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

Editorial Conception

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

Editor

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

Associate Editor

Designer

Publisher

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


Extra Life

Review

**Greta Hamilton**(she/they) is a writer and community arts facilitator living on the təmxʷúlaʔxʷ of the Sn̓ʕaýckstx in Nelson, BC. Their research considers environmental and land-based artistic practices, with a focus on gardens, bathing, hide tanning, fermenting, and fibre crafts.  

 

 _A spiral is the shape of return_, says S F Ho during their artist talk at the local stationery store. Ho’s exhibition at Oxygen Art Centre in Nelson, BC, explores the cultural and medicinal uses of plants commonly thought of as weeds, from a traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) perspective. Considering the geopolitics of yarrow, poppy, mugwort, and tea, the artist relates the plants to histories of British imperialism in Hong Kong, where the artist’s family is from, and Vancouver, where the artist now lives.

In _Dancer (無)_ (2025) and _Money Mirror (弗)_ (2022), silk cloths dyed with yarrow and tea adorn the walls of the gallery. Two earthy perfume pastes, _Full House #1_ and _Full House #2_ (both 2025), are stuccoed on the rear walls in the shape of an O, an erotic reference to bodily holes. I lean in close to smell perfume rounds ripe with must and peppercorn. A video playing on loop showcases plants growing in the artist’s garden in Vancouver, while the sound track echoes in the gallery, playing the artist’s experimental music alongside interviews conducted with farmers and TCM practitioners in Hong Kong. On the centre of the gallery floor is _Land (回)_ (2025), a sculptural installation made of clay and acupuncture needles that draw a spiral through the space. Dotted with objects like chai cups made by the artist Ayesh Kanani, moxibustion vessels, iron railway spikes, 3D printed poppy heads, homemade perfumes, and a Daoist shrine, Ho’s exhibition is overwhelming with sensorial detail. 


I’m tempted to walk around the spiral backwards, while reading the large archival printouts scattered along the floor. Like a paperweight, iron railway ties hold these pages down in a visual rhyme with the vertical acupuncture needles that make
up the spiral. The pages below the railway ties include textual passages from the Nelson Museum archives that refer to Chinese market gardeners who inhabited and farmed a large area of Nelson at the turn of the century. The passages describe the eviction of these gardeners from their homes, businesses, and farms for urban development in the city centre. The archival texts also include passages describing the
bountiful fruit and vegetables grown by Chinese market gardeners, and the distinct smell wafting from their homes. Ho notes that their impulse toward smell is spatial: for the artist, the distinct “Chinese” smell described in the archival texts is reminiscent of their grandfather’s apothecary, ripe with camphoraceous scents.

I turn toward the shrine. Dried poppy heads and yarrow spill from a black glazed vessel. Loose moxa and tea are dusted into two pinch pots. I sniff them both. On the windowsill below the shrine, a deep purple perfume and a lighter yellow one are waiting to stain my skin. I spray them first in the air, then into the fibres of my dress. The artist made these perfumes with distilled and concentrated medicinal herbs. They smell peppery, stale, and earthy. I contemplate the magical process of producing smell, the healing properties of herbs and acupuncture needles, the racist connotations of the archive, and the geopolitics of tea and poppies, especially as they relate to British colonialism and the opium trade. I think about how TCM philosophy understands farming as a
cyclical way of thinking about land through the interconnected resonant systems of the body, the cosmos, the environment, and the soil. _A spiral is a symbol of return_, Ho says, _but it is also the character for “No.”_ Walking backwards in a spiral, I wonder if this constitutes a meditation on emptiness or, as the artist puts it, a lowering of the ego and a refusal of hierarchy.

Writer

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"TRIPLE BURNER FLOWER FIELD" ran from 15 January to 8 March 2025 at Oxygen Art Centre, Nelson, British Columbia. 

"TRIPLE BURNER FLOWER FIELD" — S F Ho 

Leon Hsu is a Taiwanese-Canadian art historian and writer based in Stockholm. He holds an MA in Art History from the University of Toronto.

Misty figures float—between the state of sleep and consciousness—in a descriptive placelessness, where elements of nature construct the pretext of a possible place of (in)existence. In 2025 Prix Marcel Duchamp finalist
Xie Lei’s latest Parisian exhibition, “Mort heureuse,” contingent scenes of caress, desire, violence, abandonment, and perhaps death slip in and out of the pictorial frame through nothing other than the spectre of light that emerges in the form of gentle white orbs, tinted with
frequent fumes of surrounding colours. Luminous shifting figures persist in the shadow of wakefulness: the effect is unheimlich, or uncanny, for the troubling strangeness of that which is familiar yet unfamiliar. The figures’
facelessness, and thus their anonymity, imbues them with
the potential of being, at once, someone, anyone, and
no one. This very fact unsettles us, for the painted scenes
oscillate between concealment and revelation, not unlike
that of a dream recalled, layered with incongruities.

