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

Editor

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

Associate Editor

Designer

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

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

With feature contributors: m. nourbeSe philip; Roxanne Fernandes and Chiedza Pasipanodya; Magally Zelaya; Tak Pham and Alvin Luong; Rana Abughannam, Emelie Desrochers-Turgeon, Karen Lutsky, Ozayr Saloojee, and Zoe Todd; Yasmine Whaley-Kalaora and Chipo Chipaziwa; Laura Grier, Michele Pearson Clarke, Vicky Moufawad-Paul, Scott Miller Berry, and Christina Oyawale; Bushra Junaid and Kai Trotz-Motayne; kimi malka hanauer; Temple Marucci-Campbell

Reviews by: Micaela Dixon, Rosemary Flutur, Isha Musampa, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Irem Karaaslan, Zoe Imani Sharpe, Rebecca Salazar

Tidal

Review

Krista Bailie is an artist, art historian, and writer based in Vancouver, Canada. 

What story does a gesture tell after its narrative has been forgotten? At CICA Vancouver, Jennifer Carvalho’s “An Archive of Gestures” explores fragments of history in the form of isolated hand gestures, weeping faces, and Renaissance architectural elements that frame emptied monuments. Describing herself as “an archeologist of art history,” Carvalho excavates gestures, garments, and spatial arrangements from medieval and Renaissance sources—van Eyck, Bronzino, Giotto, d’Antonio—recombining them into new compositional relationships. With its meticulous attention to jewelled adornments, cascading drapery, and architectural framings, it evokes the Northern Renaissance painting tradition she mines so productively.  

Throughout the exhibition, Carvalho engages Mark Fisher’s concept of hauntology (via Derrida), wherein, “when the present has given up on the future, we must listen for the relics of the future in the unactivated potentials of the past.” In _Crying woman (Gerard David)_ (2025), a single face extracted from the studio of Gerard David’s _Pietà_ (c. 1520) loses its devotional identity. Removed from the strict conventions that once governed who could display grief in 15th-century Flemish painting, this isolated figure now witnesses our present anxieties about futures that remain perpetually out of reach. In this way, the weeping women throughout the exhibition function as Fisher’s ghosts made visible. 

The exhibition’s centrepiece, _An archive of gestures (garden enclosure)_ (2025), combines the _Unicorn Tapestries_ (1495–1505) with van Eyck’s _Ghent Altarpiece_ (1432) to create a garden where more than 85 plant species bloom simultaneously—a botanical impossibility that Carvalho reads as reflecting humanity’s commitment to resilience and hope. This idealized space, where nothing dies or goes dormant, exemplifies her strategy throughout of isolating historical elements from their original narratives to activate different meanings. In _An archive of gestures (Bronzino II)_ (2025) a sculptural hand from Bronzino’s _Madonna Stroganoff_ (c.1540) floats over Giotto’s symbolic wilderness, creating, as Carvalho describes in an accompanying wall text, “dislocation as a way to understand the fluid nature of meaning.” 

While this fluidity raises questions about the stakes of such recombination, rather than stripping the works of their political relevance or engaging in nostalgic appropriation, the artist’s strategy instead creates a punctuated line of history. This is where Carvalho’s feminist critique becomes clear. Drawing on Silvia Federici, she grounds the work inside a long history of how women’s bodies have functioned as vehicles for demonstrating devotion and suffering. The fragments she excavates—hands, tears, impossible gardens—do activate something beyond their original contexts by becoming spaces where present anxieties about lost futures can be acknowledged and perhaps mourned. In this sense, “An Archive of Gestures” succeeds as both elegy and proposition, suggesting that looking backwards with critical attentiveness might offer a way to imagine otherwise. 

Writer

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“An Archive of Gestures” ran from 27 June to 10 August 2025  at CICA Vancouver.

