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Fortin

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Evergreen 2

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

Editor

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

Associate Editor

Publisher

Designer

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


Chorus

Review

Brody Weaver is a writer, artist, and educator living and learning between Kjipuktuk (Halifax, NS) and Tkaronto (Toronto, ON). She is studying archives and records management at the University of Toronto’s iSchool, and her work can be found in _Femme Art Review_, _Visual Arts News_, _Peripheral Review_, and _C Magazine_.


_Anita Louise and the Wild Women_ premiered to a standing ovation from a packed audience. The short documentary opens with a shot of the white-haired Anita Louise Martinez (1939–2025) positioning her camera toward an unseen filmmaker, who in turn records Martinez in a delicate photographic standoff. The off-screen filmmaker is Arena Alamino, whose directorial debut carefully uses the documentary form to create a filmic portrait of Martinez in the final moments of her life. A lifelong activist and prolific photographer, Martinez devoted over five decades of her life to fighting for and documenting the intersecting feminist, peace, labour, and LGBTQ2IA+ rights movements in Nova Scotia, where she moved in 1983. Ever-present at community events and rarely seen without her camera, Martinez’s photographic collection chronicles generations of queer life in the province.

Alamino first discovered Martinez through her photographs in the Nova Scotia LGBT Seniors Archive. Sifting through handfuls of images depicting marches, demonstrations, and community gatherings, she was struck by a collection of photos documenting _Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues_, a recurring lesbian camping weekend held in a remote location in Pictou County between 1983 and 1996. After nearly two years of trying to contact Martinez, and fresh out of the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative’s DIY DOC program, Alamino found herself knocking on Martinez’s front door to thank her and propose making a film to honour her legacy.

_Anita Louise and the Wild Women_ oscillates between interviews with Martinez, her loved ones, and the subjects of her photographs. Among reproductions of Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues photos, we see the daily minutiae of her daughter Lorraine’s caretaking acts, and Martinez’s smile stretched cheek to cheek beside her best friend and fellow activist Eric Smith. Alamino’s next project, which won the Lunenburg Doc Fest pitch competition in 2025, will focus on Smith, who was ousted into spotlight and scrutiny in the ’80s when his AIDS diagnosis was made public without his consent. With a short run time of just over 10 minutes, _Anita Louise and the Wild Women_ is not and cannot be a comprehensive life story. Rather, it offers a vignette of one aspect of Martinez’s life, highlighting the effect her presence and photographic practice had on those whose lives she touched. Alamino very well could have focused on Martinez’s work with the Nova Scotia Persons With AIDS Coalition (now the Health Equity Alliance of Nova Scotia), where she supported and photographed gay men dying from the virus to create a dignified record to leave for their loved ones, and where her portraits of the founding members hang on the wall to this day. The focus on _Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues_ photographs is subjective, and it says more about Alamino’s creative and personal interests than it does about Martinez herself.

The traces drawn by Alamino are her interpretation of this vast photographic archive, translating visual gems that by themselves are veiled with historical opacity into animated and accessible points of entry into an underappreciated aspect of queer history in Atlantic Canada. Under Alamino’s direction, Martinez’s photographs shine as conduits for memory, storytelling, and intergenerational connection as viewers are privileged with the firsthand recollections of the queer elders depicted within them.

Anita passed away on Tuesday, February 4, 2025. The film was completed just two months after her death. It would be easy to narrate the genesis and creation of _Anita Louise and the Wild Women_ as an isolated incident of the right people meeting at the right time, but to do so would ignore the rich self- and community-documentary tradition within queer independent media, from photography and filmmaking to publishing and print, that this film both depicts and enacts. Martinez’s impulse to create an intimate record of her lesbian community is mirrored in Alamino’s decision to participate in this tradition, recording and transmitting her legacy to a younger generation of queer and trans people.

I met Martinez in 2019 at a meeting for the Community Advisory Committee for the Nova Scotia LGBT Seniors Archive, before anything had been formally donated, when she and a group of other queer elders gathered to decide if the Seniors Archive was the appropriate steward for materials they had been collecting for most of their lives. Martinez was aware of the value of her contributions and the promises that the archive held. Flashing forward from that deliberation to Alamino knocking on her door five years later, I cannot help but feel that Martinez made the right choice.