The exhibition’s title takes cue from Albert Camus’s
posthumously published novel _La mort heureuse [A Happy Death]_ (1971). By omitting singular or plural particularity in the title of the show (as with “a” or“la”), Xie forsakes certitude in favour of logical suspension. I take such an ambiguity a step further to suggest that at the heart of this series of paintings is abandonment—pleasurable abandonment—and more specifically, the double valence of violence and pleasure inherent in abandonment or withdrawal.

Take _Resonance_ (2024), which hangs in the gallery’s
main exhibition space: two figures appear in the lower
register of the life-size oil-on-canvas painting, bathed in
an atmospheric haze of softly brushed blue, green, and
yellow hues. Indigo vegetations arch across the top half
of the composition, drawing attention to the light-figure
seated, seemingly with their back toward us, adjacent
to the shadow-figure, whose upper body contracts slightly, as if in a sit-up. Caught in proximity, their entanglement dissolves the boundary of their corporeal bodies, as light and shadow leak into their shared porosities,
becoming part of the oneiric landscape in the midst of
rising through an upward movement propelled by the
luminous figure.

Their directional impulse is echoed in _Protection I_
(2024), positioned next to _Resonance_. At the centre of a
desolate field characterized by its flatness, a solid figure,
modelled by shades of deep blue and black, embraces
an ascending light-figure, whose upper body disappears
beyond the pictorial field. The looseness of the brushwork, along with the deliberate protrusion outside of the
fictional nightmarish ground, situates the light-figure
between the realm of capture and rapture. The gleam,
spilling out from the light-figure, unmakes the con-tour of the two bodies bounded in a tight embrace. Here, touch becomes an anxious longing, anticipating la petite mort—the small death, a common euphemism for orgasm taken from French—a moment of pleasurable self-abandonment and the dissolution of the other. This is oneness in an instantaneous state that is without past and future, but radically now.

Oneness rests between the interval of appearance
and disappearance. This is to say, you and I, through
our mutual decreation, albeit temporarily, become one
unto the world, where pleasure is no longer a matter
of boundary but a question of contradiction that is always already there: an opening between us; it is an invitation to “undo the creature in us,” to borrow Simone Weil’s words from her essay “Decreation” in _Gravity
and Grace_ (1947).

_Impulsion_ (2024), displayed on the adjacent wall,
seems to project this sense of oneness as a desiring or
daring act through the motion of withdrawal. A figure
hangs upside down from the centre of a circular field
composed of thinly woven autumn leaves. With their
lower body cast in shadow, bronze-like, and upper body
cast in light, halo-like, the levitating figure’s feet grip
the edge of the canvas in a close cropping that instils a
sense of presence, while they dissipate into what moonlight must be like up close—ethereal warmth. Almost in parallel to the Camus novel referenced by Xie, the figure, much like protagonist Patrice Mersault, may arrive at the climax of happiness at the draw of their last breath—at the limit of self-abandonment, here rendered as a lustrous protrusion, suspended wrong side up, reaching toward the viewer in a paradoxical state.

Should we read such a directional movement as becoming or dissolving? Are the dichotomous figures perhaps a single entity, projecting a self-reflective gaze à la magical realism? Or does their caress invite the abandonment of corporeal boundaries, forging a sense of
closeness that erodes the fixedness of self/other at the
intersection of two bodies or the decreation of oneself?
Desire, in the latter context, manifests through partaking in the figures’ common levitation—or withdrawal—
where the pleasure of losing oneself is synonymous with
abandonment. Such a logic of subtraction extends to the
figural blurring, where the pockets of interest, ablaze
with radiance, are built through a process of removal—
brushing, scratching, touching—revealing the ground ofpainting: gesso on canvas laid bare in its desire to be seen.

Visible scratches of brush-strokes rise to the surface
in the wake of a chimera interrupted, where patches of
thinly layered whiteness suggest disappearance—and its
latent violence—as something desiring, erotic, and pleasurable. The interplay between a nightmare and a darkroom, both reliant on the property of abandonment or concealment, derives its efficacy from this precise in-betweenness of corporeally being there and nowhere. Like the two figures receding into the abyss of flame-like yellows and browns in _Allusion_ (2024), with their arms entwined, shoulders bound, walking into a nocturnal, poetic placelessness in search of amorous danger, we too are poised on the edge of (a) happy death.

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 “Mort heureuse” ran from 11 January to 15 March 2025 at Semiose, Paris. 