“An Archive of Gestures” — Jennifer Carvalho

Editorial

“Hotels are Squatting on my Metaphors,” writes Kamau Brathwaite in _The Namsetoura Papers_ (2004). He was referring to the explosion of tourism industries across the Caribbean, and in particular, their impact on Barbados, where he was fighting a government that wanted to build a road to the airport over his home in Cow Pastor. It’s a line that sticks out: squatting implies property relations, where privatized land must be protected from theft. Brathwaite’s turn of phrase reverses the logic of property so that it is capital itself that squats and forecloses on imagination, on metaphor: the very stuff of language itself.

m. nourbeSe philip paraphrases Brathwaite’s maxim in her correspondence with him over the years regarding the fate of Cow Pastor, which we are so honoured to excerpt in this issue. It’s a fitting start to think through some of the preoccupations in these pages that include how we might think of capacious organizations of space, beyond borders, private property, and nations. This issue’s theme of “Tidal” is inspired by Brathwaite’s notion of tidalectics, which sees the ocean and land as inseparable, as “shifting points of contact, arrival, departure, and transformation” against easy binaries that justify colonial expansion or divide nature and culture. [^1] This is especially relevant in the recent context of Hurricane Melissa, in the literal bleed between water and land, where the Caribbean archipelago is disproportionately affected by climate change (even though they've contributed the least to ecological and capital crises).

In their collaborative feature, Rana Abughannam, Émélie Desrochers-Turgeon, Karen Lutsky, Ozayr Saloojee, and Zoe Todd are indebted to tidalectics in their work as an arts collective. They consider how imperial expansion in the authors’ various homelands—from South Africa to Gaza to Turtle Island—are contemporary manifestations of the logics of the Roman empire, which “looms large in the contemporary colonial psyche.” But, like the Tiber River flooding Rome, they also remind us of the “possibilities for solidarity, liberation, and return that come from breaking the dam.”

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

In his interview with Alvin Luong, Tak Pham discusses Luong’s video work _Corals of Bidong_ (2023–2025). Their conversation reflects on the history of Bidong Island, previously a refugee camp for displaced Vietnamese peoples from 1978–1991, and now a site where corals are cultivated. That the US received both corals and refugees from Bidong spurred Luong to arrive at analogy as a method that “enables the past to serve as a framework for engaging with our contemporary condition.”

Historical continuity is also central to Bushra Junaid’s Artist Project _Portraits in Time_ (2025). Here, Junaid presents a series of collages and photographs that connect her familial history in Newfoundland to histories of maritime colonial economies and plantation labour in the Caribbean, in ways that, as Kai Trotz-Motayne observes in her accompanying essay, highlight “the histories of enslavement and forced labour that shaped the Atlantic world.”

In Magally Zelaya’s winning text for the 2024 Indigenous Art Writing Award, she traces how amatl, the ancient Mesoamerican paper made from the wild fig tree’s bark, is used in Michelle Peraza’s ongoing work. Surviving its banning and burnings by Spanish colonizers in Mexico and Central America, amatl’s sacred significance was sustained by Otomi artists through the last 500 years. As Zelaya writes, “The artist heals the paper. The paper heals the viewer [...] The paper heals.” Meanwhile, Roxanne Fernandes and Chiedza Pasipanodya ask what’s possible when the light shifts—a literal and metaphoric invitation to notice subtle transformations of matter that unsettle fixed meaning in Pasipanodya’s sculptures. Through clay, steel, concrete, wood, graphite, wax, and more, Pasipanodya recalls the shapes and lineages of objects like the Zimbabwean instrument m’bira or termite mounds that represent legacy-building, labour, and the family. To Pasipanodya, materials are already imbued with cultural transmissions that arrive through time and place.

For the One Thing column, Temple Marucci-Campbell considers sugar cane through the lens of gastropoetics. Conceptualized by Parama Roy, gastropoetics takes taste and the alimentary tract as a way to question colonial appetite, which Marucci-Campbell pushes further to explore Black histories sustained through the mouth and stomach.

Toward a more fluid idea of archival legacies, Yasmine Whaley-Kalaora and Chipo Chipaziwa speak about Chipaziwa’s “conduits of citation” that document the artist’s performance practice with/in the absence of her physical body, including through collaborators’ writing. Through Chipaziwa’s performance series _Slipping Into Slipping Away_ (2024–ongoing) and artist book _My Mother, My Home_ (2024), they explore how the self is in tension with its own representation, and what it might mean to share the responsibility of witnessing through acts of recounting, retracing, recording, and reprocessing.

Finally, in the second of three dispatches from Open Hearing, which took place in Toronto last winter, transcripts from artists and arts workers cover the urgencies and frustrations of cultural work in this moment through grief, anger, censorship, and possible strategies of organizing and feeling. As Christina Oyawale declares, “The fascists are currently winning at politics, but they will never win at culture.”

[^1]: Elizabeth DeLoughrey, “Revisiting Tidalectics: Irma/ José/Maria 2017,” in _Tidalectics: Imagining an Oceanic Worldview Through Art and Science_, ed. Stefanie Hessler (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018), 94.

