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MOCA Toronto Sept

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Modern Fuel Sept

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Art Museum Sep 1

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Editorial

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_.

Discussions of voice in contemporary art can reflect anything from the shape and form of sound and orality; the many manifestations of the spoken word in performance, video or artists’ talks; language as material in art works; to the broader ways in which voice is entangled with power and influence. Here the issue takes voice simply, as the act of speaking to one another and to the world. But the thread throughout this issue is voice as it is tied to agency and self-determination – who can speak, who is heard; when is it advisable – or political – to stay silent and when to scream; and when staying silent can betray those around us or ourselves.

As voice comes with being heard, it is always tied to listening. This issue privileges the back and forth of conversation. We’ve changed the magazine’s typical format, offering seven interviews and conversations in lieu of the usual features and columns. The idea, and the impetus behind calling the issue “Voice,” was to present many different voices; to publish artists and writers in their own words, with little editorial interference.

The artists featured in this issue work in vastly different ways – including video, documentary filmmaking, poetry, installation, performance, podcasts, exhibition-making, photography – and have been brought together because of the force of their voices and the ways in which their work generates critical conversations around art and institutions today. I couldn’t anticipate how these diverse texts would lie side-by-side, but there are remarkable overlaps and resonances between the texts, with many contributors touching upon issues of access and accountability and others digging into the structures around art – how one’s work is made visible, the challenges of working within institutional boundaries, the good (and otherwise) conversations and relationships that precede or follow the act of making one’s work public. As can be the beautiful thing with interviews, many of the conversations here reveal the personal side of art-making, the decisions and priorities that feed artists’ work before it is seen or heard.

The issue opens with Amy Fung in dialogue with artist Deanna Bowen about Bowen’s new work _The Long Doorway_, which, at the time of publication, is soon to open at Mercer Union in Toronto; Charlotte Henay and Raven Davis hold a frank discussion about Indigenous experience in Canada through the lens of Davis’ recent performance and installation work; Esmé Hogeveen and Charles Officer discuss Officer’s documentary films and the question of what constitutes Canadian audiences, looking at Officer’s recent documentary on Desmond Cole and his upcoming film about American political exile Nehanda Isoke Abiodun. We follow Lena Suksi and Aliya Pabani on Pabani’s new podcast _The Imposter,_ and Fan Wu and Prathna Lor’s epistolary text on spectres of race and alterity in literature, which was prompted by the epigraph by Vietnamese poet Nguyen Trong Hiep that sits at the beginning of Walter Benjamin’s _The Arcades Project_. jes sachse’s essay offers a look inside the conversations that shape, motivate and at times trouble her work as an artist, be they institutional, professional or personal.

We’ve extended the dialogue format to the book reviews section, with, in both reviews, a writer interviewing an author. Artist Fabiola Carranza speaks with Steffanie Ling about her recently published book of short stories, _Nascar,_ which circles around subjects of professionalism and productivity in contemporary art; and scholar Katherine McKittrick interviews Rinaldo Walcott on the lingering impact of Walcott’s book _Black Like Who?_, a groundbreaking work published in 1997 tracing Black Canadian culture and identity.

As an editor, this issue is refreshing as it takes writing and publishing as relational – an exchange of ideas, with two minds and voices tackling each topic presented in these pages. Publishing is an act of making a conversation or a voice public, extending it and even historicizing it. To me, this issue takes up C Magazine’s responsibility to publish difficult conversations, and to listen closely to the art communities that surround us.

Writer

Voice

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Dialogue

Identity

Interpretation

Editor Kari Cwynar introduces the theme of “Voice” in this issue, in which critical conversations and dialogue-based writing from artists in a wide variety of disciplines are highlighted.

Editorial: Voice

Feature

Amy Fung is a writer and organizer of multifarious exhibitions and events. She is Toronto-based, not raised. 

It’s the morning of the James Comey hearings in America and hordes of people, young and old, are passively anticipating the change they have been so desperately seeking. Even though I’m living in the land we call Canada, I am by all free trade agreements a byproduct of American imperialist media. This will be important later when we think about Deanna Bowen’s representation of Blackness in Canada. Also keep this note in mind the next time white Canadians cry afoul, but are unwilling to make any changes themselves. I’m half listening to the Comey live stream on my phone and half trying to get out the door to meet Deanna for this “interview.” In all honesty, I don’t really know how to interview anybody anymore given that I have stopped looking for any answers. I preface all of this to Deanna in person over some broken rice and vermicelli bowls. I am giving her one last out by saying things like “gossipy” and “I write a lot about myself.”

Deanna agrees with an uh-huh laugh and we settle into some light catch-up. It’s effortless to go 10 months or longer in Toronto without actually seeing someone with whom you communicate on a semi-regular basis. Deanna has been here for over two decades, and has long earned the reputation of being a big, bad bitch. I don’t need to mention to her that this reputation carries an undertone of race and gender bias and everyone knows it, except for the one race and gender that really believes it. I update her that I’ve left my job and she said she heard, figured it was to do with the grant, and I say yes, and I say nope. We congratulate each other on our colloquially controversial New Chapter grants and we heartily shake on it over a mango salad as we-can’t-foo-king-bee-lieve-we-each-got-one.

Big news should be old hat by now to Deanna, though. For the past year, since being awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, she has been working on a multitude of new projects that focus on her own family history as the central pivot point of her ongoing auto-ethnographic approach to art making, including a new commission for the Royal Ontario Museum, which is currently on view in the Family Camera exhibition; a solo exhibition of a new work, _The Long Doorway_, at Mercer Union in Toronto this fall; a long-awaited video work with her mother for the Flux Media Art Gallery in Victoria; a large-scale project at this year’s Nuit Blanche; a solo show at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver in 2018; and for 2019, she is editing a new anthology on radical racialized artists through the Media Arts Network of Ontario. The prestigious award, and its cash prize, has allowed for a cushion after the glow. 

“I can finally stop looking to white people in the art world for permission or for help to do my work,” she declares with absolution. “The illusion of beneficial white people who will help you is a lie.”

I laugh because duh. “If they help you, they are helping themselves,” I retort.

“Even if there are hardcore bigots who just need to go, it’s the deadly silence of the masses who are upholding systematic oppression that _kills_ me,” she slams without a thud.

I nod outwardly, but in my head I am flooded with instances of all the times my peers and acquaintances have let me down through their silence. The worst ones are those who later consume and regurgitate my words in order to release themselves from their own failures to speak up. Reflecting on the idea of permission, I share how I have only ever had a history of dealing with white editors, asking each one of them from the time I was 20 to the present age of 35 for continual permission to write and publish pieces in the print platforms that they, and only they, oversee.

“I create pieces with the knowledge that I am speaking to white people,” Deanna responds to a question unnecessary to ask. “The outcome of doing this has been to start at a point of constructing and layering and responding to perceived criticisms. I have only ever been working from a point of defense, to block before the shot.”

I pause for a moment to catch my breath. “That is deep trauma,” I offer. And I mean it.

“Yeah,” her voice falters. “It’s really hard.”

Never carrying a pretense that she would and should show in most gallery spaces, because they are still understood as white spaces for white people, she had no faith in the process, and still very little trust.

“There is a performance of allyship in the art world, a performance without a follow-through, and I just wish these motherfuckers would step up,” she scathes without burning anyone. “But once I spot the narcissists, I just avoid them. No drama.”

“No dra-ma,” I repeat, stretching out each vowel to make the words more true.

“There is so much drama, but it’s all bullshit. You may have noticed an aversion to critical thought here in Toronto?” she begins, or ends, with a thought that doesn’t even need to be said.

Yes, I may have noticed that.

**THE PAST**  
From the outset of our conversation, Deanna offers an immense amount of details about her new body of work. She is at the current stage of casting a crew of nine for _The Long Doorway_, which will unfold over eight weeks of live rehearsals and conversations. This new work is based on the 1956 script of a CBC teleplay set in Toronto about a young Black lawyer assigned to defend a young, poor white man who nearly beats to death his best friend, a young, poor Black man. The layers of racial assumptions, the court system, homoeroticism, Deanna’s filial connection to one of the actors and the peripheral layers of casting only Black American actors to play Black Canadians are all factors to be unravelled.

Everything we discuss, from the media cycle of Black suffering to artist-run dysfunction, circles back into the momentum of her singular artistic vision that is rooted in her fiercely independent position as an auto-ethnographer. No one has written the history books she needs to read in order to better understand her life. So Deanna-Bowen-the-artist has taken on the task herself, again and again. Tracing her paternal family history’s migration from Nicodemus, Kansas – one of the first Black settlements established by former slaves, specifically her grandfather, a preacher – the arc of her new series is a homecoming of sorts to her formative years in Vancouver, where her family eventually settled. It’s been 24 years since her first solo exhibition, _Home_, was held at the then Helen Pitt Gallery with then-curator Dana Claxton.

