C Magazine would like to congratulate Shaneela Boodoo on winning the C New Critics Award.

In her review of "begin to be; have become" (2022), a group exhibition at TakeHome BIPOC Arts House in Winnipeg, Shaneela Boodoo generously reflects on the exhibition's engagement with world-structuring categories like race, gender, memory, sexuality, and labour. Through evocative prose, readers access lush descriptions of the work from the unique vantage point of Boodoo's curious and attentive gaze: a flicker of a candle, the way sunlight is filtered through fibres of suspended textiles. Boodoo offers readers a kind of ekphrastic art writing concerned with form. Her interpretive moves are consciously, beautifully, descriptive, in order to broach the new practices of looking called for by the exhibition's exploration of "what we [can] become outside of colonial violence."

Shaneela Boodoo (she/her) is a graduate of the University of Manitoba with a BFA (Honours) in Design and is also a recent graduate of the University of Winnipeg with an MA in Cultural Studies. She is a second-generation Indo-Caribbean immigrant, born and based in Winnipeg, MB. As an emerging artist, designer, and curator, Boodoo explores the entanglements of themes such as colonialism, displacement, and womanhood.

This piece appears in C Magazine Issue 153 “Chinatown” (Winter 2023).

We would also like to congratulate the runner-up, Stephanie Weber.

Stephanie Weber is a researcher and writer based between Calgary and Montreal. She is a PhD candidate in the department of Art History at Concordia University.

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

The jurors for 2022 were Maandeeq Mohamed, Reviews Editor at C Magazine, and two external jurors: Hagere Selam “shimby” Zegeye-Gebrehiwot and Nataleah Hunter-Young.

Hagere Selam “shimby” Zegeye-Gebrehiwot is an artist, administrator, and writer based in so-called Canada. Their research and community building practices centre queer, feminist, BIPOC, and analog moving image futures. Currently, they are the Executive Director at the Saskatchewan Filmpool Cooperative, co-Director of WNDX Festival of Moving Image and guest editor of the forthcoming Art&Wonder publication.

Nataleah Hunter-Young is a writer, film curator, and assistant professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada (the traditional lands of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lūnaapéewak, and Attawandaron peoples). Nataleah's research interests span the areas of Black studies and media studies with a focus on Black cultural production, research-creation, integrated arts and creative practice. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of Visual Culture, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, Public: Art | Culture | Ideas, The Conversation, Xtra, and Canadian Art, among other publications. At the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), she is international programmer responsible for feature selections from Africa and Arab West Asia. Nataleah holds a joint PhD in Communication and Culture from York University and Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson).