C Magazine would like to congratulate Sasha Cordingley on winning the C New Critics Award.

This year’s winner, Sasha Cordingley—in her review of Jesse Chun’s SULLAE 술래(2020), a 6-minute long single-channel film which roots itself in the precolonial Korean women’s harvest and fertility dance—offers a unique perspective on women’s ritual, translation, and language. Reflecting on the video’s exploration of phonemes in English and the Korean alphabet and showing text, Cordingley writes that Chun “interrupts the use of English as a tool toward nationalist consciousness and colonial ownership by dispossessing its aural, sonic, and visual frameworks. Disconnected from its violent positioning as a privileged vehicle which has served to provide both agency and currency within a globalized economy, Chun reveals a language which, at its core, is hollow and empty—like the centre of the circles that materialize throughout the film.”

Sasha Cordingley is a writer and editor from Hong Kong and the Philippines. Her practice is rooted in untangling the violent intersection of colonialism and racialization in contemporary culture, with a particular interest in the ways these systems affect those of the Asian diaspora. She is the recipient of the Henry Moore Institute Dissertation Prize.

This piece appears in C Magazine Issue 150 “Maps” (Winter 2022).

We would also like to congratulate the runner-up, Kalina Nedelcheva.

Kalina Nedelcheva is a multi-media artist-researcher, emerging curator, and musician, based in Tkaronto, Canada. Completing her MFA at OCAD University, she explores the ways in which human consciousness engages in the process of meaning-making. She has developed an uncanny interest in film as a medium for theoretical storytelling and her experimental shorts have been screened by Trinity Square Video, OCAD SU Spring Festival, Toronto Arthouse Film Festival, and more. As an emerging curator, Nedelcheva has headed the programming project “Archives of Space” and collaborative endeavours such as “403 Forbidden” and “Movement/ Nature: Guided Exercises by Artists” at the AGO.

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

Jurors for 2021 included Maya Wilson-Sanchez, Miriam Jordan-Haladyn, and Sophie Le-Phat Ho.

Miriam Jordan-Haladyn is a First Nations writer, artist, and scholar. She the author of Groundwork for a Haudenosaunee Philosophy (2020) and Dialogic Materialism: Bakhtin, Embodiment and Moving Image Art (2014), as well as numerous writings on contemporary art and Indigenous cultural history. With Julian Haladyn, she curated Ways of Being: Yhonnie Scarce and Michael Belmore (2019-2020) and The Films and Videos of Jamelie Hassan (2010).

Sophie Le-Phat Ho is a cultural organizer who grew up in Tiohtià:ke / Montreal and its suburbs. For more than 15 years, her work has been about experimenting with tactics for fostering intersectional solidarities through anti-racist feminist organizing, publishing, and curating. Her individual and collaborative writings have been published in esse arts + opinions, Inter art actuel, ETC MEDIA, Le Merle, Heteropolis, Livedspace, among others. Co-editor of the zine Represent: Fuck White Supremacy, she also guest edited and co-edited for .dpi,
No More Potlucks, FUSE, and MICE. She currently works as a consultant, facilitator, and conflict mediator for community organizations. As the cofounder of the transdisciplinary collective Artivistic, and in all of her different roles, she aims to facilitate the emergence of a critical and creative culture rooted in social justice.

Maya Wilson-Sanchez is a curator and writer based in Toronto and the Associate Editor at C Magazine. She has worked in numerous galleries and museums, including the AGO, Gallery TPW, and MKG127, and has curated exhibitions at Xpace Cultural Centre, the Royal Ontario Museum, Pride Toronto, and the Art Gallery of Guelph. Her essays, reviews, and exhibition texts can be found in various publications including The Senses and Society Journal, Canadian Art, Contemporary HUM, and the book Other Places: Reflections on Media Arts in Canada (PUBLIC Books, 2019). In 2019, they were an Editorial Resident at Canadian Art and a Curatorial Resident at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto. The 2020 recipient of the Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators, she is currently curating a year-long exhibition series for the City of Toronto’s Year of Public Art and teaching at OCAD University.