“I left Vancouver midway through that show’s run,” she shares, a bit stunned, perhaps at how much time has passed.

Moving out at 17 and leaving Vancouver at 24 years old, Deanna also left behind all the art objects from that first show, which she can only recollect partially. Looking into the cobwebs of her mind, she recites that there was a large set of shears, a velvet purse, a fumigation can and a book object that Dana still has.

“She tells me once in a while how much she loves it, but she has yet to return it,” Deanna recalls with a fond annoyance.

The book object was filled with a vernacular written in country twang, a representation in her mind of how “my family talked about shit.” Specifically, as self-described in staccato intonation that she grew up a low-er-class-BLACK\- DYKE\-from-EAST\-Van-from-a-SCRA\-pee- SHAY\-dee-FAM\-a-lee, _Home_ was the first in what would become the seed, the search, for all things unsaid in her own family lineage.

“From the beginning, I’ve been trying to work these people out, trying to unlearn every dysfunction from them, while researching around them to learn how we became what we became,” Deanna says as we sweep over 20 some years of her life and artistic practice.

In recent years, after having been estranged from her mother for over a decade, Deanna showed up with two friends, Scott McClaren and Chris Behnisch, who were her film crew for the day. She wasn’t a kid who brought a lot of friends around growing up, especially not white kids. So coming back with two white men who she is actively directing suddenly was a show. Her mother, who Deanna describes as a bit of a shut-in, puts on her best flirt for the men, and they all go for a drive to a handful of places Deanna had used to live. The rift between memories of growing up with one’s grandparents and the void left by an absentee single mother inevitably opens up. The amount of silence they lived in surrounding the generations of violence, substance abuse and death in the family slowly unwinds for the camera. The stories being offered up by the mother, and being captured and recorded by the daughter, were not stories the family was willing to talk about before. In one scene, her mother starts on about how many guns were in the house, and a good thing, too, to scare away the wolves. Also the white people, Deanna adds. The camera captures her mother’s shock that her own daughter would say something like that in front of these white people. Well, it’s true, some white folks had come around one of their 11 homes in Vancouver looking to beat up one of Deanna’s uncles, and Deanna’s uncle-in-law, a white man who had married into the family, took a rifle out to scare off the attackers, but if they had only known the gun was out of ammunition!

Deanna explains that there are lots of stories like that. Her mother thinks these stories are a hoot. She looks far away when she says this last sentence. I don’t say this aloud, but I think that if you’ve survived this long with these stories inside, it’s better to be funny than not.

**THE SAME**  
What is the point of an interview when it’s not answers you seek only affirmation to share we are supposedly talking about an art world the traumas that live just beneath our skins the scope of our exchange extends into just about anything everything involving our experiences working with and for and under white baby boomers as majority stakeholders I am a grown ass woman and I’m still learning this yeah do you know how hard this is for me to not put layers into this new work makes me lose sleep at night I know just to put yourself raw out there is terrifying I know to not frame and filter it for white people who you know I know are going to attack you is scary they will misunderstand you and blame you but’s a political act to go at it that way you see to fuck the filter even if it scares the shit out of me the filter protects white people from themselves from white supremacy the filter also protects you from white supremacy oh damn the mythology of having to go through certain systems and spaces to climb the ladder that goes nowhere I hope that the generation after me has figured out the ruse surely they have started their own spaces and left the old guard to patrol their fiefdoms they are just patrolling their own baby fiefdoms now because what else is there to do when you don’t know any better nothing has changed people refuse to let go institutions are slow the people running those institutions are resistant to meaningful change they will never change nothing has changed you can quote me on that Nothing has fucking changed.

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Amy Fung speaks with Deanna Bowen about her auto-ethnographic approach in her art making and her focus on individual and collective authorship in racial histories. From light-hearted catching up to thoughtful pondering, they reflect upon their past and present experiences with racial trauma. 

The Past, The Present and The Same, Deanna Bowen interviewed by Amy Fung

Prathna Lor is a poet and doctoral student of literature and critical theory at the University of Toronto where they are writing a book on aesthetic difficulty.

Fan Wu is a wayward fantasist seeking to slake his thirst for Spirit. You can find his writing online at _baest journal, MICE Magazine, Aisle 4_ and _Koffler Digital_.

**Prathna**: Our dialogue opens with a poem that serves as the epigraph to Walter Benjamin’s _The Arcades Project_. I suppose I chose this poem because I wanted to think about Orientalism and ornamentation, about race and desire, about body and gesture and how such things commingle at the level of ethics and aesthetics. Fan and I met at school and our styles of friendship are immensely divergent – I mean, you could say that about a lot of people, but it’s these styles which, I think, come out in this “dialogue.” I say that with some stubborn reticence because it might not look like we’re actually talking to one another. Our conversation quickly spirals out and, if anything, it’s a demonstration of how – and not what – one desires. According to Lacanian psychoanalysis, when one speaks one always misspeaks. One is constantly misunderstood, misrecognized. So to bring that to light, like an illuminating wall, that’s what I think is the necessity of intimacy. Often, it is about finding your own treasures hidden in a mouth you didn’t know was there.

**Fan**: William Burroughs speaks of a three-column format for the daily practice of discontinuous writing: in the first column you record the goings-on of your quotidian existence; in the second you record memories, feelings that circulate in your sensorium; in the third you record quotes from books or films: language that strikes you from outside. All of these things make their way into the fabric of a friendship, the warp-and-weft of thought charged with _intentionality_: I wish to share this with you, in a way that only you could understand. (Namely: amorous denial, adoring white people who wistfully gaze eastward, the spectrality of being racialized.) Something more than communication is at stake in friendship – something other than the demand for a response. In this dialogue, we honour each other’s stubborn silences; we reserve each other the right to stupidity, obscurity. For you, I hope it offers the suggestion of a lesson, and the intimation of our casual urgency.

> The waters are blue, the plants pink; the evening is sweet to look on;   
> One goes for a walk; the _grandes dames_ go for a walk;  
> behind them stroll the _petites dames_.   
> —Nguyen Trong Hiep, _Paris, capitale de la France: Recueil de vers_ (Hanoi, 1897), poem 25

I’m not a Benjamin scholar. But I wanted to take this poem, which opens _The Arcades Project_, as a starting point for thinking about racial residue. In a footnote to “poem 25” in Nguyen Trong Hiep’s 36 quatrain book of poems about his impressions of Paris, a reference is made to a Chinese book of poetry, “a kind of poetic treasure,” in which one can find the line: “Les grandes dames marchent ensemble, suivies de petites dames” (The _grandes dames_ go for a walk, behind them stroll the _petites dames_). If Benjamin’s reflections on Paris begin with the impressions of a Vietnamese poet as a particular threshold, what happens to such a threshold when we see that Hiep’s impressions of Paris were informed by Chinese treasures? What does it mean for us to imagine Hiep listening for the echoes of Chinese poetry in the Parisian _grandes dames_?

<p>I wonder if I’m obsessed with trying to find the image of myself in the machinations of thought. Am I listening for Narcissus’s scream or his scream repeated by Echo?

I open Jean-Luc Nancy’s _Corpus_ and read the following line: “The signifying body – the whole corpus of philosophical, theological, psychoanalytic and semiological bodies – _incarnates_ one thing only: the absolute contradiction of not being able to be a _body_ without being the body _of a spirit_, which disembodies it.”

People often ask me to repeat myself because I speak so low and mumble but I always feel like I’m yelling. It’s taxing to use one’s voice so I turn my head and grimace. “Haunting” is such an ugly word but sometimes you move your hand and it becomes a moon and then your hand again.

One can imagine Nguyen Trong Hiep trailing in the clandestine shadows behind Baudelaire, Benjamin’s most beloved poet. But whereas Baudelaire speaks in the booming voice of decadence – _I’m like the king of a rain-country, rich but sterile, young but with an old wolf’s itch_ – Hiep speaks in a whisper that does not admit of a subject in a first-person pronoun (_one_ goes for a walk), that suspends its gaze in midair so it does not become an instrument of forceful comprehension (it only reports what it sees). There is a strand of Chinese poetry that foregrounds the self’s dissolution into the landscape. What speaks is not a person so much as the fragrance of an inclination. Perhaps (if I might speak too soon) Benjamin needed from this poem the covert attunements to ordinary life that Baudelaire’s bombast could only fail.

How is it that I heartily reach for calamity and manage to always land on incremental progress? When your echo reaches me it is no less a scream. I felt older than you for the first time when you described your fresh wound, while I sat there knowing myself long steeped in the aftermath.

I open Nancy’s “Shattered Love” and read its first line: “The thinking of love, so ancient, so abundant and diverse in its forms and in its modulations, asks for an extreme reticence as soon as it is solicited. It is a question of modesty, perhaps, but it is also a question of exhaustion: has not everything been said on the subject of love?”