_Anita Louise and the Wild Women_ is a testament to how the preservation of community history does not begin or end with the archival profession—it is a collective responsibility. More than a screening, the premiere at the Halifax Independent Filmmakers Festival was a reunion and a celebration. Attended by subjects of the film and Martinez’s loved ones alike, the room applauded Alamino for representing their friend with such tact and care. The intergenerational magic present in that room attests to Alamino’s directorial strength and grounds her as a promising new voice in Atlantic Canadian filmmaking, where her work finds itself in good company among the proliferation of inquiry into queer and trans histories in this region.



Writer

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_Anita Louise and the Wild Women_ screened on 30 May 2025 at the Halifax Independent Filmmakers Festival, Bus Stop Theatre. Produced with the assistance of the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative, 2025.


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_Anita Louise and the Wild Women_ — Arena Alamino

Andrew Witt is an art historian and critic who writes on contemporary art. He is currently the 2025–2026 PERICULUM Foundation for Contemporary Art Discourse Fellow. His book _Lost Days, Endless Nights: Photography and Film from Los Angeles_ was recently published by MIT Press (2025).

The title of Sojourner Truth Parsons’s exhibition nods to the poet Louise Glück with a strange, unguarded familiarity, as if the show were already on a first-name basis. The title makes you wonder whether Glück’s poetry is meant to illuminate Parsons’s paintings, or whether the relation remains more fugitive and opaque. I feel like it’s something closer to the latter, a secret held in a very particular way, the painter’s private relation to the poet, an idea that hangs in the room, the kind of thing that resists full articulation. When confronted with an elusive relation like this one, there’s the temptation to start trawling through Glück’s poetry in search of a passage or line, some interpretative key to help guide our encounter, as if meaning were a matter of proper cross-referencing. But that doesn’t seem to be the point. Maybe the secret should remain a secret. I find myself drawn to that possibility: that Parsons’s work refuses the impulse to explain her work away by citing a line of poetry, refuses any neat literary correspondence between painting and poetry, insisting that if a relationship exists at all, it is an obscure and obstinate one.

And there is a simple fact worth stating outright: Parsons’s paintings are dark. Some are almost entirely black. You think of night when you look at them, or some nocturnal state, because they inhabit night’s atmosphere, its perceptual logic, and a refusal to yield everything all at once. Her canvases are saturated with darkness as a material fact. In a series like _End of April beginning of May_ (2023), darkness is the entire field, its structuring principle. The title refers to that seasonal threshold in the southern Catskill Mountains when winter gives way to spring, a tonal shift these paintings also hold. This series is composed of different shades of black, slight variations that reveal themselves only through sustained looking. Working through these tonal variations, the viewer must stay with the paintings, must look and keep looking, until the blacks start to separate into other shades of blues, purples, and greens, the faint residue of other colours absorbed and held within.

We might speak of Parsons’s series in the way we speak of Ad Reinhardt’s late abstractions: through the intensification of vision that occurs in sustained encounter with a black monochrome. To look closely at Reinhardt’s paintings is to realize they are never purely black, but blocks of near-black tones, variations of red-black, blue-black, and green-black. It seems like an obvious point, but those differences only start to register after time has passed, after your eyes have adjusted and recalibrated to the near-monochromatic surface. Any reproduction collapses them, flattens their slow revelation. And here, perhaps, it’s worth admitting that this kind of attention, this form of sustained looking, feels almost anachronistic now, like a muscle we’ve let atrophy. The kind of patience Reinhardt demanded presupposes a viewer who still knows how to stand still. Parsons’s paintings bet on the existence of that viewer or perhaps, more modestly, offer an invitation to become one briefly. There’s something defiant in that gesture, especially in a culture that has trained us to scroll endlessly. The painting asks us to remain, to stay with the darkness until it begins to reveal itself.

And yet Parsons is not a practitioner of “pure painting,” as Reinhardt might have framed it. The black of her canvases is not an abstraction emptied of reference, but a figural economy, a material condition. In the series _July Tree_ (2020–2021), the canvas feels constructed rather than painted, built from collaged planes, blocks of colour, silhouettes, fragments of interiors, and the suggestion of unclothed female forms sharing a space together. Her figures appear as though glimpsed across a courtyard or through an open apartment window, momentarily lit by a full moon, the dark glow of other lives moving behind glass. There is a voyeurism to this look. To look into darkness is to want something from it: the thrill of seeing another life that is not yours, or just proof that someone else is awake and that you are awake with them. Parsons’s paintings understand that desire and urge.