“Mort heureuse” — Xie Lei

Feature

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

From my balcony in North York, I have a clear view of a small daycare sandwiched between my 18-floor building and two massive 50-foot towers. The children’s bellowing laughter fills this perfectly engineered sound tunnel. This summer, I woke up to an ensemble of children humming with excitement and went out to see what was causing them to shrill. I saw two uncomfortable-looking armed police officers and their car in the daycare’s lot. The children were lined up waiting for their turn to sit in the back of the police car.

When I Googled the activity, I found language reminiscent of art-school syllabi or grant proposals: “Police Lesson: Using _play-based learning_, kindergarten students will receive an _overall understanding of community helpers_ with a focus on police officers in _their communities_. Students will visit our miniature police station and see a real police car” (emphasis added). [^1] It was a reminder of how we’ve been groomed to accept and find comfort in armed officers, their guns, and the insides of their vehicles. I also consider how this “fun” experience of sitting in a police car creates positive associations that may distract future critical thinking about police institutions.

From a bird’s eye view, police-centred “play-based learning” allowed these children to interact with typically restricted objects. Children ran toward the vehicles, jumped into their seats, and embraced officers freely. Meanwhile, these same actions by adults could result in severe consequences or even death, and children in heavily policed communities are often taught very different “games”—like how to behave during police encounters to stay safe. These stark contrasts in early learning experiences shape divergent relationships with authority.

The number of police I’ve encountered in Toronto this year has been significant: at pro-Palestine protests, at my schools, and even at cultural events like the Toronto Palestine Film Festival. Most notable was the Hate Crime Unit’s installation of a police command centre at the intersection of Bathurst and Sheppard, which operated continuously with flashing lights for months. The stated purpose was to increase police presence, and to ensure residents feel a sense of safety and security. [^2] The command centre did little more than catch dust, burn a significant amount of the city’s money, occupy valuable parking space, and create a traffic hazard at an already busy intersection.

The Hate Crime Unit intensified its surveillance of pro-Palestinian activists and protesters throughout late 2023 and 2024, leading to increased arrests and confrontations. There were also many incidents where officers conducted home searches and seized possessions in the middle of the night. [^3] Many white protesters and anti-Zionist Jews quickly unlearned their early childhood lessons about authorities. The same unit went after them, reinforcing that the cops serve political interests instead of protecting citizens.

Palestinian artist Firas Shehadeh’s _Like An Event In A Dream Dreamt By Another - Rehearsal_ (2023) begins with a split screen: on the right side, 3D animated Israeli police officers frantically enter their vehicles in pursuit; on the left side, a character with tanned skin and a white T-shirt walks through residential alleys. Shehadeh uses footage from player modifications (“mods”) of the video game _Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V)_ and its online multiplayer counterpart _Grand Theft Auto Online_ (both released 2013) to construct an essay-based video work about Palestinians under colonial rule. The _GTA_ game series is well-known for its police chases and simulation of urban criminal activity. The opening scene’s stark contrast between the agitated police and the solitary figure evokes familiar power dynamics between Palestinians and Israelis and how they embody cop and robber archetypes: in protests, academic discourse, media coverage, and now, video games.

_GTA V_’s focus on pursuit and confrontation echoes documented patterns of policing shared by Palestine and Los Angeles, the city that inspired _GTA V_’s imagined “Los Santos.” These patterns are expanded and intensified (or manipulated and explored) by player mods that transform the game’s appearance, gameplay, and sound (for example, the “Realistic Gun Sounds” mod). _GTA V_ and its modded online servers thus deliver their own police lessons through play-based learning, revealing how digital spaces can mirror and critique real-world surveillance and control.

_GTA V_’s development involved more than 1,000 people and an estimated a budget of US$265 million. [^4] The team prioritized developing open-world mechanics where players can freely roam without linear game objectives, wreaking havoc on animated city folk and driving various vehicles around Los Santos maps. They focused on creating immersive traffic patterns, flora and fauna, and environmental textures meticulously modelled after Southern California. For the modding community, the game was well-suited for creative role-playing and world-building. Players developed custom online servers featuring unique rules, cities, and roles, where they share memorable experiences and create strong friendships while co-writing their day-to-day missions.

Shehadeh’s _Like An Event In A Dream_ incorporates footage from the online Palestine server “Magic City (Palestine),” where players have recreated Palestine under Israeli rule, including buildings adorned with huge Israeli flags and refugee camps with martyr posters. There is even a city centre with a huge Palestinian flag flying above a recreated Al-Aqsa Mosque. In this virtual space, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and police officers, equipped with tanks and rifles, replace standard law enforcement. Meanwhile, the Palestinian characters wear Louis Vuitton scarves resembling keffiyehs, traverse the landscape by helicopter, and use Molotov cocktails against tanks. All these characters—the IDF, Israeli police, and keffiyeh-clad Palestinians alike—are controlled by Palestinian players in the West Bank and the diaspora. 

