Feature

Meagan Christou (b. 1991) is an Executive Board Member for OPSEU/SEFPO representing Toronto/GTA, the past Secretary of the Young Workers Committee, and a union steward and Strike Captain for Local 535 at the Art Gallery of Ontario. She successfully wrote and passed constitutional amendments to prolong union membership for precarious workers and a resolution opposing the practice of two-tier bargaining. Meagan helped launch the first series of Labour for Palestine Educationals, winning the OPSEU/SEFPO Human Rights Award in 2024.

Mitra Fakhrashrafi is a curator and archivist mapping legacies of colonial infrastructure and the resistance which has always followed.

Charlene K. Lau is an art historian, critic, and Curator of Public Art at Evergreen Brick Works and Nuit Blanche Toronto 2025. Her writing has been published in _Art in America_, _Artforum_, _The Atlantic_, _The Brooklyn Rail_, _frieze_, _Fashion Theory_ and _Journal of Curatorial Studies_, among others.

Emma Steen is a curator, writer, and the Outreach & Membership Coordinator for the mma Steen is a programmer, curator, and writer from downtown Toronto. Her area of interest lies in art and writing that explore intimacies, bodies, and gathering with feminist and anti-colonial intention. Emma works at the Royal Ontario Museum as a Performance Program Coordinator, bringing live arts performances, parties, and cultural events to the country’s largest museum.

Fan Wu writes, performs, and teaches. He is currently studying Daoism and its capacities to transform our Western political-aesthetic paradigms.

EMILIA-AMALIA (since 2016) is an intergenerational, in-flux working group that employs experiments, citation, annotation, and autobiography to activate feminist art, writing, research, and living practices. Active members include Cecilia Berkovic, Annie MacDonell, Gabrielle Moser, Zinnia Naqvi, and (_C_ editor) Joy Xiang, with support from Jennifer Harwart.

Dot Tuer is a writer and artist whose work explores the intersections of cultural memory, visual storytelling, and decolonial histories. She divides her time between Corrientes, Argentina, and Toronto, Canada, where she teaches at OCAD University.

This issue of C Magazine considers what it might mean to stop. Rather than denote absence, the stop offers an opening for something else to emerge. Across these pages, contributors explore stopping in: forms of rest, blockades, town halls, and critiques of the temporality and archives of empire. From blockades on Wet’suwet’en land to an underground hub in Jakarta, from moccasins cradling lichen to Lebanon’s El-Mina port, each work gathers its own form of interruption. <br/>

With contributors: Whess Harman, Hung Duong and Grace Samboh, Svetlana Romanova, Fan Wu, Meagan Christou, Mitra Fakhrashrafi, Emma Steen, Charlene K. Lau, Dot Tuer, Joyce Joumaa, Ali El-Darsa, Kay Rangel, Jasmine Sihra.

This issue considers what it might mean to stop. Rather than denote absence, the stop offers an opening for something else to emerge. Across these pages, contributors explore stopping in: forms of rest, blockades, town halls, and critiques of the temporality and archives of empire. From blockades on Wet’suwet’en land to an underground hub in Jakarta, from moccasins cradling lichen to Lebanon’s El-Mina port, each work gathers its own form of interruption.

With contributors: Whess Harman, Hung Duong and Grace Samboh, Svetlana Romanova, Fan Wu, Meagan Christou, Mitra Fakhrashrafi, Emma Steen, Charlene K. Lau, Dot Tuer, Joyce Joumaa, Ali El-Darsa, Kay Rangel, Jasmine Sihra.

Stop

Collective

Institutional critique

Fan Wu reflects on the first installment of “Open Hearing: Dreaming in Dark Times.” Initiated by EMILIA-AMALIA, the   gathered over 200 cultural workers in Toronto to confront urgent issues including Palestine solidarity, censorship, and labour. Inspired by the 1969 Art Workers’ Coalition open hearing in New York, the dispatch features transcripts from Meagan Christou, Mitra Fakhrashrafi, Emma Steen, Charlene K. Lau, and Dot Tuer.

Open Hearing: Dreaming in Dark Times, Dispatch I

Vera Frenkel, Laura Mulvey, Colin Campbell, Lisa Steele, Kate Craig, Mona Hatoum, Katie Thomas

Perspectives of the Body in Canadian Video Art

Ron Benner, Jamelie Hassan, Humberto Castro, Consuelo Castaneda Castellanos, Jose Bedia, Rogelio Lopez Marin, Maria Magdalena CamposPons, Greg Curnoe, Murray Favro, Fern Helfand

Decolonizing the Imagination: Artist's Exchanges: Cuba, Canada

Review

John Watt

John Porter, Katerina Thomadaki, Maria Klonaris, Vera Frenkel

Fragile Imprints/Mediated Resistances

film showing at YYZ, Toronto. Anna Gronau

Mary Mary: Anna Gronau

Discussion of performance art. Artists: Paulette Phillips, Tanya Mars

Gestures in the Looking Glass: Performance Art and the Body

A history of CEAC (The Center for Experimental Arts and Communication), presenting some of their ideas and theories. Artists: General Idea, 

The Ceac was Banned in Canada

Garnet Press, Toronto, August 9-31\. Paintings and drawings. Artists: Nicola Wojewoda

Places of Prodigy

An examination of a film by Jim Anderson “Bois de Balzac”. Artists: Jim Anderson, Auguste Rodin, Robert Smithson

Repetition and the sight of the reel

Review of “So different . . . And yet.” at Art Metropole (Toronto). Artists: James Coleman

Feminine pleasure in the politics of seduction

In reviewing a series of prints by Condé and Beveridge, “Oshawa, a history of Local 222, United Steel Workers of America, CLC“, the writer examines whether art can properly represent “the masses” and how much of oneself can one derive from art. Artists: Carole Condé, Karl Beveridge

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C Mag

Dot Tuer