Her nocturnal scenes stage a metapoetics of painting, a meditation on what it means to see through paint. Since we will never know the depth of Parsons’s relationship to Glück, the darkness of the night becomes the condition for seeing elsewhere, not necessarily with clarity, but as a counterpoint to the rhetoric of illumination that so often structures the history of vision and poetic thought. The darkness, we might say, is not just what Parsons paints, but what she paints through: the condition of working through uncertainty, of staying with the darkness long enough for something else to take form.

Parsons’s other works in the show include the patchwork composition _The beginning of the end of the garden_ (2025). The work appears to embrace an incremental process: adding a square, extending the field, altering a hue that either deepens or recedes. And perhaps this, too, is where the work of painting resides, in that same twilight condition of making and remaking. To paint is to build a world slowly, layer by layer, one colour over another, one decision covering or revealing the last. There is only the insistence of a return—to paint, to paint again, to move through the night, and return to the canvas the next day.


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“Louise” ran from 3 October 2025 to 28 February 2026 at Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver.

“Louise” — Sojourner Truth Parsons

Feature

Sarah Jane Cervenak is the Linda Arnold Carlisle
Distinguished Excellence Professor of Women’s,
Gender, and Sexuality Studies and African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is the author
of _Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life_ and
_Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial
and Sexual Freedom_, and is at work on a third book.


Nolan Oswald Dennis’s _Black Liberation Zodiac (Kgositsile’s Folly)_ (2022–ongoing) is a good place to start. In this installation for “overturns” (2025), the artist’s solo exhibition at the Swiss Institute, black wallpaper hangs from a stanchion and then, as if pulled by a gravitational force, seems to merge with the floor. Circular-cum-fractal star charts composed of staccatoed white lines bear glimpses of constellations from the south celestial pole. Dennis’s charts hide the stars’ exact coordinates, challenging the presumption of the cosmos’ availability to transparent mapping. Also threaded into this night sky is iconography associated with South Africa’s anti-apartheid Black Consciousness movement of the ’70s, including: a reference to the Wedgwood anti-slavery medallion, the outlines of a rifle, the Black Panther Party symbol, and an image of handcuffed fists.

The artist, born in Lusaka, now lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. Foregrounding anti-colonial, Black radical thought, their attention to the south celestial pole moreover indicates a Southern-oriented view of the cosmos. Southernness in _Black Liberation Zodiac_ appears in both a latitudinal and a longitudinal position, as well as in the geopolitically marginalized perspectives of philosophers, artists, and scientists living in what is referred to as the Global South. According to the artist, printed on the black wallpaper background are “diagrams […] based on the International Astronomical Union constellation charts, as well as the South African Astronomical Observatory’s southern planisphere of star patterns.” [^1] Along with Black Consciousness movement and Black Panther Party iconography, the artist also draws on Chinese and Zulu “modes of mapping the sky, and other Indigenous systems for cosmic meaning-making.” [^2] This foregrounding of African Indigenous and non-Eurocentric astronomies is furthered by _Approximations_ (1) (2021). On a conference stand in front of _Black Liberation Zodiac_, a video screens an interview with, among other interlocutors, the South African astrophysicist Sukuma Mkhize. [^3]

The colour black is featured prominently across the works that make up “overturns.” In addition to _Black Liberation Zodiac_, it is repeated in wallpapers for _recurse 4 a late planet (lush)_ (2024), and _further notes 4 a planet (nine-dash)_ (2024). Black primer also coats one of the globes in the installation _Articulated globe (pair)_ (2024), and the pyramid pedestal in _Isivivane_ (2023–ongoing). Against the imposed illuminations and enclosures of whiteness, the colour black here enacts an un/writing of Earth and sky that respects their shared “right to opacity.” [^4]

Indeed, the colour white has an aesthetic history overdetermined by colonial assumptions of its originary presence as the world’s base colour and blank canvas. [^5] In his scholarship tracing the Euro-American colonial and Enlightenment histories of paper production, Jonathan Senchyne writes: “[W]hiteness is a key feature of paper’s function as a substrate for written and printed texts. It serves as the ground against which the figures of text and image become visible and legible to readers and viewers.” [^6] Moreover, white paper’s phantasmatic instrumentalization by European Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke as the symbolic cognitive ground of reason persists today as the normative aesthetic choice for intellectual and artistic re/production.

