZ):** In an interview from 2020, you both talked about the shift in your practice since the COVID-19 pandemic began, where there seemed to be a moment of suspension, and as Denise put it, “an opening for considering existing differently.” [3] What is it like to hold readings these days, three years into the pandemic? 

**Denise Ferreira da Silva (DFS):** During the lockdown period, we felt a shift in how people came to us for readings. At the same time, we were working on the Echo tarot deck, which was itself a shift in our practice. As we enter the third year of the pandemic, I think the two [shifts] came together in ways that we did not expect. We realized that Echo was responding to a moment that wasn’t there when we started creating the deck. 

**Valentina Desideri (VD):** We started to work on the Echo tarot deck in 2019 by chance, when our common friend, Jason Dodge, sent us poems by Ai Ogawa, a Japanese American Black poet. We started to talk about how amazing it is that poems that deal so directly with violence do not represent or reproduce that violence. That conversation turned into a tarot reading where, through the reading, we understood that we had to make a whole deck. We started to reverse-engineer this deck by pairing Ogawa’s poems with cards. In the meantime, the pandemic began. Initially, we didn’t know why we were working with something that had so much pain in it. By the time the pandemic began, and as we all came to be affected by it, there was the possibility of reading for individuals in ways that did not reinforce the Individual. That was the shift we were talking about in that 2020 interview. As the pandemic progressed, we also realized that this deck became a tool for moving through this moment. Two weeks ago, the pandemic was declared over with the Scorpio eclipse. But it doesn’t end, clearly. 

**DFS:** Maybe a year ago, I was paying attention to use of the phrase “pandemic fatigue” in newspapers and magazines. They were diagnosing people with this fatigue from being locked down. But the construction I saw was that of a failed subject: according to the experts, the fatigue resulted from how people could not count on the fact that, if they decided something today, they were going to be able to follow through on the decision the next day. That anxiety of not being self-determined was the cause of the fatigue. Poethical Reading is exactly _not_ about that kind of efficacy. Rather, it is about displacing the subject. That displacement is also about the reading being fundamentally collaborative and collective, even in the absence of anyone else but the reader. 

That shift occurred in terms of a certain presentation of the subject that was being constructed during the pandemic as diseased—because of its lack of self-determination. When we were reading with people, their pain was coming out, alongside their fear, anger, shame, and guilt. Those were the things that repeatedly came up across the readings, and somehow helped people work through their pain. That pain is not an illness. The readings engage the pain as something else that is not, as the media captured it, a failed subject. 

> ###### **CZ:** How did you settle on tarot and astrology for Poethical Readings? Is there anything unique about these lenses that lends itself to this practice? 

**VD:** You need a system to read. The astrology chart [is divided into] houses and signs, while the tarot spread [is read based on] the meanings for each position. Through these systems, the [posed question] becomes an image to look at, instead of a problem to discuss. These tools allow us to displace the subject from being the central concern and the place from which we start to think. Of course, you can read tarot or an astrological chart while trying to determine somebody’s future, or [to know] what you should do. But this is not the way we approach reading. 

**DFS:** What became important as we started working together was Walter Benjamin’s doctrine of the similar and the figural.[^4] We read the image that is before us, [and in this process] we also read more images into the image. It’s not propositional—there is not a question for which we try to find an answer. Each reading assembles a figure which allows us to speculate on/with the question and its circumstances. 

**VD:** Going back to the evolution of the practice, what we’re trying to do with the Echo tarot deck, or what this deck is trying to do with us, is (as Denise was saying) about the pain that comes up. Pain comes through as the readings displace the subject, make the image more complex, and create a sociality through which this question becomes shared. [Instead of a conclusive resolution to the posed question], the tools allow for the [presence of] pain, along with anything else. 

> ###### **CZ:** I was thinking about Benjamin’s materialist historiography, which is informed by the technique of the montage.[5] The tarot spread could be thought of as a montage, where each image is part of a scene. But it is also an anti-montage that presents all components of the whole scene at once, rather than in a sequence. How does this mode of engagement blast through rational and linear temporality? 