The main character in Shehadeh’s work, the man with the white T-shirt, navigates the multifaceted landscapes typical of _GTA V_ while staying hidden under bridges, behind buildings, and on rooftops. These areas, known to players as police-free zones or escape routes, are rendered in remarkable detail and further transformed by the online mods. Shehadeh’s choice to keep the character in marginal spaces allows viewers to focus on the video’s narrated essay without the threat of a dramatic encounter with a cop. In one scene where the main character walks through parking lots and empty streets, the narrator digs deep:

> The US and European colonial domination over the Arab world can be seen through the colonial condition in Palestine, an intensified version of the United States with colonial violence, capitalism, racism, and other forms of discrimination, all justified with the idea of “liberty and guns” a core concept to the foundation of Israel and its Iron Wall.

The _GTA V_ Palestine server provides Palestinians a space for unrestricted movement and resistance without real-life mortal danger. Videos from the server highlight limitless potential: players can joyride, evade Israeli police, fly jets over Palestine, scale towers, and dance in public spaces. Virtual bodies know no boundaries, and everything—from cars to avatar bodies—can be regenerated after damage or death. In Shehadeh’s work, a heavily modded car with the words “Mashallah” and “High Boost” races through an urban landscape that resembles Ramallah and Nablus. Another Palestinian character performs daring motorcycle stunts on a highway, popping wheelies and executing acrobatic moves. The player excitedly shares this moment with online friends, declaring in Arabic, “These moves are for your eyes”—a sentimental expression of joy that contrasts sharply with the past year’s flood of Palestinian voices in distress. At this point, the split screen shows the protagonist approaching a check-point, with a watchtower looming above him on the horizon. Rather than attempt to cross the check-point, the character simply walks back to where they came from. Shehadeh’s video reinforces the fact that we can scarcely see a representation of a Palestinian, even a joyful Palestinian, without being reminded of their colonially victimized identities; their bodies are surveilled, pursued, and killed.

The narrator of _Like An Event In A Dream_ states that when Palestinians play _GTA V_, “The players aren’t going to Los Santos to die. They are going to find out if they were ever alive.” But the game offers more than an existential exploration—it helps players imagine alternatives. Play allows them to live a double life, between the real self and the made-up self, the truth and the wish. Playing on the server allows Palestinians to constantly make up their world in multiple “rehearsals” and try different actions to avoid a fixed destiny.

The modded server gamifies the colonial context of Palestine. Shehadeh’s video features fictional members of the Lions’ Den, a real-world group of armed resistance fighters who target violent Israeli settlers and IDF soldiers, virtually protesting Israeli forces in Nablus. This online role-play transforms young Palestinian players’ grim reality living under occupation in the West Bank into digital resistance without the lethal consequences that often come from protesting. Online demonstrations and re-enactments of real-life events speak to how games and storytelling create meaning and explore the potential for social or political solutions. Players use the hashtag #GTAPalestine to share their re-enactments online for others to enjoy and witness as they pray for Palestine’s liberation.

One of the most intriguing aspects of this meaning-making is how Palestinian players role-play Israeli officers. These players follow protocol, break up protests, make arrests, and initiate military operations against Palestinians. They also stop at red lights and
wait for pedestrians to cross the road. By embodying the IDF and Israeli officers, they maintain order and ultimately bring adversarial “play” into this fictional world. The players even use the little Hebrew they know to amplify the realism. These players are negotiating their freedoms, trying to understand their own identities in relation to the systems that govern their lives. Shehadeh’s work proposes that the players apply their own hyperreality to rehearse their life under colonial rule. If the players were actually Israeli, it would breach the Palestinian players’ reality, and they wouldn’t feel that the game was voluntary or leisurely anymore. Game philosopher René Reinhold Schallegger describes this eloquently: “When play invades primary reality, it ceases to be play and becomes something else: political, ideological, didactic, or commercial manipulation, designed to shape, restrict, or take away freedom of choice in primary reality.” [^5] Through role-play, Palestinians can develop a collective understanding of their social and cultural circumstances that could teach them essential skills for survival and the power of collective action.

I confess to watching Twitch livestreams of video-game players, particularly those attempting “kaizo” challenges, named for the Japanese word for modification. Kaizo games have been hijacked by rogue modders to make a game’s official version unfairly difficult but exhilaratingly challenging. Success requires persistence, skill, and deep knowledge of game mechanics, traits a lot of video-game nerds pride themselves on. On April 28, 2023, Twitch streamer “iateyourpie” finally completed his nearly impossible “Kaizo IronMON” _Pokémon_ challenge after 7,788 attempts, including months and months of labour. [^6] I was thrilled to witness this seemingly impossible feat. I long for a similar resolution for Gaza, waiting for the moment the Israeli occupation dissipates. I remain patient, watching and hoping daily for an end to this cruel, rigged game of life.