In contrast, Dennis’s black wallpaper installations foreground the mutual rights of Blackness and earthliness to express, as philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva might say, their own “creative potential” and epistemic autonomies outside of whiteness. [^7] _Black Liberation Zodiac_ decentres white astronormative visions of a universe that is Eurocentrically graphed and codified, by illuminating often-ignored cosmological views, offering a view from a black background that is everywhere. According to the exhibition statement, Dennis’s starry arrangements are mapped along the ecliptic plane—the route Earth travels around the sun—to allow the Earth some reprieve from visibility’s violence. Across _Black Liberation Zodiac_, these ecliptic paths appear as striated white circles that repeat and increase in size, like a star’s radiation.

In _recurse 4 a late planet (lush)_, we find another sheet of black wallpaper upon which an array of elliptic, circular, conic, and oblong diagrams laterally bloom. The curved lines that occupy much of the topography of the installation are muted. Soft whites, along with faded reds, greens, and ochres, seem to hyperbolically curve out from the flat wall. From afar, my initial experience of the artwork’s stunning diagrammatic sprawls was riddled with anxiety around my inability to “do math.” With that said, I found the roundedness of the lines appealing. The absence of numerical data, in conjunction with the abstract relationship between shapes and their accompanying labels, provokes a certainty that is eventually refused. For example, on the left side of the canvas, the curved lines sometimes complete as circles, and sometimes jut out as bent lines arching elsewhere. Relatively small circles seem to collide into a centipede-like shape accompanied by labels like “a yt world,” “a black world,” and “a colonial world.” Other larger circles feature obtuse labels like “something else” or “for those who know what a stone can do.” The latter’s ambivalence in lieu of shape’s calculable data suggests a kind of non-Euclidean refusal. A predominant mathematical theory derived from ancient Greek mathematician Euclid, Euclidean geometry posits that all lines are held together by mappable points. Relatedly, according to scientist-artist Margaret Wertheim, a Euclidean-informed rectangularity and compulsive “straightness” structures the modernist imposition of gridded design on a presumptively disordered and “undeveloped” Earth. [^8] Even still, as Wertheim continues to argue, Euclid’s postulates about the world’s availability to gridded knowability break down in the face of how earthly living actually is: fractal, askew, elusive, curvy, and unmappable.

The array of errant lines in _recurse 4 a late planet (lush)_ arch with and into the black wallpaper. While the lines curve and intersect, they don’t carry numerical data. The diagrammatic arrangements in recurse also reference the phenomenon of “space rocks,” with particular focus on 99942 Apophis, an asteroid that was once thought to threaten the Earth’s very survival. While it was recently determined that the asteroid will not in fact collide with Earth in 2029 (as originally forecast), Dennis brilliantly attends to the insistent incertitude, or what Calvin Warren might call “terror,” of not being able to mathematically deduce and formalize cosmo-geological unfolding. [^9] For Warren, a theory of catastrophe, and of math’s inability to anticipate “sudden variation,” bespeaks its larger anxiety around that which resists formal containment. Dennis alludes to math’s limitations even as they indict the terrible certitude of coloniality’s world-ending operations. Even as Earth’s geological intactness seems predictably “safe” from Apophis, as the accompanying labels indicate, “a yt world and a colonial world” nonetheless morph the shape of a “black world.”

