Column

Syrus is a Vanier scholar, visual artist, activist, curator and educator. For the past 13 years, Syrus was the Coordinator of the Art Gallery of Ontario Youth Program and is currently a facilitator/designer at The Banff Centre and the inaugural artist-in-residence at Daniels Spectrum in Toronto. Syrus is a long time activist, and a core team member of Black Lives Matter- Toronto.

“The dominance of language and writing has come to stand for meaning itself. Live, embodied practices not based in linguistic or literary codes, we must assume, have no claims on meaning…It’s imperative now, however overdue, to pay attention to the repertoire.” – Diana Taylor[^1] 

It’s 2025\. 

I’m running, as usual. The time it takes to get to the water station leaves me with little time to get back to the group before our nightly gathering. I really don’t need to sign up for the water shift as often as I do – there are enough people in our pod to share all the tasks. But I love the journey the time alone to think, to be, to be solo. One of the hardest things about the _Changes_ is the lack of alone time, the lack of individual moments of quiet to think and to feel free. I mean, we have a bigger _Freedom_ – one that makes the lack of personal space and alone time feel relatively manageable – but I still miss the general “aloneness” of life before the revolution. 

I slow my pace and adjust the water carrier on my back. I feel the weight of it, the heaviness of the water, but also of what it represents. We fought with our people at Standing Rock and in New Orleans and on Haida Gwaii and in Attawapiskat to protect this water, which has come to mean everything in life after the _Changes_. I should have brought something to read. I can remember before the _Changes_; I’m old enough to remember details that many in our pod can’t imagine in their wildest dreams. I recall travelling far to go to school, to go to work…trying to read to make the time go faster. I used to walk home from the 52 Lawrence bus in Weston, carefully planning my route to allow me to read and walk. I’d hold my paperback book and try to focus on the words swimming around on the page, moving with each of my steps. Now, we have the retinal share-a-book implants that were from an earlier time in the _Movement_ when we had to share information quickly. Somehow it just doesn’t feel the same. 

I used to love reading about art, about creative practice. We were making so many things back then: objects, paintings and interactions. More and more artists were creating within activist contexts. Yet, I rarely saw writing about our art-based movements. This was back when those in power still thought art was something that needed to be put inside elaborately air-conditioned buildings. Back when they thought that art was something to be seen by a select few – so few that they made sure that admission to their buildings was prohibitively expensive. Back when they knew that this act would keep the creative brilliance inside their walls and away from those who needed its beauty to ignite something in their souls. 

I remember this time. I remember when those who wrote about art wrote about the things hanging and stacked inside the air-conditioned buildings, wilfully ignoring everything else happening on every single inch of the walls, ground, space outside of these walls. 

Back in 2016, when the fires that would bring in the _Big Change_ were just beginning, we made an art gallery on the street in front of the police station in Toronto. We held a 15-day occupation that saw the creation of 20-foot textile installations, countless works on paper, paintings, performance art showcases and dances. We called for an end to anti-Blackness, an end to targeted policing – we called for change through our songs, our drawings, our bodies moving in rhythm. It was nine years ago, but I remember it like it was happening right now – as if we were still there, singing, dancing and singing: “I believe that we will win.” Smoke from traditional medicines being kissed by the fire of elders, syncopated chants fading in and out of my perception. Dancers practising their routines for the rally later that night, curators moving the art that Lido Pimienta, Amber Williams-King and others around on the walls of the public gallery. Large-scale paper ephemera from the earlier performance action at city hall: the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) report in Andrew Loku’s \[2\] case wheatpasted to the entrance of police headquarters. 

In these old memories, everything feels timeless – perhaps what Michelle M. Wright \[3\] wrote about the physics of Blackness has been laced through my thoughts. We exist inside and outside of time and timelines. It is as if today it is nine years ago and we are waking up at the Black Lives Matter #tentcity to the smell of communal pancakes being cooked as if part of some magically useful social practice art project. But it is also nighttime, and there are ciphers made up of hundreds of dancers moving in ecstatic rebellion to the DJs’ beats and the MCs’ rhymes. Mustafa the Poet \[4\] is there, on a flatbed truck, his face lit up by the glorious sunset, telling us that “as long as the sun rises, so shall I.” 

But this isn’t now; it was then. Back when we stood in the middle of the largest Pride march in the country, dropped rainbow smoke bombs with dramatic flair to begin our performance and held an audience of millions in a moment of rebellion, freedom and calls for large-scale change. We set up an arts education hub in front of the SIU, delivering 12 hours of free community arts workshops about prison-industrial complex in Canada. We held a concert that night and rallied for the end of policing, and for the start of community accountability. Artists. Activists. Performers. Political movements moving through elaborate choreography. These memories come flooding back through my cells, an embodied repertoire inside a human machine.

Maybe it was just what Diana Taylor wrote about the archive and the repertoire: how do you archive the unarchivable? Can you ever capture in writing, memory or archive, the lived experience of a performance, really? Could we ever have captured these moments of activism blurred with art?

There was no writing about the art of this movement. There was no writing about the artists who were activists who were artists. So we kept making our own writing. We wrote with fabric, scissors, gold threads pulled tight, “Which side of history are you on?” Because we knew which side we were on.

Funny that this is all now history. That we are here, now. In the _Changes_. In this time when we write our truths on the backs of maple leaves, spraying every surface with graffiti, spending entire days singing and dancing in hypnotic trances.

The dust picks up as I turn the bend in the road. From within swirls of dry clay dust I emerge and see my Black family celebrating in our field, singing, dancing, gathering. I pick up the pace of my run, bringing water with which to caress and bathe each other, to drink until we are never thirsty, to celebrate with our bodies, to create new life.

[^1]: Diana Taylor. _The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas_. Durham. NC: Duke University Press, 2003.
[^2]: Anastasia Cassisi, “Justice for All? An analysis of police brutality in the United States, England & Canada,” in _Global Studies_ (2016).
[^3]: Michelle M. Wright, _Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology_. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
[^4]: http://www.mustafathepoet.com

Writer

Force

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Site-specific

Politics

Activism

Identity

This column examines the use of art as an activist tool and as a product of activism within the context of Black Lives Matter Toronto’s various triumphs during 2016.

On Writing: 2025:  Light Black Years From Now

Wanda Nanibush is an Anishinaabe-kwe image and word warrior, curator, and community organizer from Beausoleil First Nation. She recently won the Toronto Book Award for her coauthored book Moving the Museum. She is the 2025 Helen Frankenthaler Visiting Professor in Curating in the PhD Program in Art History at CUNY. She is also part of the curatorial team for Counterpublic 2026, a triennial civic exhibition in St.
Louis. In 2024, Nanibush was awarded The Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for
Curatorial Excellence. Nanibush founded aabaakwad, an international yearly gathering of over 80 Indigenous curators writers, and artists.

I am a woman of my people  
I am an image and word warrior   
I am Anishinaabe  
I am a worker  
I am my language  
I am a daughter, aunt, sister   
I am water  
I am land  
I speak/act against violence against women, water, children, land   
I speak/act with the ancestors and knowledge keepers
  
  
I remember when I decided to add _kwe_ to Anishinaabe a few years ago and how much of a struggle it was at first. This struggle marks out some of the pathways I have found to and from western feminisms and something we could call Indigenous feminisms. Sharing this journey opens up a space for thinking about the contradictions that structure my relationship to the word and the analysis called feminism and to the identity called feminist.

Kwe means woman in my language and placing it attached to my identity as an Anishinaabe meant making it essential to my understanding of my culture, as an entry point to myself. For some people, this is easy: they are comfortable having the world divided up between men and women, and thinking of women as essential in their capacity to bear children. I was always keenly aware of the oppressions that could be contained in defining women by their wombs. This analysis came from watching many women in the many foster homes where I grew up in chained to kitchens, kids and caretaking. I saw men sit at tables eat quickly and leave before the “mother” ever sat down. I saw girls and mothers cleaning houses on a regular basis while boys were exempt. It seemed to be a very thankless life. I saw menopause hit women with a desire for their own passions, life goals and leisure. I swore as a young girl that I wouldn’t enter a kitchen because it took up so much time and I wanted to read, write, dance and change the world.

I was in care with my brothers and nephews and nieces and eventually just one brother. I lived in homes with a lot of boys. I always say I was raised by my brothers. I was always more comfortable around boys and men. Some of that is my natural rejection of most femininity as a child and some of it comes from hearing how men speak about women. Respect as a woman seemed really hard to come by. I thought to myself, if I can’t have their respect as a woman then I could get it by being more like a man – by being smarter, stronger and needless.

I remember a group of girls in my elementary school berating me for being too physical, too strong. I decided I would hang with the boys then. Boys always told you the truth and were quick to get over things. There is also a cultural element to this because I felt like the manipulation and passive aggressive behaviour young white girls enact was learned from their mothers and I knew it was a white thing. It had to do with the limited powers women had to exert in their lives. Passive aggression in some ways is suppressed desire for freedom. When I moved back to the reservation when I was 12, I realized my way of being a strong woman was acceptable and cultivated there. I no longer felt like a boyish girl because all the girls seemed this way, partly because femininity does not define womanhood or girlhood on the rez. I took something from the white world to the rez, though, and that was a critical look at the way girls and women define themselves based on male desire for them. They will beat you up for a man. There was no way I cared enough to do that. That seemed different. I’m still not married so I might have gone too far down that road. Just joking. I have had a very critical attitude towards western marriage because of its ties to the state and capitalism.

I had a baby when I was 20, on purpose, in order for my child’s spirit to speak to my mother’s spirit who had just died. When my mother died, I understood myself as a woman in a new way. I saw my own oppressions and labour as a woman joining hers and my sister’s. I had to think about what kind of mother I wanted to be. Western thought taught me to challenge mother as my primary identity and Anishinaabe thought taught me to place children at the centre of our communities and worlds. I did both, raising my son to see me as a woman with desires and aspirations but also mothering him as the centre of the future of our people. I thought a lot about how he would be as a man.

When I added _kwe_ to my identity, I began to see the diversity of constructions of women and started to seek alternatives within my own culture to western feminism. I have always been influenced by two westerners: Judith Butler and Emma Goldman. Butler because she challenges heterosexuality and understands how we perform and become women. Goldman because she had a keen sense of herself as a revolutionary individual and how to practice an anti-authoritarian ethic. As “Nish,” we raise our kids in anti-authoritarian ways and this is one connection to _kwe_. We let their spirits develop freely and without violence. Of course feminism becomes important when we think about the current state of violence against women and children in our communities today. As an analysis that understands patriarchy, it is important because colonialism enforced patriarchy in our communities where women had previously enjoyed equality or had more power than men.

In 2012, I decided to look at the work of Rebecca Belmore, who I felt could help me think through the meaning of _kwe_ from outside of where I had been learning it, which was in the teachings of elders. I knew that my responsibility was to protect the earth, the water and the children. I understood that ways of being as a mother could be learned from our first mother, the earth. I was beginning to understand the type of power women have because they bear children and how that did not have to be a limit to our freedom. But these teachings, coupled with queer theory and the activism I embedded in my everyday life, weren’t great bedmates.

Belmore’s solo exhibition was called KWE and examined the complicated and fertile relationship between Indigenous women, art and feminism. _KWE_ asked, what does the cultural specificity of Anishinaabe add to or change when we consider the meanings of being and becoming a woman for an artist who does not do ceremony? Belmore’s artistic practice has always engaged the question of what it is to be an Anishinaabe-kwe artist here and now. The very real aspects of patriarchy and its embeddedness in both Indigenous and Canadian communities through colonialism, especially in terms of the violence against women, is the subject of much of Belmore’s work. As an Anishinaabe-kwe artist, she engages on multiple levels with her cultures, practices and stories on the role of women while keeping Indigenous self-determination central.

Belmore’s insightful and aesthetically beautiful critiques play with the patriarchal present, underscoring the need for an understanding of colonialism within feminisms today. 

As a curator, I kept the meaning of _KWE_ unspoken and let the work speak for itself. The underlying analysis of power in society whereby Indigenous women fall to the bottom of any measures of health, wealth or protection is why many people see Belmore’s work as feminist. Her body and her sister’s body were present in almost every work. The presence of an Indigenous woman’s body pushes through stories of victimhood to resilience and strength, it pushes through the overwhelming denigration of stereotypes, and it pushes through its absence in reform and revolution narratives. Women’s work. As a child I hated that, but as a curator I understand it as fundamental to the meaning of _kwe_, and that the problem isn’t how much we do but its value and place in society. Anishinaabe culture allowed me to consider possibilities as yet unthought in the west and unpracticed in our societies today: more genders than two; accounting for and valuing women’s needs and labour based on their differences; the idea that a man can live as a woman; the idea that it doesn’t matter who you sleep with but what responsibilities you take up; the idea that women can have power without becoming violent, aggressive, adversarial or colonial; the idea that differences mean an expansion of society and special powers in the individual; and that the spirit of the individual should never be crushed. I don’t call myself a _feminist_ (identity statement) because Indigenous people have spent generations being named by others and I want control over my own naming, but I also think of Indigenous women as the earliest feminists and I value the analysis of western feminisms. Adding _kwe_ to my identity captures all of these paths for me and, since I am comfortable with contradictions, it is unfinished in terms of where it will take me next.