**DFS:** It’s interesting to ask _how_, because it does [blast through], right? It does this mostly because of what [the reading] does to the question. Once the question is represented as an image, it’s impossible to identify it with the one who asked the question. To ask the question is to authorize the cards to take hold of the question. There is a relinquishing of the authority to determine, answer, and decide. This is part of reading: relinquishing to the symbols that one did not come up with. 

**VD:** The importance of doing this practice together is in how it interrupts that desire for resolution. It’s a rehearsal in letting things [stay] open. How can we live with the fact that [the problem is] not resolved? That is part of the unburdening—you take the burden of your question [and place it] into the cards, into this other grammar and composition. This is a rehearsal of allowing yourself to live with that complexity that is not up to you to solve. 

> ###### **CZ:** Something I’ve noticed about how people talk about astrology and tarot is that they commonly refer to them as tools, technologies, or frameworks. These are useful terms, but they also suggest a perceived instrumentality in the sense of being a means to an end. How do you navigate this tension between having to talk about what it is that you do with these objects, and their aesthetic, affective excess? 

**DFS:** At Amant in New York, where we did a residency, Valentina was talking to a curator. She would later tell me how difficult [this translation of our practice] was. Usually, there’s no describing what our practice is, and how we do it. It happens, right? You’ve got to do it to feel it, because it’s an aesthetic experience. It’s the practice of a certain sensibility that there is no name for. [Conversely], the instrumentalization [of tarot and astrology] happens when we try to account for it at the level of the symbolic, in terms of definitions or explanations. 

**VD:** We call them tools when we introduce them, but where somebody else might describe them as tools for self-knowledge, in our practice, we use them as hacking tools. In that sense, they do maintain an instrumentality. 

> ###### **CZ:** Healing in the popular sense is often attached to self-optimization. In psychotherapy, what is commonly seen as the goal of healing is self-knowledge and integration. What does healing mean to you, if we divorce this process from the subject? 

**VD:** [Reading] is a social practice. Its goal is not the authorization of the self, nor an integration of pain that has happened, but sensing and making sense with each other. This sociality rehearses a way of being that we can hopefully bring about. It is a political, ethical, and existential practice. 

**DFS**: It’s a practice of entanglement, of implicancy, and of inseparability. It is also a practice of sensing if we take sensibility in its broadest possible mean-ing as intellectual, emotional, physical, and spiritual. Instead of subjectivity, in the moment of sensibility, you are of the world, like/as everything else. That’s the possibility of the kind of sensing that is presumed in the practice. 

**VD:** It is a rehearsal in coming together to undo how the subject [arrives at an answer] by knowing and grasping the object, making sense of what happens to her, to then determine the best possible action. In a reading, instead, there is a possibility to do something else, to un-plot those senses, to rehearse a different kind of sensibility. That’s healing as a praxis.[^6] 

> ###### **CZ:** Part of doing away with the classical liberal-humanist model of the subject necessitates a recognition that, as Denise has said else- where, “Everything is an expression of everything else.” [7] How does Poethical Reading make this implicancy apparent without enabling a reactionary sentimental belonging like nationalism or conservative religious monism? 

**DFS:** The reactionary and conservative response is one that’s premised on abstract identity. In relinquishing [authorship of] the question, there is no sentimental and conservative identification. This conservative subject is one that’s been there since the very beginning [of European philosophy]. But this subject that is supposedly self-determined still must exist with others. 

**VD:** During the reading, a question that is so personal to you becomes the object of collective exercise. The [insights] that come from this exercise could include: drawings on the cards, somebody’s comment, or a sound coming from the windows. You realize that making sense is an exercise of intuition. [Astrology and tarot] engage intuition as a valid mode of knowing, and therefore, a valid mode of: acting, deciding, caring, and living with everything and everyone. That’s where implicancy is rehearsed. We had initially called the exercise “study groups for implicated existence,” because when we gather together and study with all those tools, we are not studying the question itself. What we’re really studying is how to live and exist in implicancy. 