Environment

Conceptual

Editors Maandeeq Mohamed and Joy Xiang reflect on the issue’s theme, _Tidal_ and its contributions.

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Editorial: TIDAL

Letter

##### Dear _C_,

On October 27, the Alberta government invoked the notwithstanding clause to force striking teachers back to work. Premier Danielle Smith recently expressed solidarity with the Quebec government’s use of the notwithstanding clause to ban public employees, including teachers, from wearing religious symbols in the workplace, and has been threatening to use the clause to prevent transgender youth from accessing healthcare,
playing on girls’ sports teams, and changing their names or pronouns without their parents’ knowledge. In writing this letter, I kept asking myself: how do we strike back when striking is forbidden? I started revisiting Fred Moten, Silvia Federici, Ariella Azoulay—names I learned in my MFA program before joyfully dropping out—hoping I could find something to turn the mood of this letter around.

My phone rang. A dear artist friend of mine wanted my advice on a performance. He asked if themes of surveillance, imperialism, and data collection were explicit enough in his idea. I said _no_. He asked if the work was queer enough. I said _yes, because you’re making it_. We talked for an hour about how to produce something radical, how to inspire people to organize, and how we grapple with the responsibility of creating political work while running the risk of being wrong. We talked about his performance some more. He wanted to read aloud during it, and I talked about memorization, failure, and semantic satiation (the repetition of a word until it becomes meaningless). All the while, I was thinking about the notwithstanding clause; if our rights and freedoms can be readily taken away when they are exercised, well then, they were meaningless all along.

Today I want to read those rights out loud, over and over again, to perform an inversion of that phenomenon. _Freedom of expression. Freedom of religion. Freedom of association. Protection against unreasonable search and seizure. Right to legal counsel and habeas corpus. Protection against cruel and unusual punishment. Protection from discrimination by the government._ I want to recite these words aloud like an incantation, in a crescendoing polyphonic chorus until they mean something. Our bodies are opaque, solid, but sound permeates
and intrudes—it reaches places where our bodies are not welcome. I invite you to perform this counter-invocation with me.

##### Sincerely,

##### Marsel Reddick

##### Dear _C_,

The Stop! issue’s exploration of dissent and opposition struck a powerful chord for myself, here in Kenya. Our Gen Z has erupted into spontaneous demonstrations against President Ruto's administration. I was deeply moved by how this generation transformed their resistance into a vibrant form of expression. Hand-crafted signs evolved into potent political statements, impromptu street art emerged under the cover of night, and
real-time streams on TikTok built a living, digital record of courage and sorrow.

Observing the Kenyan protests as they unfolded, I recall the protesters’
stillness as they faced a line of riot police, with hands raised in a gesture of peace. As an architect, I frequently reflect on how urban spaces orchestrate movement, including the flow of traffic, the movement of people, and the dynamics of commerce. I also consider how, sometimes, the most innovative design lies in disrupting that very flow. These demonstrations transformed the streets into fresh visions, where the framework of resistance redrew the city’s energy. “Stop,” in that moment, functioned as both a form of protest and an invitation: what if we stopped to envision a completely different structure?

Your publication reminded me that artistic expression and activism can share a common core: the determination to challenge repetition, to interrupt what should no longer endure.

##### With sincere regards,

##### Cynthia Mmboga Khamadi

##### Dear _C_,

I was struck by the relationship between Mark Kibet’s letter and Hung Duong’s conversation with Grace Samboh in “Between Restful and Radical.”

Whether it’s the “ability to pause” Kibet described in terms of the make-
shift shrines made with plastic flowers and broken radios, the “three copies of ourselves” that artist Grace Samboh jokingly insists are necessary for keeping up with work, or the exhibition “REST” (Ruang Elok Sarat Tempo) curated by Samboh and Julian Abraham, we are
witnessing art about a _struggling to cope_. We live in such tumultuous times, which “REST” offers a response to, in a way that reminds me of Dada artists in 1916 Zurich. The rise of nationalism witnessed
during that time continued, in many ways, into the times in which we find ourselves now. I think of how Duong writes about the need for “a halt to this rollercoaster before an existence-on-fire is completely normalized.”

Thanks _C Mag_, for providing rich food for thought.

