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Mackenzie

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Plural

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Review

Kate Whiteway is an independent curator based in Toronto. Her exhibitions include _In & Out of Saskatchewan_ (Art Museum at the University of Toronto, 2019), _Whispers That Got Away_ (SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art, co-curated with Hera Chan and Thy Anne Chu Quang, 2018), and _A Glass House Should Hold No Terrors_ (Montreal, co-curated with Yen-Chao Lin, 2016). She recently completed the Master of Visual Studies in Curatorial Studies at the University of Toronto. She has worked as Gallery Manager of SUGAR Contemporary and as Publications Coordinator for the Art Museum at the University of Toronto. She is the recipient of the 2018 Reesa Greenberg Curatorial Studies Award and participated in the 2020 Momus Emerging Critics Residency. Her curatorial practice is broadly interested in correspondence, mobility, and epistolary networks. Her current research looks at histories of abstraction outside of the Euro-American context, and the intersection of contemporary art with activist practices on housing and homelessness.

##### _C Magazine_ would like to congratulate Kate Whiteway on winning the 2020 C New Critics Award, and Olivia Klevorn on being named the runner-up. Now in its 11th consecutive year, this program gives _C Magazine_ the opportunity to identify, support, and promote the work of promising new writers, who often become regular contributors. _C_ would like to sincerely thank all those who applied, as well as the jurors of this year’s award: Jaclyn Bruneau, Amy Kazymerchyk, and Monika Kin Gagnon. Measures were taken to ensure that the identity of entrants remained unknown to adjudicators.
  
  
In early April, Para Site, the contemporary art centre in Hong Kong, hosted a livestreamed presentation with curators Cosmin Costinas and Inti Guerrero reflecting on their 2013 exhibition _A Journal of the Plague Year. Fear, ghosts, rebels. SARS, Leslie and the Hong Kong story_. The exhibition traced the cultural, political, and psychological effects of Hong Kong’s association with disease, from the 19th century to the present. Looking back at the exhibition during the current coronavirus pandemic was, for the curators, a “way to observe the present moment through a continuous past.” The presentation sensitively positioned COVID\-19 within a specific historical lineage of disease and its effects on cultural production and political mobilization.

The exhibition combs through the annals of 2003 in Hong Kong, a year which witnessed the outbreak of SARS, the American invasion of Iraq, the public suicide of the beloved pop icon Leslie Cheung, and the emergence of a prodemocracy constituency punctuated by protests that started on July 1 that year, with manifestations in Occupy Central in 2014 and in opposition to Chief Executive Carrie Lam’s proposed extradition bill in 2019\. _A Journal of the Plague Year_ featured some 40 local and international artists’ works and archival material installed across three venues—Para Site, a private apartment, and a civic centre—and two re enactments of Brazilian artist Lygia Pape’s work _Divisor_ (1968), a 65-person garment worn for street procession. The exhibition was also expanded into a book published by Sternberg Press in 2015.

A highly politicized scientific debate was waged during the 19th century on the mechanics of how disease spreads. Miasmatic theory, which would eventually succumb to germ theory, held that disease was communicated not through people, but through noxious or “night” air that was believed to be inherent to certain places. During the presentation, the curators noted that the British colonial empire, as the epicentre of global trade at the time, had a vested interest in perpetuating miasmatic (and thus, racialized and morbid) thinking of Hong Kong as a place intrinsically prone to disease, because if disease was indeed communicable rather than inherent, then quarantine measures would be applied to slow transmission, thus restricting labour and the movement of goods.