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Indigenous

Feminism

Criticism

In this article Wanda Nanibush discusses her struggle to reconcile her identity as a kwe (_woman_ in Ojibway) Anishinaabe woman and her ties to Western feminism. She uses her personal life experiences, both in foster care and living on a reservation, to inform her intersectional brand of feminism. Nanibush also uses Rebecca Belmore’s artwork to extend her discussion.

Close Readings: Anishinaabe-kwe and/or Indigenous feminist? 

Aisha Sasha John is a dancer and author of _THOU_ (2014) and _The Shining Material_ (2011), both published by BookThug in Toronto.

On the flight from Frankfurt to Toronto (I spent the summer at dance camp), I posed 99 questions:

1.  
2\. What does cooperation look like?  
3\. What happens on the floor before bed if I’m not scared of my weaknesses?  
3\. How do I move in the world if I presume my environment there to serve me?  
5\. How can (name of collective’s upcoming performance) help us change our lives?  
6.  
7\. The reverse seven of swords plus the tower means what exactly?  
8.  
9.  
10.  
11.  
12\. How can I train my hips to relax?  
13.  
14.  
15.  
16.  
17.  
18\. How can I exercise my freedom to hang out exclusively with people around whom I feel relaxed?  
19\. How can I institute what Steph said re: slow expansion of range?  
20\. I.e. when do I begin to stand still but off-centre and stand not totally still but with a bit of shaking?  
21.  
22\. Does it make sense  
23\.   
24\. Durational assignments – will they be the next chapter of my research?  
25\. Will they be the next chapter of my research on gentleness?  
26\. If I compile a list of the tasks that provide good structures for my movement work, is that basically a book?  
27.  
28\.   
29\. When do I understand that casting a spell is about ordered, shared, performed self-belief?  
30\. How do I actualize the knowledge that psychic = self-believer?  
31\. What does psychic boldness look like in my Toronto life?  
32\. In my Vancouver life?  
33\. In my New York life?  
34\. In my Montreal life?  
35\.   
36\. What would come up if I lay on the floor awake every day for an hour?  
37\. How much more beautiful would life be if I told the truth all the time?  
38\.   
39\. Is psychic boldness a function of treating what I intuit, immediately, as credible?  
40\.   
41\. Do I have a question for every chakra’s health?  
42.  
43.  
44\. Could I make money as a professional angel?  
45\. How long after strengthening my core would I experience an increase in willpower?  
46\. Can I tame the lion by – instead of gentleness – offering it a bigger pasture?  
47\. What if I reacted when people said things that hurt my feelings or made me sad?  
48.  
49\.   
50\. Do I need to understand what’s there at the place where I was transformed?  
51\. How can I remember that no one is other than me?  
52\. Will orange light produce a work?  
53\. Can I build the necessary postural muscles without actually using weights?  
54\.   
55\.   
56.  
57.  
58.  
59.  
60\. Are there enough large objects on stage?  
61.  
62.  
63.  
64.  
65.  
66.  
67.  
68\.   
69\. Am I ready to really take on getting my mom housing?  
70\.   
71\. What would it mean to consult my pussy when making decisions?  
72\. How much should I advertise my apartment for?  
73\.   
74.  
75.  
76\. When can I hang out in Vancouver for months?  
77\.   
78\.   
79\.   
80.  
81\. What will Deborah Hay and Louise Hay give me in overlap?  
82.  
83.  
84\. If my idea of selfishness is actually just maintaining healthy boundaries, what would ordinary selfishness look like?  
85\.   
86\. Is John Cage a good direction?  
87\. Is Sun Ra a greater direction?  
88\. What would trying again to metabolize that one really rhythmically difficult song Saba gave us give me?  
89\.   
86\. Where is my snake?  
87.  
88.  
89.  
90.  
91.  
92.  
93.  
94.  
95.  
96.  
97\. What would it feel like to not be scared – at all?  
98\. How much more can I get for the work I’ve already done?  
99\. 

+1

What is the relationship between me clenching my hips and anxiety around being “scary”? And containment?

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Poet and dancer Aisha Sasha John shares her inventory of 99 questions she asked herself en route to Toronto from Frankfurt where she attended a summer dance camp.

Inventory: Ready Fire Aim 

Merray Gerges writes around art rather than about it. She studied art history at NSCAD and journalism at King’s University in Halifax, where she co-founded and co-edited CRIT, a free biannual criticism publication. She was editorial resident at Canadian Art in 2016, and assistant editor there from 2017 to 2019\. She is now editorial fellow at C Magazine. 

Since there is no singular feminism, there ought not to be any set aesthetic qualities for feminist art. Is an artwork’s feminism predicated, then, on the artist’s self-proclamation or exhibitionism of their feminist politics? What typically defines feminist art, Wikipedia tells us, is its reflection of women’s lives and experiences with the ultimate goal of changing the foundation for the production and reception of contemporary art. It is also historically self-organizing – an aspect of feminist art that becomes even more pertinent when most people have access to an Internet connection.

Even though there ought not to be any set aesthetic qualities for feminist art, women’s selfies have come to be a primary constituent of feminist art over the past three years. In “Closing the Loop,” Aria Dean writes about how the selfie’s subject ostensibly asserts her autonomy from the male gaze by wrestling narrative power from him via her repeated unapologetic self-representation. The selfie’s subject seizes visibility to verify and affirm her very existence on her own terms; as Dean writes, “If you could flood the network with something, it would become impossible to ignore.” She identifies artists like Petra Collins, Molly Soda, Audrey Wollen and others, who have all been catapulted into the popular imagination of current feminist art through their significant social media followings and Internet fashion glossies’ declarations of their girl-power feminism. Think of pink suburban bedrooms where teenage girls groom each other, flaunting their body hair in acts of defiant body-positivity. Amongst these artists, Dean says, there is a “shared belief that the control afforded through the act of self-imaging is invaluable; nothing less, in fact, than _the primary_ feminist tool for resistance. The claim follows a logic in which circulation of personal narratives through Instagram and other social media platforms is supposed to provide points of identification for _all women_, everywhere.”

These feminist selfie artists have been the subject of countless regurgitated profiles and think pieces extolling their radical feminism; with one of the most prominent among them, Audrey Wollen, even labelled as a “Feminist art star.” Wollen coined Sad Girl Theory, which proposes that,

> the sadness of girls should be recognised as an act of resistance. Political protest is usually defined in masculine terms – as something external and often violent, a demonstration in the streets, a riot, an occupation of space. But I think that this limited spectrum of activism excludes a whole history of girls who have used their sorrow and their self-destruction to disrupt systems of domination. Girls’ sadness is not passive, self-involved or shallow; it is a gesture of liberation, it is articulate and informed, it is a way of reclaiming agency over our bodies, identities, and lives. \[…\] Sad Girl Theory is a permission slip: feminism doesn’t need to advocate for how awesome and fun being a girl is. Feminism needs to acknowledge that being a girl in the world right now is one of the hardest things there is – it is unimaginably painful – and that our pain doesn’t need to be discarded in the name of empowerment. It can be used as a material, a weight, a wedge, to jam that machinery and change those patterns.[^1]

Wollen superimposes herself taking a selfie in her underwear over Botticelli’s Venus; she reclines like Ingres’ Odalisque but instead of addressing the viewer she’s facing Photo Booth on her Mac. Similarly, the women who embrace Sad Girl Theory represent their thin, white-passing, willowy bodies gracefully drowning in Pre-Raphaelite melancholy set to Lana Del Rey soundtracks. The Sad Girl posts tearful selfies with immaculate makeup; she makes you forget that having the time and the space to wallow is itself a privilege. She spends her days in domestic languor. Her monochromatic Instagram feed is composed of a palette of baby pink and heather gray that almost matches her skin, which her reclusiveness shields from the sun.

Occupying the same social media platforms, the Feminist Anxiety Memer shares the Sad Girl’s drive for catharsis and de-stigmatizing mental illness. The Anxiety Memer’s cry, however, is an ugly cry, unlike the Sad Girl’s, whose cohesive and seemingly curated feed inadvertently appeases the hetero male gaze, as if to illuminate the condition in a way that won’t alienate him, in a way that won’t ultimately diminish his desire for her. By contrast, the output of @scariest\_bug\_ever, the quintessential Anxiety Meme Instagram account, is erratic, absurdist and abject. Though her memes often describe the conditions of her mental illness in explicit and hyper-personal specificity, they elicit a very visceral “\_same\_” from the viewer – from me. When she posts selfies, she’s making a double chin, or grinning with her top lip tucked in to fully reveal her top row of teeth, or both. Her memes dismantle the hyper-controlled, male-gaze-centric narrative of the interior life of a woman.

The Anxiety Memer flaunts her ineffectualness to embrace her alienation. “Try crying for 48 hours straight if things aren’t working out for you,” she tells her Instagram followers, who comment that they can relate. She calls out men who conceal their misogyny and perpetuation of rape culture by proclaiming to be feminist, taking stock images of bro and superimposing them with captions mimicking him, like, “I have really bad anxiety. I think im a good person. But I choose relationships with troubled women just to bolster my savior complex. I’ll probably pretend you’re too good for me then bail asap. Anyways what do you say to some disappointing straight people sex ;) please I bought you four domestic beers.” Or, “when he calls you his muse and makes art about what he assumes your personality is and expect \[sic\] you to take this as an honor rather than feeling dehumanized and not particularly enjoying the fetishization of your deeply personal human experience.”

The image macro trope that circulates widely enough to achieve meme status often features any variety of reaction images: low-res stock photos—of white men with cargo shorts, spiked hair and Oakley sunglasses, animals in wigs and costumes they’d rather not be in, frogs on unicycles, the Kardashians– captioned with Helvetica Neue Light ironic quips to banal occurrences, or lamenting microaggressions, the misfortune of shooting oneself in the foot, or karma finally rearing its ugly head. The subject matter is nebulous and so is the reader, enabling the meme’s universal appeal – to be #relatable – to Anyone. At once, they make you loathe yourself for the flaw that they’ve articulated like no one has before, and yet provide relief that other people share it with you.

The instant and infinite reproducibility of the Anxiety Memer’s personal-is-political consciousness-raising _might_ have the capacity to resist capitalist and misogyny-related alienation. The standardized visual language is easy to mimic, with an image formula that anyone could replicate using free browser meme generators. When they become viral, they circulate in the relatively public but definitely-non-academic sphere, making mental health conditions less isolating. The Anxiety Memer’s disembodied articulation of her mental illness is considerably more relatable – and, to borrow a classic Sad Girl term, “empowering.”

The Anxiety Memer is anti-self-care. Instead of succumbing to the medical-industrial complex, she makes memes. Her despair is not designed to be covetable or enviable or palatable. And because the Anxiety Memer’s output is so dissonant – its humour too fragmented, its despair in self-deprecation too unyielding, too unwavering – it resists branding. Unlike the Sad Girl, the Anxiety Memer’s Instagram bio does not contain a link to the latest interview on her output. She has not been bestowed as an Artist. Anxiety memes cater, first and foremost, to those who can relate to them, those who are most likely to circulate them.

If self-imaging and the circulation of personal narratives are “\_the primary\_ feminist tool for resistance,” but the Sad Girl is the most pervasive representation of the neuro-atypical woman, then the Sad Girl is meant to embody the woman whose articulation of depression and anxiety is supposedly radical enough to constitute feminist art. That radical self-representation is now benign, aestheticized then de-politicized, subsumed by capital-F Feminism, and, as Dean argues, it echoes white feminism’s narcissistic claim of a universal female experience. If the Sad Girl is the prototypical subject of feminist art now, then the body of artwork that Sad Girl Theory propels perpetuates the exclusion of the bodies of women of colour across the gender spectrum, mirroring the barriers to healthcare that these bodies tend to have. And while the Anxiety Memer’s feminism may not translate to anything beyond stating the obvious – especially in her call-outs of misogyny and rape culture – it steers clear of proselytizing to non-white women that they ought to be empowered by their sadness, with the assumption of a Universal Woman who has access to what she preaches. And while requesting the meme hold emancipatory potential over-taxes it, the messiness of Anxiety Memes might open up narratives – in memes and in art – about de-stigmatizing mental health as a feminist practice that are less monolithic, homogenous, white. Returning to Dean, “If there is liberation, it will not take place on corporate platforms.”

[^1]: “How girls are finding empowerment through being sad online,” an interview with Audrey Wollen, _Dazed Digital_, December 2015.

issue-132-p80-82.pdf

Technology

Health

This article explores how social media, especially “the selfie” and women’s open detailing of their anxieties and sadness is changing the definition of feminist art. The article discusses contemporary artists who have incorporated social media trends into their practices. It also details the various social media activities of the fictionalized “The Anxiety Memer”. This is a generic character based on the phenomenon of girls speaking about their sadness on social media platforms as a means of empowerment. Gerges uses this character to discuss social media feminism’s salubrious potential to destigmatize mental health in art and society. 

