We are delighted to announce Louis-Philippe Savard as the winner of the 15th annual C New Critics Award!

Savard impressed the jury with his review of "The Traces That Remain" at MAI (Montreal, art interculturels), which was curated by eunice bélidor and featured the work of Po B. K. Lomami, Zinnia Naqvi, Shaya Ishaq, and Lan “Florence” Yee. His piece carefully considers the moment of encounter between exhibited works and their publics, with respect to subjectivity and the politics of the archive, and we look forward to publishing it in C159 Mirror Mirror (Winter 2025).

We would also like to congratulate Lins Demchuk on being named this year's runner up for her review of Audie Murray's exhibition, "To Make Smoke," at The Mackenzie Art Gallery, Regina. The jury noted that her piece also functioned as a meta-commentary on the genre of the exhibition review itself. Demchuk offered a generative critique of the interpretive contexts within which the category known as "Indigenous art" is engaged, without losing sight of the exhibition itself.

Thank you to everyone who participated in this year's award! We are also very greatful to Nadia Kurd and Alice Ming Wai Jim, who adjudicated this year's award alongside C Magazine's Associate Editor, Maandeeq Mohamed.

Louis-Philippe Savard is an art history master’s student at Concordia University (Tiohtià:ke/Montreal), where he also received his bachelor’s degree. His thesis project, for which he received a SSHRC scholarship, investigates the relationship between performance art and its documentation, with the aim to historicize and understand the interplay between political art, embodiment, archival memory, and political discourses in the body of work of contemporary artists. His research interests also include architecture and spaces, politics, installation art, museums, and visual culture. Louis-Philippe is interested in theoretical, historical, and philosophical approaches to artistic practices challenging the dominant conceptions of art making.

Lins is a master’s student at University of Regina, studying Art History and Curation. Her research interests include public art, particularly outdoor sculpture; prairie regional art history; urban/rural and regional/cosmopolitan divides; and consumer behaviour. Much of her life has been spent on Treaty 4 territory, where she currently resides with two dogs, four cats, and an endlessly patient spouse.

Alice Ming Wai Jim is an art historian and curator based in Montreal. She is currently Concordia University Research Chair in Critical Curatorial Studies and Decolonizing Art Institutions and founding editor-in-chief of the journal Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (Brill, with Concordia University and NYU).

Previously Concordia University Research Chair in Ethnocultural Art Histories, 2017-2022, she co-convened the NYU Global Asia/Pacific Art Exchange, GAX 2019 Tiohtiá:ke (Montreal): Asian Indigenous Relations in Contemporary Art on the theme of curatorial hospitality. She is currently working on a SSHRC-funded oral histories project that examines Afrofuturism and Black Lives Matter in the Canadian art scene. Recent projects include the WPC 2023 “Worlding Tiohtià:ke/Montreal: Bridging Knowledges, Practices, and Beings” conference at Concordia University, 31 March –1 April 2023 about how global, transnational, and transcultural public narratives are being represented in universities, museums and other spaces of art and culture, focusing on the unique art ecology of Montreal. Jim was recipient of UAAC’s 2022 inaugural Award for the advancement of equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility, and is a member of the College of New Scholars of the Royal Society of Canada.

Nadia Kurd is an interdisciplinary curator and art historian with a PhD from McGill University. She has special interests in museum practices and advocacy, contemporary Muslim visual culture and Islamic architecture in North America. In addition to working at diverse arts organizations such as the Ontario Association of Art Galleries and the Prison Arts Foundation, Nadia was the Curator of the Thunder Bay Art Gallery from 2010-2018, where her focus was on community engagement and emerging artists in Northwestern Ontario. In recognition of her work, she was awarded the Northwestern Ontario Visionary Award in 2014 and the Canadian Council of Muslim Women’s Women Who Inspire Award in 2016. She was the recipient of the 2017 Hamad bin Khalifa Symposium on Islamic Art Fellowship and was the 2018 Arts-Writer in Residence at the Banff International Curatorial Institute. Nadia currently serves on the Editorial Committee for BlackFlash Magazine and is the Curator at the University of Alberta Museums Art Collection.