The exhibition lifts its title from Daniel Defoe’s 1722 eponymous tome that records the events of the 1665 bubonic plague in London. An interview with Hong Kong–based journalist Fionnuala McHugh, which was included as a video work in the exhibition, elucidated the many similarities between the plague of 1722 and the SARS outbreak in the spring of 2003\. Revisiting Defoe’s book during SARS’s reign, McHugh notes, “It wasn’t some fusty literary classic, it was a prediction of tomorrow’s headlines. The use of vinegar, the deaths of doctors, the shutting up of houses, the departure of the wealthy, the orders for cleansing the streets: it was all there.” Notably, both diseases erupted on the eve of looming wars: the Second Anglo-Dutch war (1665–1667) and the American invasion of Iraq (2003), which led the curators to assume and explore the recurring response of heightened paranoia and social unrest that often coincide with moments of mass disease. The curators state in their curatorial essay, “In Hong Kong and elsewhere, fear of infectious carriers has repeatedly evoked irrational fear of other people, quarantine has mirrored exclusion, whilst epidemiological, racial, and cultural contamination have shared the same language.”

If epidemics tend to deepen the grooves of preexisting social inequalities, governments also tend to use the moment of crisis to reshape what constitutes the freedom of the social body. McHugh relays, “As it happens, on the sixth anniversary of the Handover, July 1, 2003 several weeks after the WHO’s travel advisory was lifted—half a million Hong Kong residents marched against planned legislation which would outlaw sedition, treason, and subversion. … The security legislation vanished, rather like SARS, to wait until it could reappear in another form.” As predicted, it seems to have reappeared in the form of the new national security law passed on the eve of July 1, 2020, effectively rendering myriad forms of protest and dissent illegal.

One striking aspect of the presentation was the way the curators wove contagion and its many metaphors into a methodology with the travel of the exhibition itself. Following from one of the foundational tenets of contemporary curatorial work—that placement essentially alters meaning—Costinas and Guerrero suggested that more critical attention could be paid to the ways in which exhibitions travel. They contended that the exhibition’s “center of gravity shifts under the influence of magnetic forces in each location on its itinerary.” After Hong Kong, it went to Taipei (TheCube Project Space), Seoul (Arko Art Center), and San Francisco (Kadist Art Foundation and The Lab). The decision to bring the exhibition to San Francisco was in part based on the well-travelled 19th-century axis between South China and California, both in terms of immigration and in transmission of the bubonic plague, an axis that has nonetheless rarely been critically activated in exhibition history. In doing so, the curators actualized the relationship between Hong Kong and North America, taking travel as an opportunity to recontextualize the exhibition’s contents and breaking the predominant logic that travelling exhibitions are, in effect, mobile commodities, identical regardless of location.

Throughout the spring of 2020, the closure of nonessential businesses due to COVID\-19 caused contemporary art exhibitions, in their public and spatial manifestations, to take a hard and indeterminate pause. In response, we saw a rapid turn by institutions to catch the falling knife by making exhibitions and their corollaries— tours, panels, screenings, publications accessible via digital means. Many art institutions enacted strategies of engaging their publics’ attention through their archives, yet opening the vault of past exhibitions and programs can quickly lead to oversaturation on the part of the audience. Beyond its undeniable relevance to the present moment, by revisiting _A Journal of the Plague Year_, the curators brought this complex lineage of contagion and cultural production into active public memory, positioning it as a present moment in the continuous past.

Writer

Gather

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Illness

Kate Whiteway reviews the livestreamed presentation   _Revisiting: A Journal of the Plague Year_  (2013) by Cosmin Costinas and Inti Guerrero at Para Site, Hong Kong. (April 1, 2020).

Revisiting ‘A Journal of the Plague Year’ (2013): Cosmin Costinas and Inti Guerrero

Safia Siad is a curator, DJ, and arts programmer currently residing in Tkaronto.

The Prairies are my home. The Prairies are not my home. I am from the Prairies. I am not from the Prairies. It has always been like this. Although I, a Black woman of varied origins, have spent a significant portion of my life living in Alberta, my relation to the Canadian Prairies has been complicated and fraught. _The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology_, edited by Karina Vernon, was an illuminating, affirming, enraging, revelatory, exciting, and daunting read. Thoroughly dense, this 580-page anthology serves as a mere introduction to the myriad of Black lives in the Prairies. We are here. We have been here. We have histories here. We have futures here.