> ###### **CZ:** You’ve discussed the difference between a reading and an interpretation, where the latter offers an analysis of cause and effect while the former opens up to uncertainty, humility, and porosity. I’m reminded of how, in political organizing, we understand certain universal ideals like equality as already resolved, instead of relations to be worked out in real time. This is captured by a question posed by the late affect theorist Lauren Berlant: “How does a commitment to radical equality [8] bear the perverse fact that equality must be defined by the impossibility of attaining it?” [9] What is the political work that Poethical Reading does, if not the work of analysis? 

**DFS:** Poethical Reading asks for something other than equality. One of the reasons why equality fails is that it only works in the abstract. For ethics to remain significant, it must no longer only concern the rational human (or Man 1, as Sylvia Wynter calls it), as it has in the past 200 to 300 years of European philosophy. We will need an ethics that is not contingent upon those impossible principles of liberty and equality. We need another basis for both posing and addressing the question of how to make existence more than possible—not only for the human, but for everything else that exists. That is an excellent quote from Berlant, because it highlights the impossibility of abstracted equality to do what it promises.

**VD:** Rehearsing different modes of knowing is a commitment to collectively entering this process of undoing, so that imagination can come out, so that we don’t repeat the same [humanist] narrative in new terms. 

---

**Valentina Desideri** explores art-making as a form of study and study as a form of making art. She is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She is one of the co-organizers of PAF (Performing Arts Forum) in France.

**Denise Ferreira da Silva** is an artist, philosopher, and professor at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at University of British Columbia and at the Monash University Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (Melbourne, Australia). She is the author of _Unpayable Debt _ (2022), which examines the relationships among coloniality, raciality, and global capital from a Black feminist perspective.


[^1]: Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Poethical Readings / Intuiting the Political,” April 18, 2015, video documentation of public performance, Tramway, Glasgow, https://vimeo.com/168306007 
[^2]: Desideri and Ferreira da Silva, “A Poethical Reading,” _Bulletins of The Serving Library_, Journal 13, 2017, https://servinglibrary.org/journal/13/a-poethical-reading
[^3]: Desideri et al., “Another Image of Existence: Denise Ferreira Da Silva and Valentina Desideri on Their Practice of Poethical Readings, the COVID-19 Pandemic, and the Need for a Radical Reevaluation of Modern Politics. An Interview by Eve Katsouraki and Georg Döcker,” _Performance Philosophy_, vol. 7, no. 1 (2022), 132–45. https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2022.71381 
[^4]: Informed by the materiality of photography, Benjamin’s idea of the similar and the figural can be understood as both a principle and mode of perception, whereby apparently divergent phenomena are brought into relation through their common underlying structure, rescued from the flattening process of historicization, and set into motion to shift a present reality, however temporarily: “The nexus of meaning of words or sentences is the bearer through which, like a flash, similarity appears. [...] [I]ts production by man— like its perception by him—is [...] tied to its flashing up. It flits past.” “On the Mimetic Faculty,” in _Selected Writings Volume_ 2, 1927–1934 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), 722.
[^5]: I understand, via Avery Gordon, that Benjamin’s “montage-based” method is one that “leads along an associative path of correspondences” in different historical moments, to show how a past—the historian’s object— animates her present. “the other door,” in _Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 65–66. 
[^6]: On their website, Desideri and Ferreira da Silva write that “healing, as it occurs during a reading, is sense-making. [...] [It is] the unknowing of this _world_ as the practice of existing otherwise.” “Poethical Readings,” _The Sensing Salon_, accessed June 5, 2023, thesensingsalon.org/poethical-readings. In other words, to “unknow the world” by dissolving habituated ways of sensing and being is to challenge the Kantian program that establishes the hierarchical divide between subject and object, self and world. For an extended discussion on Kant, see Ferreira da Silva, “the most perfect hallucination,” in _Unpayable Debt_ (London: Sternberg Press, 2022), 83–163. 
[^7]: Desideri and Ferreira da Silva, “A Conversation between Valentina Desideri & Denise Ferreira da Silva,” originally published for the exhibition “Double Bind,” at Rupert, Vilnius, Pabrade and Visaginas (LT), the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (NO), and The Living Art Museum in Reykjavik (IS) from Oct 2015 to March 2016. 
[^8]: I want to acknowledge that the usefulness of utopian notions like “equality” is an ongoing discussion in political philosophy, and that Berlant’s challenge is by no means a total refusal of the concept. For a defence of equality as a form of sociality that cultivates our expectations, see William M. Paris, “The Art of Equality,” _Boston Review_, May 10, 2023, https://www.bostonreview.net/forum_response/the-art-of-equality 
[^9]: Lauren Berlant, “Introduction. Intentions,” in _On the Inconvenience of Other People_ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022), 18.

