Column

Tess Edmonson is a writer and editor based in Toronto. She is the recipient of a 2019 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

D. St-Amour (they/she) is a writer, book-maker, and recovering arts worker. Since 2011, St-Amour has held curatorial, administrative, and research positions at a range of institutions, including the AGO, the Walter Phillips Gallery, Art Metropole, and Galerie SBC. St-Amour regularly writes about artists’ books and publishing practices through the lens of visual arts and media history, and is slowly publishing a series of queer sci-fi and speculative fiction books through their slow-press project, specific. place (with co-editor S F Ho). Recently, St-Amour completed an MA in Art History/Visual Cultures at York University, and is currently an MLIS candidate at Western University in London. 


Nancy Webb is a Montreal-based writer and founding editor-in-chief of Spiffy Moves.

Writer

Citizenship

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Canadian

Collaboration

History

Collections

Site-specific

Criticism

Following their collaborative gathering at the Banff International Curatorial Institute in the spring of 2015, these writers reflect upon works of art they encountered both within, and outside of, the Banff Centre’s collection. Writing about concealed artworks, frequent returns to the Banff Centre, and the minor events that constitute one’s visit, these writers ruminate upon the ways in which these works defy their intended ephemerality, coming to embody a sense of place and history within the context of the Banff Centre.

On Writing: Critical Art Writing Ensemble

**Richard William Hill** is an independent writer and curator, and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Studies at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver. First debted in _FUSE_ Magazine, Close Readings aims to offer honest assessments of exhibitions of contemporary Indigenous art.

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Indigenous

Curatorial practice

Exhibitions

Institutional critique

Since the 1980’s it has become common practice to include contemporary work in survey exhibitions of historical Indigenous art, thought the inclusion of these contemporary works through often awkward and ungainly installation practices begs the consideration: should this practice be reconsidered? Hill examines curatorial strategies in two exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and suggests that thematic surveys are no longer a sufficient or compelling approach to the exhibition of Indigenous art.

Close Readings: Before and after the Horizon: Anishinaabe Artists of the Great Lakes & The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky

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Publishing

Text

Bambitchell is an artistic collaboration between Sharlene Bamboat and Alexis Mitchell, and their research-based practice uses queer and feminist frameworks to re-imagine borders and mobility, migration and memory. For C Magazine’s Inventory, Bambitchell draws upon a variety of historical anecdotes and cultural products, exploring the ubiquity of the mule in contemporary consciousness.

Inventory: Citizenship

Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen is a research-based artist. In 2011 she completed the Whitney’s Independent Study Program, having obtained her MFA and a post-graduate diploma in Critical Studies from the Malmö Art Academy, Sweden, in 2005, and a BFA from Concordia University, Montreal, in 2003\. Nguyen is currently artist-in-residence at the Museum of Ethnography, Sweden, as part of SWICH – Sharing a World of Inclusion, Creativity and Heritage – a collaborative project involving 10 European museums of Ethnography and World Cultures, with the aim of creating dialogues on citizenship and belonging in contemporary Europe.

The exhibition _The Family of Man_ was a landmark event in the history of photography. Curated by Edward Steichen, a photographer and former Director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the show was composed of 503 photographs, taken by 273 photographers. The images were grouped thematically, focused on the commonalities that bind people and cultures around the world, leaving behind national borders, yet with an impulse for a hetero-normative social order. Themes such as love, marriage, childbirth, family, work and death organized the images into an installation of independent panels. The layout of the exhibition invited visitors to create their own pathways through the photographs, generating an essay-like experience. The exhibition was presented initially at MoMA in 1955 and various configurations of the show toured around the world for the next decade, thanks to the sponsorship of the United States Information Agency (USIA).

The exhibition served as an expression of humanism in the decade following World War II. Steichen describes this humanistic sentiment in the accompanying publication, writing that, “\[the\] art of photography is a dynamic process of giving form to ideas and explaining man to man. It was conceived as a mirror of the universal elements and emotions in the everydayness of life – as a mirror of the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world.” The exhibition became an instant success and during its 10 years of exhibition, it attracted more than 9 million visitors and 2.5 million people purchased the catalogue. The exhibition is now permanently housed and displayed in the Clervaux Castle in Luxembourg, as part of the UNESCO Memory of the World register.

Roland Barthes, a fervent critic of the exhibition, dismissed Steichen’s attempt to create a universal language through photography, and accused the curator of producing a modern myth fuelled by “conventional humanism.”[^1] The French philosopher’s observations shaped the initial wave of criticisms of the exhibition. Following in the footsteps of Barthes, photographer Allan Sekula condemned the instrumentalization of the photographs as the “epitome of American cold war liberalism.”[^2] For Sekula, the images function as overt racist expressions similar to earlier forms of colonial enterprise, yet the “humanizing of other” was intrinsic to the discourse of neocolonialism. In spite of these earlier disapprobations, a more recent wave of critical writings, heralded notably by Eric J. Sandeen, Blake Stimson and Ariella Azoulay, exhumes the role and modes of reception of _The Family of Man_. More specifically, Azoulay’s re-reading of the exhibition proposes to read the photographs not as descriptive statements, but rather as prescriptive statements for universal rights, a harbinger of the civic potential of photography for global citizenry.

_The Family of Man_ can be seen as a diplomatic tool for a new world order at the height of the Cold War and, concurrently, at the emergence of a new world economic order managed by the United States. By the end of World War II, much of Europe was devastated and in great need of rapid reconstruction. The United States gave funds for the rebuilding of Europe, which was known as the Marshall Plan or the European Recovery Program, and this intervention was a “crucial moment inthe transition to global capitalism,” as observed by political theorists Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin.[^3] Sekula’s argument is that the making of the images for The Family of Man coincides not only with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as Azoulay suggests, but also contemporaneously with the transition to the free market economy. But to suggest that the practice of photography is entirely and inseparably bound by capitalist modes of organizing would be too reductive. The issues at stake are more complex than they appear, and may not only be described as a simple manifestation of how photography is practiced. However, the very fact that the The Family of Man bypasses representations of nations reinforces what Panitch and Gindin define as the very mechanisms of global capitalism. Even though globalization may seem a natural outcome of an unstoppable process, the rise of global capitalism was made possible through the interferences of nation-states and the regulations that were implemented by these very countries. If _The Family of Man_ is only seen through the lens of human rights,may face its own humanist claptrap.

This exhibition becomes a locus for fostering new globalist subjectivities, man as consumer thus as citizen. We might imagine this exhibition not as a rupture from a colonial past, but rather as a continuation of its imperial condition of unstoppable movement for progress. On the facing page, the exhibition catalogue of _The Family of Man_ is presented in the tradition of the ethnographic object, as Steichen’s exhibition could be seen to uphold the tenets of a colonial enterprise with a humanist veil.

[^1]: Roland Barthes, “La grande famille des hommes” (“The Great Family of Man”), in _Mythologies_ (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1957), 173–76.
[^2]: Allan Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs,” in _Art Journal_. Vol. 41, Photography and the Scholar/Critic (Spring, 1981), 15–25.
[^3]: Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, _The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire_, (London: Verso, 2012), 144.

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Representation

Colonialism

Nguyen revisits Edward Steichen’s exhibition The Family of Man, and criticizes its support of colonial enterprise despite its attempts to serve as an expression of humanism. Nguyen suggests that “we might imagine this exhibition not as a rupture from a colonial past, but rather as a continuation of its imperial condition of unstoppable movement for progress.” 

Artefact: Explaining Man to Man

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Editorial

AM: When we began work on this issue, last June, Canada’s Bill C-51 “Anti-terrorism Act” had just been passed, enhancing the government’s powers of surveillance, along with a new provision to Bill C-24, the “Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act,” enabling the federal government to revoke Canadian citizenship from dual-nationals. At the same time, a Conservative government was making it increasingly difficult for refugees to find asylum in Canada, all of which was happening within the context of the Syrian refugee crisis and daily reports of people drowning while crossing the Mediterranean. Just weeks earlier, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report was released, detailing the mechanisms and effects of cultural genocide that were enacted through Canada’s residential school system as part of the creation of the Canadian nation state.

KC: An art magazine issue on citizenship will necessarily be inadequate and incomplete, and this recognition followed us through the editorial process. Throughout we questioned how to explore citizenship not as a “current topic in the art world,” or something to make work “about” – but as a question affecting us all; as citizens beyond nationality and background; as embodied subjects, with our histories, communities and varied positions of power. A question that – given the current events described by Amish above – yields few answers. We proceeded in conversation with artists, writers and our editorial advisory board, who in turn invited in more voices and new writers; in an attempt to diffuse the position of the editor as gatekeeper or arbiter, however impossible this might be.

AM: One of the things that came out of our discussions with members of our advisory – including some who had been to this year’s Venice Biennale, was the fact that it was thematically framed as responding to current global crises, and the conditions of migrant labourers and refugees, yet it firmly positioned some kinds of people outside of the Biennale. In response, we commissioned a number of writers and artists who were in attendance to address this contradiction and discuss specific interventions into constructions of nationality at the Biennale. In many ways, doing so seemed to get at a larger discrepancy within the art world where we traffic in the critique of conditions of inequality and exclusion, while these same problems aren’t merely present in the art world, but magnified. _C Magazine_ isn’t entirely innocent of these contradictions either. But one of our jobs is to call them out, and to give space to writers and artists who can help us think through them in productive ways.