##### Sincerely,

##### Danielle Hogan


Letters

Micaela Dixon is a writer and gallerist working for KIN in Brussels. Micaela joined the gallery from Fogo Island Arts, a contemporary arts and ideas organization based off the east coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. Her writing has appeared in _Peripheral Review_, _Public Parking_, and on other platforms.

The Bonavista Biennale returned this year for its fifth edition under the theme “String Games.” A theme is a curious thing: while it helps direct you, it can’t prepare you for dirt roads that could have defeated our KIA sedan (on Route 236), the sudden appearance of a moose, or the shifting terrain that makes up much of the biennial experience. More than once my close friend (and faithful driver) asked whether the car would make it up a slope near one of the sites. Each time, I replied, half-distracted, “Oh for sure.” But after two days of driving around the peninsula, I began to see “String Games” less like a guide to the individual exhibition sites, and more like a prompt made to reinforce the Biennale’s local-to-global ties. The week leading up the Biennale had been challenging. A series of out-of-control forest fires razed nearby parts of the province and cast an ominous mood over the opening weekend. We asked ourselves if we were adding to the problem by flying into the province to go see art. When we landed, the air smelled of fire.

Our first stop was the Generator Shack in Bonavista. I felt a deep and immediate affinity for English Harbour local Douglas Penney’s sculpture presentation, _Smokey the Polar Bear_ (c. 2010). A birdlike snowman made from Styrofoam with buttons for eyes stood in the centre of the room, surrounded by wooden and rock creatures made to look like snakes, whales, and flamingos. What I liked so much about Penney’s work was the humour with which he imbues his sculptures. They’re light on their feet and adopt a sensitivity that is in equal parts resourceful and modernist. A few minutes down the road at the Ryan Premises, Larry Weyand’s hyper-embellished lobster sculpture offered an impressively decadent counterpoint to Penney’s refined yet playful approach. Where Penney leans more economical, Weyand’s _Fabulous Little Lobster_ (2025) revels in excess.

In Trinity, I was enchanted by Clara Clayton Gough’s basket sculptures: _Basketman_ (1998) and _Basketwoman with child_ (1998). Gough hails from a lineage of African Nova Scotian basket-makers who have been selling baskets since the late-18th century. Her sculptures are strict compositions that adopt basket-making techniques to represent the human form. In _Basketman_, the result is a scarecrow-looking figure who looks more scared than scary, but the effect is endearing.

Back on the road, we set out on an hour’s drive toward Keels. Lisa Myers had taken over the Keels Community Hall with an exhibition called “Sunset in Process” (2025) devoted to a temporality that she calls “blueberry time.” When we entered, visitors were invited to plot
the time of day along a large sundial set to the seasonal changes of the blueberry plant. In the adjoining room, a series of screenprints made with the anthocyanin pigment from blueberries annotated the depth of water bodies between the Georgian Bay and the Atlantic. A stop-motion video, _Sunset in process, don’t look away_ (2025), considered how the industrial development of the St. Lawrence River disrupted the flow between fresh water and salt water. The camera traverses the water’s flora, bobbing up to the surface and then back down into the waterway. In the video, shifts in colour between browns and greens eventually give way to the saturated blues of the Atlantic—this is how we know where we are. When I left Myers’s site, a couple entering apologized for their late arrival. She replied, “You’re not late, we’re on blueberry time here.”

On the way back toward Bonavista, we stopped into King’s Cove Community Hall. Here on display was an exhibition of works by Ethan Murphy and Inuuteq Storch. Where Murphy’s visual language is the result of patient fieldwork, often travelling the length of the province
for the opportunity to learn and document ferry-access communities, Storch’s relies on inspiration from his hometown of Sisimiut, Greenland. In Storch’s photographic series _Necromancer_ (2020–2023), the artist arranges scenes from the everyday into a heavily post-produced black-and-white register. When I first saw the photographs, I found them to look like etchings. When I asked Storch how he achieved this effect, he told me, “lots of contrast and Photoshop.” Murphy, on the other hand, deals with photography in an analogue register, producing images that foreground the medium. The outcome is a careful reflection on styles of self-suﬃcient living, with an editing process that emphasizes rhythm and sequencing over digital manipulation. Across his work, we see a man tending to his garden, scenes from the province’s intra-provincial ferry network, and moments of everyday leisure. Among my favourites is a photograph of high schoolers playing baseball dressed in suit jackets and baseball caps (_Baseball_, 2022). The ball hangs mid-air as it approaches the batter. Murphy has timed his shutter speed just right.