Artefact: Virgo Woman Matches Tinder Men Only to Criticize their Profiles 

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The New Gallery

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Varley

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Editorial

> Once a year, _C Magazine_ invites a guest editor to take over an issue, and this particular guest edited issue coincides with _C_’s commitment to re-visiting contemporary feminisms on a regular basis. For C132, guest edited by dance artist, choreographer and educator taisha paggett, and art historian and curator Erin Silver, the editors have importantly broadened the feminist conversation much further than _C_ has in the past. It resonates deeply with the events of 2016, and it offers a series of exchanges and provocations that I’m thrilled to present to _C_ readers at the beginning of my time as Editor. — Kari Cwynar

The force of this issue lies in concerns over matter, and what matters, in the face of the political urgencies of 2016\. We consider and interject the current place of intersectional feminisms in relation to a view of lived realities as embodied, material and distinct.[^1] 

In her 1993 book _Bodies that Matter_, Judith Butler famously asked, “Which bodies come to matter – and why?”[^2] When, in 2016, the notion that Black lives matter is met with resistance, dismissed and subordinated under a universalizing defense that “all lives matter,” Butler’s question appears prescient, and pressing. As 2016 unfolded and we witnessed bodies exert, resist and negotiate power, we became concerned to test the value of thinking and making in relation to the body as materially formed, or forming, in the face of these present day political urgencies. We felt urgency to address the lived realities of POC, trans and LGBQ bodies in exerting force against systemic, social and physical violence. As we held in our minds the events of 2016, we looked to consider their broader implications: Orlando against the backdrop of Pride celebrations and a call to recognizing the role of Latina trans women in the history of gay liberation; BLMTO’s Pride Parade action, which shut down the parade for half an hour while BLMTO made a historic demand for greater visibility for queer people of colour in the parade, and greater accountability from parade organizers and police; increasingly nuanced understandings of solidarity, allyship and holding space in relation to Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock and Idle No More. We asked, where does feminism – as it informs and has been informed by rights movements – reside in these events? How does it support and propel present-day political struggle? How do we conceptualize “force” in relation to the material, social and political body? And how do we resist the aestheticization/anesthetization of political urgency? How do we make a magazine that “moves” in time with political movement?

Movement occupies a central place in this issue, affirming embodiment as in-extricably tied to the realm of the political, the body, a material conduit for tracing the historical and carving new worldviews. Essays by Anna Martine Whitehead and Treva C. Ellison examine the world-making potential of Black dance – in Whitehead’s case, histories of occupation and of enslaved ancestors as evoked by a dance ensemble of Black queer and femme women, rocking “an activation of spirit in the flesh.” In Ellison’s essay on Black dance forms including flexing and the collaborative practice of weight exchange in the choreography of taisha paggett and the WXPT dance company, Ellison offers flexibility, in its focus on “process, practice, conjuring, tarrying, cracking and hacking as ways of approaching Blackness and Black embodiment.” taisha occupies multiple roles in the development of this issue: asan artist, an interlocutor and editor – a reflection of our desire not only to promote a view to the written text as alive, but also to test the boundaries of author-ship and authority. As co-editors, we have met only once in person, yet underscoring the issue is a trail of rich textual and virtual exchange, plotting artistic, affective and political affinities; cross-continental (taisha in Los Angeles; Erin in Toronto)correspondence; emails saturated with emphatic bolds, underlines, CAPS LOCKS—the spectral index to the texts presented herein.

Dialogue figures prominently in this issue; Martine Syms, in conversation with Amy Kazymerchyk, discusses the power of repetitive gesture and of borrowing inconnecting people, culturally and cross-temporally, while Lucca Fraser, co-author of the _Xenofeminist Manifesto_, talks to Esmé Hogeveen about Laboria Cuboniks and the role of technology in forging pluralistic feminisms. In their artist project _At the Edge of Space and Time: Expanding beyond Our 4% Universe_, Jennifer Moon and laub bridge quantum mechanics with the the racialized, gendered body, employing Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action, by which individuals come into being via exchange. In addition to strengthening the lines that tie different feminisms together –intergenerational dialogues, spectral tracings, co-conspirings – the tensions within the concept of a cohesive and dominant western feminist genealogy are interrogated by Wanda Nanibush in her guest-written Close Readings, where a re-tracing of Rebecca Belmore’s exhibition KWE opens up reflections on the “complicated and fertile relationship between Indigenous women, art and feminism” and her identification as Anishinaabe-kwe. 

Making a magazine that moves in time with political movement means keeping pace with temporal crossings and ruptures– the cautionary lessons learned by looking back, as well as those offered via views toward the future. We meet somewhere in the middle. During the Q&A of a screen-ing this past summer of Lizzie Borden’s 1983 dystopic feminist revolutionary film _Born in Flames_ (reviewed herein by YaniyaLee), at one point the numbers “2016” flash on a retro digital screen – a prescient view to ongoing, and scarily similar, conditions of racialized and gendered oppression. In Syrus Marcus Ware’s On Writing, it’s 2025 – nine years since BLMTO – BLACKCITY, the 15-day occupation in front of the Toronto Police Headquarters in protest of police accountability in the death of Andrew Loku and against anti-Blackness and targeted policing. As we seal this issue in the wake of the American election and in the face of political futures unknown, we make this small offering towards the world-making potential of writing, making and moving – of momentum and force, and the resistance to be found in between.

[^1]: Samantha Frost, “The Implications of the New Materialisms for Feminist Epistemology,” in Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Power in Knowledge, ed. H.E. Grasswick (Springer Science & Business media, 2011), p70.
[^2]: Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), p xii.

Editorial Conception

taisha paggett is a Southern California-based dance artist whose individual and collaborative interdisciplinary works re-articulate and collide certain Western choreographic practices with the politics of daily life to interrogate fixed notions of Black and queer embodiment and survival. paggett is an assistant professor of Dance at UC Riverside

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Representation

Race

Education

Infrastructure

Environment

Guest editor, art historian and curator Erin Silver introduces the theme of “Force” for this issue. 

Editorial: Force

Feature

Amy Kazymerchyk is the curator of the Audain Gallery at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, BC. 

Amy Kazymerchyk, curator of the Audain Gallery in Vancouver, BC, talks with Los Angeles based artist Martine Syms about the development of her first solo exhibition in Canada, titled _Borrowed Lady_, at the gallery from October 13 – December 10, 2016\. They discuss the familial, cultural and historical inheritances in Syms’ practice, the conditions of borrowing and the circulation of vocal and physical gesture.   
**Amy Kazymerchyk**: The centerpiece of _Borrowed Lady_ is an expanded installation of your 2015 video _Notes on Gesture_. Could you describe this original work?  
**Martine Syms**: The first iteration of _Notes of Gesture_ is a single-channel video that looks at the differences between how a person moves naturally versus when they are acting. While I was researching acting techniques I found an index of gestures that was published in 1644 by an English physician named John Bulwer, titled _Chirologia: or the naturall language of the band_. I learned that these gestures were associated with Shakespearean form of acting, and that each one was linked to an emotive or affective way of communicating. I found a lot of similarities between them and emojis, so there was a contemporary link that resonated with me.

Initially, I developed a character who was loosely based on my great-aunt, as well as other women in my family. I worked with an actor named Diamond Stingily to perform some of those gestures to physically think with me about everyday performance, the performance of identity and the kinds of movements and gestures that connect people in a group. We talked about women in our families and I asked her to do impressions of them. I also had her improvise from photographs of my great-aunt, as well as pop-culture images, films and memes. 

At the time I was shooting, there was a trend in which every fashion magazine had a Black woman on the cover of their September issue. This made me think about what made certain identities and their movements and gestures marketable or viral. I was also looking at repetition in memes, Vines and gifs, and how they compress cultural information and an experience into a single gesture.  
**AK**: How did this iteration of work change its presentation at the Audain Gallery?  
**MS**: In the version of _Notes on Gesture_ that I produced for the Audain Gallery, I worked a lot on developing the sound. The soundtrack for the first video was just the music that was playing in the room while we were tapping, because I thought the video would be silent, but once I started editing I became interested in the ambient music and our conversation. When I imagined the Audain installation, I wanted to create a call-and-response structure in which Diamond talks to herself across the gallery. The rhythm of the video edit really lends itself to that kind of feedback loop. I worked with a musician named Celia Hollander, who performs under the name $3.33\. She used the original soundtrack to create score, which I responded to in my new edit. So there’s also a call-and-response loop in our working process as well.  
**AK**: The titled of the exhibition, _Borrowed Lady_ is itself borrowed, isn’t it?  
**MS**: Yes, I read about the idea in Samuel R. Delany’s autobiography, _Motion of the Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957-1965_ (1988). He writes about a tendency within 11th and 12th century Provençal poetry for female characters to possess qualities that are borrowed from different women. In contemporary times it would be like, “She’s got the ass of Kim Kardashian, the hair of Tyra Banks, and the lips of Monica Lewinsky.” That’s a borrowed lady! The idea of inhabiting different women was something that I was already playing with in working with images and directing performance.  
**AK**: What does _borrowed_ mean to you, and how does it differ from other terms we use in contemporary art such as copied, appropriated, stolen or mimicked?  
**MS**: Borrowing is more in line with a kind of sampling aesthetic. I’m thinking about the Wu-Tang song that is named after the Wendy Rene sample, “After the laughter comes tears.” I guess you could say the sample is stolen, but you could also say that they’re just using it. Maybe borrowing is more colloquial or vernacular. It has an ephemeral quality to it – like you’re just going to take it for a second and it’s going to lead to something else. People have been talking about mimicry and specifically mimetic desire a lot with me. Maybe mimicry has a similar quality to borrowing, but appropriation doesn’t feel that way to me.  
**AK**: Part of the social contract of borrowing is the intention to take care of the borrowed thing well enough so that when you return it, it can continue to be used. If you don’t literally return it to the original owner, but pass it on to a third person, there’s a more complex migratory process of care that is enacted. The images in _Borrowed Lady_ migrate across multiple screens, which leads me to think about borrowing in relation to migration or circulation of ideas, in which caring for an idea also means being open to it being evolved by others.  
**MS**: Yeah, definitely! Circulation is a key part of everything that I work on, and I think of my own process as operating in circular patterns. It’s important for me to work through an idea in various forms but also in formats that circulate in different ways amongst distinct audiences. It’s something I’ve been working on in the last two installations I made. In _Fact and Trouble_ at the ICA in London, there are back-to-back monitors that suggest to viewers to move around that space in a circular motion. In _Black Box_ at Human Resources in Los Angeles, there were three video channels in the room that played at variable intervals. Viewers weren’t sure of the playing pattern, so people followed each other’s movement, which created a kind of social script for circulation.

I’m working with migration in more explicit ways as well. This grew out of my research on the Great Migration of African-Americans moving from the rural South to urban centres in the North between 1910 and 1970, and how this migration paralleled the development of the American film and entertainment industry. Circulation is significant in both these historical moments, with regards to how information is distributed, how it informs how people see themselves, and how it is invariably mutated, morphed, changed and passed on. Jacqueline Stewart’s research on this history – particularly about Black creators’ roles within American cinema from audience to producers – in her book _Migrating to the Movies_ (2005), is really interesting.  
**AK**: In a short video produced by the ICA on the _Fact and Trouble_ exhibition, you speak about familial, historical and cultural “inheritances” in your work, which is an interesting synonym for borrowing because it also implies a certain responsibility to care for something that has been passed on to you, in order to be able to pass it on. What are the inheritances in this work?  
**MS**: The primary inheritances are familial ones. I’ve been working with material from my great-aunt’s house, which my dad inherited. I helped him clean out the house, and so her heirlooms, photos, furniture were one source. Her house was a west-coast locus for my family, and it was also a boarding house from about the late-’70s, early ’80s onwards. It took a lot of time to figure out who the people in the images were, which ones were family and which weren’t. A lot of the initial writing for the piece was generating scenarios for understanding what was going on in the images. While I was shooting _Notes on Gesture_, I was also shooting reenactments of my aunt’s photos.  
**AK**: The title for _Notes on Gesture_ was also inherited from Giorgio Agamben’s essay of the same name. How does Agamben’s ideas from _Notes on Gesture_ (2000) resonate in the work?  
**MS**: I was interested in his assertion that film resided within the realm of politics because of its focus on movement, which is distrinct from Hannah Arendt’s idea of politics being based in the public. I thought there was something in the meeting of their two ideas that is palpable in the way that images of bodies and particularly Black bodies are currently circulating in mediated public space through both documents of police brutality and creative or funny Vines.  
**AK**: Agamben writes, via Varro and Aristotle, that the gesture as an action is closer to the Latin _gerere_, which means to carry or carry on, and relative to _gerunt_, to support or endure. Gesture in cinema, as acts of endurance exhibit “being-in-a-medium of human being” and open an ethical dimension by making the means visible without a political end. This leads me to think about the ethics and politics of _becoming_, because of its promixity to carrying on, and endurance. How do _being_ and _becoming_ relate to how you explore gesture and movement in relation to identity formation and the performance of identity?  
**MS**: Yeah, I keyed into that part of his essay as well, and I’ve thought about film as a container where gestures and movements are stores or preserved. I sort of disagree with Agamben’s claim that we’ve lost our gestures and cinema has revived them, but I understand how he uses it to make the argument. This is pretty fundamental to my own being and becoming because I learned to _be_ in a certain sense – learned how to present myself, how to talk, how to walk – from family and community and cinema alike. I like the idea that you could see an image or a film and then decide that you wanted to be like the person in it.