Sometimes I dream of a _Stardew Valley_ version of Palestine, where everyone’s a bit damaged but still comes together to make a big cauldron of soup and celebrate life. The farm simulation game, which presents an inclusive world where players can marry any character
regardless of gender, also critiques corporate capitalism (Joja Corporation’s products are literally classified as “trash”). Notably absent are police, allowing the community to thrive and rely on each other. Other games, with their open-world formats, have seen direct digital protests take over their servers. On _Animal Crossing_, players hosted digital iterations of the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests, which were suppressed in real life through police force and strict COVID-19 pandemic measures. Banned from occupying the streets, protesters imported flags and images into the video game, creating banners declaring “Free Hong Kong – Revolution Now.” This digital activism led mainland China to ban sales of _Animal Crossing_ in stores and online. [^7] Similar protests emerged in _GTA online_, culminating in an epic virtual battle between players in Hong Kong and mainland China, fought through their avatars with water-cannon trucks and Molotov cocktails—with mainland China’s numerical advantage ultimately prevailing. [^8]

Different resistance movements lead to different strategies within virtual world-building games. In _The Sims_, modding communities create pride flags, trans-inclusive character options, and fashion choices. Young people have used _Roblox_ and _Minecraft_ for political discussions, protests, and memorials, in addition to using their chat functions to organize in-person protests. [^9] Throughout 2023, thousands of players (the majority being12–16 years old) on custom _Roblox_ servers waved Palestinian flags to protest Israel’s bombing of Gaza. [^10] Syrian players have recreated destroyed cultural heritage sites using _Minecraft_’s sophisticated world-building mechanics as a digital-preservation tool. [^11] In 2020, the basketball simulation game _NBA 2K_ paused its online servers for two hours and gave players “Black Lives Matter” and “I Can’t Breathe” T-shirts to honour George Floyd. [^12]

Can games be effective at imagining a better future? The answer depends on how well players can project their vision of a future within the limits of video-game spaces, and use these spaces to build real-world solidarity. Citing game designer and academic Gonzalo Frasca, Schallegger writes, “RPGs are not per se revolutionary tools, but they can affect [sic] evolutionary change in a society.” [^13] Role-play may not change things directly, but it can help us imagine change.

Games become spaces for reimagining power relationships because there is an active desire to do so. In games like _GTA V_, players can rewrite those early scripts about police authority—turning what was once seen as friendly and approachable to some into dynamics that are questioned, challenged, and overturned. As Shehadeh’s _Like An Event In A Dream_ reveals, Palestinians are using _GTA V_ to create their own form of play-based learning—one that teaches resistance, survival, and freedom of movement instead of compliance.

A good role-playing game sets the player free of their everyday to escape into another reality where autonomous meaning-making is central. Israel has devastated schools, healthcare facilities, infrastructure, and public services. In virtual space, games with modding capabilities could provide collaborative sites to envision the rehabilitation and renewal of Gaza. Can gamifying this challenge give us the creativity and energy we long for? Maybe. Through role-play, we can endlessly test different futures for Gaza together. It won’t liberate Palestine on its own, but it could help us further develop the awareness and critical thinking we need to move forward.

[^1]: “Teachers,” YorkRegional Police, https://www.yrp.ca/en/community/Teachers.asp

[^2]: “Toronto police step up patrols after communities voice fear stemming from Israel-Hamas war,” _CBC News_, October 12, 2023, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toronto-police-israel-hamas-concerns-1.6993684

[^3]: Martin Lukacs, “Inside the ‘shocking’ police operation targeting pro-Palestine activists in Toronto,” _The Breach_, June 17, 2024, https://breachmedia.ca/inside-the-shocking-police-operations-targeting-pro-palestine-activists-in-toronto

[^4]: Luke Villapaz, “‘GTA 5’ Costs $265 Million to Develop And Market, Ma-king It The Most Expensive Video Game Ever Produced: Report,” _International Business Times_, September 8, 2013, https://www.ibtimes.com/gta-5-costs-265-million-develop-market-making-it-most-expensive-video-game-ever-produced-report; Michael French, “InsideRockstar North – Part 2: The Studio,” _MCV/DEVELOP_, October 4, 2013, https://mcvuk.com/development-news/inside-rockstar-north-part-2-the-studio

[^5]: René Reinhold Schallegger, _The Postmodern Joy of Role-Playing Games: Agency, Ritual and Meaning in the Medium_ (Jefferson: McFarland, 2018), 54. 