I love you, Prathna, without being able to say _why_. You withhold what I need from you, as though you intuit that this withholding is what I need most. We tangle with each other in the thickets of psychoanalysis; we treat the psyche like a chess game, each ordeal a moveable feast. I believe I can learn from your palatial self-regard but likely this is the fantasy that keeps me from learning a thing. The subject of love is inexhaustible so long as we spare the love of one subject.

> Two citations by Anne Carson: 

> 1\. “The Sublime is a documentary technique.”   
> 
> 2\. “In ancient Chinese tradition (I have heard) there is a genre of poems written by ghosts… A blackness in which I am suspended, you are suspended, and its water is sold for mirrors. Ghosts are distinguishable from regular people by their gliding walk, apparently on no feet.”

> Some observations from ordinary life:  
> 
> “The thing that angels do” / “powers of destiny” / “the education of desire” / pedagogy vs. education / sickness / bad dreams / a grown man ordering a cookie / brown nipples / the first suggestive mirage of the sexual / sexual difference / activation or reminder / a complaint / rather than as a permanent instantiation of disgust / “level-headed” / “infantile amnesia” turns childhood into “a prehistoric epoch”

Tenderlessness – and the amount of endurance it takes to scold the necessity of adoration into stickiness.

The relationship between experience and enunciation maintains its frazzled tenor of incorrigible thought in the domain of open secrecy. Or, to pose it another way, what happens to criticism when criticism takes the form of oceanic associations that seemingly dissociate us from what’s ordinarily called the political? Is the mirth of what Barthes called “psychoanalytic listening” a generative space between thought and unthought where action takes the name of solitude and patience rather than complacency?

Speak nothing of love. You ask your question as if it troubles you. Rearrange what you take in for splendour. Then tell me you love me.

Last night I had a dream with a voice with which I could not scream; I was wearing the wrong coat, evidently.

“At a particular moment, the psychoanalyst defines imaginary inter-subjectivity as a three-term structure: 1) I see the other; 2) I see him seeing me; 3) he knows I see him. Now, in the lover’s relation, the gaze is not so devious, so to speak, it lacks one of these trajectories. No doubt, in this relation, on the one hand, I see the other, with intensity; I see only the other, I scan the other, I want to penetrate the secret of this body I desire; and on the other hand, I see the other seeing me: I am intimidated, dazzled, passively constituted by the other’s all-powerful gaze; and this panic is so great that I cannot (or will not) recognize that the other knows I see him (which would dis-alienate me): I see myself _blind_ in front of the other.” (Barthes, “Right in the Eyes”)

Barthes is obsessed with the position of love as the possession of nothing but displacement. Barthes, ever the overactive semiotician, needs the gaze to be broken down into steps. This way the lover can be excluded from an essential step, therefore moving himself into another economy: that of the refusal of recognition. But even this refusal is optimistic. Isn’t the lover the one who sees the other _even though_ blind, blind in the first place, blinded to begin with by how love wounds the gaze?

We speak parallel to each other at best, but luckily for us writing does not need us to touch for the resonance of communication to sound itself. (Explicitness wrings me out.)

Is it criticism that you care for, or is it for us to begin the work of making our worlds a temple in which, finally, silence is permitted?

Anne Carson wades into Japanese and Chinese thought like a careful anthropologist. She will tell you where she found her objects, or she will tell you it’s all just hearsay. Was Hiep one of Benjamin’s ghosts, whose evenings were made of glass? Are we the spectres of which she speaks, suspended in the neither-here-nor-there, the neither-me- nor-you of exile?

> All night, I ride shotgun side by side with the ghost I call failure, for whom gesture, if not entirely the one language left, is the only one he still trusts, though there are times, even now, I forget this: he takes my hand, and I hold it – tight.   
> And I turn my head away.

I write endlessly in the register of prayer. Not for myself, nor others, but as a vehicle for speaking and giving some sense to what hidden remains I intuit. Perhaps my optimism is overdetermined by thinking that something emerges from the crevices which form around every monolith that inhabits even the slightest of my gestures.

Lacan speaking similarly, though less romantically, about vision articulates the “moment of anxiety” as “the impossible sight that threatens you, of your own eyes lying on the ground.” Or, from the song, “Candy Says”: _What do you think I’d see – If I could walk away from me?_

Whenever someone asks me how I’ve arrived at a certain point of self-understanding, I hold back from telling them that I’ve always hated my body.

I chipped my glasses crying on the street last night.

Have I made too much of friendship as mutual abandonment? As though a friendship, once brought into the fold of oneself, reaches a state of _completion_ after which one responds to the friend’s need – need is beyond the confines of friendship – but loses the feeling of wanting the friend’s company. For what is it to want what you already are?

Your gestures: a still pool for ghosts to hover over. My gestures: the demand for someone to come and whisper place names to me all day, names that sound like what they are, Junco River, Los Angeles.

Is it hatred of our bodies that propels us to trail the _grandes dames_ and _petites dames_ of this world, to live in their shadow even as we see ourselves in them? Race makes my gaze spin so it lies sprawled on the ground, neither mine nor white. _Candy says: I hate the quiet places / that cause the smallest taste of what will be._ One goes for a walk, sweet evening, blunt noise of the ebbing future.

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Poetry

Critique

This article considers Nguyen Tron Hiep’s poem “Paris, capitale de la France, Recueil de vers” (Hanoi,1897), which served as the epigraph to Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. Prathna Lor and Fan Wu bring together critical theory by Jean-Luc Nancy, Anne Carson and Roland Barthes to contemplate on their own friendship. 

Sisyphus’ Music Box: A dialogue on race and interruption

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

<h5>Internationally recognized for writing, directing and producing films about Black Canadians in sectors ranging from sports to culture to activism, Charles Officer works mostly in Toronto these days. It’s the city where he grew up and one he’s come to hold politically accountable. His conscientious scrutiny is evident in recent work, specifically _Unarmed Verses_ (2017), which profiles Toronto’s soon-to-be-developed Villaways neighbourhood through conversations with its youth, and _The Skin We’re In_ (2017), a documentary about anti-Black racism in Canada structured as a long-form conversation with Desmond Cole.

This past June, amid the fervid afterglow of _Unarmed Verses’_ success at the Hot Docs festival, I spoke to Officer about the challenges and rewards of working in Canada. During our conversation, Officer remarked upon the complex dynamics of pitching and producing films for an ever-shifting definition of “Canadian audience.”

While listening to the interview recording, I was reminded of first meeting Officer at a public screening of _The Skin We’re In_ at a cinema in Toronto’s Yonge and Dundas Square the Q & A was unusually lively, with audience members sitting in the aisles and leaning against upholstered walls as Officer, Cole and moderator Lu Asfaha took questions. After an articulate high school student raised her hand to reflect on the shortcomings of Canada’s dialogue on racism, Officer offered a quotation by George Elliott Clarke about the value of knowing history as a means to better understand collective presents and futures. The room hushed for a moment. We were in the presence of a history, albeit in flux, but one activated by dialogue, first in the film and then again amongst the viewers in the air-conditioned theatre.

It felt propitious to speak to Officer, then, in the weeks leading up to Canada 150 about what it means to tell stories that have been overlooked in a country that’s still interpreting its national audience and voices.</h5>

**Note: this interviewed has been edited and condensed.**
  
  
**Esmé Hogeveen**: _Many of your films deal with the power of language, most recently perhaps the portrayal of Francine \[a 13-year-old poet living in Villaways\] in_ Unarmed Verses.

**Charles Officer**: I think language is so powerful, but when I think about language, I don’t think of it as just words. Behaviour and action \[are\] language. Since I started \[working\], it’s been my objective to make silent films. That’s why I’m not so crazy about one-hour doc space or television. Everything is so dialogue driven these days. We talk a lot and it doesn’t seem to – I mean, sometimes it does – but talking doesn’t always solve issues.

**EH**: _So, are you interested in building silent, or otherwise reflective, space into your narrative structures?_

**CO**: Yes. I think just watching someone go about doing something in complete silence is a way to focus in. Why do we usually cut so fast? How can \[we\] sit and watch one story, but not another?

In this country, we watch and praise films of white kids doing absolutely nothing all day long. In making _\[Unarmed Verses\]_, I thought: how about we watch a kid like Francine, who’s doing something, but in complete silence? She’s not just throwing rocks against a wall; she’s engaging and showing how she thinks. With Francine, specifically, I \[decided\] to push the edits, to push some scenes to the point where \[the audience\] starts to say, “Let’s see, let’s see,” and where they have to get to know her.

