C Magazine would like to congratulate Kate Whiteway on winning the C New Critics Award.

This year’s winner, Kate Whiteway—in her review of a livestreamed conversation called Revisiting A Journal of the Plague Year’(2013) between curators Cosmin Costinas and Inti Guerrero at Para Site in Hong Kong—offers original perspectives on the impacts of COVID-19 on the art world by situating the pandemic in broader geographical, artistic, cultural, and temporal contexts. Rather than simply describe how arts institutions are responding to the pandemic and its effects on artistic presentation, the author calls on ideas espoused in this program to draw critical attention to the procedural conditions of these decisions and their potential consequences. With inquisitiveness and speculation, she poses questions and concerns regarding digital dissemination, archiving, memory, site specificity, and historicizing exhibitions, yet productively withholds from taking an authoritative or conclusive position. Lastly, she generously illustrates the many nodes inherent to the conversation between Costinas and Guerrero, and offers ample citations to encourage further research.

This piece appears in C Magazine Issue 147 “Gather” (Autumn 2020).

Kate Whiteway is an independent curator based in Toronto. Her exhibitions include In & Out of Saskatchewan (Art Museum, 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 is the recipient of the 2018 Reesa Greenberg Curatorial Studies Award. She has worked as Gallery Manager of SUGAR Contemporary and as Publications Assistant for the Art Museum.

We would also like to congratulate the runner-up, Olivia Klevorn.

Olivia Klevorn is a queer, Black writer and artist born in Chicago and living in Toronto. She received a Master’s in Visual Anthropology from the University of Oxford and has served as curatorial assistant for London’s Serpentine Gallery. Primarily performance-based, her creative work uses body, text, and image to force a radical refiguring of marginalized subjectivities. Beyond writing, she loves techno and sour candy.

Thank you to all who participated in this year’s C New Critics Award.

Jurors for 2020 included Jaclyn Bruneau, Monika Kin Gagnon and Amy Kazymerchyk.