[^6]: Iateyourpie, “It Took Me 2 Years to Beat This Pokémon Challenge,” YouTube, April 28, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01jR7IpZlG4

[^7]: “Hong Kong and mainland China gamers clash on GTA V,” _BBC News_, December 23, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50894769

[^8]: Ibid.

[^9]: Laura Molloy, “The kids are alright: why young people are protesting in virtual worlds,” _Dazed_, November 21, 2023, https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/61323/1/here-s-why-young-people-are-protesting-in-virtual-worlds-roblox-palestine

[^10]: Hayden Field, “Kids are attending pro-Palestinian protests on Roblox,” _CNBC_, October 26, 2023, https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/26/kids-are-attending-pro-palestinian-protests-on-roblox.html

[^11]: Alan Boyle, “Microsoft teams up with UNESCO and kids to revive lost monuments with Minecraft,” _GeekWire_, May 3, 2019, https://www.geekwire.com/2019/microsoft-joins-forces-unesco-kids-revive-lost-monuments-minecraft

[^12]: “NBA 2K players honoured George Floyd with a two-hour protest,” _BarDown_, June 6, 2020, https://www.bardown.com/nba-2k-players-honoured-george-floyd-with-a-two-hour-protest-1.1483691

[^13]: Schallegger, _The Postmodern Joy of Role-Playing Games_, 223.

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Politics

Colonialism

New Media

Amanda Boulos discusses how virtual game worlds can be spaces for testing different futures, which cannot happen in real life without mortal consequence. She explores how players express autonomy under occupation in Firas Shehadeh’s video work _Like an Event in A Dream Dreamt by Another – Rehearsal_ (2023), which uses footage from _Grand Theft Auto Online_’s modded Palestinian server.


When Play Confronts Power

Anna Shah Hoque is an independent curator, doctoral fellow, educator, and writer. Her research examines the interplay between embodied and living archives, praxis, and visual art, centring on the work of Indigenous and South Asian artists and curators in Canada. She produced To Be Continued: Troubling the Archive, an arts podcast. Her writing has appeared in Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, C Magazine, Canadian Journal of Communication, esse, and the Journal of Palestine Studies, with a forthcoming
publication from Amherst College Press.

Curated by Ariane De Blois and Muhammad Nour ElKhairy, “P is for Palestine” emphasizes the importance of Palestinian archives, which have been a persistent target for destruction by Israel. These archives— spanning the embodied and the felt—have been produced across the intimate spheres of homes as well as academic and cultural spaces. Rehab Nazzal’s short film _Vibrations from Gaza_ (2023) offers a glimpse into the experiences of deaf children in Gaza who attend
the Atfaluna Society for Deaf Children. In December 2023, the society’s building was bombed and destroyed, and the fates of the children whom we see onscreen and with whom we fall in love are now unknown. Through the short film, we witness the children recount their memories of growing up amid Israeli bombardments. Nazzal captures the pervasive
soundscape of military drones—a persistent and unbearable sonic presence overshadowing Palestinian lives in Gaza. The film shows children playing on the shores of the sea, in the waters, and in the schoolyard. These images gain new significance in light of Gaza’s Government Media Office October 2024 statement citing the extermination of 902 Palestinian families by the Israel Occupation Forces (IOF) since October 7, 2023, supported by the United States and its allies (including Canada).

Intimate and experiential archives are also evoked
by artists Amal Al Nakhala and Bayan Abu Nahla, who
managed to flee Gaza in the early days of this ongoing
violence. In _Family portraits and scenes of everyday life_
(2022–2023), a series of inkjet reproductions on paper,
Abu Nahla’s drawn self is surrounded by loved ones, inviting a look into life under occupation. Al Nakhala’s _What the actual fuck? War diaries_ (2023–2024) chronicles her experiences of multiple forced displacements
within Gaza as she and her loved ones evade Israeli
bombings. On display are 24 reproductions of entries
from her original 50-page journal. Her diary entries
range from intimate observations of new white hairs
sprouting on her head, a stark testament to the relentless strain of living under perpetual military violence, to sketches of her cat, Zaatar. In one entry dated November 15, 2023 (Day 39), Al Nakhala recounts Zaatar’s desperate attempts to escape the terror of bombings, including his near-success at chewing through the cardboard box meant to shield him. Woven seamlessly into her accounts, Zaatar is a cherished family member, a companion whose survival is as precious as her own.