We might say that Dennis’s art unmoors the line from its relationship to something knowable or calculable. Across _recurse_, alongside lines that seem hard and straight, there are also lines that undulate and wave. There are lines that seem to be so thinned out that they appear striated enough to let air in. One dotted line is labelled as “afro-indigenous.” Black Indigeneity here isn’t mapped but, rather, exists as a pulsing, deregulated assertion of living. Recalling _Black Liberation Zodiac_’s references to the Black liberation struggle in ’70s South Africa, the artist’s reimagining of lines in the sky and floating geologies is an insistent anti-colonial defamiliarization of mapping practices, toward a critique and destabilization of enclosure. We see this in the artist’s juxtaposition of “afro-indigenous” with a striated line that both isn’t and doesn’t. Accompanying diagrams of various rocks are curved lines labelled with the seemingly transparent language of “cause” and “effect 1.” But these same lines are also eventually labelled as leading to a more obtuse “something else.” I am reminded of Wertheim again, who writes about how even in Euclidean straightness, there’s still something “surprisingly plastic” about diagrams too. [^10] Indeed, in their own writing, Dennis shares that “the diagram is simultaneously an actual concrete arrangement of representational elements as well as a virtual device, an arrangement of potentialities, capacities and tendencies.” [^11] For example, both _Black Radical Zodiac_ and _recurse_ gesture toward particular views made possible by the South African Astronomical Observatory (in the former work), and the orbit of the feared Apophis (in the latter). While both views are linked to particular geopolitical contexts—of post- and pre-colonial Africa—they are also unsettled by other kinds of topographies and geologies. These include sites where Indigeneities across Africa draw and live out their own lines and relations, without the closures imposed by settler maps. These are also places where rocks aren’t named, and where Earth is just one node of cosmic light among many others. [^12]

I want to conclude with _Articulated globe (pair)_—an installation where two globes are propped up by steel armature, while their upper regions rest on one another. To the left, there is the “standard” blue globe upon which the “world” is mapped. This globe is typically used as a teaching accompaniment in geography classes, and is often marketed with words like “explorer,” “pioneer,” and “traveller.” With this device, the world becomes flattened, even though it bears a spherical conceit. With every spin, waters and lands are subject to chromatic ordering and differentiation, which in turn invites colonial modes of seeing and touching. By contrast, the second globe is covered entirely with black primer, and bears a veil made of loose netting and cowry shells. The difference between the two globes manifests as the violent viewability of the commodified blue version, on the left, and the somehow protected and concealed version on the right. As with the wallpaper installations _Black Liberation Zodiac_ and _recurse_, black primer in conjunction with the cowry shells function as a spiritually informed, anti-colonial aesthetic shield. The black globe might also be the artist’s way of enjoining us to (un)see the Earth as originarily anti-colonial and anti-apartheid, as “difference without separability,” [^13] and as just another unwritten-upon orb in the sky.

In a conversation with scholar Zoé Samudzi for The Kitchen, Dennis shared: “I’ve been wrestling with (the implications of) this fragment on grammar from South African photographer Santu Mofokeng: ‘My approach to landscapes is informed by cleaving the word landscape into its portmanteau component parts: “land” (the verb) and “scape” (to view).’ I’m committed to the idea of ‘land’ (the verb) and the question of what it means to view a verb. It feels like a demand to think of the land as something we do (a collective happening)—a process, procedure, and practice rather than a thing.” [^14] The black globe of _Articulated globe (pair)_ enacts the kinetics of that other view. Across the black globe, the violence of Enlightenment modalities of imposed transparency are interrupted. The Earth is invisible as undifferentiated, unextracted, and somehow protected. Land’s opacities join with the sky’s own secret arrangements. Maybe there’s that Wynterian overturning that the artist evokes as a moniker for the show: another ceremony, but one whose coordinates remain (un)written.

[^1]: Monisha Holmes and Nolan Oswald Dennis, “Astrologer Monisha Holmes and Artist Nolan Oswald Dennis on the Zodiac and Black Liberation,” _Art in America_, January 1, 2020, https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/interviews/nolan-oswald-dennis-monsha-holmes-black-liberation-zodiac-1202673932

[^2]: Ibid.

[^3 ]: Nolan Oswald Dennis, email correspondence with author.

[^4]: Édouard Glissant, _Poetics of Relation_ (University of Michigan Press, 1997).

[^5]: Bernd Herzogenrath, “White,” in _Prismatic Ecology_, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

[^6]: Jonathan Senchyne, _The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature_ (University of Massachusetts Press, 2019).

[^7]: Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World,” _The Black Scholar_ 44 (2014).

[^8]: Margaret Wertheim, _A Field Guide to Hyperbolic Space: An Exploration of the Intersection of Higher Geometry and Feminine Handicraft_ (The Institute for Figuring, 2007).

[^9]: Calvin Warren, “The Catastrophe: Black Feminist Poethics, (Anti)form, and Mathematical Nihilism,” _Qui Parle_ 28 (2019).

[^10]: Wertheim, 15.