**EH**: _In making_ Unarmed Verses _or_ The Skin We’re In _, to what degree did you feel tasked with contextualizing your subjects’ experiences for an audience that may, in part, not appreciate the nuance of their experiences? \[…\] I guess I’m wondering about the idea of a “Canadian audience” and whether that is something you care to think about._

**CO**: I think we make \[films\] to show them; I’ve learned to understand how important that is to me. I also have a philosophy, or an idea about audience, that may not coincide with what maybe some broadcasters or distributors – the ones who have all the experience and know what people want to watch – believe.

**EH**: _In what way?_

**CO**: When you’re investing time, money, energy and creativity into a project, you have to analyze where the audience is. There are millions of people in this country and when it comes to what projects get green-lit and what projects don’t, suddenly certain people \[in production and broadcasting\] become all-knowing arbiters of what audiences want. And if they really knew, I think I’d see more successful projects… I see a business where we spend so much money making things and \[not enough\] energy marketing projects and expanding audiences.

With _The Skin We’re In_, a note came back after we sent in the first edit \[saying\] that the film was too hard for \[CBC’s\] mainline audience. \[The note\] didn’t infuriate me; it made me sit back and look at the film. When you’re making a piece, you’re trying to please the broadcaster, but you’re also trying to say something – you’re trying to be true and to please the people that are involved. It comes back to the question about audience. When I analyzed the edit, there was nothing radical there, not even in form. So, it put me in a place of really questioning: this “mainline audience,” does is it include anyone like me? The audience that you’re telling me I’m making this piece for – does it include my mother or my niece and my nephew? Does it include my sisters? Because I don’t think that they would think this edit is too hardline.

**EH**: _Thinking about creating documentaries that are intercultural, but also clearly relevant to you as someone working primarily in Toronto, I’m curious if you can speak to the process of developing NIA \[an upcoming documentary about Nehanda Isoke Abiodun, an American political exile\] and whether you faced challenges making a film about an American subject._

**CO**: That project has been a long, interesting journey, obviously because of the nature of the subject. I first engaged with \[Abiodun’s story\] back in 2005, but I didn’t meet her until later. I’d known about her and that she was living in exile in Cuba, an American woman from Harlem, New York, who was part of a movement that involved former Black Panthers and Black Liberation Army members \[including\] Assata Shakur, Mutulu Shakur, Kathy Boudin and the Weathermen Underground.

I was very interested in trying to take on \[Abiodun’s\] story, but I knew that there were other filmmakers who had more experience and who had possibly been in touch with her. Nehanda is wanted by the FBI and you can’t jump into a project like that without doing some homework, so I had to catch myself. \[In 2005\] I said to myself, “I’m going to have to make a feature documentary at some point and then I can have a conversation with \[Abiodun\] about making the film.”

When I applied for funding, a common question was, “What’s the Canadian angle?” We \[in Canada\] want to make projects that have international appeal and \[I was\] like, “\_I am the Canadian angle\_.” To have a Canadian who has access to this particular story… but again, it’s about a Black woman who’s in exile, so the first question \[from prospective funding bodies\] is “Did she kill anybody?”

**EH**: _Because that would make the documentary too hard for a “mainline” audience?_

**CO**: Yeah, it becomes a moral judgment. If \[Abiodun\] says that she didn’t kill anybody and you still have doubts, then let’s make the film and see it. Again, though, the relevance of telling the story became an issue… In America, I think it was hard, because I think Sam \[Green, who made \_The Weather Underground\_\] wanted to make this film, but \[Abiodun’s\] considered a domestic terrorist. Who’s going to fund that?

I was under the illusion in the beginning that Canada \[was\] the answer, because we come from a place where we want the truth. We want to be that person that steps in – like the Hurricane Carter story, the Canadians \[have to\] be the saviours, right? Perhaps if I wasn’t Black and I was “more objective”… maybe \[funders\] would have \[thought\], “Oh, this guy wants to tell this story – he must have an interesting angle.” \[…\] I guess I just really clearly see that if there’s space for films about the Group of Seven, whom I respect, then there’s definitely room for a film about Nehanda.

**EH**: _Abiodun worked at a drug rehabilitation centre during the ’60s and ’70s, right_?

**CO**: Yeah, she worked with Mutulu Shakur in rehabilitation clinics for heroin addicts and Shakur introduced acupuncture. \[Abiodun and Shakur\] built their own sort of clinic \[the Lincoln Detox Center in the Bronx, which was connected to the Black Acupuncture Association of North America\] – they’re even recognized by the World Health Organization – but \[the clinic\] was deemed a domestic terrorist cell, because during \[the\] Vietnam \[war\], they taught patients about how drugs arrived in their neighbourhoods. Building awareness about addiction led \[the clinic\] to get shut down by the New York police.

\[Eventually\] there was a big robbery that happened when \[Abiodun and others\] ex-appropriated funds from Brink’s trucks with arms. Do I agree with those actions? \[That\] isn’t important. For me as a filmmaker, \[I’m\] trying to understand what happens \[when\] a woman who has been through \[those experiences\] is able to reflect and offer our youth some insight as we deal with \[similar\] issues today.

I shot this film in 2014 and into 2015, when Obama was opening talks with Cuba. I felt there was an urgency then, but now, in 2017, Donald Trump may have actually saved \[Abiodun’s\] life, because if the borders opened up and these conversations about extradition continued… She’s still wanted by the FBI. There’s a bounty on her head, so with borders opened up, people could go after her. We haven’t heard a peep about Cuba since Trump has been around, but he’s off doing other things, hanging out with the Russians and whatever.

**EH**: _Golfing_ –

**CO**: Exactly, golfing and eating chocolate cake. So it’s an interesting period right now \[to complete \_NIA\_\].

**EH**: _Are you self-producing NIA then_?

**CO**: Self-producing with my team, Jake \[Yanowski, Officer’s co-producer at Canesugar Filmworks\] and the producer Christina Carvhalo and I had support from Ron Mann. Some people have heard about _\[NIA\]_ already and now that I’m getting closer to finishing production, I’m cool \[with taking questions\], but, for a period there, I was even questioning putting it up on the website. But it’s interesting to put it out there and see what comes back.

**EH**: _Yeah, you just mentioned NIA briefly when we met and I was like, wow, that sounds so interesting, not that I represent the Canadian viewer_ –

**CO**: But you do represent the Canadian viewer and that’s why we have to see more spaces for content that \[Canadians\] want to watch. \[…\] This country has dedicated a lot of funding towards this 150 celebration of confederation, but we still haven’t been able to tell certain stories about our history? It’s just really fascinating to me and I’m just going to keep being honest about what I’ve seen and what I’ve experienced.

issue-135-p20-25.pdf

Race

Documentary

Language

Film

This article features an interview with Canadian filmmaker Charles Officer whose documentary films deal with the power of language and intercultural stories. In the context of Canada 150, Officer discusses the question of audience and the dilemma of contextualizing work for a country that is still finding its own national identity and voice. 

Making Us Look: Filmmaker Charles Officer on documentary-making, silent film aspirations and the overdue question of national audience in the year of Canada 150

Anna Kovler is an artist and writer living in Toronto. She is currently interested in DIY art galleries as engines of empowerment and community building, and their invaluable role in creating opportunities for artists and curators.

It only makes sense to claim that there are “too many artists” if artists rely on existing institutional structures to exhibit and legitimize their work. Throughout history, artists have demonstrated that creativity in the studio can be matched in developing new models for exhibiting their work. In Canada, artists have played an important role in developing independent artist-run spaces, ranging from publicly funded, anti-commercial ones like Vancouver’s Western Front in the ’70s to the likes of Cold City Gallery in Toronto in the ’80s, which strove to fully engage with the art market.

Today, the expansion of graduate programs in both studio art and curatorial practice, and the overhaul of former art colleges into universities, has created more degree-holding artists and curators than ever before – an increase not necessarily matched with career sustaining opportunities. The recent closure of a handful of commercial galleries in Toronto compounds the problem, pushing artists and curators to start their own gallery projects. But those opening a DIY art gallery face a host of challenges: accessible locations, lack of amenities, struggling with zoning by-laws, financial hardships and sudden rent increases. Freedom from many of the restrictions of larger institutions and commercial galleries is certainly a creative boon, but also means a lack of reliable funding and difficulty sustaining the project in the long term.

Despite all of these hurdles, countless independent, artist- and curator-run galleries and venues have opened up and thrived in recent years. In Toronto, 8-11, YTB, AC Repair Co, VSVSVS, Whippersnapper, Double Double Land, Warner, Bunker 2, Franz Kaka, The Loon, Little Sister and Roberta Pelan, among many others; Y+ Contemporary in Scarborough; Carl Louie in London, Ontario; and Raising Cattle, soon.tw and Vie D’ange in Montréal. An antidote to art scene competitiveness, these spaces provide an opportunity for artists to support other artists by getting to know their work, even spending weeks together through residency programs and other collective projects. I spoke with the artists and curators behind five of these spaces in Toronto and Scarborough to discuss their motivations, their biggest challenges, how they navigate issues of gentrification and where their work lies in relation to the art market.