155_ZHOU.jpg

155_zhou.pdf

Coco Zhou interviews Denise Ferreira da Silva and Valentina Desideri on their project of imaging an ethics without the modern subject, to refuse a separation between the Individual and world. The collaborators’ Poethical Readings use tarot and astrology to collectively perform, with participants, a relinquishing of the desire for resolution.


“A Political, Ethical, Existence Practice”: In Conversation with Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva

Coco Zhou is a writer and cultural worker living on an estuary where river meets sea, on the unceded territories of xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.

Mercedes Webb / ma̱lidi / məlidi (they/she) is a writer, art historian, and artist with mixed ancestry; Kunn janaas, Mama̱liliḵa̱la, Fort Williams First Nation, Italian, and Welsh. Language reclamation, currently Kwak̓wala, figures prominently in their practice. Central to their practice is perennially learning non-authoritative, anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and anti-ableist ways of being.


Kaylee Maciejko is a settler of Swedish, Polish, and Scottish heritage, and an artist and arts administrator based in Mohkinstsis/Calgary. 


masus wəλəɫəʔos? we hear the brook

Meech Boakye (BA in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto) is an artist and writer currently based in “Portland, OR.” Their practice is rooted in relationships with flora, fungal, and microbial kin as armatures for learning how to be in a community.


spirit-flesh-soul-icon

Matt Nish-Lapidus’ practice probes the myth that computers should be useful rather than beautiful through examining contemporary technoculture and its histories and impacts. His work results in diverse outputs including publications, recordings, installations, performances, software, and objects. You can find Matt under various aliases and collaborations including emenel, New Tendancies, and, <blink>.

Joyful, Poetic Microworlds

Ruth Marsh (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist working in immersive, world-building practices. They are a queer, non-binary person of settler ancestry based on unceded Mi'kmaw territory in K'jipuktuk, Mi'kma'ki (also known as Halifax, NS). They are interested in playfully queering the intersections between DIY culture and science fact/fiction/fabulation to ponder positive mutations and imagine with beings and environments.

Composition: Full Moon Ritual

Alex Quicho is a writer and associate lecturer at Central Saint Martins. _Small Gods_, her book on terror and transcendence in drone technology, was published by Zer0 Books in 2021. 

Gossip After Dictatorship

Rouzbeh Shadpey is an artist, musician, and writer with a doctorate in medicine and inexhaustible exhaustion. He currently resides in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal.

The Injunction to Forget: documenta fifteen and the Test of Memory

Laurel V. McLaughlin is a writer, curator, and art historian based in New Haven, CT. Her work examines research-based sculpture, installation, new media, social practice, and performance concerning globalized migration and ecological networks. McLaughlin is completing her PhD in the History of Art at Bryn Mawr College, and her work has been published in _Art Papers_, _BOMB Magazine_, _The Brooklyn Rail_, _Performa Magazine_, _Contact Quarterly_, and _Performance Research_, among others.

One Thing: Silences in _Death of an Artist_

Emily Guerrero is an archivist and community librarian living on the unceded territories of the xᵂməθkᵂəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaɬ Nations. They last wrote about gossip for the journal _Archivaria_ in 2022. Emily is a parent and a Leo.

Gossipy Scraps, Gossip(ing) Archives

Marsya Maharani (she/her) is a researcher, arts administrator, and curator working with the collectives Younger Than Beyoncé and Gendai. Marsya’s doctoral research explores practices of collective care and radical friendship as grounds for work culture and labour practices.