KC: If we continue using the Venice Biennale as a marker for one of the most public ways in which citizenship or the nation-state shapes the perception and valuation of art, we should consider artistic director Okwui Enwezor’s prologue to this year’s exhibition: “The principal question the exhibition will pose is this: How can artists, thinkers, writers, composers, choreographers, singers, and musicians, through images, objects, words, movement, actions, lyrics, sound bring together publics in acts of looking, listening, responding, engaging, speaking in order to make sense of the current upheaval?” Do we react? Do we carry on, with the belief of art as a universal good in the face of a chaotic world? Who has the privilege?

AM: One of the questions that arose as the issue came together was how do we talk about these problems when _C_’s staff is made up entirely of people whose citizenship is almost never questioned. We saw the risk of reproducing this false neutrality, where citizenship was presented as always concerning an “other” whether on the basis of race, nationality or sexuality. It became increasingly apparent that we needed to interrogate many of the different ways citizenship is produced, both consciously and unconsciously. In this issue Yaniya Lee looks at this idea of neutrality within art criticism, and at instances where it serves to re-inscribe forms of exclusion and reaffirm dominant forms of citizenship. One of the ways we are implicated as editors and writers is through how we frame and represent other peoples’ words and ideas, so we are faced with the question of how not to project our own assumptions and experiences on others, and instead learn to listen and converse.

In the spirit of this conversation, we invited artists and writers to respond to the _Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission_, a document that is 536 pages long and includes 94 calls to action based on 6,740 statements, including visual art, gathered over six years. We were interested in understanding what bearing the report might have on visual art practice and what ethical imperatives it might present in terms of recognizing forms of citizenship outside the national narrative.

KC: If we continue to ask: How do you think and write about art in the midst of a global crisis? How do you think from within a country geographically isolated and often self-satisfied, able to continue on with daily life, and yet still implicated in other more long-standing betrayals of citizenship? I need to think, in this case, not of the dominant art world’s glossiness, commerce and object fetishization, but of art as a historically rooted language; one that has for centuries come before words, or when there are no words. That the TRC report accepted visual art as a legitimate form of response and testimonial reminds of this, and in turn we solicited artists’ responses to the report.

AM: Among these responses is Anishinabe intermedia artist Scott Benesiinaabandan’s _marykennethagnes | oka_, a photograph that incorporates an iconic image from the 1990 Oka Crisis, of a Mohawk warrior atop an overturned police car, and an image of Benesiinaabandan’s mother, who grew up in a foster home, with her siblings. Having also been placed in foster care at birth, he kept the image from the Oka uprising as a symbol of his political ideals, in lieu of family photos. When he searched out members of his family as an adult, he obtained the image of his birth mother that appears in the piece. Combined in Photoshop, printed and then crumpled into a three-dimensional form that he placed on a scanner, this image reflects a genealogy that is both visual and biological, connecting his personal history with a history of indigenous resistance.

In another article, the curator Derrick Chang addresses the position of the queer citizen-subject, looking specifically at sonic interventions into heteronormative performances of nationalism through works by Igor Grubić and Pascal Lièvre and Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, as well by members of Pussy Riot. This reveals not only how dominant forms of citizenship are enacted through expressions of sexuality, but the ways it can also be resisted, one of which is making its workings visible. I should add that this issue of _C Magazine_ isn’t only about citizenship as a repressive “othering” force, but about how it’s a productive force in the sense of producing conforming citizen-subjects. For the artist project Tyler Coburn interviewed workers at the Integrated Systems Operations Centre in Songdo, South Korea, one of the world’s largest urban development projects. Smart technologies are used at every level of its construction to create a system of almost total surveillance, which aims to create perfect alignment between its citizens and the needs of capital. Coburn wrote a fictional narrative, based on interviews with a worker who monitors sensor and surveillance data gathered throughout the city. Coburn’s project reveals not just how this technology produces a particular kind of citizen, but also provides poetic allusion to how these citizens might in turn intervene within or disrupt that very apparatus. In this way, Coburn’s piece speaks to the need for self-reflexivity and the need to recognize that while we may always be implicated, we also have agency.

KC: We started work on this issue just prior to the widespread attention to the refugee crisis, which intensified, shockingly, as we edited. As the issue was ready to go to press, the world sent an outpouring of support to Paris following the attacks on November 13th, which opened up a set of complexities and angry conversations over the Western world’s heedless disregard of similar attacks carried out in Lebanon and Kenya. The world continues to stratify; the pride of being a “citizen” of a desired nation-state at once increasingly loathsome and yet coveted. In the days since the shootings in Paris, a mosque in Peterborough, Ontario, was set on fire; a woman picking up her child from school in Toronto had her hijab torn off by attackers. And Canada has a new Prime Minister, who once again has pledged allegiance to the Queen of England, and whose tenure begins with hope, however wary. This issue offers many questions and few answers. It is a reminder of the ways in which we take stock of our positions, our responsibilities, the pitch of our voices in relation to others. It is a questioning of our roles as artists, editors, writers, curators and the ways in which we engage with, inherit, dismantle, disrupt and construct citizenship In our work and our institutions, without merely accepting it.

Amish Morrell is Assistant Professor at OCAD University, where he teaches Criticism & Curatorial Practice, and Visual and Critical Studies.

Editor

Kari Cwynar is a curator, writer and editor based in Toronto, where she is Director of Kunstverein Toronto and Editorial Director of _C Magazine_. She writes on contemporary art for publications and catalogues, contributes regularly to _Frieze_ and _Metropolis M_.

Assistant Editor

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Dialogue

In presenting the theme of the issue (citizenship), Morrell and Cwynar create a dialogue through which they address concerns of presumed neutrality and privilege among C Magazine’s staff, as well as the resulting conversations which would dictate the direction of the editorial content.

Editorial: Citizenship

Feature

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Memory

Participation

Location

International

Relational art

Diaspora

Wang revisits the works of Aman Mojadidi, Victor Ekpuk, and Jeanno Gaussi, three international artists who deploy participatory art practices in order to consider the role of the citizen and the public within Cuban society. Each project engages with the socio-political and socio-cultural aspects of Cuban society, and participates in the construction of local memory and history.

The Creation of Sanctioned Spaces and the Fall of the Cuban Wall: The 12th Bienal de la Habana

Yaniya Lee is an arts writer based in Toronto.

Just a few days after Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s 2008 apology to survivors of residential schools, Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore used an image of British Queen Victoria to create an Indigenous queen in her likeness.[^1] Over the course of an hour, to the blaring sound of “God Save the Queen,” Belmore ripped and crumpled and smoothed newspaper dipped in honey into the shape of a large, bouffant dress around the seated body of her collaborator, Daina Warren. When Belmore was finished, the music still deafening, her queen sat poised with a drumstick scepter in one hand, a small dreamcatcher in the other, and a crown of feathers on her head. The newspaper sash across the Indigenous Queen’s body bore rows and rows of unidentifiable faces, quite possibly the missing and murdered Indigenous women of the Highway of Tears. The acrimonious tone of the piece is unsurprising considering the ongoing colonial and racial violence of the white settler state of Canada. The history textbooks in grade school classrooms across the country tell stories that conceal colonialism’s processes of self-invention, a history marked by white supremacy’s erasure and rewriting. Our national identity is built on the shifting ground of divergent experiences with, and perspectives on, this ongoing history. 

Rather than something fixed, what it means to be a Canadian citizen is slippery and elusive. Many Canadian artists’ projects draw from within those alternate stories. Kent Monkman, for instance, has become widely recognized for his two-spirited interventions into traditional colonial representations of Canada. Recently, the exhibition _Invisible Empires_ (2013) by Deanna Bowen at the Art Gallery of York University brought forth the Ku Klux Klan’s presence north of the border. The fact that the activities of the white supremacist group, first registered in Toronto in 1925 and operating nation-wide until the 1930s, remain widely unknown hints at many other obscured aspects of Canadian history. In a settler colonial society, history is not only temporal, but also spatial and racial. Canadian art works and criticism reveal the ways citizenship is maintained by a stubborn, anxious image of national identity, and resisted by artists for whom the official story just isn’t enough.

“National identity,” writes theorist Sunera Thobani,“ like the geographical borders of the nation and its regime of citizenship rights, remain contested terrain, for outsiders as well as insiders.”[^2] In Canada, citizenship implies belonging and grants access to an exclusive set of rights and privileges. The settler state’s rituals, customs, beliefs and laws redraw boundaries of inclusions and exclusions to naturalize a sense of belonging for some while keeping it out of reach for others. In reality, though citizenship is enshrined in law, our experience of national identity is limited to how we see each other, and the ways, as individuals, we come to relate to one another. According to Thobani, Canadian laws create and maintain exalted citizens. They are the imagined bearers of national identity and their citizenship is based on a defining opposition to “others.” This “national subject is not only existentially but also institutionally and systematically defined in direct relation to the outsider. Such exaltations function as a form of ontological and existential capital that can be claimed by national subjects in their relations with the Indian, the immigrant, and the refugee.” \[3\] This tension between the exalted subject and the “other” surfaces and comes to matter in how we look at, and write about each other’s work. Art critics occupy an irreconcilable position: they must project neutrality even while their opinions are unavoidably subjective. I would like to draw attention to that neutrality, and how it buttresses the position of the exalted subject. 