_Something from there_ (2020), a video work by Rana
Nazzal Hamadeh, features stories from her parents
on how soil bridges memories from Palestine with her
father’s life in exile in Canada. The video work is accompanied by a wall installation, _1/1000th of a Dunam_ (2021–ongoing), comprising five bags of soil. Each bag is marked with the name of the village from which
the artist sourced the soil. _1/1000th of a Dunam_ invokes a kind of cauterization that must occur when one removes soil from one’s land. At the same time, soil also offers a tangible opportunity for reconnection to home. Soil is an alchemical bridge linking Palestine to Kanien'kehá:ka lands. In this context, Nazzal Hamadeh’s work asserts Palestinian belonging by
grounding the viewer in land that marks Palestine as
ever-present. Nazzal Hamadeh’s work is placed within the sight-line of the works of her mother, Rehab Nazzal. The interplay between their practices transforms the exhibition into an intergenerational conversation,
where familial bonds manifest as a shared artistic commitment to documenting and resisting displacement.

Nada El-Omari’s video _from where to where_ (2021)
documents conversations between herself and her parents
in Arabic, English, and French. The softly lit, grainy film offers a nostalgic tone, as if to reinforce the persistence of heritage across generations. During the vernissage, El-Omari expressed how surreal it felt to be able to present her work alongside that of an artistic elder and idol,
Mona Hatoum, whose 1988 video _Measures of Distance_
influenced El-Omari’s own cross-generational and multilingual film. The juxtaposition of these two works gestures toward another form of continuity—one where an artistic call and response is skilfully evoked by the curators.

Muhammad Nour ElKhairy’s monochrome video
_I would like to visit_ (2017) takes the viewer through
his attempts to obtain a visa to enter the apartheid state of
Israel. We watch each word of his visa application being typed on the screen, deleted, reframed, and reworded, all to appease legal and political entities. ElKhairy is a Palestinian who grew up in Jordan, where his family
were displaced as refugees after the Nakba. The film’s
monochrome palette accentuates the bureaucratic monotony of ElKhairy’s visa application process and the dehumanizing reduction of his identity to mere text on screen—a poignant commentary on the discursive violence enacted on a person within regimes of apartheid and displacement.

In the accompanying exhibition leaflet, curators
De Blois and ElKhairy refer to the exhibition as an agora for a persistent promise of continuous belonging to a homeland that, for many, remains physically inaccessible due to Israeli settler-colonial occupation. As
I moved through the exhibit, one thought lingered: P is for perseverance. In this exhibition, Palestinians reveal their enduring love and honour for their ancestral lands, communities, histories, and stories, underscoring the commitment and longevity of the Palestinian calls for liberation.

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“P is for Palestine” included works from Bayan Abu Nahla, Amal Al Nakhala, Yara El-Ghadban, Muhammad Nour ElKhairy, Nada El-Omari, Mona Hatoum, Rehab Nazzal, and  Rana Nazzal Hamadeh.  The exhibition ran from 21 September to 14 December 2024 at Plein sud art actuel, Quebec City. Guest curated by Ariane De Blois and Muhammad Nour ElKhairy.

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“P is for Palestine” — Bayan Abu Nahla, Amal Al Nakhala, Yara El-Ghadban, Muhammad Nour ElKhairy, Nada El-Omari, Mona Hatoum, Rehab Nazzal, Rana Nazzal Hamadeh

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Column

_This poem extends from Wanda Nanibush’s billboard project at AKA artist-run centre (November 8, 2024, to February 28, 2025), which was translated into Arabic by Mohammed Abu Laban._ We Return _will next take place from June 1, 2025, to May 30, 2026, at Hamilton Artists Inc. The current text appears meaningfully in Plantagenet Cherokee font._

_To respect the layout, we’ve chosen to upload it in images. You can also [view or download the pdf.](https://strapi-uploads-c-mag-prod.s3.ca-central-1.amazonaws.com/C160_Nanibush_a8bec9bfa7.pdf)_

Images by the artist: 
1. Palestinian _ tatreez_ pattern woven with Anishinaabe saddle bag pattern (above) 
2. Photograph of cacti from the Nakba village of Lifta, marked with the word Palestine (article thumbnail)

C160_Nanibush.pdf

In an extension of her billboard project at AKA artist-run centre (2024–2025), Wanda Nanibush relates Palestinian and Anishinaabe experiences of love, land, and children of the future.


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Composition: We Return

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

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


The Afterlife of Writing

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

One Thing: In Search of an Incorruptible Life

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

The House Edge

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

For Those Who Visit Us in Our Dreams

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

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

To Enshrine an Ululation

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

The _KISSSSS_ of Yong Soon Min

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

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

In the Lacuna

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

A Vampire Walks Into a Funhouse

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

One Thing: Kamala Ibrahim Ishag’s Zar Paintings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bhenji Ra Dances at the End of the Rainbow

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

Floor Drawing Series by Aubin Soonhwan K: Text

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

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

Our Third Sun

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

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

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

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

Hard Limits, Soft Landing

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

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

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

One Thing: Tracing Fragments of Queer Desire


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


Sinister Pleasure: Interview with Ja'Tovia Gary

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

A Good Animal on Wet Sheets: Disobedient Gasps in Subspace

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

Composition: give up your own

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

What is the Safe Word?