> **Anna Kovler**: _What inspired you to start an independent art gallery?_

> **Aryen Hoekstra (Franz Kaka)**: I didn’t like having to rely on outside institutions for operating support. When I decided to open Franz Kaka I was in the process of leaving what was generally a positive experience working with G Gallery, but its relationship to a university, the bureaucracy that surrounded its funding and the need to constantly justify its existence to some unseen set of financial officers was so deflating. It just sucked all the energy out of the thing. But there was something worth hanging on to in the freedom the G Gallery projects afforded, and I wanted to extend that gesture. So I opened Franz Kaka with a similar hands-off ethos: work with interesting artists; trust them; invite people to see the results.

> **Tiffany Schofield (Y+)**: Initially, we were seeking a studio space. We had all been attending the University of Toronto Scarborough, and were hoping to stay in the area and split the cost of rent. We wanted a separate project space, a clean space where we could test project ideas; from there, opening up the space as a platform for others became a sort of natural conclusion. A few of us had already been involved with galleries and non-profit organizations, so we had the collective knowledge to make it happen.

> **AK**: _Describe the highlights of having your space._

> **Kate Kolberg (Little Sister)**: It is really the best to witness the artist realize their work! Beyond this, the highlight that may have surprised us the most has been the daily rentals. We decided to make the space available to others at times that fall outside Little Sister programming. It operates as a short-term platform for people to showcase and circulate their own work, and bring their circle of followers or friends together. As an example, someone recently hosted an afternoon event to launch an EP of their music. This type of engagement has really encouraged a broader community to form around the space, and hopefully aids to blur some of the potentially superficial distinctions between art forms and practices.

> **Liam Crockard (The Loon)**: Foremost: building deeper relationships with people who come by the space, and the artists we show. Having an artist in your space for a few weeks at a time gives you a great opportunity to learn about them and their practice; being able to offer someone carte blanche in terms of what they want to do is a really good feeling, and I think the community responds to that kind of ambition and open-endedness; not everything has to be a really singular, polished exhibition.

> **Tiffany Schofield (Y+)**: One of the greatest benefits of having a space is its capacity to connect us to new people – artists, audiences and other organizations. It has been incredible to witness the community that has formed around our space, and how it has acted as a catalyst for an expanding network of collaborations. We are able to leverage our position to provide resources to other artists, to support and cultivate the kind of experimentation and artistic development that becomes difficult within more established institutions and which are especially inaccessible in Scarborough. As we facilitate multiple professional development programs in addition to our exhibition programming, we are especially conscious of how fortunate we are to have a space. A guaranteed location removes much of the administrative burden that comes with program development, allowing us to pursue projects without relying on multiple stakeholders in order to move forward.

> **AK**: _Many artists struggle with our role in the gentrification patterns of a ravenous real estate market; how do you see your gallery functioning within its immediate neighbourhood?_

> **Veronika Ivanova (Bunker 2)**: The gallery took its shape out of necessity; we are the direct result of the inaccessibility of the real estate market. We don’t exactly conform to middle-class taste and sensibilities; we’ve gotten formal complaints that our gallery is an eyesore and is actually bringing the property value of the surrounding area down. As far as our priorities are concerned, we can and will move with ease to offset gentrification.

> **Liam Crockard (The Loon)**: While we are all complicit in the role we play in gentrification, the Sterling Road area has been a hotspot for studios and workshops for a very long time. My partner Aleksander Hardashnakov’s first Toronto gallery, Tomorrow, opened here seven or eight years ago. The Loon has a fairly discreet presence in the neighbourhood, and fits in readily with its neighbours. With MOCA Toronto opening its doors here sometime next year, we hope they will still have some fellow artists as neighbours by the time the ribbon is cut, but we will have to wait and see.

> **Tiffany Schofield (Y+)**: While we aren’t exempt from the conversation around gentrification, there is still a bit of buffer for us being located in suburban Scarborough – the landscape here is undergoing change much less rapidly. We exist as part of this neighbourhood, and conceived of ourselves being here – we are not located here simply because we were priced out of other neighbourhoods. We specifically sought out this place, not just this space.

> **AK**: _Do you think there is a stigma nowadays for artists to stage shows of their own work? How do you conceptualize the difference between artist and director/curator? Would you ever show your own work?_

> **Veronika Ivanova (Bunker 2)**: In the words of Boris Groys, “There is no longer any ontological difference between making art and displaying art.”[^1] Which is to say that the event or the experience of an exhibition as a whole can be just as presently felt as any particular work in the exhibition. Curating is not unlike conducting an orchestra, and if done well, the conduction of an exhibition will be a product that is more than the sum of its parts. Curatorial authorship can be just as presently felt and seen in an exhibition as artistic authorship. I find that this stigma is more applicable to the curator who displays her own work rather than the artist who curates her own work. I find artist-as-curator projects inspiring and exceptional, because here you have someone who is really taking the reception of their work into their own hands. This takes a lot of confidence. I think at the beginning of our practice we trust others to celebrate our work more than we trust ourselves to celebrate and esteem our own work, which is why an artist may want to collaborate with a curator. We’re reluctant to show our poems to our parents, our closest friends, our acquaintances; sometimes it’s easier to show our poems to a curator. But the curator-as-artist, to me, is just a curator. The stigma arises when artists demand space/the most flattering conditions at the expense of their collaborators, in order to celebrate their work and themselves alone.

> **Aryen Hoekstra (Franz Kaka)**: There’s a stigma when it’s done poorly or seems calculated and opportunistic, but I can think of plenty of examples of artist-run spaces that show their own work with great care and generosity; where their inclusion strengthens an exhibition or brings new eyes to the work of other artists. At their best these independent spaces are meant to be generous, and my experience is that they’re being received generously as well. But just like the move from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, if all of these spaces only exist for a year or two at a time, then we’re not really any further along. The hope is that new spaces continue to emerge, with projects that grow this conversation and can complement and push back against these already existing projects as they too begin to evolve. If support continues, we can see what effect longevity has on these projects, what role(s) they might be better suited to fill than our existing institutions, and how and if they transform in response to a little perspective.

> **Liam Crockard (The Loon)**: Both Aleks and I have shown our work at The Loon in group shows. The kind of stigma you are referring to is tied more so to a for-profit gallery with a roster than that of a DIY project space. Given that The Loon is run out of an existing studio and often has artists staying here for days or weeks at a time, collaboration is a welcome possibility, not necessarily something we feel a need to avoid. The Loon is very much by and for artists, and really tries to cultivate that kind of communal sensibility. “Curator” is just one of a dozen roles that your average artist inhabits on any given day.

> **AK**: _What have been the biggest challenges for you?_

> **Kate Kolberg (Little Sister)**: Easily the biggest challenge is the most evident: financial. But it is important to note that the financial embodies so much more than the money itself. The financial includes the time that has to be spent at our other jobs which ultimately makes it difficult to find time to work on developing the space or even presenting consistent gallery hours.

> **Veronika Ivanova (Bunker 2)**: $$$$$$. Despite the low overhead, money is still an issue. We pay for everything out of pocket and it’s a shallow pocket. Luckily, we have incredibly generous friends willing to volunteer their time, resources and skills. The gallery would not have come together without their support.

> **Aryen Hoekstra (Franz Kaka)**: Even though we’ve built in measures to decrease this – the gallery shares its space with another gallery \[called\] Towards, scheduling exhibitions only every other month – running the gallery requires a significant amount of time and energy. The challenge isn’t only finding the time and energy, but also finding a balance between its operation, my own practice as an artist and writer and any other jobs that might come to help pay for its operation. And then, what does that balance look like? As the gallery grows, how much more time will it need dedicated to it? Maybe that means involving more people in its operation. If it does, how then to stop it from falling back  
> into the bureaucracy I’d hoped to escape?

> **AK**: _When the network of artist-run centres was established in Canada, it was done with an ethos of opposition to the system of art institutions and commercial galleries. These were meant to be spaces where artists could show experimental, risky, immaterial or otherwise “hard to sell” work. Is there a new, emergent relationship between the establishment and the independent periphery? And how do you relate to issues of commercialization?_

> **Kate Kolberg (Little Sister)**: That’s tough – because as much as the primary intention is not to sell, we share the belief in allocating money to the arts or for people to buy art. That is not because it might appreciate financially, but for the simple reason (as tacky as it might sound) of throwing your weight behind something you admire and enjoy. This is particularly true of a small-scale operation such as our own; people who are producing and attending exhibitions are inherently more likely to run in the same circles outside the venue. The relationship between the establishment and periphery may have shifted towards a more fluid one, where generally the work need not defy the institution of commercialization to prove a point but if it does, that’s okay too.