Manitoban artist Divya Mehra intentionally plays with language and stereotypes to throw into relief the discomfort sometimes experienced by exalted Canadians vis-à-vis immigrants and people of colour. In 2012, the Bank of Canada decided that a female scientist’s image looked too Asian to be printed on the new hundred-dollar bill. Mehra’s 2014 solo exhibition at Georgia Scherman Projects in Toronto, _Pouring Water on a Drowning Man_, addressed the incident. “That violent gesture,” Mehra explained in an interview, “which I’m sure people don’t want us to see as violent, that erasure of the ‘ethnic looking’ woman, is the point of departure for _Neutral Ethnicity_.”4 Mehra covered a wall with yellow-brown hundred-dollar bill specimens. In front of the money wallpaper, she placed a headless, gold mannequin in a tracksuit printed with the same hundred-dollar-bill pattern. The rest of the works attempted to destabilize comfortable reading. The series of sizzurp silkscreen prints _How to do things with words (Culture and Captivity)_ addressed visibility and presence from the perspective of the “other.” _We don’t stand in line, borrowed shoes hurt your feet OR To India and back: Why we must not give up_ (2014) reads “\_HOW/ MANY/ MILES TO/EXCLUSION\_” in big block purple letters. You Made Me (2014) reads “\_I WILL WORK/HARD TO/MAKE YOU/FEEL COM\-/FORTABLE\_.” Mehra’s language works are subtle provocations that expose the exalted subjects’ implicit racism in relation to non-white “others.”

Some critics had a hard time reviewing _Pouring Water on a Drowning Man_. In responses by white critics in particular, there was a palpable, inarticulate anxiety. Theorist Christina Sharpe in her book _Monstrous Intimacie_ (2010) describes the source of this anxiety in detail. Reviewing the critical reception of artist Kara Walker’s cut-outs and silhouettes of grotesque scenes from the antebellum south, Sharpe explains that “\[r\]ace, like slavery, is read as entirely about black people.”[^5] Some white viewers, she writes, actively deny any identification with work that is made by artists of colour: In other words, the majority of critics, readers, and reviewers, regardless of their diegetic reading of the work, locate its signifying effect almost exclusively on black people. Such myopia is unsurprising given that the history of slavery (and race) in the United States tends to be regarded as an issue of and for black people _about_ black people and involves a persistent erasure of whiteness.[^6]

Sharpe’s analysis is useful to understand the criticism of Mehra’s exhibition. In Canada, the persistent erasure of whiteness is a component of the exalted subject’s encounter with the “other.” When white critics face work that calls attention to their whiteness, it is the unconscious nature of that erasure of whiteness that causes anxiety.

In one review, Leah Sandals describes how _Neutral Ethnicity_ put her on “a self-conscious edge by resisting easy interpretation.”[^7] She identifies the problematic the installation puts forward and then makes it the artist’s issue rather than society’s issue. Sandals describes how

bq.Mehra’s use of repetition in _Neutral Ethnicity_ suggests the wide reproduction of stereotypes, and the work evokes a feeling of (legitimate) anger with the fact that Caucasian is perceived by many as being a “neutral” ethnicity in Canada, while all others are perceived as “not neutral.” Still, the title of the tracksuit work— _Neutral Ethnicity (I guess the money should’ve changed him, I guess I should’ve forgot where I came from)_ also hints that personal dimensions, withheld from the viewer, are at hand.[^8]

Sandals takes the liberty of inventing, condoning and finally excusing Mehra’s anger by making it mysterious and incomprehensible. In one sentence, the critic undermines the work by making the issues it raises “personal” rather than structural. Moreover, Sandals uses passive language to write about racial social dynamics. In this way she naturalizes the relation between whiteness and “neutrality.” White people are simply the accidental bearers of racial neutrality. The angry artist then becomes the only active person in the discussions of race, culture, and nationality raised by the exhibition. In conclusion, Sandals writes,

> Mehra’s work reminds me that there are vast gaps of understanding and fairness that occur within and without different communities, and that these gaps can lead to much emotional upset and tension—not to mention memorable and far-reaching errors on the part of the Canadian government and other institutions.[^9]

Again Sandals’ language is passive: no one is responsible or complicit and the artist – the angry, withholding female artist – is the only person emotionally “upset.” Sandals dances on the surface of the problem but does not delve in. She never engages with the work beyond her initial, “self-conscious edge.” The exalted critic’s uncomfortable attitude is complicit with the myth of national identity.

Sandals’ review is an example of how some citizens hold on to their exalted status as “neutral,” “Caucasian” Canadians in their ways of seeing and not seeing. The anxiety that troubled Sandals in approaching Mehra’s work is not uncommon. Murray Whyte’s review of Jérôme Havre’s work performed a similar erasure of whiteness, in this case intensified by worrisome anti-blackness. _Fictions and Legends_ (2013–2014) was a dual exhibition Havre participated in with Heather Goodchild at the Textile Museum of Canada. Havre’s immersive installation showcased several of his unique textile sculptures, hybrid creatures whose skin is tightly sewn together from rough, multi-coloured fabrics. For this exhibition, Havre painted the walls and added ambient sounds of rain on a roof to evoke the caged space of a zoo. In his review, Whyte assigns a meager four and a half paragraphs out of 17 to Havre, yet finds space within his exuberant praise of Goodchild’s work to retell Havre’s biographical origins twice. Goodchild’s ancestry or race is never mentioned, presumably because she is white, and thus, for Whyte, neutral. Moreover, Whyte describes the setting of Havre’s “unrestrained” work as “an electrified jungle,” then describes Havre’s installation as “a screed against colonial superiority.”[^10] Whyte’s conclusion, for any who were in doubt, firmly places Havre, and his work, as outside and “other,” in binary opposition to polite, civilized Canadians:

> Like Goodchild, Havre’s figures speak of mythologies, but here, from cultures distant from polite European canons; where she is restrained, using simplicity and elegance as a foil for the dark corners of our Eurocentric Christian mythology, Havre lets it all hang out, bundling up the worst western biases of faraway tribal cultures in a fetishized version of an exotic that condemns our above-it-all politesse.[^11]

Reflecting on the review later, Havre described his bewilderment and disappointment at the reviewer being so fixedly unable to see beyond his own subjective perspective to judge the installation on its own terms. In an interview, Havre explains how Whyte

> draws upon an image bank that belongs to a colonialist fantasy in order to illustrate his article. He develops an argument in which he fetishizes my works and an environment of ‘beasts, electrified jungle.’ He feverishly leads us with a syntax seeped in colonialist overtones in order to distill a condescending reading of my work and to oppose it to the notion of civilization.[^12]

Though Havre is not Canadian, Whyte’s inability to consider the artist’s work outside stereotypes of race, indeed his forceful insistence on using Goodchild’s work as a foil for understanding it _within_ those stereotypes, demonstrate his need for an “other” to reaffirm his own white, Canadian identity.

Meeting the exalted subject’s stubborn position, as illustrated in the attitudes of the aforementioned critics, black Canadians are time and again faced with surprise when they claim citizenship. Theorist Katherine McKittrick has explained how this surprise reinforces black non-belonging while reasserting the white (“neutral”) nature of Canada. Surprise is a process of subjectification for both the surprised person and the black Canadian. A white settler state is solidified every time it disavows the racial histories in its midst. Surprise places the black person outside of any space, and confirms the surprised person’s belonging to that very same space. “\[A\]bsence and elsewhere are, in fact, critical sites of nation, in that black subjects encountering and living the nation also expose its social, political, racial, and sexual limitations.” \[13\]

Canadian artists have made work that functions in direct opposition to this exalted surprise. Camille Turner’s sonic walk _HUSH HARBOUR: Exploring a Black Canadian geography through a sound walk_ is an experiment in making fiction speak untold stories. Turner’s walk used sound as a way to challenge and rethink spatialization by reinscribing black history into the Canadian landscape. Black life in Canada in the 18th century was marked by   
an act passed in 1793 that “enabled enslaved Americans to cross the Canadian border into freedom but ensured that those who were enslaved in Canada remained slaves for life until 1833.”[^14] Set within this interval, Turner’s piece tells the complicated love story of Peggy, an enslaved black Canadian who falls for a man who came to Canada to escape US slavery. In her 19-minute video _sum of the parts: what can be named_ (2010), Deanna Bowen meticulously traces her own genealogy and in so doing uncovers an intergenerational history of black settlers in the Canadian west. Bowen’s family narrative, which she reads herself in black clothes on a black background with minimal visual manipulation, articulates the space occupied by black Canadians, both geographically and historically. These artists’ works reveal the limits of Canada’s self-invention as a white settler nation. They tell stories that defy Canadian surprise, and show the ways the colonial government, and its exalted citizens, desperately need to continually _place_ race in relation to the nation.

McKittrick’s conceptualization of surprise exposes nationhood as an inscription onto geography. The racialized dispossession of colonial spatialization unfolds as a persistent negation that constructs the settler state and its idealized notion of citizenship. The doctrine of _terra nullius_, meaning “land belonging to no one,” was used by colonizers to justify taking over Indigenous territories. Though the lands were inhabited, the doctrine preemptively nullified Indigenous claims to sovereignty and allowed colonizers to reimagine them as uninhabited. Some of Kent Monkman’s paintings underscore this mis/apprehension. His epic, large-scale canvases reproduce a style of landscape painting that belonged to a discourse of Canada as a place of fierce, overwhelming and unpopulated nature. Into these settings, he reinserts Indigenous characters andreverses discursive colonial erasures. Monkman’s _Trappers of Men_ (2006), for instance, is a 12′ × 7′ canvas that bears a striking resemblance to American-German painter Albert Bierstadt’s _Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California_ (1868). In the foreground of his sublime landscape, Monkman places white and Indigenous men lounging, working, posing, making art and hanging out. Among them one can spot Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrian, Edward S. Curtis and Monkman’s ravishing alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. The artist’s intervention is in a dialogue with modernity on many registers. It challenges the violent moralizing and genocidal incursions of colonizers onto Indigenous lands and peoples by subverting the neat and tidy discourse of national identity that ensconces most Canadians.