C the Visual Arts Foundation, with the support of its board of directors and staff, re-articulates the [public commitment we made to the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) in 2021](https://www.instagram.com/p/CPeJinntzMy/). In line with PACBI guidelines, we will (as paraphrased by Writers Against the War On Gaza): 

1)	Boycott all cultural products and events that are funded, commissioned, or sponsored by 
an official Israeli body. 
2)	Boycott complicit Israeli institutions. 
3)	Boycott normalization projects. 

We do this because, as Shiv Kotecha and Rainer Diana Hamilton write in [“PACBI Now,”](https://thenewinquiry.com/pacbi-now/) “boycotts shorten the perceived distances between moral actors.” The Canadian state is deeply complicit in providing military and political support to Israel. In the period since October 2023, we have seen Palestinian solidarity across Turtle Island—including in our cultural sectors—increasingly censored and criminalized. Meanwhile, as Rana Nazzal Hamadeh and Alia Hijaab write in [“Art as a Mirror: How Canadian Institutions Are Complicit in Silencing Palestinian Voices,”](https://cmagazine.com/articles/art-as-a-mirror-how-canadian-institutions-are-complicit-in-silencing-palestinian-voices) nearly “200 historical and cultural landmarks have been damaged or destroyed, and two of the four museums in Gaza have been levelled entirely.” We witness this colonial violence and identify its analogues within so-called Canada, from Wet'suwet'en land defenders who are fighting off the Coastal GasLink pipeline, to Six Nations of the Grand River’s ongoing defense of their unceded land across the Haldimand Tract, to Grassy Narrows First Nation’s fight against the government-sanctioned mercury poisoning of their homes, to the implementation of Bill C-5, which prioritizes extractive industries. The settler colonial project across the Americas is deeply imbricated with global imperialism: the maintenance of both structures relies on ongoing violence here on Turtle Island and abroad. As a cultural institution situated in so-called Canada, by participating in PACBI, we hope to, alongside our peers, be a part of a cultural formation that refuses complicity not only with routinized violence against the Palestinian people but also all Indigenous life.

PACBI targets institutions, not individuals, complicity, not identity, and is endorsed by the absolute majority of Palestinian cultural and mass movement organizations. According to PACBI guidelines, the boycott [“subscribes to the internationally-accepted definition of freedom of expression as stipulated in the United Nations’ International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).”](https://bdsmovement.net/pacbi/cultural-boycott-guidelines)
 
With this reaffirmation, we align our organizational and existing publishing values. We are honoured to be part of the groundswell of peer cultural organizations in Canada who recognize that PACBI is the floor, not the ceiling. This provides a starting point for our cultural sectors to be part of a horizon of change oriented towards a free Palestine. 
 
The full guidelines for PACBI can be found [here.](https://bdsmovement.net/pacbi/cultural-boycott-guidelines)
 
In solidarity,
 
C The Visual Arts Foundation

Comments and questions may be directed to [board@cmagazine.com](mailto:board@cmagazine.com)

Support for the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel 

Announcement

C the Visual Arts Foundation, with the support of its board of directors and staff, re-articulates the public commitment we made to the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) in 2021.

C The Visual Arts Foundation Recommits to PACBI

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

We’re excited to launch the 4th 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 text about an artist, project, exhibition, performance, event, initiative, theme, or other art-adjacent subject. Suggested length for submissions is between 1,000-2,000 words.

The winner will receive $1,500 CAD; editorial support to prepare their article for publication in a future issue of _C Magazine_ and to be shared across ICCA’s platforms; and a two-year _C_ subscription. Two runners-up will receive $1,000 CAD; an open invitation to develop a pitch for a different text to be published in _C Magazine_; and a two-year subscription. All participants can request feedback on their submitted work, 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 primarily be in English, but may include non-English words or phrases. For submissions entirely in another language, we kindly ask for translations. The award will be adjudicated by ICCA staff, _C Magazine_ editors, and an external juror. 

There is one submission per applicant. Please note that submissions must not be previously published or slated for future publication elsewhere. Complete the [submission form](https://forms.gle/wBGeNxC3R4vxRAke9) by **November 24, 2025.**

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 the kind of writing _C Magazine_ publishes can be found on our [Submissions page.](https://cmagazine.com/about/submissions)


Partners

Call for the 4th Annual Indigenous Art Writing Award

Call

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. The award is presented by _C Magazine_ and the [Indigenous Curatorial Collective / Collectif des commissaires autochtones ](link)(ICCA).

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. Please note for the purposes of this award, submissions must not be previously published or slated for future publication elsewhere.

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 participants 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

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.

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Composition: We Return

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