Petrina Ng (she/her) is an artist and organizer. In addition to her work with Gendai, she is also a member of the collectives Durable Good (a small publishing studio) and Waard Ward (a floristry and gardening initiative that supports newcomers).

We Should _Talk_:  Obvious Truths About Working in the Arts

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

"Worlds appear from her big mouth": The Mutiny of Online Open Letters

Jumana Manna is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her work explores how power is articulated, focusing on the body, land, and materiality in relation to colonial inheritances and histories of place. Through sculpture, filmmaking, and occasional writing, Manna deals with the paradoxes of preservation practices, particularly within the fields of archaeology, agriculture, and law. Her practice considers the tension between the modernist traditions of categorization and conservation and the unruly potential of ruination as an integral part of life and its regeneration. Jumana was raised in Jerusalem and lives in Berlin. 


ma ma is a Toronto-based curatorial collective consisting of Magdalyn Asimakis and Heather Canlas Rigg.

Perpetual Scofflaws

22nd Annual "Being Scene" at Workman Arts

**Shawn Tse** 謝兆龍 (he/him) is a father, artist, filmmaker, and community organizer. He is a member of aiya哎呀, a collective creating spaces to remember the emotional and geographic loss of ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ | amisk wacîwâskahikan | Edmonton’s Chinatown; co-organizer of Chinatown Greetings, an arts-based fundraising plat form exploring ways to build healthy relationships between the artist and Chinatown community; a consultant for the CanAsian Arts Network, a national digital platform sup porting Asian Canadian artists; and an actor and coordinator for Third Space Playback The are, committed to creating spaces of dialogue to promote community change and social justice. 

A Garden in Chinatown on Indigenous Land

**Peter Sealy** is a historian who studies the ways in which architects constructively engage with reality through indexical media such as photography. Current projects include a history of photography’s remediations and a study of the Berlin Wall as it appears in films. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. 


**Linda Zhang** is an architect, drone pilot, and educator whose scholarly and artistic practice studies memory, cul tural heritage, and community identity as they are indexically embodied in matter, emergent technologies (including VR, AR, and AI), and material processes. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo. 


Resisting Either/ Or: _Shanzhai_ Photogrammetry 

amanda wan (they/them) is a queer han chinese settler based on the unceded, occupied territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and sʔəl̀ilwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Wau tuth) First Nations. Their MA thesis project asks how the “Asian” body is produced through erotic mediations, and suggests that staying with the erotic ambivalence around what is aestheticized as in/organic, im/material, or self/ other can enable reciprocity to become a form of queerly reproductive labour. amanda also creates poetry and artwork in the form of zines, illustrations, and published writing in _Room Magazine, Augur Magazine, LooseLeaf Magazine_, and elsewhere.

Queer Asian Diaspora as Sensibility

Godfre Leung is a critic and curator.

His writing has recently appeared in _ArtAsiaPacific_ and _ReIssue_, and his recent exhibitions include “Offsite: Christopher K. Ho” (Vancouver Art Gallery, 2022) and “TJ Shin: The Vegetarian” (The Bows, 2022). He is the Curator at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəyə̓ m, Sḵwxw̱ ú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Nations.

Vancouver Photohistory and the Politics of Disappearance

**Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong** is an artist and trained architect based out of New York City. Her creative practice lies at the intersection of art, architecture, and the public realm. Through site-specific architectural interventions, she creates experiences that activate forgotten or unused spaces, and that can spark people to encounter each other in unexpected ways.


 Linda Mae’s: An Architectural Past Life

**Tak Pham** is a curator and critic who graduated from OCAD University with an MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice. He has curated exhibitions for the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina (2019– present); Contemporary Calgary (2022); Varley Art Gallery, Markham (2020); Nuit Blanche Toronto (2017); Pari Nadimi Gallery, Toronto (2017); Xpace Cultural Centre, Toronto (2017); and Y+ contemporary, Scarborough (2016), among others. His writings and reviews have appeared in _Canadian Art, Espace art actuel, esse arts + opinions, Galleries West, Studio magazine, ArtAsiaPacific_, and _Hyperallergic_, and he currently works as Associate Curator at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina, Canada. 