The work of Indigenous artists and artists of the diaspora makes clear some of the ways in which Canadian identity is bound to a myth of neutrality. Citizenship becomes an unsettling concept when considered in light of its selective exaltations and the historical, spatial and critical denials required to keep it neutral. In a white settler society, “neutral,” of course, means white. The anxiety experienced by some Canadian critics when they come into contact with work by non-white artists stems from an inability to displace their assumptions of neutrality. Without taking into account their own whiteness, they cannot examine the intimate relation of their own, exalted point of view with the perspective of the perceived “others.” Artists like Mehra, Turner and Monkman disrupt neutrality, reclaim territory and call attention to the ongoing legacies of colonialism. By unearthing and retelling marginalized histories in their work, these artists’ practices resist the racialized dispossessions of citizenship.

[^1]: Rebecca Belmore, _Victorious_, created for Hive 2 at the Magnetic North Theatre Festival, Vancouver, 2008.
[^2]: Sunera Thobani, _Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada_, (University of Toronto Press, 2007), 29.
[^3]: Ibid., 5.
[^4]: John G. Hampton, “Culturally Contentious Divya Mehra and the art of busting stereotypes,” _Magenta Magazine_, 2014, http://www.magentafoundation.org/magazine/culturally-contentious/
[^5]: Christina Sharpe, _Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects_, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 173.
[^6]: Ibid., 154.
[^7]: Leah Sandals, “Divya Mehra Troubles Stereotypes in Toronto,” _Canadian Art_, March 27, 2014, http://canadianart.ca/reviews/divya-mehra-georgia-scherman/
[^8]: Ibid.
[^9]: Ibid.
[^10]: Murray Whyte, “Heather Goodchild and Jérôme Havre: Fictions and Legends at the Textile Museum of Canada,” _The Toronto Star_, December 14, 2014\. 
[^11]: Ibid.
[^12]: Sky Goodden, “INTERVIEW: Jérôme Havre on Identity, Context, and His Bad Review”, _BlouinArtInfo_, March 31, 2014, http://ca.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/1021373/interview-jerome-havre-on-identity-context-and-his-bad-review
[^13]: 
[^14]: Katherine McKittrick, _Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 103.
[^15]: http://camilleturner.com/project/hush-harbour/

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Revisiting reviews of exhibitions by Divya Mehra and Jérôme Havre, Lee interrogates the art critics’ projections of neutrality when confronted by the works of Indigenous artists and artists of the diaspora. Examining the anxious responses of white critics when faced with works that recall the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism, Lee outlines the ways in which citizenship is maintained by a stubborn image of national identity, and challenged by artists retelling marginalized histories in their work. 

Anxious Territory: The Politics of Neutral Citizenship in Canadian Art Criticism

David Garneau (Métis) teaches painting and drawing at the University of Regina.

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Stewart, Benesiinaabandan, Garneau and Busby utilize text and imagery in response to Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report and its reception. Highlighting the report’s past tense descriptions of Indigenous assimilation and dispossession, as well as reactions to the Report in the media, these artists consider the benefits of the state-designated Reconciliation for the settlers’ conscience, and the lack of productive response to contemporary Aboriginal concerns.

Responding to Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report

**Justin Langlois** is an artist and Associate Professor at Emily Carr University of Art & Design. His practice explores collaborative structures, critical pedagogy and custodial frameworks as tools for gathering, learning and making.

Amanda Shore is a white-settler arts worker, critic, and curator based in K’jipuktuk (Halifax, NS). 


**Leah Snyder** is a writer and digital designer whose research and curatorial work centres around art as social practice, arts advocacy and contemporary Indigenous art with a particular focus on digital archives, new media activism, national narratives in a digital era and developing communities in cyberspace. At its foundation, her work is about constructing different kinds of architectures that provide alternative spaces for engagement. Leah is also the editor of _Mixed Bag Mag_, an online magazine on contemporary culture in Canada.

Rinaldo Walcott is Associate Professor and Director of Women and Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto. He is the author of _Queer Returns: Essays on Multiculturalism, Diaspora and Black Studies_ (Insomniac Press, 2016).

##### Justin A. Langlois

The idea of citizenship, and who gets to grant it, receive it, retain it and who has to give it up, is clearly one of the most pressing issues of our time. While concerns about the status of refugees, migrant labour and notions of citizenship appeared at the 56th Venice Biennale, and the corresponding Creative Time Summit in August, these crises have only become more pressing since then. The Biennale encouraged audiences to play witness to a set of artworks and activisms that are mostly hermetically sealed – they represent or depict a problem, perhaps encouraging us to act more or less directly to redress that problem. And yet despite the urgency or the nuance of the ideas presented at the Biennale and the Creative Time Summit, few audience members have the capacity to act in the face of such urgency and crisis. 

However, there were works that complicate our imagination of citizenship, offering us less of a directive to action and more of a set of meditations on duration, commitment and labour that could reinvigorate everyday life and political practices, bringing us closer to those other kinds of arrangements of people, and political and social relations. To this end, one might consider works like Taryn Simon’s _Paperwork, and the Will of Capital: An Account of Flora as Witness_, which archives hundreds of pressed flora alongside photographs of the same live flora from signings of governmental resolutions, suggesting the need to develop other measures of time and attend to ecological scales of experience; or Adrian Piper’s _The Probable Trust Registry: The Rules of the Game #1-3_ (2013–15) offering participants the opportunity to contractually commit themselves to one of three declarative statements (“I will always be too expensive to buy / I will always mean what I say / I will always do what I say I am going to do”), binding them to these ideas, and to an assembled collectivity made up of the other participants who have signed on, for the rest of their lives; or Rirkrit Tiravanija’s _Untitled 2015 (14086 unfired)_ (2015) wherein a sole labourer made bricks stamped with the Mandarin translation of Guy Debord’s slogan “Ne Travaillez Jamais” that were available for purchase, with proceeds benefitting iscos (Trade Unions Institute for Development Co-operation, an organization supporting international workers’ rights). Further, at the Creative Time Summit, we need look no further than presentations by Joshua Wong, the 19-year-old student activist who co-founded Scholarism and sparked the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong, to witness the possibility and necessity of provoking our largest civic imagination, or Mina Setra, the Deputy Secretary General of Indonesia’s Indigenous Peoples’ Alliance of the Archipelago, who framed the need to consider deep indigenous knowledge and knowledge from the territories we occupy as fundamental to social justice movements around the world, or the closing keynote by Antonio Negri, in which he suggested that life in common is life in language, fostering an appeal to continue to produce affective practices together. These projects and presentations offer models for practicing or enacting citizenship that are nuanced, complicated and poetic, providing not just depictions of resistance, but also ways of testing and rehearsing citizenship on a daily basis. 

Our citizenship relies on the testing of its very boundaries. And more often, it relies on a series of small and not-so-small gestures that secure or resist it, and that help us to exercise our capacity to measure, record and produce social and civic life together. Art provides an inventory of expanded practices and poetics that might offer us clues on how to do this, but we must work to hone our own actions and activities towards more complicated expressions that can evince our agency in the world. If we await an invitation to perform our citizenship, we will never get around to producing it ourselves.

_Justin A. Langlois_ is an artist, educator, and organizer living in Vancouver, B.C., where he is currently an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Culture and Community at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

##### Amanda Shore

“We can’t trust the flags we fly here,” were Noah Fischer’s first words when it was his turn to speak. Sitting on a panel at the world’s oldest art biennale, Fischer and four other members of Gulf Labor Artist Coalition were discussing their respective projects, each aiming to bring attention to the exploitation of migrant workers during museum construction in Abu Dhabi.[^1] 

Fischer then elaborated to explain the difficulty associated with territory acknowledgment at la Biennale di Venezia, a place where national pavilions declare temporary cultural sovereignty on individual plots of Venetian land. Despite my numerous visits to the pavilions, I experienced a dull feeling of being lost, which seems appropriate in a place where territorial sovereignty falls away. The pavilions put shallow roots into Italian soil, while outside their walls Italy fortifies its borders against citizens of neighbouring states.

As an increasing number of nations are welcomed to occupy the Biennale, incoming refugees in the surrounding province of Veneto continue to be directly targeted. Violent protests against migrants settled in Treviso have prompted Luca Zaia – President of Veneto and leader of Northern League, the right-wing extremists leading the protests – to declare, “No more refugees will be arriving” in the province.[^2]

This year’s main exhibition makes close contact with these issues, operating in the midst of the migrant crisis. Working directly with non-citizens on Italian soil, Canadian artists Adrian Blackwell, Elle Flanders and Tamira Sawatzky sought to combat territorial amnesia at the Biennale. Their performance _Migrant Choir_ brought a chorus of recent migrants to the Ferrara region into the Giardini to sing the national anthems of Italy, France and Great Britain before their respective pavilions.