For example, I love the show _How to Get Away with Murder_ and I see an image of Annalise Keating in the show and desire her composure or her attractiveness, her way of speaking or the way she holds herself, and in that desire, adopt some of those qualities myself. That’s what the refrain “fake it ‘til you make it,” basically means. It’s just about performing. 

And so I think the line is really thin between _becoming_ and _being_ and that physical language is a big part of being, especially with regards to how you are perceived. It’s what I wanted to enact in _Notes on Gesture_. I wasn’t making a film about Diamond, though sometimes people think that. Some people have also seen the video and think that it’s about me. That slipperiness is a good sign – that through the process of making the film and exhibiting it, the character is read as being or becoming different people.  
**AK**: In your 2015 text “A Pilot for a Show about Nowhere,” in _Art Papers_, you write about how the presence of Black actors and narratives in television sitcoms influenced your youth, and informs the dialogue, choreography, editing and feeling of your work. This is palpable in the TV pilot She Mad that you’ve been developing over the past few years, as well as your lecture performance _Misdirected Kiss_, which you performed in Vancouver at the Western Front in January 2016\. Do you think ’90s sitcoms recuperate lost gestures of the 20th century?  
**MS**: There were actually two early TV shows, _I Remember Mama_ and _The Goldbergs_ (both 1949), that were migration narratives about moving from a rural area and an agrarian way of life to a consumer lifestyle in the city. They also portrayed a generational shift, and the shows were about how each person related to each other and their anxieties. In the 1970s, TV sitcoms transformed to more aspirational narratives, when I would say that some of the Black sitcoms that Norman Lear made, like _Good Times_ (1974), gave a narrative to similar working-class anxieties. This comes up again in the late ’80s, early ’90s, once the kind of economics of TV shifts and the sitcoms really are made for a working-class audience, while a more affluent audience is targeted with hour-long dramas, which were considered quality TV. And that’s still with us. HBO and Netflix shows are more or less geared towards affluence. Current sitcoms, and maybe the 30-minute reality TV show, take up working-class narratives.

What I’m more interested in is how the forms of speech and movement that were captured in television sitcoms are now being replicated in self-presentations online. Social media spaces and the way that people talk about their lives in them feel very sitcom-y to me.  
**AK**: Are you saying that what we’re seeing in YouTube videos, gifs, Vines and memes, is the product of a generation that grew up with television sitcoms in the ‘80s and ‘90s and inherited the expressions and structures of speaking, acting and moving from this media and are emulating them in their own lives and representations of life?  
**MS**: Yeah, and the way that they narrativize their lives – their way of understanding collective consciousness or history.  
**Ak**: I know you’re interested in Alison Landsberg’s writing on prosthetic memory and how the mass media produces narratives that invite people to witness memories that they did not actually live. She talks about these memories literally being grafted on the body like a prosthetic limb. In the way you’ve shot _Notes on Gesture_, you’ve fragmented Diamond’s body so that you see only one aspect of her body at a time. You focus on the movement of her arm, her face or her shoulder. What did you decide to capture her gesture like this?  
**MS**: I was looking closely at the compositions of etchings in John Bulwer’s _Chirologia_, and I was using them as a formal reference, so I only shot closeups of her hand or her face, or a medium shot of her head and shoulders. Again, I didn’t want the piece to be read like it was a portrait of Diamond. I wanted to create a separate character. Stylistically, I also wanted the video to reference indexical or diagrammatic methods.  
**AK**: In Laura Marks’ book _Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media_ (2002), she considers what the body of digital video versus the body of analogue video is. She speculates that digital video doesn’t have a material body like analogue video does, and thus refuses an original, authentic or singular form. Rather it is non-linear, multiple and accumulative. When you choose to make a work on digital video, such as _Notes on Gesture_, are you thinking about how the medium might refuse a determined body? How instead it proliferates and migrates?  
**MS**: Yeah, definitely. One reason I use video a lot is that it’s very easy to take – or borrow – from other sources. I’m fluidly accumulating video footage all the time. I shoot footage constantly and grew up shooting footage. I actually got into making movies through Super 8, and have always been drawn to consumer filmmaking technologies. I’m also collecting found Super 8 footage, found slides and found snapshots. In the material that I shoot, like the found stuff, I’m not worried about production value. My thoughts about production value are oriented around ideology and narrative. I’m really interested in why and when people employ a certain type of shot. That’s maybe the film theory nerd in myself. For me, the process of editing and of creating video is part of my daily practice. I’m a writer in so many ways and there are a lot of similarities between writing and editing media. I think about my pool of video footage as an image bank that I’m always adding to and pulling from.  
**AK:** I want to pick up on what you first said about returning to the source material for _Notes on Gesture_ and tuning into conversation that you and Diamond were having, which was unintentionally recorded. You mentioned that this dialogue was the impetus for creating a multi-channel installation in which the actor talks to herself across the gallery, and that the process by which it would be made would echo that structure – though a dialogue between yourself, Celia the sound designer and a second editor, Nicole Otero. What types of unique editing decisions did this produce? And what did they express about gesture, everyday performance and the performance of identity that was distinct from, or built upon, the single channel version?  
**MS**: I use repetition for its ability to build continuity and to completely destabilize at the same time. This project is a collaboration between four women: Diamond, Celia, Nicole and me. We worked in relay, passing files, and this collective assembly is analogous to the way that identities are created.

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Video

Installation

This article is a transcription of a conversation between Audain Curator Amy Kazymerchyk and L.A. –based artist Martine Syms. The two discuss Syms work, “Borrowed Lady”, which was on show at Vancouver’s Audian Gallery from October 13 to December 10\. Kazymerchyk and Syms discuss the creation and implications of “Borrowed Lady”, which is an expanded version of her earlier video work, “Notes on Gesture”. Syms’ oeuvre, the theoretical underpinnings and curatorial aims of “Borrowed Woman” are also discussed as well as their contemporary gestural counterparts – memes, GIFs and emojis. 

Borrowed Lady Martine Syms in Conversation with Amy Kazymerchyk

Anna Martine Whitehead is a Black queer femme artist using movement and language to escape planet Earth. 

I am hitting a rhythm. Like the ancestors at Igbo Landing, I am hitting a rock, rocking out to sea. I am rocking in my seat, my heels; my body rocks. My ghosts have memories past time of rocking. We’ve caught the spirit, we’ve jigged and jumped, we’ve danced and grooved and broken. Ancient memories of being elevated in a trance, with hands laid upon memory, remembering in _sema_, swaying in _shucklen_, and so on – who knows what memories these ghosts hold. In New Orleans, supine with toes up, in close enough proximity to the other Black women here to feel their sweat pool around my shoulders, I begin to rock my heels. I am rocking my heels, my body rocks, memory is activated, I am unlocked. I am available as Toni Morrison identifies availability: The body “hanging around,” accessible to spirit.[^1]

We are a new ensemble in the early stages of developing interdisciplinary work addressing freedom. This week we are exploring the hull-of-the-ship Middle Passage experience, asking ourselves how those folk down there shared stories with each other when they couldn’t raise their voices, didn’t have room to stand, didn’t speak the same language. We know this is powerful work – ancestor work– so every day we enter the studio and build an altar, set intentions and ground ourselves spiritually before rehearsal. We are a small group of Black women, femmes and queers, with varying creative practices and spiritual, ethnic and geographic backgrounds. Without necessarily naming it as such, every rehearsal is a re-enactment of the ritual we have collectively created to re-collect our ancestors and carry them with us into freedom. To get there, we often start on the floor, toes up, rocking.

Rocking has been long been used by many as an entryway into a trance state, a border-crossing action that allows the soul to vibrate more easily between the physical and astral planes. Similarly to another vibrational practice – singing – it has been used by Hebrews, Sufi, Hindus, Evangelicals and Baptists, among others, as a self-contained and sustainable method to “change \[one’s\] condition.”[^2] Like singing – a process of “running sound through your body” – rocking is an activation of spirit in the flesh. In our ensemble, the practice is rooted in the imagined experience of enslaved Africans shackled to the floor of a ship crossing the Atlantic Ocean. We imagine the storms at sea, and the proximity to other bodies shaking (for we know that while in the hold babies were born, seizures were had, illnesses were fought and so on) over the up-to-six-month journey would have made for a turbulent passage. So we rock from the ankles to connect to the physical experience of our ancestors en route.

(A memory of the Middle Passage.)

We rock and we run the spirit through us. I am on this studio floor-ship rocking with the others when I am overtaken by spirit. I am penetrated by an energy, which enters through my chest and takes up residence throughout me, toe to head. Over the following weeks and months I will reflect on this time using a litany of synonyms, trying and failing to attach language-meaning to the experience of being entered, possessed and activated. Occupation is the word I return to. Occupation as a feeling, if one can imagine the feeling of occupation, though “feeling” – neither in the sense of emotion nor physical sensation – is an imprecise term for what is happening.

The more recently colonized may recognize this feeling-not-feeling of alien occupation. A feeling of the Other that also becomes you until you move as the other moves and the point where you distinguish yourself from your occupier is so slippery that you must wage wars to maintain your borders. Or you must allow your borders to grow soft. This “feeling.”

What does it feel like to be a Palestinian elder in Gaza? The feeling of losing one’s grasp on one’s memories of life before the _nakba_; the feeling of knowing that your children have never tasted water that did not come from Israel or looked up at a night sky that was not owned and contested by foreign governments. And you yourself cannot remember such a sky, and it is only in the poems in your head that water and sky and living are free. How is it to be the elder’s grandchild who plays intifada games in seized and regulated streets, and laughs with the eruptive joy of a child. This “feeling”?

What does it feel like to be young, gifted and Black in Chicago, locking arms with your peers and refusing to leave Homan Square, or King Drive, or City Hall? City Hall: The feeling of proclaiming your right to a space that is not yours and was never intended to be, but despite your hatred for that space you still need it, though you barely know what “it” is – but you have dreams and in your dreams you are as powerful as that place, and in your waking life you feel most woke when you demand of that space that it acknowledge your incumbent power and, yes, even care about you? How does it feel to stand empowered by the knowledge that, as Baldwin said, “nothing… can take away our title to the land which we, too, \[have\] purchased with our blood?”[^3] This “feeling”? This bloody purchase of our selves?

These scenarios I am using by example still do not quite get to the kind of occupied feeling I am experiencing on the floor in New Orleans. It is uncomfortable, yes, and violent. And there is certain- ly an element of myopic non-consensuality in my relationship to my Other, at least in terms of my inability to even acknowledge her existence before this moment. But I did not steal what belonged to my ancestor-occupier, inasmuch as once you are dead everything and nothing belonging to the living is yours. And the young, slight, enslaved African woman whose energy occupies me in New Orleans does not mean to take anything from me by force. She just needs to get something done, and, perhaps, she needs me to know something. She – that is, vibrations resonant with a soul’s memory of some particular body – takes up residence in and throughout me, not with the force of hatred or defiance, but with a life force that disturbs me into a fuller life-in-my-body. I am occupied forcefully, but there is no ill will between us. Together, we become multi-spirited.

* \* \*

This is just the beginning. Once I am occupied by my ancestor, I am visited by the ghost of a white European slaver. Like all the ghosts I have ever known, this one has a weight, a shape, which it brings down on top of us as my body rocks – and it begins to rock us. That is to say, we are raped. Here I am further spirited as the presence enters me – the rocking becomes a combined result of my muscles moving and the ghost moving us from the inside of my body. During this time of vesseltude, in which my body experiences multiple visitations, my own psyche remains present – in fact, it is hyper-present. For example, I am present to the piece we are making in this studio in New Orleans _right now_, and I know there is a scene after this one. It is almost impossible but I rise off of the ground in performing the sequence. Somewhere in the process of standing, I am vacated of these spirits. Later on, I will collapse.

She comes to me again the next day during the same scene. I feel her arrival and then her residence inside my body, and I welcome it. The ghost comes too: another white European slaver, un- mistakably different in form than yesterday’s. Again we are raped, though this new ghost’s feel is less heavy and more rapid. Again I am vacated upon standing. She comes to me a third time the following day, as does a new aspect of that slaver’s variegated violent energy. She comes a fourth time on the fourth day, and so does he/it.