Through a comprehensive introduction, Vernon lays the groundwork for a “recovered \[B\]lack archive”; many of the pieces and excerpts were published for the first time in this anthology, an incredibly important detail underscoring the reality that the Canadian literary and publishing landscape historically has not made space for these voices. Vernon respects and brings attention to the specificity in handling Black oral histories and Black community building, emphasizing the care necessary not to replicate or reproduce colonial archival methods in preserving and sharing these stories. As she states, “A \[B\]lack archive is a network of social relations forged slowly and carefully, on the basis of trust.” This is not only an archive, but a living document of firsts.

Vernon’s introduction comes with the promise that “this is not the timeless, homogeneously unraced microcosm of the Canadian regional imaginary.” That pervasive and simply incorrect imaginary is precisely why taking in this anthology is like a cool refreshing drink of water, a shock to the system, life-giving and real. Vernon recalls thinking of herself and her family as anomalies in ’80s Alberta, rather than what they actually were, which were members of the third wave of Black migration to the Canadian Prairies from across the African diaspora. How many of us thought and felt that very same thing? Anomalies, exceptions, exceptional, the only ones, the very few.

Sharing the catalyst that began the whole editing process, Vernon recounts a chance encounter in the library stacks two months into her doctoral program with the English department at the University of Victoria. Drawn to a shelf containing writing on the region in Alberta where she had grown up, Vernon found a brief, matter-of-fact passing sentence written about a Black person in a travelogue from April 20, 1873, by William Francis Butler, proving that we have, in fact, been here all along: “one fine day a canoe came floating down the lonely river; it held a solitary negro—a pioneer, cook, trapper, vagrant, idler or squatter as chance suited him.” Having never seen anything like this in a historical document from that time myself, I can only imagine the weight of such a moment. “Reading this passage, I was stunned,” Vernon shares. “The image of a \[B\]lack paddler inside a canoe places \[B\]lackness inside the very icon of a particular kind of Canada, one that sentimentally links the nation to the wilderness and to the fantasy of white settler Indigeneity, but rarely, if ever, to \[B\]lackness.”

Vernon works “with an understanding of the prairies not as a natural geographic location, but as an ideological and ‘ideation space’” in which we exist, whole worlds fleshed out under expansive Prairie skies. In this anthology, we are introduced to 145 years of Black writing on the Prairies from 1872 to 2019 by Black settlers, migrants, and refugees. As I slowly take in their stories, I can’t help but think about how wildly different my formative years would have been if I had known that they existed, that all these people existed. I will forever be thinking about this gaping erasure.

Arranged chronologically by author birth date (where known), “The Repertoire” portion of the book includes the archival records and contributions of 61 Black Prairie dwellers across time. Throughout a multitude of verses, plays, and stories is the almost sci-fi feeling of belonging and unbelonging at once. Cheryl Foggo, journalist, screenwriter, poet, playwright, and writer, shares her memories growing up in Calgary, and has been lovingly unfolding, reframing, and sharing the story of legendary cowboy John Ware. In an excerpt from her recent play _John Ware Reimagined_ (staged in 2014 and 2017), Foggo’s “representation of John’s quietude, his many hurts, and Toronto-born Mildred \[Ware\]’s homesickness for urban life looks beyond the stereotype of John as a Paul Bunyan-like giant and Mildred as dutiful wife.” In “sum of the parts that can be named,” multidisciplinary artist Deanna Bowen details her meticulous and patient research of personal family histories, marked by and intertwined with Canada’s violent anti-Black histories. With “Djinn in Saskatchewan,” writer Nehal El-Hadi connects over here to over there, Prairie dust to desert dust. There are offerings by Esi Edugyan, Lawrence Hill, Tchitala Nyota Kamba, Kaie Kellough, Bola Opaleke, Marika Warner, Claire Harris, Roland (Rollie) Pemberton (Cadence Weapon), Dawn Carter, Nduka Otiono, and Ahmed Ali, among many others. I believe that this anthology should be required reading for all who live across the Prairies and beyond. This book is a portal. An opening to the many more stories to be told from our past, our present, and our futures.

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Race

Publishing

The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology Edited by Karina Vernon  Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2020