The majority of migrants seeking refuge globally are fleeing countries once colonized by these three nations, whose bloody anthems call for the fortification of borders and the scattering of enemies. However, choir members Isaac Akhidenor and Stephne Koumtozou insisted that they felt no hostility when singing the anthems’ lyrics – only joy at being able to feel that they belong. Crowds gathered on August 13 as their voices moved from the isolated Italian pavilion to the open gardens of the Giardini. Perhaps visitors joined in song out of habit, or as an act of solidarity, or simply out of a common awareness of what it means to belong to a place. Rather than   
re-inscribing the divisive lines between nations, the anthems, in this context, become affirmative declarations of citizenship for those designated as non-citizens. 

For many, the flags on display at the Biennale represent unattainable rights and freedoms. Blackwell, Flanders and Sawatzky, who partnered with co-operatives and organizations in Ferrara to realize their project, participate in what artist Mariam Ghani calls “loaning their own leverage” by acting in solidarity with migrant workers. Sitting alongside Noah Fischer at the Gulf Labour panel, Ghani described this method for redistributing agency: a way of building alliances across borders, and promoting transnational sharing of knowledge and power.

In a culturally saturated city, where many self-declared “watershed” exhibitions are quickly forgotten, it is challenging for an artist to make a lasting and visible impact on civic life. However, pavilions that highlight a number of artists across many nationalities build solidarity across physical borders, and rupture cultural borders. Each day the need for more porous borders becomes more urgent, and with 1.4 million refugees expected to arrive in Europe before the next Biennale, national pavilions may be called to loan their leverage.[^3]

_Amanda Shore_ is a freelance writer and curator based in Halifax. She is currently living in Venice, Italy studying the performance of nationalism at the Biennale.

##### Rinaldo Walcott

At the end of April, I passed through the Munich airport while returning home from Athens. At the passport control, an official asked me, “Where is Bridgetown?,” referring to the city in Barbados where I was born. Once again, the gate attendant asked me, “Where is Bridgetown?” And in a final and new twist, just before I went down the ramp to board my plane to Toronto, German police took a look at my passport and asked me, “Where is Bridgetown?” As you might imagine, I was quite annoyed by the repeated questioning, and it was only later, during the current Canadian federal election, that I found out that the Harper government had instituted new controls overseas to prevent persons who might enter Canada and claim refugee status from doing so. One of the most significant things about Canadian passports is that they include one’s place of birth, forever making clear to all its carriers who are not born in Canada that their citizenship is conditional or at least not fully “native” Canadian. 

After reflecting on my Munich experience, I suddenly felt a certain kind of anxiety about returning to Europe for the opening of the Venice Biennale in early May. I fully expected to be questioned at the passport control, given that it had been a mere five days since the Athens trip. However, this time I wasn’t subject to the repeated questioning I’d received the week before, and my passage through Munich was pleasantly uneventful. I recall this story of moving across borders because I think it is germane to the kind of intervention that Okwui Enwezor attempted to make with his curation of the 56th Venice Biennale. Titled “All the World’s Futures,” one cannot help but think about crossing borders. Why does the notion of “all the world’s futures” produce a moment for me to think about borders? The backdrop of Enwezor’s intervention has to be read in relation to the mass migration of Africans across the Mediterranean and from South America and the Caribbean to North America. When Enwezor’s curatorial practice is read alongside the waves of migration that are positioned to potentially transform Europe – and unlike during previous periods of colonialism, this transformation is not entirely within Europe’s control – we begin to see some flaws in his vision. Enwezor’s intervention might be read as diasporic, and therefore beyond nation, but it still does not leave nation-states behind, because diaspora peoples always find themselves in a nation-space somehow which is always its central problematic. The migrants making their way across Europe, especially African migrants, exist in a state of post-citizenship. By this, I mean that even though they may have come from nation-spaces, they are forced to reject those spaces and to inhabit new spaces where they are much more concerned with achieving a life than their relationship to any kind of patrimony. Indeed, their movement confounds what citizenship is and illuminates the exclusionary work of citizenship. More importantly, their movement reveals the ways in which citizenship is a disciplinary apparatus.

So here is my critique of Enwezor’s curatorial vision for the Biennale: it works with liberalism’s notion that we all have a place and therefore are citizens somewhere. However, this assumption is confounded by the recent waves of African migrants as they occupy and begin to transform Europe in a rude kind of way – and in reality, enact “the world’s future.” What I am getting at here is the way Enwezor’s curatorial intervention brings a record number of African/Black artists to the Biennale, but in doing so, unwittingly undoes citizenship as container for any possible freedom.

My return to Europe and the trepidation I felt as the plane landed confirmed for me the problem of Enwezor’s project. Asked where I was headed with my Canadian passport, and saying with confidence, “the Venice Biennale,” I entered Italy with ease. As I crossed the border, I looked back to notice all the Africans behind me, with the multiple documents they needed for their own crossing, and for whom possessing a passport is simply not enough. Like all these passports, Enwezor’s intervention simply is not enough. From my point of view, the Zimbabwe pavilion is one of the most exciting shows taking up Enwezor’s theme. But it is also an offsite pavilion, neither in the Giardini nor in the Arsenale. Indeed its offsite position is an unwitting critique of Enwezor’s theme as it simultaneously tells us where we might look to glimpse all the world’s futures.

_Rinaldo Walcott_ is the Director of the Women and Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto. He attended the Venice Biennale as part of the project, “Expanded Context: Black Canadian Curators at the 56th Venice Biennale,” funded by The Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

##### Leah Snyder

This past August, during a steamy morning in Venice, I listened to visual historian, artist and curator Jolene Rickard address an international crowd of cultural provocateurs on the concept of wampum. Rickard is of the Tuscarora Nation and on that particular day she was speaking as part of the Creative Time Summit “Geography of Learning” session. For an audience seeking transformative knowledge, she affirmed “Indigenous cultures are art and today we use art as our wampum belt for change.”

Many speak on the deep knowledge that is embedded in wampums like the Kaswhenta (Two Row Wampum).[^1]

I have listened to knowledge keepers “read” the belts on land that is traditionally Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe. It is poignant to hear the wampums explained in areas historically implicated in breaking the agreements they represent. The words are moving because they offer pathways forward to right relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, many who have arrived as newcomers in search of freedom. This time the words hung suspended in ambiguity. Venice is at a great distance from the lands the wampums represent. On the grounds of the Biennale, with its bordered spaces promoting patriotism and its flag-waving, the concepts of wampum were difficult to link to the critique of nation states’ relations with immigrants, migrants and refugees – the theme of both the Summit and the Biennale. Rickard was tasked with inserting Indigenous concepts and symbology into a location dominated by signifiers of colonization and to a crowd largely unaware of the deep history wampums represent. She also only had 10 short minutes to do this. Without the reinforcement of other Indigenous perspectives challenging representations of belonging, her task was not easy. Separated from the insight provided when located on the land the wampum is referencing, it became apparent how symbols, like flags, inundate our understanding (or misunderstanding) of peoples’ connection to place.

A wampum can mark trade agreements or alliances made during times of war. One of the other functions of wampum is to represent relationship-building between people who share space in a particular territory. When a wampum is “read” its function is to recall the relationships formed as a result of that agreement. Wampum is a mnemonic device or visual marker that cues the memory of those people present as to the specifics of the agreement it represents. The parties involved can stand in front of each other and reconnect by sharing the original story that birthed that particular wampum. Action is inherent in the concept of wampum as relationships are ever-evolving and transforming.

Flags, on the other hand, are historically connected to colonialism, representing a static hierarchy of top-down power within even the most “progressive” of nation states. For those fleeing their homeland, flags become double-edged swords offering a visual symbol of freedom that can also be linked to poverty and other forms of oppression upon entering the new territory. For all the artistic critique of flags (Pedro Lasch’s _How to Know: The Protocols and Pedagogy of National Abstraction_), nationalism (Indian Raqs Media Collective’s _Coronation Park_) and the exploitation of migrants (the interventions by Gulf Labor Artist Coalition) at both the Biennale and the Summit, alternatives that countered the visual iconography of colonialism were in short supply.

In those 10 short minutes, though, Rickard shared how Indigenous artists like Alan Michelson, Marie Watt, and Denise Deadman use the representation of wampum as an artistic intervention into colonized spaces. “As artists,” Rickard stated, “we transform the Kaswhenta into a living symbol.” As the stifling heat baked the earth outside where we gathered in the Arsenale, Rickard reminded the us that, “in the moment of war and ecological collapse,the Haudenosaunee are enacting the principle of the Two Row to call for peace and equity.”

We have arrived at an intimate global moment. Populations displaced by war and resource extraction and Indigenous peoples are linked together in a complex embrace. Indigenous peoples have always been impacted by migration and as a result have devised and utilized political and social mechanisms, like wampum, to peacefully integrate newcomers into their communities. For Rickard the “Kaswhenta is a path from violence to peace” – a way out from under the oppression of nation states as well as a prototype for moving forward with equitable relations. Foregrounding the interventions of Indigenous artists within the landscape of the Biennale would have offered reinforcement to Okwui Enwezor’s curatorial proposition that art has the capacity to provide the world with both an exit as well as a future.

_Leah Snyder_ is the Editor of Mixed Bag Mag, an online magazine that includes both Indigenous and immigrant perspectives on contemporary culture in Canada. This past August, along with a delegation of artists and curators, Leah attended the Creative Time Summit held at the Venice Biennale.