In the marketplace of ideas, it seems that biennials don’t satiate like they used to (consider recent reviews of the Berlin and Venice biennials). The Bonavista Biennale presents a meaningful counterpoint to the blockbuster mega-exhibition. Rather than presenting a list of blue-chip practices, the selection is well-considered for the setting. Things that are already part of the local context, like knitting, basket-making, four-wheelers, fish,
blueberries, and pigments, return as source material for the presentations on display. Yet, the way these objects and themes are approached (and sometimes abstracted), allows them to transcend the everyday and acquire new interpretations. The curatorial vision of Rose Bouthillier and Dr. Heather Igloliorte smoothly blends the range of artistic presentations into an exhibition context that is inspiring for onlookers. Contemporary
art has a tendency to feel strange, but here the works remain close to their origins.

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The 2025 Bonavista Biennale: “String Games” ran from 16 August to 14 September on the Bonavista Peninsula, Newfoundland and Labrador. Curated by Dr. Heather Igloliorte. 

“String Games”

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Bushra Junaid’s mother, Adassa, came to Montreal from Jamaica in the ’50s as part of the West Indian Domestic Scheme, which saw thousands of Caribbean women migrate to Canada as domestic workers from 1955 to 1967. It was in Montreal that she met Junaid’s father, who had emigrated from Nigeria. After living in Montreal for some years, the family moved to Newfoundland for her father’s work. Standing at the meeting point of coasts, continents, and oceans, Junaid’s practice weaves together her parents’ histories, tracing their arrival as she searches for her own
place in Newfoundland.

Junaid told me a story that took place before her late mother’s passing: catching sight of her mother at the sink, for a moment she saw herself instead. As if a system glitched, time seemed to immediately collapse. That vision led her to think about time as layered. Even when we spoke about her work, her stories challenged any linear understanding of time, with anecdotes zigzagging across varied places and moments, before eventually returning to Newfoundland. Junaid’s work continues to blur the boundaries of time, memory, and history in her attempt to configure a reciprocal relationship with a province from which she has felt estranged.

Caribbean storytelling practices, like Junaid’s work, are themselves layered. [1] Memory is held close, and passed down through generations like an heirloom. The gaps left by time invite acts of critical fabulation, [2] as our stories wander, like Junaid’s, through unexpected constellations of memory, time, and place.

The images that fill the first few pages of this issue are taken from Junaid’s _Portraits in Time_ (2025) series and reference the technology of the stereoview photograph. Stereoscopy, which dates back to the 1840s, requires a stereoscopic camera featuring two lenses placed at the same distance as the space between two human eyes, to produce two separate photographs at the same moment in time. Viewed side by side, each separate photograph is combined by the brain into a singular image, creating a singular multi-dimensional (or 3D) image. Junaid’s use of this practice considers how the historical past of centuries ago, Junaid’s own family history, and the present moment are interconnected. Drawing on the stereoview format, the work positions the viewer between temporal, cultural, and familial dimensions.

On the right-hand side of “A Portrait in Time II” (2025) is a faded family photograph taken at Middle Cove Beach, NL, in 1970, where children are seen playing at the water’s edge, framed by cliffs and the cold Atlantic. To the left is an archival image from 1903, captioned
“Planting Cane, Island of St. Kitts,” depicting Caribbean children labouring in the fields. The juxtaposition reveals unsettling and overt continuities between freedom and bondage, leisure and labour, and the Canadian shore and the Caribbean plantation. The convergence of all these threads produces a discomfort that likely arises from Junaid’s acknowledgement that her family’s happy moment is inseparable from the histories of en-
slavement and forced labour that shaped the Atlantic world. By pairing these photographs with an 18th-century Nova Scotia merchant’s list of commodities (sugar, rum, molasses) the work binds personal (and collective) memory to the material traces of empire.

On paper, Junaid’s artistic journey begins in St. John’s, NL. The city is an important context for understanding her work. As Junaid spoke to me on the phone, I imagine that she looked out her window and thought about the events that happened on the same coast in 1497 when the first European, John Cabot, stumbled upon the land. His arrival marked the beginning of “exploration,” settlement, and the violent displacement of the Beothuk. The European settlements that grew on this shore, like those farther down the Atlantic Coast (such as Cape Cod in Massachusetts), were built around the cod fisheries that sustained tight-knit coastal communities. Over 500 years later, Junaid and her family would live in one such community in St. John’s.