AKA and Jin Jin Cuisine

Charlene K. Lau is an art historian, critic and Curator of Public Art at Evergreen Brick Works.
She has held fellowships at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity; Parsons School of Design,
The New School; and Performa Biennial. Her writing has been published in _Art in America_,
_Artforum_, _TheAtlantic.com_, _The Brooklyn Rail_, _frieze_, _Fashion Theory_, and _Journal of Curatorial Studies_, among others.

The Spatial Imaginaries of Karen Tam 譚嘉文

**Michelle Bui** is a Montreal based artist working in photography and sculpture. Her research lies in the use of material culture as a creative modality. Looking for points of combustion between objects, Bui elicits an array of physical feelings that conjure both pleasurable and confounding sensations, offering a space where sensory identity can unfold. 


**Shellie Zhang** is a multidisciplinary artist. She creates images, objects, and projects in a wide range of media to explore how integration, diversity, and assimilation are implemented and negotiated, and how manifestations of these ideas relate to lived experiences.


Artificial Artifacts

Aamna Muzaffar collaborates on space, text, and moving image projects with artists and arts organizations as an independent creative director and technical supervisor. Based in Toronto, she is the Assistant Curator at Mercer Union, a centre for contemporary art.

Golden Jubilee: An interview with Suneil Sanzgiri

Tilling: Permanence for Black Diasporic Art in Canada 

Composition: Transplant Collaborations

Nadine Khalil is an independent arts writer, editor, researcher, and curator. After a decade-long stint in art publishing, she is currently advising art institutions such as the Ishara Art Foundation and Goethe-Institut on programming and editorial strategy. She is former editor of Dubai-based contemporary art magazine _Canvas_ (2017–2020) and her writing can be found in _art-agenda_, _Artforum_, _The Art Newspaper_, _ArtReview Asia_, _Artsy_, _Broadcast_, _The Brooklyn Rail_, _FT Arts_, _Ocula_, and _Women’s Review of Books_.

Ebb and Flow / Moving Through Mourning

You’re invited to submit a letter in response to C Magazine Issue 155 “Codes” by OCTOBER 25.

Selected letters will be published in C156 "Craft" (Winter 2024).

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

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

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

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

Call for Letters: Codes

Call

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

Presented by _C Magazine_ and the Indigenous [Curatorial Collective / Collectif des commissaires autochtones.](https://icca.art/)

We’re thrilled to launch the 2nd annual Indigenous Art Writing Award, an initiative created to support, compensate, and platform three standout individuals who are advancing critical and creative thought about Indigenous contemporary art. 

Indigenous writers are invited to submit a single non-fiction (creative non-fiction welcome!) text about an artist, project, exhibition, performance, event, initiative, or theme. Suggested length for submissions is between 1000-2000 words.

The winner will receive $1500 CAD, editorial support to prepare their article for publication in an upcoming issue of _C Magazine_, and a two-year subscription. Each of the two runners-up will receive $1000 CAD, an invitation to develop a pitch for a different text to be published in _C Magazine_, and a two-year subscription. All participants will have the option to request feedback, and will receive a one-year subscription.

Applicants must identify as an Indigenous person. There are no geographical restrictions, although we strongly encourage those based in Canada to apply. Submissions should be primarily in English, but may include non-English words or phrases. For submissions entirely in another language, we require translations. The award will be adjudicated by an ICCA representative, a _C Magazine_ editor, and an external juror. One submission per applicant. Complete [the submission form](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfodeUcRMNefue9ExD0I-QmDJwX5WkyyRFkfDOnmSeZaEjyYw/viewform) by October 30, 2023.

Please write to [editor@cmagazine.com](mailto:editor@cmagazine.com) if you require any accommodation during the application process. Note that measures will be taken to ensure that the identity of entrants remains unknown to adjudicators. More information about writing for _C Magazine_ can be found on our [Submissions page.](https://cmagazine.com/opportunities/write)

Partners

Call for the Indigenous Art Writing Award

The Indigenous Art Writing Award is an initiative created to support, compensate, and platform standout individuals who are advancing critical and creative thought about Indigenous contemporary art. 