[^1]: Gulf Labor Coalition, “A New Wave of Arts Activism?” Panel discussion, Biennale di Venezia, August 5, 2015\. 
[^2]: See “Clashes, arrests as neofascists, locals protest new migrant center near Rome,” _ADN Kronos_ (Rome), July 17, 2015,and Stephanie Kirchgaessner, “Clear out African Migrants, Lega Nord governor orders in stand-off with Rome,” The Guardian, June 13, 2015\. 
[^3]: See, “UN Agency expects 1.4mn migrants over next two years,” _France 24_, October 1, 2015.
[^4]: The Kaswhenta, or Two Row Wampum is one of the oldest recorded wampum agreements between Indigenous people and Europeans, negotiated in 1613 (in this case, the Haudenosaunee and the Dutch). The Two Row Wampum depicts lines of white and purple shell beads. Two purple rows signify a canoe and a ship traveling side by side in the river of life. It represents agreements based on the ideas of mutual respect and noninterference.

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These writers revisit projects and presentations at the Venice Biennale that offer alternative models for practicing and engaging with citizenship that are “nuanced, complicated and poetic,” including Public Studio and Adrian Blackwell’s performative intervention Migrant Choir. They further ruminate on the idealistic curatorial intervention of Okwui Enwezor, and the dialogue generated between Indigenous peoples and recently displaced populations during the Creative Time Summit. 

Questioning Citizenship at the Venice Biennale: Responses and Interventions

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Sound

Human Rights

Video

Queer artists, performers and activists challenge, redefine and criticize mainstream ideas of citizenship by presenting a queer citizen-subjects that are excluded from popular media representations of LGBT identity. Chang examines works that “articulate the complex societal and civic protections that govern the binary between gay-friendly and homophobic realities” by harnessing the evocative potential of noise. 

Shout, Shout Let It All Out

Designer

Publisher

Artist Project

Artist

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Cities

Technology

Narrative

Surveillance

This Artist Project is derived from Coburn’s field work in Songdo, South Korea, which is advertised as an “ubiquitous” or “U-city,” where smart technologies are implemented throughout urban design. This fictional text is narrated from the perspective of an employee of the Integrated Operations Centre, who monitors surveillance and sensor data generated throughout the city. Coburn interviewed employees of the Centre, as well as members of the technology and real estate companies, in the summer of 2014\. 

I preferred my old skin to this one, but don't know where it went...

Review

_Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada_ assembles a selection of essays that probe the relevance of the categories “Canadian” and “art” in a globalized neoliberal society founded on values of individualism, economic and technological progress, property ownership and utilitarianism. Central to the book’s argument is the contention that “Canadian art history,” as the discipline is currently practiced, replicates neoliberal values, often in the name of concepts like “creative economy.” Drawn from several discussions that have been taking place since 2006 at the Universities Art Association Conference (UAAC) and Canadian Art Association (CAA) conferences, and crystallized in a 2009 workshop at the University of Toronto, the assembled texts all aim, in some way, to re-envision the discipline. The book’s editors, Lynda Jessup, Erin Morton and Kirsty Robertson, begin the text with a provocative introduction – one that sets out to trouble the existence of such a thing as Canada. Among other things, their compelling introduction muses on inclusion and the canon. They ask whether simply adding underrepresented works to the Canadian canon actually destabilizes its underlying principles. They also include the thought-experiment-like suggestion that, instead of opting to insert Indigenous art into an existing canon of historical Canadian art, the National Gallery of Canada could instead curate a Canadian gallery “from an Indigenous perspective of what a ‘National Gallery of Canada’ might mean.”

The assembled texts range wildly in their scope, from Kristy A. Holmes’ inquiry into the intersection of feminist art and nationalism in the 1960s and ’70s to Susan Cahill’s case study of an exhibition  
of Afghan war rugs at the Textile Museum of Canada. Each essay differs in tone and approach, but the uniting feature among them is an attempt to demonstrate how the study of visual culture in Canada might be done in a way mindful of the dangers of nationalism and neoliberalism. The best contributions go further than mindfulness of art’s mobilization as a tool for creating narratives that support the dominant ideologies of the nation state to propose some solutions to the entanglements artists and cultural workers regularly face in their attempts to position their work within the overarching organizational schema of “Canadian.”

Some of the tactics are simple gestures – wordplay and reversals of language emerge as successful strategies for shifting the conversation. For example, the editors’ decision to avoid pigeonholing the subject matter of this book by calling it “Canadian art” (which might suggest some uniting } feature of Canada and art), opting instead for “the visual in Canada.” Mark Cheetham, in his piece on the trend of likening Canadian artists to artists of other nationalities (Homer Watson as the “Canadian Constable” and Jack Chambers as the “Canadian Puvis de Chavannes”) plays with this cross-cultural comparison by also comparing the two with each other, and Chambers with Gerhard Richter, highlighting the way that such likening could disrupt geographical  
and temporal boundaries.

Heather Igloliorte’s article is a powerful assertion of the link between art and sovereignty. This link is discussed elsewhere in the text, but it is often as a critique of the colonial impulse to assert sovereignty over Canada through artistic practice and display. In Igloliorte’s essay, however, art production is a tool for the affirmation of Inuit sovereignty, achieved through an emphasis on the articulation of Inuit principles of collective purpose _(piliriqatigiingiq)_, consensus _(Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit)_ and serving the common good _(Pijitsirarniq)_. Richard Hill provokes with an examination of Jimmie Durham’s practice as a way to think through the assimilatory agenda that comes through neoliberal capitalism. Hill suggests an attention to the “local, the specific, the out of the way and the impractical” can provide a resistance to being co-opted into white, middle-class, politically neutralized models of citizenship. There are some beautiful kernels of almost-tangible  
advice here.

As I read this book, however, I was left wondering at the real lack of solutions to the struggles of visual culture in a globalized era that remains decidedly racist and complacent in (if not ferociously supportive of) the construction of its arbitrary borders. Wouldn’t it be amazing if the editorial team for this volume had mobilized some of their funding towards something radically experimental – say, a reorganization of a national collection from an Indigenous perspective of Canadian nationhood? Or, what if this text had taken the form of a toolkit for academics and curators supporting artistic practices that reject or transgress borders? What if this had been a book about re-imagining studying the visual in Canada that didn’t only include Canadian scholars writing on Canadian topics? Weirder and more provocative still, and in the tradition of wordplay and subversion already living in this tome, what if the book was structured in such a way as  
to avoid using the word “Canada” altogether?

I’m dreaming. These possibilities are so far outside the purview of this kind of academic text. But if the goal is to reimagine, unsettle or intervene in the way art is mobilized in our society as a tool for  
nationalism, I do wonder why there is not a little more dreaming in this book. While it advances solid criticism of museums and galleries, of individual writers, artists, granting bodies, and other institutional structures, a critique of the academy itself is sorely missing (Alice Ming Wai Jim’s brilliant study of the “ethno-cultural” art history survey course aside). After all, aren’t periodization and geographical distinction academic constructs? 

Reading Jennifer VanderBurgh’s article, included in this text’s last chapter, which queries the role of Telefilm Canada in deciding what film and TV gets supported here by virtue of its success at fulfilling certain criteria of Canadianness, I’m reminded of the parallels between that particular funding body and the funders that supported the production of this book. The Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Canada Book Fund, and publisher McGill–Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History all prioritize Canadian authors and Canadian subjects, even citing the use of Canadian sources as key to their eligibility for funding. Rather than speculate on how the Canadian academic funding structure might have implications for the radicality and experimentalism of this text, I’d like to borrow VanderBurgh’s words on Telefilm as a kind of oblique reflection: “As long as the methods by which \[…\] texts are produced, distributed, and received in Canada is determined by state incentives, regulations, and policies, the nation-state is an inherent part of the texts produced in this location.”

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This article reviews the book, “Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada”, which attempts to address concepts such as “Canadian” and “Art” through a selection of essays. 

Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual In Canada, Edited by Lydna Jessup, Erin Morton and Kirsty Robertson

**Steffanie Ling** is a producer of criticism, pamphlets, stories, essays, exhibitions, reviews, bluntness, anecdotes, shout outs, wrestling storylines, proposals, applications, jokes, readings, minimal poems, poems, dinner, compliments and diatribes. Her books are _Nascar_ (Blank Cheque, 2016) and _Cuts of Thin Meat_ (Spare Room, 2015).

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This article reviews Benjamin Seror’s exhibition at 221A in Vancouver, presented from Sept. 12 to Oct. 24, 2015.

Mime Radio; a novel, an exhibition and a performance

Jon Lockyer is the Director of Artspace in Peterborough, Ontario.

From pandemics to famine and environmental catastrophes, the idea of the Apocalypse has managed to intrigue and entertain for generations. Through literature, film and the visual arts, invocations of these world-ending scenarios continue to capture our collective imaginations. While these fictitious dystopian worlds are often based on real-world occurrences, or speak directly to our collective unease with the world we inhabit, there are few that have experienced the nightmarish conditions brought on by the Apocalypse.

In that vein, a recent conversation with Candice Hopkins put forward the following question: “After up to 90 percent of the continental population of Indigenous peoples has been lost as a result of the inherent violence of ongoing settler colonialism, who would understand the end of worlds better than Indigenous peoples?”[^1] This is the starting point for _An Evening Redness in the West_, a new group exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Curated by Hopkins – MoCNA’s Chief Curator – the exhibition features work from 11 artists and collectives from Canada and the United States. Its curatorial vision is built around the central idea of the Apocalypse as interpreted from Indigenous perspectives. The exhibition’s title is taken from Cormac McCarthy’s novel _Blood Meridian_ (1985), which captures the banality of the violence that was implicit in the ideology of Manifest Destiny and its enactment in the settlement of the American West. This ideology was foundational in the shaping of the present-day state of New Mexico and its surrounding regions, both on a cultural and geographical level.