[^11]: Nolan Oswald Dennis, _A Fragment on Diagrams and Dreams_, 2018, https://www.nolanoswalddennis.com/studio_theory/a%20fragment%20on%20diagrams%20and%20dreams%20.pdf

[^12]: Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism,” _boundary 2_ 12/13 (1984).

[^13]: Denise Ferreira da Silva, “On Difference Without Separability,” in _Incerteza Viva_, exh. cat. (Bienal de São Paulo, 2016).

[^14]: Nolan Oswald Dennis and Zoé Samudzi, “Land: Experience, Myth and Memory,” _ON MIND_, July 1, 2022, https://thekitchen.org/on-mind/land-experience-myth-and-memory




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Science

Mapping

Philosophy

Scholar Sarah Jane Cervenak thinks alongside “overturns,” Nolan Oswald Dennis’s 2025 solo show at the Swiss Institute. Cervenak surveys how Dennis’s diagrams, based on International Astronomical Union constellation charts, layer references to global Indigenous cosmologies, the Black consciousness movement, and Black Panther Party iconography, toward an “anti-colonial defamiliarization of mapping practices.”

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An Un/Written Proposition: Nolan Oswald Dennis Overturns the World

Sherry Chunqing Liu 刘纯青 (b. Xiamen, China) is a writer, artist, and curator whose work engages contemporary art and storytelling, often drawing on diasporic experience, cultural identity, and personal memory. Her writing has appeared in _C Magazine_, _esse arts + opinions_, _ESPACE art actuel_, Artoronto.ca, and _photoED_, while her curatorial projects have been featured by _Dezeen_, _e-flux_, the Art Museum at the University o-f Toronto, CONTACT Photography Festival, and DesignTO, among others. She holds a Master of Visual Studies in Curatorial Studies and an HBA in Architecture from the University of Toronto.



How do diasporic subjects remain in relation to their ancestors when rituals that once held those bonds are disrupted, translated, or misunderstood across continents? Annie Wong’s “to hear all the sounds in the world” at YYZ Artists' Outlet takes this question as its heartbeat, using joss paper, performance, and printed apparitions as a material vocabulary to map fragmented inheritances. Wong explores the limits of remembering and reclaiming ancestors, including countless distant and unknown ones, while suggesting that these bonds can be forged and brought into the present through attentive, tender, and partial gestures.

The gallery’s quiet registers first. A large sweeping arc of joss paper hangs horizontally from the ceiling, forming a rhythmic cadence of life and death, of preparation and anticipation. Hundreds of interconnected serene faces of the devotees of Guanyin, the Bodhisattva of compassion, float in a contemplative curve, their matte surfaces absorbing and diffusing the overhead light. Assembled from many sheets of 100 Ghosts (一百鬼) joss paper, which Wong encountered through her research beginning in 2020, the work reflects a process of careful repetition. Originally conceived as halo-like cutouts, the faces are folded to emerge from the surface and stand upright. Their stillness carries a sense of imminence, the moment before ritual, or the instant when breath is drawn but not yet released. Wong described the installation as something that “emerged on its own” as she assembled it, bending and rising naturally with fishing wire for support. What began in a flat plane evolved into a sculptural wave, invoking the ocean as a metaphor for migration, where physical distance, temporal dislocation, and the pull of return are held in constant motion. Below, a metal fire bucket stands ready. The absence of combustion positions the viewer at a threshold where offerings are prepared but not yet sent.

The suspended faces pulled me back to childhood afternoons in my father’s hometown of Putian, hiking with my family to visit ancestral graves. I was too young to understand the cosmology and reciprocity embedded in the burning of joss paper, which offers care to ancestors and deceased family in exchange for protection and continued connection between generations. I remember the smoke thinning among the trees, folding into the green of the forest, the scent of foliage mingling with paper. After moving overseas as a teenager, such memories became rare threads anchoring a home that had begun to feel distant. Entering Wong’s exhibition, those threads tugged again, softly but firmly.
This floating multiplicity evokes not only Guanyin but the countless unnamed women, devotees, and ancestral figures whose acts of care shaped Guanyin’s iconography. In her text “How to Burn Paper for the Dead” (_Mice Magazine_, 2017), Wong reflects on the “ghost” carried by the diasporic subject as the residue of ancestral rituals, practices that remain ordinary and domestic, woven into daily life yet rendered spectral or estranged within Westernized spaces. I thought of the small burning rituals for my grandfather that my family practiced during my childhood in Xiamen, gradually fading as the city grew more urban and attuned to new ideas of safety and order shaped by global influences. What remains with me is not a clear causal narrative but the sensation of change, of watching a practice thin out until only its echoes linger.