But this fourth and final time, something is different. She occupies me and then, for our protection, she calls her spiritual allies to join us. They come immediately, one after another, so that I almost instantly feel myself extend beyond my self with ancestors. I become extensive; I become robust with energy and socially bonded to an expanding spirit. My body is made into a vessel barely containing myself, my visitor and all of her visitors; and all of our individuated and collective memory, terror and rage; and all of our combined resplendent resilience and our joyful passion and our love. This energy wraps around and through me; it courses through my body electromagnetically; it lights my cells on fire. We wrestle our attacker(s) with the strength of millions. We are more powerful than him/it – we are literally infinite and will devour him – and we use our strength to carry him inside us from out of wherever we are, take him to the poop deck and over the railing, where we drown all of us in the sea, and become finally free.

When it is all over, I will hear the scene described back to me by onlookers as a wild rolling scuffle inside of myself, as if I were be-bopping myself to an untraceable polyrhythm trapped inside a seizure. Something like dancing.

As I reflect on New Orleans from the illusion of distance that time provides, I am learning to better distinguish between an occupying spirit and a guardian spirit who helps create the soul – and both as wholly different from a ghost. Through conversations with two-spirit friends, I am coming to empathize with the feeling of living with a daily awareness of multiple spirits inside one’s body – two or more spirits who remain fully at home and a part of one’s soul. Occupation isn’t necessarily possession – a \_zombie\_-like state of total acquiescence to spirit. In my case in New Orleans, the occupation was a sharing of my body, a kind of intimate collaboration. Fred Moten describes this type of collaboration as the “consent to not be a single being; to become an instrument for one another.”[^4] Like Akasha Gloria Hull who writes extensively on the “creative partnership with spirit” that Black women maintain, Moten also stresses that the expression of this becoming-instrument is an act of simultaneous composition (making the work) and dispossession (losing the self).[^5]

Moten and Hull both speak to the idea of a community whose members are not only in solidarity with one another but who also remain in a constant state of becoming one another. This is a spiritual community – one that exists on both the physical and astral plane – as much as a social and embodied one. It is a community made through coalition. The living are not the dead, but we do coexist, and in our coexistence lies our potential for building together. As Martin Berger notes, the “living and dead were interdependent. Always. Only a uniquely modern form of egotism has broken this interdependence. With disastrous results for the living, who now think of the dead as _eliminated_.”[^6]

To flip Berger’s thesis, we might consider the ways we think of our eliminated as dead. Who else has been eliminated? To where have the over 7.2 million people living under carceral control on U.S. territory gone? Where are the absent Black bodies whose labour produces the physical, intellectual, cultural and psychic power the world so greedily consumes? What are we, if not present? Are we dead in the context of the modern egotism Berger references, where dead is synonymous with “dead and gone”? Does our elimination render us ghosts – even as our gone-ness produces living capital, even after the point of death, as though the vibrancy of our spirit after elimination was only the spoils of a blood-thirsty parasite?[^7] Is that all that we are – hosts to the living?

As I reflect on an individual’s capacity to become an eliminated subject en route to a dead body, I am reminded of the 2014 lynching of Michael Brown, in which, according to Marc Lamont Hill, the community was forced to “watch \[Brown\] lay there, as if he belonged to nobody… That nobodiness happens even before you encounter a Darren Wilson… If you’re not part of the 1% you just might be nobody.”[^8] Imagine a late morning in Ferguson, Missouri: A community brought together through their shared Blackness and poverty, which has rendered them a collective of eliminated nobodies, watching a fellow eliminated nobody lay dying. How does it feel to be nobody watching nobody die? How does one transition from living to dead – to the realm of ancestors resisting elimination – when one has already been eliminated into nobodiness? This “feeling”?

I look to our ancestors for answers. Like the one who occupied me in New Orleans, they resist elimination and make me a simultaneous host and composer. This particular ancestor compels me to refuse the elimination of my living and my dead through collaboration, which is really merely a manifestation of our rebellious spirit moving through us and demanding remembrance plus action.

She entreats me to reinvigorate thermodynamics’ first law, the conservation of energy: Nothing to be thrown away because there is no away. There is no dead-and-gone, no not-here, no town of nobodies-merely-bodies-in-waiting. Darren Wilson’s somebodiness exists only inasmuch as Michael Brown is equally somebody. The conservation of energy argues that the power of the state exists only by the power of the people, and the people’s power is flamed by the power of the unseen. We are recycled. We are connected: ancestors and the not-yet-ancestors, people inside prison and outside, people outside our borders and inside, people killing us and those of us who have been killed. I touched this interdependent spirit when my ancestor occupied me and we entered into an embodied and instrumental discourse on themes of freedom, which, in conversation, becomes collective. More precisely, I touched this spirit in the moment I was physically on the floor rocking with my sisters while becoming thick with ancestors and drowning together in the sea. Even that ghost slaver, working out his ghastly memories of violence in the physical realm; his own resistance to elimination – troubled as it was – was pulled into the conversation. We were connected through the cipher of my corpus. We touched spirit through flesh and pulled each other into the deep, and we all drowned together.

Our work in New Orleans is a re-collection: an invitation to run the spirit through the body, an acknowledgement of our interdependence. When we make spiritually rooted creative work, we offer this hand of collaboration to all of our ancestors and ancestors-to-be. We say with our art: “Welcome. Glad to meet you. Let me help you. Pull me up.” We offer this hand to those from the hold whose names we’ll never know. We offer it, too, to those whose names we have: Harriet, Audre, Fannie Lou, Langston, Sojourner, Toni, James, Nina, Marsha, Ed, Josephine, Nat, Grandma Maddie, Aunt Lula, Trayvon, Eric, Rekia, Emmett, Skye, Tyre, TT, and on and on. And then, too, we offer the hand to each other: those of us living, dancing, struggling, surviving – all at the same damn time. All of us – seen and unseen – we touch the spirit and we illuminate us all.

We are hitting a rhythm now; we are hitting our rock. We are on the studio floor, rocking. The floor is a ship, which carries us away and brings us back home. The rocking shakes the shackles as it shakes our loved ones and those we don’t yet know to love us. We are dancing with our breath; we are rocking. We are having a conversation about freedom. We are collaborating with spirit, which is infinite, which is to say: We are making ourselves infinite. We are making ourselves free.

[^1]: Toni Morrison, _Soul Talk_, quoted in Akasha Gloria Hull, _Soul Talk: The New Spirituality of African American Women_ (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2001), 233.
[^2]: Bernice Johnson Reagon, discussing spirituals in _The Songs are Free_, a documentary by Bill Moyers and Gail Pellett (PBS, 1991). Quoted in P. Kimberleigh Jordan, “‘Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around’: Spirituals as Embodied Acts of Resistance,” _The Black Scholar_ 46, No. 1 (Spring 2016), 37-45.
[^3]: James Baldwin “Princes and Powers,” _Observer_, November 25, 1956.
[^4]: Fred Moten at REDCAT, Los Angeles, March 19, 2014.
[^5]: Akasha Gloria Hull, 109.
[^6]: Martin Berger, “On the Economy of the Dead,” _Harper’s_, September, 2008, http://harpers.org/archive/2008/09/on- the-economy-of-the- dead/
[^7]: Frances Robles and Mike McPhate, “George Zimmerman Tries to Auction Gun Used to Kill Trayvon Martin,” _New York Times_, May 12, 2016.
[^8]: “Marc Lamont Hill & Mychal Denzel Smith React to Police Killings of Alton Sterling & Philando Castile (Pt. 2)”, (on Democracy Now, July 7, 2016). “http://www.democracynow.org/2016/7/7/marc\_lamont\_hill\_my- chal\_denzel\_smith\_react”

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History

Spirituality

Collective

This takes the reader on a stream-of-consciousness type exploration in which the identities and feelings of others, specifically African-American subalterns are investigated. The work enters this narrative through textual mediation created by describing the process of trance-induced rocking. The writing also explores the authors’ spiritual relationship with her ancestors and Diasporic kin.

Rocking the Running Spirit: Meditations on Sisterhood and Occupations

Esmé Hogeveen is a writer based between Tkaronto/Toronto and Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal.

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Multi-disciplinary

In this text Esmé Hogeveen discusses Xenofeminsim with Lucca Fraser, Halifax-based theorist, scholar and programmer, and one of the members of Laboria Cuboniks (LC). LC’s relationship to Xenofeminism – a cause for which the group created a manifesto –accounts for the myriad ways it can “facilitate pluralistic feminisms, but also the extent to which technology may constitute an interdisciplinary means for revising, and ideally revitalizing, discourse about gendered identity, labour and bodily experience.” The conversation is divided into five question clusters: DEFINE, ATTEND, UPEND, EXTEND and MANIFEST. 

Feminisms of the Future, Now: Rethinking Technofeminism and the Manifesto Form

Treva C. Ellison is a Black queer unicorn residing in the forests of New Hampshire. Treva works as an Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Geography at Dartmouth College. 

issue-132-p28-34.pdf

Body

Performance

This article considers the theories about the social and political nature and constraints of Blackness in North American culture from scholars such as Fred Moten, Aihwa Ong among others. These theories are then applied to contemporary Black dance styles and practices. The idea of flexibility takes a primary position in this discussion being applied both to theoretical approaches to Blackness and as a reference to the dance style Flexin’. 

Flex, Conjure, Crack. Flexibility and the Uncertainty of Blackness

Olivia Boudreau’s practice spans film, video and performance. Over the last few years her work has been featured in various exhibitions and screenings  
mainly in Québec and Europe. She live and works in Montréal.

Barbara Clausen is an independent curator and professor of performance theory and history in the art history department at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Clausen is co-editor of After the Act: _The (Re)presentation of Performance Art_ (Verlag Moderne Kunst, 2006). In 2012 she curated the first retrospective of Babette Mangolte at VOX: Centre de l’image contemporaine as well as the 2014 exhibition and performance series _STAGE SET STAGE: On Identity and Institutionalism_ at SBC Gallery in Montréal. She is currently working on Joan Jonas’ first Canadian retrospective, opening on April 26, 2016, as well as the conjoint performance series _Affinities_, Variations, and Scenarios, opening in May 2018, both at at DHC / Art in Montréal.

Simone Forti (Los Angeles, USA), is an Italian American Postmodern artist, dancer,  
choreographer, and writer. She is a key figure of 1960s minimalist dance, examining  
the relationship of space and the body.

Corinn Gerber is an editor and publisher, co-founder of Passenger Books, former Director of Art Metropole (Toronto) and the CCA Bookstore (Montreal), and Deputy Director of Zurich’s Women’s Bookstore. 

issue-132-p34-44.pdf

Collaboration

This article is a reflection on Joan Jonas’ practice inspired by her major show “From Away” which saw five decades of the artists’ work on view at DHC/ART in Montreal. Accompanying this show was a program called “Affinities”, which combined dance, performance, movement, film screenings and dialogue, pivoted around the resonances of Jonas’ work with contemporary artists with whom Jonas collaborated. This article combines dialogue from those artists participating in “Affinity”, audience members and other “key interlocutors” reflect on Jonas’ practice in three distinct “moments” from “Affinities”. 

Joan Jonas/ Affinities

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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_.

Editor

Designer

Publisher

Artist Project

Jennifer Moon is a futuristic humanoid from outer space. They live and work together in Los Angeles.

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Social

Myth

Science

Narrative

This articles focuses on the idea of the 4% Universe, which comes from the fact that humans exist in a cosmos to which only 4.9% is perceptible to them. This fact was taken by Science writer and Professor, Richard Panek as an embrace of the nearly 95% of darkness which contains knowledge and discovery. This idea of embracing “darkness” or the “95%”is applied to a variety of social and political contexts including anti-blackness and introspection.

At the Edge of Space and Time: Expanding Beyond Our 4% Universe

Review

Yaniya Lee is an arts writer based in Toronto.

This summer the TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) Cinematheque in Toronto showed Lizzie Borden’s _Born in Flames_ (1983) as part its Free Screen series. Similar to Jennie Livingston’s 1990 film, _Paris is Burning, BIF_ has gained tremendous significance among the LGBTQ community. The small-budget production was drawn out over a five-year period. Bleak, downtrodden streets of downtown New York City serve as the backdrop for the film’s fictitious near future, in which a socialist democratic revolution has overturned the capitalist state. Borden casts predominately Black female protagonists who seek a radical reorganization of society. The film’s portrayal of different groups of women working out how to challenge patriarchy and white supremacy was unique for its clear illustration of the fragmentation within second wave feminist struggles. Craig Willse and Dean Spade described the film in the _BIF_ \-themed issue of _Women & Performance_ that they co-edited in 2013: its “radical vision…felt truly shocking: lesbian feminists building multi-strategy responses to heteropatriarchy through an analysis of racism and poverty, debating connections and disjunctions between community organizing, working inside systems, cross-gender and cross-race alliances, and armed resistance.”[^1] The film’s criticisms of society remain relevant today. It seems women of colour are still the most marginalized members of our communities, and the only way to stop the machinations of heteropatriarchy is drastic and immediate structural change.

