Review

Elliott Ramsey is Curator at The Polygon Gallery. He has sat on numerous art juries and advisories including the Sobey Art Award, the VIVA Awards, the Portfolio Prize, and the Barbara Spohr Memorial Award for Photography. His recent exhibition “As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic,” featuring work from the Toronto-based Wedge Collection and presented by Aperture, is currently touring.  


"Spines" ran from 6 March to 30 March 2025 at Wil Aballe Art Projects, Vancouver.

“Spines” — Justin Somjen 

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

Broad: Say Less and Documents were performed on 22 November 2024 at the Libby Leshgold Gallery in Vancouver.

_Broad: Say Less_ and _Documents_ — Lisa E. Harris and Autumn Knight

In _C Magazine_’s 40th year of publication, the writing and visual projects in this issue form an almanac in themselves, out of the impulse to make meaning out of the present state of contemporary art and liberatory organizing. As contributors find grounding in celestial time, ancestors, the stakes of censorship, the choreography of movement building, AI incantations, and more, we express almanacs as projects of persistence between past, present, and future—and even of spell-casting.

In C Magazine’s 40th year of publication, the writing and visual projects in this issue form an almanac in themselves, out of the impulse to make meaning out of the present state of contemporary art and liberatory organizing. As contributors find grounding in celestial time, ancestors, the stakes of censorship, the choreography of movement building, AI incantations, and more, we express almanacs as projects of persistence between past, present, and future—and even of spell-casting.

Almanac

_DIANA ROSS DREAM_ was performed on 1 March 2024 at the Plastic Orchid Factory and Electric Company Theatre, Vancouver.


_DIANA ROSS DREAM_ — Aisha Sasha John

Column

Missla Libsekal (b. Addis Abeba, Ethiopia) is an independent curator and writer whose practice centres on alteriority and knowledge transmission. Her long-term interdisciplinary research looks at historically marginalized ways of knowing, with the current chapter considering how stories of living in the land can oﬀer better ways of being in relation with the places that we inhabit and occupy. She is based in Vancouver, Canada, in the unceded, ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.

Photography

Curatorial practice

Race

In the second entry of the Otherwise column, co-presented with the Centre for the Study of Black Canadian Diaspora, Missla Libsekal and Elliott Ramsey discuss curatorial practices in the context of portraiture, subjectivity, and Blackness. 

Reflecting on Great Care: Missla Libsekal in Conversation with Elliott Ramsey

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Header

C Mag

Elliott Ramsey

“Spines” — Justin Somjen

Broad: Say Less and Documents — Lisa E. Harris and Autumn Knight

DIANA ROSS DREAM — Aisha Sasha John

Reflecting on Great Care: Missla Libsekal in Conversation with Elliott Ramsey