> **Aryen Hoekstra (Franz Kaka)**: I feel like I should start by addressing the presupposition that we think the gallery is somehow on the periphery. We have pretty “establishment” credentials, like a formal art education and published writing and all of the artists that we’ve worked with exhibit in very “establishment” contexts regularly, so I think we’d be lying to ourselves if we claimed to be outside of that. But there are maybe different expectations shared between artist and gallery with a project like ours. And despite literally being run by an artist, we’re not at all what I would call “artist-run” in the sense that title has come to be understood in Canada. But we’re also not trying to position ourselves as a commercial gallery with a roster of artists and a business plan. We’re somewhere in between, and we see the gallery as working to complement what’s already taking place here. With the resources we do have, we can only offer so much, so we prioritize freedom and flexibility. But, we also know that enough gallerists, writers and curators take our exhibitions seriously so that the conversations that begin at Franz Kaka will be extended. When work does sell, we’re excited, and the artist is excited and the gallery gets to stay open for another couple of months.

**Franz Kaka** is Aryen Hoekstra, located at B1 87 Wade Ave, Toronto.

**Bunker 2** is Matthew Kyba, Veronika Ivanova, John Elammar, Kate Benedict and Tamara Hart, located at 346 Campbell Ave, Toronto.

**Y+ Contemporary** is Danièle Dennis, Daniel Griffin Hunt, Dorica Manuel and Tiffany Schofield, located at 15 – 1345 Morningside Ave, Scarborough.

**Little Sister** is Holden Kelly, Kate Kolberg and Jack Lambert, located at 13 Mansfield Ave, Toronto.

**The Loon** is Liam Crockard and Aleksander Hardashnakov, located at 109a – 227 Sterling Rd, Toronto.

[^1]: Groys, Boris. “Going Public,” e-flux journal, Sternberg Press, (2010), p. 52.

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issue-135-p26-33.pdf

Artist-run centres

Curatorial practice

Exhibitions

Collective

Anna Kovler interviews the representatives from five independent art galleries in Toronto: Little Sister (Kate Kolberg), Bunker 2 (Veronika Ivanova), Franz Kaka (Aryen Hoekstra), The Loon (Liam Crockard) and Y+ Contemporary (Tiffany Schofield).

A New Generation: In conversation with five independent art galleries: Little Sister, Bunker 2, Franz Kaka, The Loon and Y+ Contemporary

Lena Suksi attended OCADU. She writes poetry in Toronto.

##### Aliya Pabani hosts _The Imposter_, a podcast affiliated with the news site and podcast network _Canadaland_, where she follows her curiosity to conduct memorable interviews with everyone from music producer and storyteller Jarrett Martineau, to the sister of dead Vancouver novelist Betty Lambert, to art psychic Cindy Mochizuki, alongside visual artists like Rajni Perera and Kiera Boult. On air and off she pulls stories out of people with warmth, sensitivity and keen interest. I wanted to adapt Aliya’s strategies to Aliya herself as I learned about them.
  
  
**Lena Suksi**: _I listen to_ The Imposter _at my part-time job. In that time, I tend to avoid podcasts, which reinforce my passivity, as opposed to other media on the web, but_ The Imposter _is different because it’s grounded in a local cultural scene, and is affirming of surprising communities happening all around me. Could you comment on how_ The Imposter’s _podcast format is useful for what it does?_

**Aliya Pabani**: I think that people now often feel like they need to remove themselves from that world where you can consume any amount of information at any pace you would like. Maybe there is a new fetishization of audio storytelling because it requires certain things from you; it has constraints. A lot of the artists who listen to this show will say, “I listen all the time when I’m in my studio,” so it’s an addition to the process of thinking through one’s own creative work, or doing something possibly visual. I like to imagine scenarios where maybe someone’s taking a break, lying on the floor and listening to it before they get back to their own work.

Part of that is the intimacy of the voice. Editing has made me realize that you’re taking in information that’s about someone’s breath and someone’s nervousness, like the quivering of their voice, \[their\] pauses– that is also information. And that information is absent in a lot of interactive or text-based media. The thing I love about it is that it is the closest thing to human interaction, and that is a thing I’ve heard people crave in this moment: the desire to have interaction but not to get lost in too much of it, and not to have it be influenced by all these other kinds of social anxieties that one might have.

**LS**: _You’ve spoken before about intimacy as an ethic of conversation or interviewing – acknowledging intimacy. And that would happen, you suggest, in any conversation, through having elements of a person’s trace – their voice and breath and so on. But what are other practices that you as an interviewer might have to expand the acknowledgement of intimacy?_

**AP**: One thing is, I don’t think my insecurity presents itself as hostility to people. We all have insecurity, and mine doesn’t present itself in a way that is distancing. The way that I am told I am in the world, which is to say, open and approachable, is how I’m read as an interviewer as well.

I would also say I don’t really worry too much about seeming \[like\] an expert. And that isn’t something that really happens in media that often, or as often as it should. And I think there are all kinds of reasons for that – like, sometimes people actually are experts and they don’t want to dumb down their knowledge. I am lucky enough to be undertaking a thing that is not that focussed. The other thing is, I sometimes intentionally perform ignorance to bring someone out of their shell who might not be a natural radio personality. One of the things I do to draw those people out is to be almost performatively ignorant or playful in a childish or naïve way. And that is perceived as my actual identity by some listeners who want to tell me that they didn’t like it.

I was thinking about this recently in terms of costuming… I was thinking about how, sometimes, if you are a white man, you can grow your hair in a weird haircut and wear a vintage suit every day and it’s assumed that you’re putting on a performative thing, but that’s not who you are. Whereas I find with people of colour, or people who are away from that norm or de facto state, it’s often perceived as who you are, not something you are performing.

**LS**: _So, intimacy in this context might be allowing yourself to be vulnerable in this performance of naïvety, or in finding this common ground?_

**AP**: I might be reluctant to commit to it being fully a performance of naïvety! Maybe more just a refusal to – or not a refusal, but a desire not to perform an expertise.

**LS**: _I think a lot of artists resist that as well, resist performing their expertise about their own work. Like, they might say that this work – which is often not language-based – should be to what people refer to understand their practice. But when you take away the pressure of communicating in a way that is not about expertise, then this is what The Imposter does well – it gives people the opportunity to give the insight that they do have. You’ve given me insight into why that is, because you’re not predetermining what someone can talk about._

**AP**: I’m trying not to. Also, it’s just not who I am! I’m not really a critic. I’m not formally trained in any way. I don’t have that kind of knowledge. I like that I’m given the opportunity to have a different thing, and that people like that.

**LS**: _You’ve said that where boredom or hostility might be obstacles to finding out new information, they are less so for you. Do you have obstacles to your curiosity?_

**AP**: One of the things that I’m sad about is when I’m in a room with someone who assumes we have similar politics. We’ll talk about politics in a way that is full of shorthand and is based on our mutual understanding, and I’m there for the conversation, but I’m also thinking in the back of my head: we can’t use this. And I can ask them to expand on things but it still might not work.

**LS**: _So, that’s where intimacy might be a barrier._

**AP**: Yeah. And \[it’s\] one of the things I find hard to deal with, because the form of this show is very much about intimacy and openness and vulnerability, but the art world or the world of media is so…

**LS**: _Anxious._

**AP**: Yeah. And there are certain conventions of this world… certain barriers that are thrown up by that world. I’ve heard enough times that people come out of the interview saying, “This isn’t what I was expecting… we talked for such a long time… I’ve never talked about this one work to this extent.” And so, if people are more guarded about that work and like to be, that can cause some friction and tension. And I find it often when people are at a state in their career where they’re starting to be seen internationally, or if they’re very established, they worry that they might say something the wrong way and people might talk about it.

**LS**: _Because your taste isn’t narrow in some kind of specialized way, the show can be seen as a reflection of your world and your personality. So you’re making choices in the medium of conversation. I see a lack of intimate conversations about art in the public world, and I wonder if you have insight into where that might happen beyond The Imposter._

**AP**: The thing is, I don’t really think I talk about the art that much – my guests do – but my interest is in the contextualizing elements, which is who the person is and why they have this desire. Why this desire motivates them, what that process looks like, and I don’t see this happening in a panel discussion.

**LS**: _Because you’re talking about not being led by expectations, but by a dynamic._

**AP**: In real world settings, you have this in hangouts.

**LS**: _Yeah, but maybe not in professional contexts. Because at, say, an opening, people are guarded, and they’re guarded with one small piece of information and that’s why those settings can be frustrating._

**AP**: Especially since there’s a dearth of free wine.

**LS**: _So, in professional contexts, the intimacy or the dynamic might not be there because of this problem of coming preloaded…_

**AP**: Yeah, it feels like there \[aren’t many other forums for\] talking about art between a conversation you have in a social setting and an artist talk or a reading group. What is that thing I wonder?