A couple of years ago, in 2012, Allyson Mitchell, Deirdre Logue and Scott Miller Berry screened _BIF_ in protest _against_ TIFF’s egregious sexism. The “100 Essential Films by Feminists” series they organized at the Feminist Art Gallery (FAG) was a reaction to TIFF’s 2010 “Essential 100 films of all time,” which recognized just a single woman filmmaker alongside 99 male directors. As the FAG programmers noted, “TIFF readily, however wrongly, assumes the role of an ‘authority’ that dictates what kinds of film cultures are worthy, valuable, and eventually ‘historical’ enough to grace their oh-so silver screens.”[^2] TIFF, with its prestigious film festival and year-round screenings, events and exhibitions, has substantial institutional power. I’m interested in thinking about what it might mean for TIFF to show _BIF_ now, especially in light of the film’s earlier use to criticize the institution. Does programming a feminist film represent TIFF’s support of social justice?

Media attention is susceptible to falling in line with what’s fashionable. Recent Black Lives Matter actions, for instance, have brought social justice concerns into a mainstream conversation. Perhaps the most widely covered political action this year was BLMTO’s blockade of the gay pride parade in Toronto to demand recognition of the needs of the most marginalized LGBTQ folks. By comparison, Grassy Narrows, another issue that has been the subject of longstanding activism, has received substantially less coverage. These actions demanding a right to clean land and water in the community may be less newsworthy because they have been ongoing since the town’s mercury spill in the 1970s. It’s clear that the importance of political actions is filtered by topicality and aesthetic appeal. Selecting to show _BIF_ and host a talk with director Lizzie Borden aligns with the concerns of the current political climate: TIFF audiences are ready to see Black queers and movements for societal change on screen.

Representation of marginalized communities on screen is sorely needed and often overdue. This can have the effect of blinding eager audiences to unchanged institutional power. Without redistribution of power, political programming like TIFF’s screening of _BIF_ does not address the grievances outlined by the FAG programmers. In a recent essay, Hannah Black wrote that, “the limits of inclusion are clear.” \[3\] She went on to explain how “\[t\]he evocation of the dismal histories and current realities of race/gender in an art context…is not often directly aimed at producing actual political effects.”[^4] Onscreen representation is only a single part of what is required for institutional transformation. During the Q&A after the film, Borden talked about what happened to some of the people who were in it. Kathryn Bigelow, the white woman who played one of the white feminist journalists, went on to direct films ideologically opposite to the sentiment of _Born in Flames_, and became the first woman director ever to win an Oscar Jean Satterfield, the Black woman who played Adelaide Norris, is now a social worker. Borden told the audience that a week earlier Satterfield was followed while driving home and then beaten up by her pursuants. The different evolution of these two women’s lives is a more reliable account of the racial and gendered inequalities BIF attempted to highlight. The protest organized by Mitchell, Logue and Berry called attention to how TIFF’s “MeN-ssentialist list” made the institution complicit in the kind of society that would bring about such disparate experiences.

In the ongoing struggle for change, it remains easy to feel we have made more progress than actually exists. Of course it’s not enough to judge TIFF by who is included and who is excluded. In reality, the institution is a complex entanglement of political inconsistencies that make it nearly impossible to criticize. I don’t expect TIFF to be the bearer of political awareness. Institutions like this are many-headed hydra. It does seem that TIFF has begun to make space for women, LGBTQ folks and non-white programmers and directors. I can only hope for future programming that ignores political trends rather than follows them when it suits. I have my fingers crossed for a film about queer Muslim women freedom fighters or an Indigenous community surviving limited access to resources and the threats of government encroachment.

[^1]: Dean Spade and Willse, Craig. “We are ‘Born In Flames,’” _Women & Performance – A Journal of Feminist Theory_, Vol. 23, no. 1, 2013, p. 1.
[^2]: Allyson Mitchell, Deirdre Logue and Scott Miller Berry. “Are you burning?: Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames circa 2012.” _Women & Performance – A Journal of Feminist Theory_, Vol. 23, no. 1, 2013., p. 53.
[^3]: Hannah Black, “The identity artist and the identity critic,” _Artforum_, Vol. 54, New York, 2016.
[^4]: Black

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This article is a review of Lizzie Borden’s film “Born in Flames” (1983) showing with an accompanying Q& A at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox on July 26, 2016\. 

Lizzie Borden: Born in Flames (1983)

Kendra Place is a writer and artist (and femme of settler cultures) living in Tio’tia:ke/Mooniyang (Montreal).

Jaime Black’s Conversations with the Land first reached an audience at Actual Gallery, a commercial space that has since closed. Black’s process engages with the histories, materialities and relations of specific sites, both on the land where she and her ancestors have lived and as a guest on other people’s territories (this is work with the more-than-human that does not “free” anyone from cultural distinctions and responsibilities). Recalling her grandfather’s ways of living with the land, she gathers things that happen to be nearby – stones, fabric, remains of past living – and creates allusive mise-en-scènes that also incorporate herself.

Photographs mediate the ongoing project, yet both the title and the work suggest that conventional discourses of photography – as technical apparatus, documentation or art – are limiting with respect to the work’s dimensions. I imagine the photographs as life-stills: although they are presented in the gallery as rectangular, printed formats excerpted from the subjective lives of the artist and her relations, they nonetheless convey movement, time, voice and space at several paces, volumes and scales.

For _the land remembers_ (2016), the artist has composed animal bones around and beside herself on the lichenous (back)ground. The remnants of hunting from years or generations past cycle through the wide photo, a skeletal aura changing depending on where (or when) it is: scattered, as found; arranged, as left; glowing like a sun-bleached halo of someone (once) present. Also on the tundra, for _breath of the land I-IV_ (2016), Black stands on a shore beside tall rock formations. She has draped herself in found tent fabric secured to the ground around her with heavy stones. In four stills, wind gusts around and through her temporary shelter, animating the series while placing geological time in dialogue with the erosive daily weather. Black (who’s Métis) and I (of settler cultures) talked a few times about this review; she told me that she is considering her relationship with the land as ceremony, a tentative approach encouraged by visits with Inuit of Pangnirtung, where these works were made.

Several stills are from performances near her family’s southern-Manitoba home, where the land is flat, tilled or forested. _Fallow_ (2016) is a deceptively simple composition, as the Prairies sometimes are when the sky is calm. The artist stands on a leaf-covered field with a grey wool blanket covering her head and upper body. The effect is almost static, a hauntology but not a paradox, as though recalling a quiet or whispered conversation. Black’s performances often begin in half-sleep – the imagery of her dreaming. For _uniform_ (2016), Black lies on the ground partially covered with patches of grass; it is as though a horizon line has collapsed into the land, the land now almost indistinguishable from her body. This image recalls Edward Poitras’ _Offensive/ Defensive_ (1988), an unforgettable conceptual-material work in which he moved a rectangle of grass from a reserve to an urban gallery lawn and vice versa: while the disparity between sovereignty and carcerality is most pronounced in colonial contexts, each artist also contends with several intersections, whether of gender, location or class.

Black’s exhibition also includes an earlier inter-media photo series, _Contested Territories_ (2012). Anticipating _uniform_, the work intends to foreground the body as land and the subject of knowledge practices. Red lines screen-printed or embroidered across ink-jet prints of the artist’s abdomen depict Indigenous maps of waterways, colonial survey maps for land privatization, or medical “maps” as cuts or scars of expedient C-section birthing. Although there are many ways to (dis)identify with these images, I worry their important truths might be obscured by photographic surfaces, the black-and-white photos yet to disinherit the camera’s gaze as an objectifying apparatus insofar as they replicate commercial or advertising strategies. 

With _untitled_ (2016), Black negotiates vulnerability and resilience, as established through the ongoing REDress project for which she is known. Whereas the REDress project contributes to the necessary, melancholic labour of addressing settler publics, often in institutional spaces – campuses or legislatures – the momentum of untitled performs a more vivid conversation about Indigenous two-spirit, women and girls’ survivance under colonial patriarchy. Embodying a red garment as a transformative and hopeful gesture, this pivotal work offers an imaginary of refusal and freedom.

_Lean to_ (2016) is displayed as two photos on either side of _untitled_. In the first still, the artist stands in a field with tree poles leaning against her blanketed shoulders; whether this is a precarious or reinforcing structure, she is bearing its weight. In the second image, she sits with the trees radiating on the ground around her. _Lean to_ is perhaps most audible live: Black recently performed the work during Duane Linklater’s roaming Wood Land School, co-curated in this iteration with Jaimie Isaac at Plug In ICA. After painting her legs and arms with riverbank clay, Black moved from the gallery to the rooftop, where those present carefully built the structure around and with her. Artist Lita Fontaine then led its peaceful dismantling, following the performance with a smudge. This reclamation of relational, embodied and land-based autonomy, owing something to the inimitable practices of Rebecca Belmore and Peter Morin, is unaffected by a gallery’s claim to aesthetic autonomy.

Unlike the Eurowestern tradition of land art, which imagines most viewers to leave “civilization” physically or conceptually in order to experience the art, with Black’s practice the land is present with her, meeting the viewer wherever they are. Black’s work invites other diffractive readings: among them, perhaps, a resonance with the multi-territory _#call-response_ project (2016) based at Vancouver’s grunt gallery; and a challenge (to whom it may concern) to pay less attention to Bruno Latour or the so-called ontological turn and more to the land and its relations (echoing Indigenous feminist and anthropologist Zoë Todd). It also compels me to continue an unapologetic critique of the (bio)political economy.

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This is a review of Jaime Black’s exhibition “Conversations With The Land”, which showed at Winnipeg’s Actual Gallery from April 1 to May 8, 2016\. 

Jaime Black: Conversations with the Land 

Jessica Karuhanga is a Toronto-based artist working in drawing, video and performance.

Are you mad?   
Harness this feeling.

How do we channel madness when we find ourselves continually rooted in being undone? Our bodies hold ineffable energies that remain unperceivable to those existing outside their fleshy contours. This cipher precedes language and its translation deep within the wells of un-mappable geographies. These wells harbour safety until we are awash in death and she leaves us rising like smoke diffused and unnamed. So we say her name. We repeat these utterances like mantras. In this madness we merge and dance furiously. I missed the incessant dancing on September 1, 2016\. However, instinctively, I felt this vision was a continuous unfolding and each day there awaited a new experience.

Simone Leigh’s _The Waiting Room_ – an expansion of her socially engaged project _Free People’s Medical Clinic_ (2014) – is an undeniable affirmation of her investment in centralizing subjectivities of Black women and femmes. Leigh foregrounds these bodies within a legacy of community-organized healthcare practices necessitated by the systemic deferral of Black vulnerability and livelihood. _The Waiting Room_ inaugurates a residency and exhibition series at the New Museum that is committed to a dialectic exchange between the public and the institution focused on art and social justice. The exhibition is comprised of a series of performances, lectures and care sessions led and enacted by artists and educators from within Leigh’s community. Most of these workshops, which occurred outside the museum’s standard hours, were free to the public. Leigh’s program reveals Black women to be unwavering despite of and in defiance of a violent history of dispossession and medicalization. Let us recall the death of Esmin Green, a catalyst for Leigh’s vision, who was forcibly admitted to a psychiatric ward in Brooklyn where she waited for 24 hours to receive care that would never reach her before her untimely death. She collapsed in a chair in the waiting room. Her body, even in death, lay waiting. “I don’t want to wait in vain for your love,”[^1] becomes a riff that summons deeper sensibilities

On a Saturday morning in mid-September I attended a session in _The Waiting Room_. I was greeted at the entrance of the New Museum by a woman checking off the names of those who had signed up to participate in a guided meditation for Black Lives Matter. In the foyer a receptionist, wearing a brightly coloured hat, smiled while singing a cappella. She summoned me with her voice and ushered me toward an elevator leading to the fifth floor. I ascended to The Waiting Room with several strangers. I reflected on what possible sets of motions had drawn us all here to this apex. Many of us were not merely visitors to the site but only in town for a sojourn, which seemed noteworthy.

The elevator doors parted. I entered a dimly lit room to face an intricately etched paper curtain. This partition insisted our bodies move in one of two directions. I intuitively followed the scents of lavender and hibiscus toward the apothecary, which was sanctioned off from the rest of the installation space by a pristine glass wall. Before this room stood a table covered with stacks of mint-hued newsprint weighted down by large stones. I took a paper, but I suspended reading it to allow for distance after witnessing. In the apothecary baskets on floor were filled to the brim with sage. White walls were lined with rows of white shelves holding meticulously placed jars. They were filled with cinnamon, chamomile and flower petals. The mélange of scents tethered me to the ground while I sipped on tea offerings. The waiting room was buttressed with heaps of white sandbags reaching my hips. These piles enveloped the central space, which is strewn with black cushions, and they soften the distilled realities of the institutional framework through which we were temporarily passing. A group of thirty-something people was about to sit together through a mettabhavana (loving-kindness) meditation led by Mona Chopra. Several candles rested flush with the wall behind her, forming an altar that suggests the residue of something that transpired before our emergence. Chopra guided us through intention and we endeavoured to be in our bodies despite all mental wanderings and reflexes. I wondered if I was able to emit warmth toward my tormentors. I repeated their names in addition to individuals I barely know. I conjured their images. This task is difficult. I resigned myself to thinking about the cupcakes I was going to eat later with my friend. I returned to this site in my body. I shifted my weight trying to remain centred. I was not certain if I was doing things right. I tried to dispel my skepticism. This task was difficult as I am rooted in being undone with no solace in sight.