The exhibition is a curatorial progression of Hopkins’ previous work on the 2011 exhibition _Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years_, in which Hopkins and her co-curators considered the legacy and ongoing influence of colonization, and possible futures for Indigenous peoples as imagined by a collection of international Indigenous artists and writers. Grounded in a southwestern perspective, this new exhibition addresses the cultural genocide and environmental degradation that have created Apocalypse-like conditions for Indigenous peoples and their communities for more than 500 years. In doing so, the exhibition acknowledges that while the Apocalypse brings our present world to an end, it also gives birth to the possibilities of a new future.

It was appropriate, then, that the exhibition’s opening events coincided with the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts’ (SWAIA) annual Santa Fe Indian Market. Taking place over a two-day period following the third Thursday in August and located in and around the historic Santa Fe Plaza, Indian Market has been a staple of the Santa Fe community since its inception in September 1922\. Indian Market has also allowed generations of Indigenous artists from Canada and the United States the opportunity to generate significant revenue – artists retain 100 percent of all sales – as well as exposure of their work to the more than 100,000 local and international visitors whose patronage brings millions of dollars into the local economy each year. However, since its inception, Indian Market has been a public exercise in the unbridled consumption of Indigenous art by predominantly white buyers, collectors, and gallerists.[^2] Indian Market and its inseparable connection to the city of Santa Fe foster an ongoing romantic understanding of the American west and a disassociation from the colonization of both land and people.

The exhibition stands in stark defiance of this fantastical engagement with Indigenous visual and material culture that transpires. On the eve of Indian Market, Death Convention Singers’ sonic procession wove its way through the streets of the Santa Fe Plaza, in jarring opposition to the Plaza’s festive vibes, creating an atmosphere akin to an Acid Western. The performance became a point of decentralization, functioning as both a critique of and replacement for the capitalist structure of the looming Market, with the sprawling deserts of New Mexico standing in for a post-apocalyptic landscape.

Duane Linklater’s _Tautology_ (2011–2013) is a counterpoint to the gaudy neon “Cowboy and Indian” signs that hang in the windows of haute couture western wear shops surrounding the Santa Fe Plaza. Challenging the racist iconography of the countless Hollywood Westerns that are projected in these shops is Linklater’s thunderbird, an Anishinaabe cultural symbol imbued with deep spiritual meaning that acts as a mediator between worlds. Linklater’s work is a symbolic gesture that functions as a site for the cultural empowerment and rejuvenation of Indigenous peoples in the face of objectification and appropriation.

Similarly, sculptural and textile works by Naomi Bebo, Virgil Ortiz and Rose B. Simpson elicit a menacing beauty while referencing the survival, adaptability and resistance of Indigenous peoples – what Anishinaabe author and scholar Gerald Vizenor has termed _survivance_.[^3] For Ortiz and Simpson, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, which saw the Indigenous Pueblo people of Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico (present-day New Mexico) drive out the territory’s Spanish colonizers, serves as inspiration for their storefront installation _Wanderlust_ (2015). Through a series of ceramic masks and costumes, the artists imagine a post-apocalyptic world 500 years after the Pueblo Revolt, where Indigenous people have continued to create new ways to not only adapt, but also thrive in their world. Two works by Bebo address the maintenance of agency in the face of conflict. _Beaded Mask_ (2010) and _Woodland Child in Gas Mask_ (2015) use Woodland beadwork to ornately adorn objects of necessity – in this case, gas masks. Each mask is a signifier of not only one’s ability to survive, but also to find new and meaningful cultural forms of expression and empowerment.

The message behind Hopkins’ curatorial vision and the work of the artists included in the exhibition is both refreshing and necessary, not only within the context of the Santa Fe Indian Market, but also in terms of understanding larger geopolitical conditions. As a reminder of how such conditions are experienced by many Indigenous peoples, a large glass jug sealed with a cork plug sits under a vitrine at the entrance to MoCNA’s main gallery. The jug contains a radiant orange liquid taken from the contaminated Animas River that runs through the states of Colorado and New Mexico in the traditional territories of the Ute and Navajo peoples. In August 2015, the Animas turned a Tang-like hue as nearly 3 million gallons of mine tailings leaked into the river. Deposited in the gallery by Death Convention Singers at the completion of their performance, it is a bleak reminder that the Apocalypse does not exist as a fictitious occurrence but is something that we live within and that we, in turn, contribute to the makings of our world’s end. This is by no means new territory for Indigenous peoples. Like so many foundational works of dystopian and apocalyptic fiction, _An Evening Redness in the West_ situates itself as part of a much larger conversation concerning the world’s end by invoking the terrifying realities of our collective history.

[^1]: The author in con- versation with Candice Hopkins, September 9, 2015.
[^2]: All artists who partic- ipate in the SWAIA Indian Market must provide and display proof of enrolment in a tribe recognized  
by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the United States.
[^3]: To read more on the concept of survivance see Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners; Postindian Warriors of Survivance, Wesleyan UP, 1993.

issue-128-p57-59.pdf

This article reviews the group exhibition, presented at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA) in Sante Fe, from August 21 – December 31, 2015\. Curated by Candice Hopkins.

An Evening Redness in the West

issue-128-p59-61.pdf

This article reviews the exhibition by Sameer Farooq and Mirjam Linschooten at Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga. Presented June 14 to Aug. 2, 2015.

The Figure in the Carpet

Ben Portis is a curator and writer based in Toronto.

issue-128-p60-62.pdf

This article reviews the exhibition by Rana Hamadeh, presented at Gallery TPW, Toronto from June 3 to July 25, 2015.

Can You Pull In An Actor With A Fishhook Or Tie Down His Tongue With A Rope?

issue-128-p62-64.pdf

This article reviews the exhibition by R. Murray Schafer, presented at Luminato Festival, Toronto from June 26-28, 2015.

Apocalypsis

Jane Affleck is a PhD candidate in the Cultural Studies program at Trent University, a part-time instructor at NSCAD University and a freelance writer.

issue-128-p63-65.pdf

This article reviews two bodies of work, presented alongside one another. Thierry Delva’s Drawings from the Heart: Reproductions, and Paulette Phillips: The Directed Lie, were   
brought together by Dalhousie Art Gallery Curator Peter Dykhuis and were shown from Aug. 28 to Nov. 22, 2015.

Drawings from the Heart: Reproductions and Paulette Phillips: The Directed Lie

Angela Jerardi is a freelance curator and writer currently living in Amsterdam.

Plastic banana, sitting in an old wooden box, its handles strung as a simple zither; a conch shell with a recorder mouthpiece protruding out the top; a brass horn, playing the shallow pool of water at his feet; a trombone (vaguely), with a black bulbous end, like a turkey baster; a tin box for rice or cookies – maroon red, decorated with an quasi-orientalist scene on its sides – married with a clarinet; a garish assembly of yellow, blue and orange paperboard cereal and cracker boxes, each with a simple wooden handle attached, now rattle and shake as maracas; the cry of a pair of cats in a squabble erupting from a faux rock, sporting a shiny chrome grill on its front from which the sound escapes; a shiny photo of a starfish, punctured by a simple plastic recorder; a small piece of cloth on the floor, acting as a doormat; an antique Esso oil drum, hit with a mallet topped by a red rubber ball, a low timbre.

_Boooooom, cling, clang, shuffle, shuffle, ping, boiiiing- swish, squeal, creak, crack, schwip, zwap, zap, clack, blop, bap, boop, boom, choooooo-chooooooo, plomp, plap, screeeeech_, A tentative silence, followed by clapping and the collective sound of human murmuring. Feet shuffling out of the room. Then, quiet.

First installed at La Loge in Brussels, Gareth Moore’s _A Burning Bag as a Smoke-Grey Lotus_ fits the space of Stroom in Den Haag as though in its natural home. Six large dioramas are arranged around the room, each with similar rectangular dimensions. They are simple enclosures, framed by avocado-coloured wood, and lined with a flexible plastic mesh netting or taut chicken wire. The base of each diorama is made of a different material: earth, cement, water, sand, roll-on roofing or carpet. Painted in a style reminiscent of trends in house painting from the ’90s, each has its own sponge-painted backdrop: aqua, drab green-grey, warm yellow. The small booklet accompanying the exhibition explains that the six backdrops are canvas on wooden stretchers, the paint made from a mixture of tempera, acrylic or seasonal paint with a single, seemingly symbolic addition: concrete, cuttlefish ink, engine oil, fish food, rat poison, leaves and wallpaper, respectively. Inside each enclosure is a carefully orchestrated _mise en scène_, a motley crew of performers as objects/objects as performers, a collection of characters that can be played. Lacking the intervention of a sextet of human interlocutors to prod and poke these performers, it might feel as though you have arrived at the scene at just the wrong time. Or maybe not – perhaps it’s been abandoned for quite some time? Or could it be that once you turn your back, the objects themselves will begin to jig and swing?