**LS**: _Maybe_ The Imposter _fits there? And that mode is both dedicated and joyful._

**AP**: At least less structured.

**LS**: _Less studied, because the reading group and the panel discussion are still very much concerned with expertise, whereas_ The Imposter _is really built on the social…_

**AP**: One of the things that feels different about _The Imposter_ is, people sometimes ask if they can prepare or if they can have questions ahead of time, and I’ll say, “Nah, I don’t really do that.” What I like doing is creating a process of mutual discovery in an interview. And I think that has to do with the idea that everything they come with is the knowledge they need, and everything I come with is the knowledge I need. So that’s why I try not to be too well-researched. Or even if I am, the questions are not that totalizing, or it’s not that important for me to have an arc.

**LS**: _That idea, that you have all the knowledge you need, and that they have all the knowledge they need – that idea is not universal to social interactions. Maybe that’s the skill that led you to doing this work._

**AP**: What do you mean?

**LS**: _It’s political, that everyone is grounded in their space and that it’s adequate, and maybe that’s what led you to doing this work. That you can claim that for yourself and hold that in time for another person, is rare. Your area of expertise might be compassion and curiosity._

**AP**: It will always sound cliché, but compassion and curiosity are really such hard things to maintain. You re- ally have to create the conditions for them to be practised. And always be tending to that state. I’ve heard that I make people feel seen. And that’s one of the biggest compliments I’ve heard. When someone tells me they felt seen, that’s the ultimate for me, because it’s at once the idea that it’s so hard to feel seen, and the struggle of being human is that most of the time you don’t feel seen, and it’s an inevitability given the fact that there’s no real universal consciousness (laughs), or maybe some people believe that, but I just haven’t experienced that.

But the desire to understand others and a curiosity about others is grounded in childhood, in the feeling of being very outside and threatened by that otherness, because of the place I grew up in, which was mostly white, and people who were several generations Canadian and me feeling brown bodied and embarrassed of my origins and who I was also. And so I do feel that something I developed, which was a tactic of social survival, was the development of humour. It wasn’t some- thing that came naturally to me. It always strikes me as strange that when I think back to who I was as a kid– I really was a shy, moralistic person, and I can’t even access that in the same way anymore. And it strikes me that I can remember the points of transition, and it strikes me that they were very intentional. The recognition of humour as something I can have and will use.

**LS**: _Humour, I think, is often a response to disillusionment._

**AP**: Yeah, ’cause also who are the people who practise comedy or humour? It’s a cover.

**LS**: _It’s a cover, or it could be something else. When you say you went from being shy and moralistic to something else, I completely relate. And humour is holding that idealism. It’s often like, “Oh, I thought everyone would adhere to this principle.” But they don’t, and I still have to live with it. It could be a cover but it’s also a refusal to turn away. You still want to be engaged, but you’re appalled. You can reconcile those in the absurd, maybe._

**AP**: Right. Yup. It passes as socially acceptable modes of wry critique.

**LS**: _Well, because it does put people at ease. Sarah Schulman said in an interview recently that if you call something out, you become the site of the problem. It’s so true. People don’t know how to respond, but if you use humour you make them comfortable._

**AP**: Right. But it registers differently.

**LS**: _When you say people say you’re approachable, it might have to do with humour, but not exclusively, because lots of people are funny and mean._

**AP**: There is a sweet spot. But, yeah, the fact of conditioning myself to be someone who observes how to be for another \[person\], as a means of social survival or belonging, for that thing to have developed out of a feeling of exclusion, is now a useful skill to have for this job. Which is not something I was expecting.

Aliya Pabani is an artist and independent audio producer in Toronto.

Speaker

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Sound

Lena Suksi turns the table on and interviews Aliya Pabani, host of the weekly podcast The Imposter on news site and podcast network Canadaland. Together they discuss the intimacy of the voice, the ethics of using voice in interviewing, and the barriers that intimacy can present. 

Soft Listen, Aliya Pabani interviewed by Lena Suksi

Charlotte Henay is a daughter, teacher, storyteller and researcher. She works to counter extinction myths through storywork, and relationships of imagining. Charlotte writes about cultural memory, re-memory and grandmothers’ gardens at the interstices of blackness and Indigeneity, as an activist for Afro-Indigenous futurities. She has a background in black diasporic feminisms, and being exiled. Charlotte is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Perspectives and Cultural Boundaries at York University.

Raven Davis does the hard work of making futurity and community through their art. Their performance, installation and visual art acts as protest and reverence, asking what we have to honour and to offer, in an ethic of responsibility. They subvert the norm, refusing colonial society’s reverence and memorialization of war, genocide, Indigenous erasure and womxn as commodifiable and disposable. Raven speaks about making work from the now, from a place/space/time of humility – acknowledging our ancestors and our voices as echoes of theirs. We spoke about voice as being so much more than speech, if not sometimes its antithesis. Raven reflects, in their work and in this conversation, on silence as inherent in voice. What is not said speaks as loudly, if not louder than, what is spoken. We’re accountable for what we say, as well as for the repercussions of the silences in which we are complicit. Personal voice articulates an expression of self, and a rejection of homogenizing representations of Indigeneity. Raven’s work is multidisciplinary and multifaceted in its conception, presentation and scope. I read it as connected to relationships of imagining, where critiques of colonial oppressions and constructs give way to re-imagining ourselves and how we relate to each other, all beings and elements in the multiverse. This relational imaginary invites creative world-making in ways, forms and with means we may not yet remember. This is futurity.

**Charlotte Henay**: _I read your work as connected to the relationships of imagining that undergird the politics of art, especially in a matrilineal legacy of survival and expression. What is most important for you in the work that you’re doing now, that you want to have come across?_

**Raven Davis**: Silence requires courage and speaking requires humility. Especially with the complexities of our lives, when we may feel we’ve been both taught and betrayed by the same person or system. In _My Mother Gave Me My IMFA – Indigenous Master’s of Fine Arts_, I wrote about something I cherish. It was a story in honour of my mother, my first teacher. Our relationship has held so many beautiful and tragic events. As I age, I am learning, understanding and unpacking the fruits and gi s that I want to carry and those I want to let go of. Art can reconcile and heal without words. It’s transformative and humbling, and as a result, some of my work doesn’t leave my studio. I keep it close to me like a treasured childhood diary.

It is important to me that my work reflects the truest feeling I have in my heart at that moment, and the viewer then shares a mutual call-and-response with my work. This invites self-reflection, and a journey to learn more about the society the viewer lives in, or about the Indigenous people they have in their lives. I also realize that critiques of my work may not reflect the intent I had making it. People have different experiences and awareness. As a result, I have to be mindful that my intent and messaging may fall differently on different people – which, for me, is also a beautiful human response and result from making and sharing art.

It is equally important to me that in some of my installations and performances, the viewer becomes a part of the art, as opposed to creating a unidirectional exhibit. For example, I made an installation piece called _Child’s Play for Them, Murder for Us_. It’s a replica of a beanbag toss that would typically be played at a birthday party. The board has points. Each bag is a representation of the tokenized souvenir dolls representing missing and murdered Indigenous women, children and Two-Spirit (MMIWC2S) people. These dolls, which you can still purchase at gift shops, romanticize and fetishize our culture. Each of these beanbags has an image of the printed souvenirs on them. In the game, each doll represents 10 to 12 Indigenous women. There are 150 bags in the installation. Upon entering the gallery, people are inclined to think this is a game. The board represents the Canadian government, as a parallel for Canada playing games with our lives. People have the option to play the game in the gallery, throwing the lives of MMIWC2S people into the mouth of the Canadian government – a creepy circus clown who is careless with our lives. Deep down, I hope no one actually decides to play, but that is their choice. The intention is to engage the participation of the visitors, invoking a realization of how neglectful the government is in dealing with Indigenous lives, and how “Canadians” show up for Indigenous people.

**CH**: _Voice is not always speech. How do you work with silence in The De-Celebration of Canada?_

**RD**: Sometimes the strongest voices are silent. The strength of the work is what we do, versus what we say. \[…\] If you follow my artwork and my practice, that _is_ my statement, versus an artist statement that I write to try to capture everything I want to say. Conversations with friends, my life outside of the gallery, the life I live, all create my artwork.

**CH**: _Voice can also manifest as a contributing factor in the erasure of Indigeneity. How do you think of political art as prayer, and what Zahir Kolia (2016) refers to as the sacred as a fluid manifestation of time? How can art and prayer form the sacred and intervene to subvert oppression beyond colonial, linear (read Gregorian calendar) time?_

**RD**: The prayer bench that was used in my performance for Halifax _Mayworks_, this spring, is also included in my solo exhibit _The De-Celebration of Canada 150_ at the Khyber.