During the opening, Wong and her sister Jennifer Vong performed _Waking Up the Girls_, folding several Guanyin faces upright while calling “Wake up” in Cantonese. Wong later told me that when she was taught how to pray for ancestors, her mother referred to the act as waking them up. Revived in Wong’s hands, the act became a recognition of the women whose stories were thinned by migration. The installation, once still, shifted into a subtle awakening.
Pinned along the wall, 一百鬼 / _100 Ghosts_ (2019–2020) extends this inquiry into spectral memory. Faces are screenprinted with varied clarity onto a field of gilded joss paper. Some are crisp, others blurred or slightly out of register, forming a delicate grammar of haunting. As a breeze passes, the gold shimmers, echoing Wong’s recollection of burning paper shoes, trousers, and shirts for distant ancestors across China and Vietnam with her mother. These prints recall acts of care eroded not by forgetting but by the slow pressure of assimilation and urban life. The emotional architecture remains in fleeting sparks of recognition.

In “How to Burn Paper,” Wong further describes the Chinese afterlife as a bureaucratic realm of ongoing errands and obligations, a world where the dead continue to eat, pay debts, and navigate daily life. This stands in contrast to Western narratives of heaven or transcendence. Standing before the shimmering sheets, I felt the uncanny tension familiar to many diasporic subjects: the sense of being both tethered to and estranged from familial pasts. Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology, referenced by Wong, helps illuminate this space, where the past returns not as settled inheritance but as partial, insistent echoes. Wong renders this oscillation visible, materializing the fragile traces through which care persists.

Wong situates her broader practice within hauntology in the East Asian diaspora, exploring how belief systems surrounding ghosts, spirits, and minor gods provide a lens for understanding remembrance and collective histories. She also references Stuart Hall’s idea that identities are shaped through past narratives, a concept that resonates throughout the installation. The work visualizes fragmented transmissions, revealing how diasporic subjects navigate overlapping and sometimes conflicting cultural timelines, carrying multiple inheritances that never fully align yet continue to shape lived experience.

Small details deepen these resonances. A single orange rests on a plate on a small red platform jutting out from the wall, recalling altars of New Year offerings for ancestors, like those from my own family home. The fire bucket beneath the central installation remained unlit until it was carried outside by the artist and her sister, where Sifu Julian Diego—fire arts practitioner and Wong’s kung fu teacher—performed a fire ceremony as a gift to the 100 spirit figures. The burning of the _100 Ghosts_ joss paper carried the ritual to completion, linking interior anticipation with outdoor release.

The exhibition’s red walls, the rhythmic wave of paper faces, the flicker of gilded prints, and the humble gestures of care create a trembling equilibrium between stillness and motion, inheritance and imagination. Wong cultivates a space where diasporic inheritance is not a narrative of loss. Through acts of folding, offering, and attentive looking, she suggests that connection endures even when lineage is fractured. Ancestry appears not as a resurrected whole, but as a series of fleeting, companionable presences that make themselves felt in the quietest of moments.

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 “to hear all the sounds in the world” ran from 20 September to 6 December 2025 at YYZ Artists’ Outlet, Toronto.


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“to hear all the sounds in the world” — Annie Wong

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Sebastian De Line focuses on notions of audibility in the context of caring for museum collections, where attuning to ancestors who reside there is a paradigm shift for what Western Eurocentric museum practices call “objects.”


Listening to Collections: Ancestor-Led Care in Museums

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

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The Afterlife of Writing

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One Thing: In Search of an Incorruptible Life

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The House Edge

Kai Trotz-Motayne is a Guyanese-Canadian researcher and writer from Tkaronto/Toronto, whose work takes inspiration from the many Caribbean people that raised her. She spends most days reminiscing about family gatherings that would end with tales of her family’s
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For Those Who Visit Us in Our Dreams

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

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In the Lacuna

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bhenji Ra Dances at the End of the Rainbow

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

Floor Drawing Series by Aubin Soonhwan K: Text

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

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