Days later, on my way home, leafing through mint-hued newsprint, I find myself moved to tears. The intricacies reveal a fragility I know, and yet I do not have the capacity to contend with the notion that my teachers and maternal figures may leave me. Or that I too will leave this place. So I hold on to them, pulling them out of splits into a form that is beyond human. Sometimes we remain unperceivable even while our tormentors gaze and graze upon our skins. Sometimes we revel within and beyond the frame.

[^1]: Bob Marley & The Wailers. “Waiting in Vain”, 1977.

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This is a review of Simone Leigh’s “The Waiting Room”, which was showing from June 22 to September 18, 2016 at the New Museum in New York. 

Simone Leigh: The Waiting Room 

Genevieve Flavelle is an independent curator, writer and PhD student in the Department of Art History & Art Conservation at Queen’s University.

I don’t think I ever watched porn on VHS; I’m too young for that. As my sexuality took shape, amid the early dramas of being a queer teenager, the Internet was already fully accessible to the public. My first curious fantasies were thus nervously typed into a search engine or furtively searched for in library books. The rapid dominance of Internet porn meant that by the time I was 18, daily glimpses of sticker-covered nipples at the corner store and the mysterious curtained-off backrooms of my local video stores had vanished. As these sexual ephemera remain an object of childhood speculation rather than adult consumption, I’ve learned only through research of the huge impact that obscenity laws and morality brigades had on precarious queer communities. The uncertain digital future of this era of gay porn is one of the subjects of Cait McKinney and Hazel Meyer’s collaborative show at the Canadian Lesbian & Gay Archives. Rather than a nostalgia-laden presentation, however, _Tape Condition: degraded_ punches a hole in the wall of the archive to bring Toronto’s complex queer sexual histories into the present.

_Tape Condition: degraded_ is the product of McKinney and Meyer’s discovery that the CLGA holds a collection of over 800 VHS porn tapes. Spending years watching, rewinding and reporting the condition of the tapes, the pair began to fantasize about their dream tapes – homemade tapes, kinky tapes, tapes with women, trans folks, people of colour and people with different bodies. Finding little to none of these dream tapes in a collection that is largely comprised of commercially produced gay male porn from the 1980s and 1990s, McKinney and Meyer turned to the queer imagination and the desire to imagine a different kind of archive. The result is a multifunctional space for watching, archiving and creating queer porn in the CLGA’s gallery, accompanied by a free publication detailing the dream tapes of 11 artists, activists and thinkers illustrated in Meyer’s signature black-and-white ink drawings.

Requiring visitors to duck through a jagged hole bashed into a false wall built over the gallery’s usually generous entrance (the wall once proposed as protection against police raids), _Tape Condition: degraded_ doesn’t immediately feel like an art installation. But it doesn’t really feel like an archive either. It feels domestic, colourful, welcoming, kitschy and sexy in a secret and seedy way. There is no customary vinyl on the wall proclaiming the title of the show, no works loudly declaring their status as art and no densely packed archive stacks. There are some white gloves, but they are stored on a cute yellow wire rack along with other tools that assist in VHS maintenance. Rather, the colourful space feels like one in which, depending upon the time of day you arrive, you could find people digitizing VHS tapes at the large work table, drawing up sexy porn ideas at the drafting table or pushing aside the furniture to film their very own dream tapes against the vibrant green screen wall.

Auspiciously placed props gesture toward these three uses of the space. The large table is set up as a DIY digitization station – technology that Meyer and McKinney made accessible to the public for the duration of the exhibition. The second fantasy-laden aspect of the show is illustrated in Morgan Sea’s commissioned comic, _Transsexual Dream Girls 2_. The comic, which is included in the publication and displayed in the space, is comprised of two parts: first, Sea reviews the only tape with trans women performers that she was able to find in the archive; and second, Sea falls asleep and enters the fantasy-porn-filled world of the _Conceptual Archives of Queer Eros and Ephemera_. Props such as a leather vest, hard-hat, bondage rope and rubber-tipped clothespins are ready on shelves and the pale pink peg board wall, and entice making fantasies porn realities using a casually placed VHS video camera.

As an exhibition, _Tape Condition: degraded_ weaves together contemporary contributions with material from the archives and critical content from the publication with considerable care. McKinney and Meyer’s lament over the lack of lesbian- and women-produced porn is reflected in clippings on the bulletin board from lesbian feminist activist and hero Chris Bearchell’s 1983 _Body Politic_ article, “In Search of Lesbian Porn.” The bulletin board details the title of the show and its artists, and sets the stage for its themes and issues through small archival clippings about censorship, the persecution of local gay establishments by police, DIY porn, porn versus erotica and porn appreciation. Contemporary works, including Meyer’s original drawings for the publication, are displayed alongside archival items such as a 1993 Rhythms of Resistance poster, which advertises the benefit dance as the “hottest Queers of Colour dance in 1993.” The poster is a nod to the legacy of Toronto’s very active QTBIPOC communities, which are detailed in Syrus Marcus Ware’s contribution to the publication, and represent an act of resistance to the whitewashed grand narratives of gay liberation.

Confronted with an archive collection that depicts and legitimizes a narrow portrait of gay sexuality, McKinney and Meyer have opened up access to representation and commemoration through an act of creative queer world-making, rather than canonizing the CLGA’s limited collection. By asking what is missing from the archive, the practices of archiving are queered to take the form of a community hub pulsing with history, politics, desire, fantasy, conflict and intimacy. The show enacts the productive tensions of at once being an archive and a counter-archive, a celebration and a critique. Promoting promiscuous knowledge production in the form of gossip, anecdotes, unofficial histories and dirty desires, the exhibition contributes to an important contemporary questioning of whose knowledge and narratives count in an LGBTQ archive.

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This article reviews Cait McKinney and Hazel Meyer’s show “Tape Condition: degraded”, which ran from June 16 to September 18, 2016 at the Canadian Lesbian & Gay Archives in Toronto. 

Cait McKinney and Hazel Meyer: Tape Condition: degraded

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

The name of the exhibition _A Pool is Water_ is excerpted from a Joan Didion essay about wealth and drought. When Didion writes “a pool is water,” she means that swimming pools are symbolic. In California, they have always signalled affluence and leisure. But to Didion, pools represent order: they stand for the mastery and control achieved by cutting a hole in the ground and filling it with water that stays there until we drain it. Even though that water is undrinkable, even though it’s in limited supply, we’ve tamed it and claimed it. Four words, equally terse and poetic, convey all this.

Everything in this show is on trend – not a curatorial diminishment, but a nod toward the acuteness of the selection – from Didion, to the rosé palette, to poetry.

Poetry has become irresistible to the art world in the past few years, to which the proliferation of essays and exhibitions devoted to this topic (including a recent poetry-themed issue of this magazine) attest. One theory is that poetry is penniless, defies commodification, prefers to live underneath the cool dark of a rock, and so appears to the contemporary art world as a salve for its own vulgarity. Poetry adds vulnerability and integrity.

_A Pool is Water_ also seems tailored to a specific audience of young feminists – the kind who read poets like Ariana Reines, who read Chris Kraus’s _I Love Dick_, who get stoned and watch torrented episodes of _Transparent_ in bed. While defining a variety of feminism by the commodifiable media that surrounds it is a bit bleak, it’s a reality.

The five artists in this exhibition give form to this very specific matrix of cultural influences; it’s a pleasingly self-aware combination of agitated sensuality, parodied “girlishness” and a razor-sharp dexterity with language.

Megan Rooney – who often folds poetic audio components and performances into her work – exposes the awkwardness of performing mainstream femininity. Layering paint, marker, pastel and ink over a two-page spread from _Topshop_ magazine, she conjures a goofy sexuality. She pares catalogue models down to basic parts – red lips, fluffy eye blobs, pillowy breasts – so that they appear as smiling ghosts, sad and creaturely. Her _Untitled_ floor snake, like the skinniest bed-worn T-shirt stuffed with birdseed, rests coiled and flaccid in the exhibition’s second room. Kissed and smudged with paint, its body is propped up by a dense clay head whose eye-less sockets communicate the same kind of banal, sweet numb as the figures in Rooney’s paintings.

In a similar coil, poetic verses from Tiziana La Melia’s _From staring at the ceiling seeing d.o.g_ spiral down a wall in a ʼ90s-reminiscent bubble flower typeface: “no sweat my pet, butter lettuce in the breeze eating your garnish.” La Melia combines lethargic texting shorthand (e.g. “yr” instead of “your”) with a rounded tone, smoothed at the edges and bouncy like baby talk. Following the poem’s meanders, a self-assertive blow strikes: “just trying to get an ordinary pleasure.” One of La Melia’s paintings features disjointed muscle men in white tanks collapsing into one another at the hips. Sliding down the painting’s border is an orange-tinted spermy figure– masculinity’s final trickle.

Propped against the gallery wall is Athena Papadopoulos’ _S & B, III_: a disembodied pair of high-heeled legs, stuffed tightly and red-stained with hair dye and wine. Papadopoulos’s work is alluring in same way that the bedroom of the girl that made you steal lipstick from the pharmacy in grade school was. Her large-scale painting soils the surface of a bed sheet with lipstick, nail polish, Pepto-Bismol, witchy spiders and bat pins, wild women, snakeskin and the words “Hoochie Mama” in animal-print letters. Her works labour against the sterilizing effect of Division’s white walls; the rouged surfaces reassert that stains can be intentional, productive even. Papadopoulos’ painting has a gravitational effect on the room, drawing everything inward toward its heart. It hangs facing, but slightly askew from, a similar-sized square hole that’s been ruggedly carved out of the gallery wall, making it seem as though the work blasted through the drywall on its way in.

Across the room, Raque Ford’s _The Devil is in the Details_ rewrites the narrative of Georgia Brown, a character from the 1940 musical _Cabin in the Sky_, which featured Broadway’s first all-Black cast. Produced and scored by white writers, _Cabin_ was, unsurprisingly, a fantasy-driven appropriation of life in the rural South, loaded with cultural and religious stereotypes. Ford’s crisp acrylic surfaces are engraved with Brown’s words, reimagining the doomed, money-driven seductress trope as a complex, searching voice. In the original musical, Brown sings: “If there’s honey in the honeycomb then, baby, Look out! ’Cause oh, there’s love in me.” In a hand- drawn style, Ford carves out honeybees and cartoonish devils alongside her own lyrics: “Dear Devil, I want to be alone, but I don’t want to be lonely. Do you ever feel like that? Sincerely, Georgia Brown.” Another of Ford’s acrylic surfaces is like brittle honey in a milky yellow; it seems like it would be fragrant if not for its obvious rigidity and sealed-in glossiness. Ford’s works read as inquisitive devotions to the intense intellectual and emotional lives of women who have been written into one-dimensional narratives.

Published in tandem with the exhibition is a book of poetry by Maryse Larivière entitled _Hummzinger_, which is steeped in yearning. The textural quality of Larivière’s ode to missing someone resonates with the exhibition’s material sensibility: “A hummingbird, in between my lips, Puffy frills and ruffles, Buzzing thick on my tongue, Like an ice cream sandwich, In black velour.” Hummingbirds inform her other works in the show too – the delicacy of her collages, the pageantry of the shimmering red bird baffle at the gallery’s entrance. Taken together, Larivière’s works embody a nectar-thick need to be closer, and that unabashed vulnerability speaks to a complicated feminist interiority that pervades the exhibition – maroon days inside a blistering emotional landscape of watered-down oppression. But here, vulnerability is speculated upon, celebrated, parodied, claimed. _A Pool is Water_ is thrilling because its artists deliver a bastion of unexploited feminist terrain, all coiled up and wine-stained and flowing out in endless sticky verses. Ford, La Melia, Larivière, Papadopoulos and Rooney all in turn alchemize a worn-out formula with the fluidity and ease of Didion’s title assertion.

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This article is a review of the group show “A Pool is Water”, which was held at Montreal’s Division Gallery from July 14 to September 3, 2016\. 

Raque Ford, Tiziana La Melia, Maryse Larivière, Athena Papadopoulos, Megan Rooney: A Pool is Water

Carolyn Jervis is a freelance writer and curator, and Exhibition Experience and Interpretation Coordinator at the Art Gallery of Alberta.