Long before Junaid’s arrival, ships were built and shipped out of Newfoundland to transport stolen people from the coast of West Africa to the coast of the Caribbean. Once there, our ancestors laboured to produce sugar, molasses, rum, and cotton. By the 18th and 19th centuries, Newfoundland’s fishing economy saw large profits from the sale of cheap salted cod to the Caribbean colonies, for planters to feed the enslaved populations. When the conversation around abolition was first broached, it was opposed in the British parliament out of fear that its Newfoundland colony’s fishery would collapse. [3] Wealthy merchants and coastal fishermen alike profited from the economy of slavery.

Junaid’s inquiry into Newfoundland’s history began in 2014 when she was told about the Plantation at Quidi Vidi, an ongoing project in St. John’s. Its name, chosen in part because settlers there were once called “planters,” disregarded the word’s connection to slavery. Though the building management first defended the use of the name in 2020 saying
that the name honoured the village’s rich history and culture, they quietly changed their name to Quidi Vidi Village Artisan Studios in 2022, ahead of a royal visit. [4] Junaid’s discomfort around such an unthinking, unknowing use of the word stirred Junaid into considering how the Atlantic region is bound to both the Caribbean and West Africa—the former her mother’s home and the latter her father’s. The very ships that once traversed these waters touched each of those shores, linking them through histories of movement and displacement: the same currents Junaid now brings together through her work.

The third spread in the _Portraits in Time series_, “A Portrait in Time: Past and Present” (2025), temporally distinguishes itself from the others. While the other images remain anchored in the colonial past, grounded in the memories of Junaid’s childhood, this image turns outward and forward. Here, contemporary Black Caribbean Canadian children run along the same beach, in 1970 on the left, and 2025 on the right. Placed side by side as if holding hands across decades, the image collapses time and space. Though we as viewers understand the heavy history that binds these children, this is also the only image with no material link to slavery. There are no commodities lists or hundred-year-old images. It’s
just children. The children move together, radiant and unaware that they carry within them the quiet weight of the past. The image evokes a time when life felt more tangible, when the distance between then and now seemed bridgeable. It invites viewers to imagine a future defined by connection rather than the inheritance of pain; the haunting yet beautiful burden that binds them. Centring a tender, childlike innocence, the work becomes an ode to Junaid’s younger self—a self who once moved through the world before race and place became knowing boundaries.

On the phone, Junaid spoke longingly about her childhood home, brought to life by her mother, as the place where she first felt safe in her Blackness. Like Caribbean stories, we as Caribbean people are made of many pieces: layered, complex, and zigzagging. At times, those pieces seem not to fit, yet we continue to shape them, making what seems complicated feel right. As we grow older, new fragments surface, adding pieces we didn’t know existed. Each fragment, each memory, is carefully placed atop another until a fuller image emerges. Through her work, Junaid assembles herself piece by piece, tracing threads of belonging, to re-embody a once-disembodied past.

[^1]: Sarah Goodwin, “Bushra Junaid’s Two Pretty Girls, Stereographs, & Sugarcane Workers,” in _Like Sugar_, ed. Sarah Goodwin and Rachel Seligman (Saratoga Springs: The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, 2020).
[^2]: Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two acts,” _Small Axe_ 12, no. 2 (2008).
[^3]: _The Debate on a Motion for the Abolition of the Slave-Trade, in the House of Commons on Monday and Tuesday, April 18 and 19, 1791, Reported in Detail_, 2nd ed. (London: printed by James Phillips, George Yard Lombard Street, 1792), 112, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433086978354&view=1up&seq=122
[^4]: Malone Mullin, “St. John’s Quietly Changes Name of Quidi Vidi Plantation Ahead of Royal Visit,” CBC News, April 28, 2022, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/quidi-vidi-plantation-new-name-1.6433134

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In _Portraits in Time_ (2025), Bushra Junaid references the history of stereoview photography to present a series of family and archival images that, as Kai Trotz-Motayne writes in her accompanying essay, highlight the ongoing legacies of “enslavement and forced labour that shaped the Atlantic world.”

_Portraits in Time_ by Bushra Junaid: Text

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.

Composition: We Return

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.

When Play Confronts Power

**Nic Wilson** (they/he) is an artist and writer living and working between the Prairies and the Maritimes. Their most recent book, The ‘Ayin, was published in the summer of 2025.


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, 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
Caribbean past. Inspired by their imaginative retellings, her mind now wonders what stories she will 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.

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Portraits in Time by Bushra Junaid: Text

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