In my imagination, outside the confines of present time and space, this room is in fact the astoundingly well-preserved remains of the zoo-like enclosures of a neo-Victorian reptile and avian appreciation society. Sometime in the not-too-distant future, humans develop a deep fascination with the advanced societies of reptiles and birds. Having eclipsed human society with their advancements in sonic communication long ago, reptiles and birds have since became enamored with fabricating and playing myriad simple hand-made vernacular musical instruments for their edification and pleasure. Using found materials, primarily made of human tools and refuse, they have concocted a wide array of instruments making a cacophony of sound. Naturally, some humans then decided it would be nice to hold these creatures and their instruments captive, putting them on display for their enjoyment.

This future fable may or may not be true, but regardless, there is something eerie about this space. The objects and their placement, the particularity of each tableau, the disposition of the enclosures and the circuitous route they offer the visitor intimates a place of ritual and habit, tied up with time. While chatting with two of the musicians performing the day I visited the art space, I learn that there is a time-based score for the works. Each instrument is tied to a time of day, e.g. “First Light,” “When the sun is at its highest,” or “Watering (Ablutions)”. Sound and performance become a means of demarcating time.

Calling to mind the tone of vernacular architecture in the southern US, _A Burning Bag as a Smoke-Grey Lotus_ feels unapologetically nostalgic. A romantic and careful tale unfolds, veering close to preciousness – a whimsy in line with the visual motif of Wes Anderson’s _Moonrise Kingdom_. I feel the pull of an alternative narrative, an idiosyncratic mythology carrying a bevy of hidden stories. It treads closely to Americana folklore and the allure of solitary adventure – a manifest destiny of sorts. And yet, the character of the instruments continues to compel. Even when devoid of human performers and visitors, there is an electric hum to the space’s near soundlessness.

Beginning in the late 1960s, a nascent academic field began to study the soundscapes of human environments. Founded by R. Murray Schafer and his team at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, the field of acoustic ecology studies hoped to envision ecologically balanced soundscapes where the relationship between the human community and its sonic environment would be in harmony. This idea of soundscapes encapsulates both the so-called natural acoustic environment, including animal vocalizations and the sounds of weather and other natural elements, and environmental sounds created by humans, through musical composition, and other ordinary human activities, including conversation, work and those resulting from the development and use of industrial technology. This research attempted to foreground an understanding of the shared aural condition of inter-species life, which leads me to wonder if sound and music could be seen as a phenomenon of inherent inter-species sociality. In one of the Homeric Hymns, Hermes is said to have invented the lyre when he discovered that the shell of a tortoise, used as a resonant body, produced sound. But it is precisely in the void of the shell’s life from which its newfound animation derives. The potentiality of its animation and the violence of its seemingly deadened state become a paradox of human engagement with our social and environmental milieu. While this quandary is not likely resolvable via rational thought, it is certainly deserving of our attention and of Moore’s continuing, quiet interrogation.

issue-128-p65-67.pdf

This article reviews Gareth Moore’s exhibition, displayed at The Hague from July 5 – Sept 20, 2015.

A Burning Bag as a Smoke-Grey Lotus

Tiziana La Melia is an artist and writer based in Vancouver.

On September 1, I am making my way to _Duty Free_, the Feminist Land Art Retreat’s (now going by the rubric FLAR) first solo exhibition, with the Studio for Propositional Cinema, in Dusseldorf, Germany. FLAR got together in 2010, in Vancouver, formed out of a desire by, and for, young women artists to create an oral space, for fluids of thought to flow freely, to drink together.

I remember the first FLAR poster, tacked above the toilet at Exercise Projects, Vancouver, printed on cheap, yellow tabloid-format office paper. It invited anyone who noticed it to “the retreat.” Robert Smithson’s _Spiral Jetty_ (1970), copy pasted and doubled under the title, connects the micro and macro, reading both as the iconic work, but also like a giant intrauterine device. Initially, FLAR expressed itself through the making of one poster a year. The simplicity of the design gives it a retro feel somehow, and contributes to a sense of fiction surrounding the project. _Is the retreat happening? If yes, how do I attend?_ Many people who left the washroom expressed curiosity  
and desire.

Back in Dusseldorf, I am two days early, an escape from the routine of my own life, with no intention to report on the project. I arrive imagining myself as the first guest at the inaugural retreat. Jet-lagged, I nap on Styrofoam, which I later break up into popcornsized bits that get sprinkled between a layer of concrete, later poured into derelict desk drawers, at times interrupted by pipes, or poured into plastic basins. This work consists of a champagne fountain built in the centre of the gallery, which is set within the former studio of Swiss artist and writer Daniel Spoerri, whose name, still scrawled over the door in red paint, adds to the mythos and excitement surrounding the fountain’s unveiling. 

Long rods of hand-bent and welded rebar appear to impale the brutalist forms, spelling out the acronym/ logo _F – L – A – R_. The rebar letters function as both a formal declaration and a weapon-like, piercing gesture that resonates with Pipilotti Rist’s swing of a flower stem in _Ever is Over All_ (1997), the two-channel videowhere she skips down the street in a blue dress, breaking car windows with a flower. Water hyacinths float amidst the islands of concrete, brutalist blocks, at times interrupted by pvc pipes that reference Nancy Holt’s _Sun Tunnels_ (1976). If the fountain is a metaphor for the body, then the artists are the fountain-keepers. The fountain spits into the pentagram-shaped base that collects the drool, or you could also call it jizz. This fountain is tasteful yet subtly crass. It was made through the process of working together. I even help myself, in my half-asleep state.

Two new posters were made for the exhibition (a display of the full suite of FLAR ephemera was on  
display in a studio across from the gallery). The one poster accompanying _Duty Free_ depicts an aerial map of Dusseldorf, with an x plotting the site of the fountain. In addition to airports, the exhibition title also speaks (by its absence of speech) to the fact that this, along with all of FLAR’s endeavours, so far insists on the refrain, allowing the project to form its identities slowly, thereby allowing itself to be open to negotiation and to be in conversation with others. It provides no answers. 

It is in its restraint that _Duty Free_ opens up a space for me to fantasize about what a retreat might  
look like. About what it might feel like to be free, as any marginalized group or individual might struggle to be spared from — of justifying itself. This, of course, comes from the position that cis women, for instance, are not only asked to explain, they also often become overly preoccupied by expectations to explain. FLAR has taken up, with the plainness of explaining, the elegance of the office, with a corporate or militant black and white aesthetic. And this has been done from an off-kilter “secretary’s” point of view, wearing makeup. Furthermore, there seems to be a preoccupation with the artworks and personas coming out of canonized conceptual, minimal, and land art. I am a bit wary of the endeavour to destabilize these legacies now, mainly because I would rather not encounter, yet again, the legacies and blind spots that canonical artists enact or represent. For example, what does the subtle gesture of adding a lipstick stain to a glass in a restaged Ian Wallace picture (composed for an earlier poster) say? Is it a reminder that there was a lady in the house (the whole time)?

The second poster for the show promotes FLAR‘S first performance, on Sunday, September 6, titled _Throw Your Voice_. This took place at the Dan Graham Pavilion outside of K21, organized by _Seira’s_, another anonymous collective. In this one, inky cursive writing is splayed out like a spider’s web over a picture of the artist taking a picture with her iPhone of the deep gash in the mirrored glass of the pavilion. Minute evidence of cosmetic entropy is evident through details such as the photographer’s chipped nail polish. 

During the performance, viewers huddle around a FLAR member who controls the volume from an amp in the middle of the pavilion, while a second person monitors a computer from the other side. Recordings of a mother and a sister’s adaptation of Dan Graham’s _Performer/Audience/Mirror_ (1975) exercise recorded in their homes play. Their voices, distinguished by what linguists call “vocal fry,” hint at a proprioceptive description of the boundary between their bodies and the environment. The artists approximate, vocal/genetic doubles, use an inflection, grain and rhythm that exemplifies voices negatively interpreted as “insecure, emotional or even stupid” in the media and by the general public over the past year, usurping “up speak” as the most annoying vocal trend (I do both).[^1]

The performance ends with a B-52’s song, _Hero Worship_, which Graham wrote about in his essay “New Wave Rock and the Feminine” (1980–4). The sound gets louder as a shovel is passed over the pavilion’s wall while another hand passes over an apple tree. I find the gesture of planting a tree deeply tender, despite my initial reaction to it as cheesy. It is a way of tending to the structure, planting something that will continue giving: hopefully sustenance, shade, comfort. This gesture brings care to a thing active within its own state of entropy. If it’s allowed to grow there, I look forward to returning to the apple tree some day in the future to see its unkempt branches pushing over the pavilion’s cracked mirrors.

[^1]: Linguistic professors say that these types of inflection reveal empathy, serving as a kind of tool for building relationships between people. (See Douglas Querqua, “They’re, Like, Way Ahead of the Linguistic Currrrve”, in the _New York Times_, February 28, 2012: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/science/young-women-often-trendsetters-in-vocal-patterns.html)

issue-128-p66-68.pdf

This article reviews the exhibition by Feminist Land Art Retreat (FLAR), with the Studio for Propositional Cinema, in Dusseldorf, Germany from September 4 to October 4, 2015\. 

Duty Free: Feminist Land Art Retreat

issue-128-p70-72.pdf

This article reviews the book “Babe”, a printed anthology of work previously featured on Collin’s curated digital domain “The Ardorous”.

Babe, Edited by Petra Collins

issue-128-p71-73.pdf

This article reviews two books edited by Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin, which examine the structural potential of books to present material in the same way that curated exhibitions present artworks.

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Issue 128