Indigenous writers in the first decade of their career are invited to submit a single text up to 2,000 words in length about an artist, project, exhibition, performance, event, initiative, theme, and/or phenomenon therein.

Applicants must identify as an Indigenous person. There are no geographical restrictions, although we strongly encourage those based in Canada to apply. Submissions should be primarily in English, but may include non-English words or phrases. For submissions entirely in another language, we require translations. It is free to make a submission.

The award is adjudicated by ICCA staff, _C Magazine_ editors, and an external juror. The winner receives a cash award and editorial support to prepare their article for publication in _C Magazine_, and the runner receives a cash award. All participamts receive a subscription to _C Magazine_.

The 2022 winner was awarded the Momus Emerging Critics Residency, supported in part by [Momus](https://momus.ca/), together with the presenting partners.

Submission

Indigenous Art Writing Award

Program

We are now accepting applications!
Deadline: October 30, 2023


Program Information

Lois Taylor Biggs' feature [_Archives, Bones, and Polaroids_](https://cmagazine.com/articles/archives-bones-and-polaroids) is published in C151 "Greif" (Spring 2022). 

The winner of our inaugural Indigenous Art Writing Award, co-presented with the Indigenous Curatorial Collective, focuses on the late artist Kimowan Metchewais, who sought to build a personal photo archive toward his “imagining of a post-[Edward] Curtis world, without ‘ethnographic baggage.’”     

2022 Indigenous Art Writing Award Winner

Presented by _C Magazine_ and the Indigenous Curatorial Collective / Collectif des commissaires autochtones. The Indigenous Art Writing Award is an initiative created to support, compensate, and platform standout individuals who are advancing critical and creative thought about Indigenous contemporary art. 

In partnership with the Indigenous Curatorial Collective / Collectif des commissaires autochtones, we are now accepting applications for the 2nd annual Indigenous Art Writing Award.




Call for Indigenous Art Writing Award

We are thrilled to announce the 19th Annual _C Magazine_ Contemporary Art Auction! This year’s Auction features over 50 works generously donated by artists working in painting, photography, sculpture, textile, and beyond. Please join us and support _C_ by participating online through [Waddington's](https://www.waddingtons.ca/auction/19th-annual-c-magazine-contemporary-art-auction-nov-13-2023/), from 4 to 13 November 2023. Your contribution directly supports _C Magazine_ in its mission to engage our community in the ideas of our time through Canadian-led contemporary art and art writing. Help _C Magazine_ continue to offer a vital platform for diverse artists, writers, and thinkers! 

**This year’s Auction features work by** Anahita Akhavan, Farihah Aliyah Shah, Maru Aponte, Trevor Baird, Keiran Brennan Hinton, Jasmine Cardenas, Renee Condo, Lauren Crazybull, Gabi Dao, Kayza DeGraff-Ford, Wally Dion, Chun Hua Catherine Dong, Hana Elmasry, Andy Fabo, Ella Gonzales, Ezra Gray, KC Hall, Laura Hudspith, Nadya Isabella, Min Jia, Rae Johnson, Julia Kansas, Keerat Kaur, Scott Kemp, Shane Krepakevich, HaeAhn Paul Kwon Kajander, Cheyenne Rain Le Grande, Anne Low, Annie MacDonell, Sanaz Mazinani, Sondra Meszaros, Raoul Olou, Luke Parnell, Preston Pavlis, Atheana Pitcha, Janice Reid, Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez, Moses Salihou, Matthew Schofield, Walter Scott, Kathy Slade, Lisa Smolkin, Greg Staats, Karen Tam, Anna Torma, Howie Tsui, Alex Turgeon, Alix Van Der Donckt-Ferrand, Christian Vistan, Jan Wade, Caeden Wigston, Nicholas Zirk, **and more.**



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19th Annual C Magazine contemporary art Auction

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Please join us and support t _C Magazine_ by participating in the 19th Annual C Magazine Contemporary Art Auction online, through Waddington's from 4 to 13 November 2023.


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“A Political, Ethical, Existence Practice”: In Conversation with Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva

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