Water is intrinsically dynamic: its state changes depending on temperature and, in its most common liquid form, it responds to movement. Water’s chemical properties suggest neutrality: it is tasteless, it can act as both an acid and a base, it dissolves many substances and it is almost entirely clear. Globally, it demarcates many liminal places, such as international waters, and time spent on water often has a feeling of suspension. Although the political issues regarding water are often as various and as complicated as its chemical properties, the United Nations nonetheless considers clean water a fundamental human right. Ruth Cuthand’s _Don’t Breathe Don’t Drink_ makes it clear that in Canada clean water is far from politically neutral, and in a disconcertingly beautiful installation she forces her audience to encounter their own subjective position in relationship to the crisis.

The central component of _Don’t Breathe, Don’t Drink_ is the crystal-clear resin that poses as water in 94 glasses, pitchers and baby bottles, which correspond collectively to the number of First Nations communities with water advisories at the time the work was created. A glass-beaded replica of a water-borne pathogen is suspended in the substance within each vessel. As you move through the small room, with its low ceiling and clapboard walls, light refracts through the resin onto the blue tarp tablecloth that covers the table on which the water vessels sit. As the light moves, the beaded pathogens gleam.

Apparently contaminated and eerily still, this installation raises the question of why clean water is treated as a human right in seemingly every jurisdiction in Canada except these First Nations communities. Furthermore, through Cuthand’s scaling down of a national crisis to the setting of a modest domestic room filled with everyday objects and crafted materials, she confronts her audience with their implication in the problem.

The artist’s use of beaded pathogens in this artwork echoes her 2009 series _Trading_, in which she created beaded versions of illnesses and disease that have been overrepresented among Indigenous populations, historically and in the present, and displayed them in framed petri dishes. Similarly, in both _Don’t Breathe, Don’t Drink_ and _Trading_, the use of glass beads, which became a form of currency during the time of trading posts, evokes this early colonial history as well as the history of Indigenous cultural production that resulted from access to what was then a new material.[^1]

The act of recreating illness-causing microbes by hand, using a crafting skill with a long and specific trajectory, emphasizes both the labour this entails and the weight of a history of genocide. What if, instead of impotent federal policies, each community lacking access to clean water was consulted, and treated with the level of individualized and informed care, skill and labour that Cuthand employs in her beading? Other elements of Cuthand’s installation also gesture to the myriad ways that the federal government has been ineffectual in supporting the basic needs of First Nations communities. The beaded blue tarp tablecloth on which the glasses sit references the tarps used as stop-gap measures to protect people from the dangers of black mold in homes on some reservations, offering a further reminder of the threats to health and safety present in the everyday lives of residents of remote First Nations communities.

_Don’t Breathe, Don’t Drink_ notably distinguishes itself from Cuthand’s previous series by contextualizing the beaded pathogens in a domestic space, which personalizes the crisis. Every water vessel in the artwork evokes an interpersonal gesture of care. A bottle brings to mind the feeding of an infant, a pitcher brings to mind common acts of offering hospitality to guests. Cuthand’s work reminds us that these basic practices of family and community care embedded in the simple act of providing a glass of clean water are impossible in the kitchens of many First Nations communities in Canada. Although the choice to include the same number of water vessels as there were communities in crisis could have felt like too literal a gesture, the environment in which Cuthand places them creates a nuanced conversation about the nation state’s relationship with Indigenous subjects in Canada.

In the artwork, the person behind the gesture of hospitality suggested by the vessels placed on the domestic table is absent. This reflects the contingent subjectivity that the Canadian nation state has maintained for Indigenous peoples. As scholar Sunera Thobani notes, the Canadian national imaginary is wrapped up in binary ways of understanding our social world that bleed into our very conception of who gets to be the subject raised above others, the subject considered human and thus entitled to full human rights. Colonialism still lives within the way the nation state and the “exalted” national subject (which mutually support each other) remain set up in an oppositional relationship to Indigenous people, meaning they are in part defined by not being Indigenous and by the idea that Indigenous history is long past.[^2] The missing host at the artwork’s table is a reminder of the uneven rights each subject is afforded, contingent to one’s relationship with colonial history. The Indigenous host’s labour is present, but they are invisible.

Cuthand hails her viewer by offering up water glasses on a kitchen table. _Don’t Breathe, Don’t Drink_’s visitor interpellation is contextually significant when thinking about what it means to exhibit this artwork in a gallery setting that, like so many, addresses a largely white clientele. Serving to personalize and concretize systemic national issues, the artwork is a litmus test for checking your own privilege and status when provoked to consider whether or not you would ever be in a position to accept or reject contaminated water.

[^1]: Gerald McMaster, “Cruel Beauty: New World Holocaust,” in _Ruth Cuthand: Back Talk, Works 1983 – 2009_ (Regina: Mendel Art Gallery, 2012), 81.
[^2]: Sunera Thobani, _Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada_ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division, 2007): 14, 18.

This is an article reviewing Ruth Cuthland’s show “Don’t Breathe, Don’t Drink”, which ran from March 18 to April 16,2016 at Edmonton’s dc3 Art Projects, 

Ruth Cuthand: Don't Breathe, Don't Drink 

**D.J. Fraser** is a critical and creative writer, instructor and doctoral student at Concordia University in the art history department. They work in between Montréal and New York.

Desearch Repartment’s _Institute for Durational Futures: Brought to you by ESSENTIALHAPPINESSPOSSIBILITY_ exhibition revealed a commitment to exposing the narcissism of unreflexive privilege and the so-called apolitical detachment of the artist in a post-feminist and post-identity art world. As an anonymous think tank working in between platforms of social performance, DR takes the apathetic to task, and snarkily reminds us that the post-identity artist assumes no responsibility. Claiming identity politics were too restrictive throughout the ’90s, the satirical DR works to undermine an “excess of content” in the contemporary art world, instead focusing on the production and performance of immaterial spaces _around_ content. To this end, Desearch offered up an “interactive convention” in exhibition form at AKADEMYSPACE in Cologne last November; this “convention” encouraged viewers to escape from accountability in favour of personal satisfaction in a hostile climate of surveillance and incarceration. Durational performances of art and life encouraged viewers to tune in to themselves, opt out and, above all, be flexible.

The DR, and their uncomfortably on-the-nose critique of neoliberal consumerism recalls parodic praxis of earlier generations of feminist performance artists engaged in reflexive and living art meant to run parallel and often confront grim political realities. The DR exhibition, along with its online operatives and printed matter, unnerved and displaced cultural complacency, ultimately calling attention to an entrenched practice of performing the self. What does the queer feminist body perform in a climate supposedly beyond identity and enmeshed in surveillance culture, social media and corporate sponsorship?

The exhibition reflected an uneasy coupling of satire and sombre recognition: Guantanamo Art Fair tote bags reminded the spectator of torture practices perpetrated in the prison industrial complex to which corporate America is inextricably linked; flags with the _Institute for Durational Futures_ (IDF) logo were placed in “torture cells” enclosed with barbed wire in the exhibition; attendees were invited to snap selfies beside corporate logos while walking the red carpet in celebrity masks.

The DR made explicit with their video installation _Neo-Lived Realism: Compassion Torture_ that nothing is sacred, or immune to critique in their art practice. The instructional video offered spectators a practice of “selfie-embodiment” through yaga, a mutant yoga practice that reflects an empty, complicit exercise of involution as directly linked to personal de-politicization. The video guided spectators through a bodily performance that required the material 

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This is a review of the show “Desearch Repartment Institute for Durational Futures: Brought to you by ESSENTIALHAPPINESSPOSSIBILITY”, which ran from November 13 to December 18, 2015 at AKADEMYSPACE in Cologne. 

Desearch Repartment Institute for Durational Futures: Brought to you by ESSENTIALHAPPINESSPOSSIBILITY

**Shellie Zhang** is a multidisciplinary artist. She creates images, objects, and projects in a wide range of media to explore how integration, diversity, and assimilation are implemented and negotiated, and how manifestations of these ideas relate to lived experiences.


Since 2009, Toronto’s small and efficacious Gendai Gallery has programmed exhibitions and events with the goal of cultivating dialogue through contemporary art from East Asian perspectives. In 2014, Gendai published _Model Minority_, a compilation of essays, articles, readings, ephemera and archival material compiled from the gallery’s year-long programming series under the same name. Chock full of contributions from Canadian artists, academics and writers, and the first Toronto-based East-Asian-centered arts publication I have come across, _Model Minority_ bridges the void in defining Asian-Canadian dialogues against the larger and often overshadowing Asian-American discourses. In discussing Asian identity, statements of homogeneity are not uncommon due to the erasure and generalization of our histories. _Model Minority_ dispels this homogeneousness by presenting an array of historical and contemporary strategies, models and voices of resistance– a testament to the power of one small but resilient unit, itself a defiance against the very paradigm for which it’s named.

In 2012, Gendai closed the doors of its workstation after an active year and reorganized to carry out its activities through a flexible nomadic structure, opting to engage the public through collaborations and partnerships with artists and organizations. _Model Minority_ opens with an honest statement from the gallery’s team expressing a reflective period during which Gendai grappled with the fact that they are funded under the umbrella of state multiculturalism, while working to challenge the failures of multiculturalism, white supremacy and colonialism through their programming. By acknowledging their place in settler-colonial multiculturalism, Gendai hoped that its work could be “mobilized towards the cultivation of alliances, solidarity and support of subjects within, beyond and against the violent settler state.” As such, the book – co-published by Gendai and Guelph’s Publication Studio – is intended to function as a resource for all those interested in workshopping the model minority concept.

Often broadly ascribed to East Asians, the model minority myth is the stereotype that hard work in the face of adversity allows a marginalized group to achieve a higher degree of socioeconomic success. The term is sometimes used to suggest there is no need for government intervention against discrimination. Historically and presently, it is used to protect institutionalized white supremacy and validate anti-Black racism and xenophobic beliefs. _Model Minority_ tackles the model minority myth in four parts. First, reference texts provide a background to which the model minority archetype can be seen alongside landmark developments in Canadian history, such as the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II and the establishment of the Multiculturalism Act. Second, media clippings provide evidence of the dissemination of the model minority. When examined with a critical eye, these archival materials highlight how East Asians are consistently portrayed by the press as succeeding against all odds while the structures of oppression that persecute them go unaddressed. 

Third, the commissioned texts and projects in _Model Minority_ centre the publication strongly in a contemporary Canadian context. Tings Chak’s analysis of Chinese-Indigenous solidarities through oral histories looks to how Indigenous peoples and early Chinese migrants in British Columbia banded together in times of oppression on a colony “built on free land with half-priced labour.” Calling for more acknowledgement that Canada is a colonial state from Asian communities, Chak addresses the need for immigrant and migrant communities to “know where you came from, and know whose lands you now live on.” A transcript of Will Kwan’s video piece _If All You Have is a Hammer, Everything Looks like A Nail_ portrays subtle racism and micro-aggressions through an imagined encounter between a white real estate agent and a Chinese client, painting a clear picture of “Canadian friendliness,” while challenging the assumptions that arise. Alvis Choi reflects on the Chinatown Community Think Tank project with Gendai, which used space in Whippersnapper Gallery to survey Toronto’s Chinatown community regarding what they were looking for in a gallery. Through a meticulous and critical analysis of their own practice and conduct, Choi questions the strategies of engagement that they employed and shares the learned experience that social engaged art requires transparency outside of the gallery with the people a project seeks to engage.

_Model Minority_ ends with a plethora of resources to consult. Originally, _Model Minority_ was a program series of workshops and screenings that took place between 2013 and 2014\. The book includes a detailed listing of Gendai’s programming, including the challenges, encounters and thinking that occurred behind the scenes. Finally, enclosed throughout the book are zine-like inserts – called “counter-models” – that refer to the work and life of artists and activists like Jesse Nishihata and _The Asianadian_. My only wish was that they had included more local collectives and groups such as the Project 40 Collective, Kapisanan Philippine Centre for Arts & Culture and Asians 4 Black Lives – Toronto. Perhaps for a future edition, fingers crossed.

Politically, Asian Americans and Canadians often occupy an incredibly dualistic position. Recent projects such as Letters for Black Lives Matter (a crowd-sourced resource of multilingual letters aimed at creating a space for and dialogue about racial justice, police violence and anti-Blackness in our families and communities) attempt to bridge generational and language gaps in an effort to preach intersectional support and solidary. _Model Minority_ is a toolkit and foundational resource for beginning to tackle issues of where Asian-identified folks can stand – how we can navigate the precarious terrain of our own identities while fighting for the liberation of all marginalized groups and voices. Without having to elaborate on why these issues are important and valid, as many discussions about social justice sometimes can fall prey to, _Model Minority_ starts on the path of mobilizing and acting.

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This review, written by Shellie Zhang, discusses “Model Minority” (Gendai Gallery (Toronto) Publication Studio (Guelph), 2015, edited by Chris Lee and Maiko Tanaka. 

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Issue 132