It’s facing a 10-foot pure white Canadian flag. The flag is used as a projection screen. It speaks to white supremacy in Canada. I called the installation _Whiteness is Civility_. It’s what people think is civil; people in church, people who don’t fight, who stay quiet, the government: all are civil. White bodies are civil. Ten white people running down the street, that’s civil. Ten people of colour running down the street, and something is wrong. Civility has a close relationship to Canada 150\. The “civil” church was instrumental to Indigenous genocide in Canada. It is instrumental in dealing with the “Indian Problem.”

There is a lot of beauty in spirituality, in praying for people who have experienced trauma. Beauty, strength, resilience come through spirituality. Religion is a tool that has been used to inflict abuse on our people. People generalize, and see spirituality as religion, as harmful, or bad. There’s also a lot of judgment of people who are spiritual, and who pray, especially in the queer community. Spirituality, prayer and ceremony are such a big part of who I am, so ostensibly they’re part of my work.

**CH**: _How does it feel to be so embodied in the work, and vulnerable in performances where your body is on display?_

**RD**: Walking down the street in our bodies is being vulnerable. It’s easy for people to see the vulnerability in the performance. They see the ropes, not seeing the vulnerability of living; surviving the daily threat of racism, police violence, violence from other people in the society, violence as a womon, violence as a Two-Spirit person.

The work disrupts what people are comfortable honouring and marking. In Halifax, canons, monuments and tourist attractions are these markings. Tour buses flock to Citadel Hill, where – as part of the attraction – you can dress up as a British soldier. We don’t go to Germany and dress up as Nazis. Why are we doing that here, where genocide and violence has been, and continues to be, perpetuated on Indigenous bodies every day?

I honour my ancestors, and the past. I stand for the past, in the present, through my work. I stand for a different narrative. I’m on display but I am also privi- leged. I can walk away from this monument. The performances at _Mayworks_ were endurance performances. I stood there with my discomfort, for an hour and 50 minutes. It was two degrees on the Hill. I was wearing a long thin black dress with my shoulders, arms and legs exposed. By the end of the performance, my knuckles and lips were purple from wind and cold exposure. In that small moment, I was honouring my ancestors, those who went through so much more, and who weren’t able to walk away. It’s insignificant in comparison. The government picks these colonial sites to acknowledge and commemorate, while Indigenous peoples continue to go without recognition. It’s shameful. The government pours money into legislation that does not protect Indigenous people and children. This is happening now, today.

**CH**: _Do you choose or create specific pieces for sale to collectors, and others for placement in the colonial archive, as a disruption of the institutional narrative?_

**RD**: When archiving my work, I think about my children. I hope they’ll remember the work and be inspired. I’ve watched my children question things I’ve done, and then a year or two year later, recount the teachings as they have come to understand them. This transfer of knowledge is archival. The “archive” lives through my children’s legacy. This is the way that Indigenous people have transferred information for thousands of years. My greatest achievement is witnessing my children talk about my work, or the topics I address in them. It’s not about whether someone is going to buy my work, but whether my children can speak to what they’ve been taught, and how they’ve obtained that knowledge. It’s important to know that my children, their bodies, their skin, their stories feel represented in galleries that have been predominantly accessed by white bodies.

In a piece entitled _Indians Are Tired, c/o Colonial Tire_, I reprinted Canadian Tire money. In the centre of the money is an image of \[Justin\] Trudeau. In our contemporary context, there’s an understanding reconciliation has occurred. It hasn’t. Within our current governmental structures, the harm is ongoing, and has not ended.

**CH**: _How do you prepare for how the work will be received?_

**RD**: All work created for this show should provoke and create reactions from people used to honouring the military, police and the Canadian government. For example, I recreated a Canadian military jacket as an installation piece for the _De-Celebration of Canada 150_. Sewn on both arms of the jacket are corporal chevrons and the Canadian flag, which have been placed upside down. Included are gold and blue embroidered patches representing atrocities such as: police and military violence, slavery, genocide and human trafficking, (dis)honour badges of practices that have been enforced by Canadian institutions.

This policing is underwritten by the very clear expectation: don’t mess around with the military, don’t dishonour the flag. Folks don’t see what the military is used for here in Canada. I am not going to shy away from the reasons I made this. Under Bill C51, the Canadian government views this work as terrorism. Anything that goes against the government is open to charges under the terrorism law. I am definitely preparing myself for the di cult conversations, the ones with people who don’t like my work, or take issue with it.

**CH**: _Does the work speak for itself or are there a multiplicity of voices?_

**RD**: The older I get, the more I realize how important it is to check, and to be critical of, my voice. I haven’t attended university; I don’t use academic language to describe what my voice is. I check what I’m saying and learning. I realize now that it’s so easy to make mistakes. There’s something very reflective about wondering, did I walk on this earth and speak good things today? Did I honour myself, life, my voice? If I make something that has nothing to do with politics, with experience, with history, then would I be in it? What about what has happened to my family and ancestors on this land?

I realize that in putting art out into the world, I have no control over how it’s interpreted and where it goes. I feel good when I have the chance to speak to the work directly. That’s where the strength is. Communicating. Once words leave your mouth you have no control over your voice, or how it’s taken up. The work I create comes from a place of voice, and the deepest part of me. The art has left my hands, like voice has left my mouth.

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Indigenous

Activism

Performance

Charlotte Henay interviews Anishinaabe Aboriginal artist and activist Raven Davis. They discuss Davis’ artistic practice which examines self-expression and self-reflection through silence.

LOUD: In Conversation with Raven Davis

Often found marrying poetry with large-scale sculptural forms, Toronto-based artist jes sachse’s work and practice addresses the negotiation of bodies moving in public/private space and the work of their care.

I roll my suitcase into the room and am immediately confronted by the ignited gaze of Toronto’s skyline, like a reticent ex-lover.

I haven’t been back to the village since the trans march last weekend, I realize. The hotel room looks like an affluent gay man’s condo. I approach the windows of a door-locked balcony and can feel my heart start to race. Staring up at me is the sprawling appliqué of rainbows across the commercial pave of Church Street, lingering from the festivities of the past week, leading my gaze with large colourful indifference into the horizon.

“Where’s the bed?”

I’m searching a room that becomes larger and larger at each glance. Closet. Closet. Closet. Bathroom. Oh my god there’s a bedroom?

I text three different friends at once. A asks if I have oil money. M says “omg send me a selfie vid.” I take out my computer and log onto the hotel’s Wi-Fi to make sure I have access to NOVA. After two failed attempts I see that I’m connected.

I said yes to this jury invitation even though I was already working too much. I knew how to respond to them this time. This wasn’t 2016\. If an arts council or arts organization emails you, you reply right away before their outbox has even exhaled to say thank you for thinking of me this is a confirmation of my interest please let me know what else you need from me. Tip: it’s a massive train and you must already be at a run.

I didn’t know this in 2016 and I thought it was a personal invitation and was very touched and took three business days to respond to the train. The train was deeply apologetic but had already invited someone else. I’m a little embarrassed but I called the train and cried on the phone (you never cry to the train it will rust). I can forgive myself for crying though, it was June and I was hungry and horizontal.

I call my brother N and say I don’t know why I’m anxious. I say maybe it is the money making me anxious. Maybe it’s how high up I am.

I asked for what I needed this time. I asked for this hotel room near the office so that 9-5 two days back to back would not also include the arduous hour of transit from Parkdale on my body. I knew the train had funding and bylaws and I said disabled and access a bunch of times. It’s like needing the password. Sure there are forums and research and policies and officers but none of that matters if you don’t say the magic words even if you are famous for being disabled the train will assume you are also a train. The train will always assume.

N tells me to try and just sit with the fact that rooms like this exist and money exists and I don’t need to feel shame for not fitting I can just be aware. He starts talking about the Holocaust and how Carl Jung was ostracized in the wake of the war crimes for warning against condemning fascist leaders as extreme evil, as though there isn’t a collective container that contributes to mass suffering. I am not sure how we got to this topic so quickly but that is because I am probably dissociating. He talks about dad. I don’t hear that part. I hear my stomach and my kidneys.

I end the call by deactivating all my social media and taking my phone apart into pieces. I feel crazy. You are crazy. Look at these three gratuitous luxury pillows what is wrong with me why is my skin on fire.

It isn’t until I take the elevator from 26 in the air all the way down to the street walk to O’Grady’s order weird mac n cheese in two ball shapes and a beer and stare for an hour that I remember: the trans march. The large man in the grass stomped on your ribcage.

---

My name is jes sachse and I spent most of last year in self isolation, hyper-vigilantly reading about gaslighting on the internet. Also sleeping. Also drinking red wine. Also doing community care. Also doing administration. I don’t really remember because all of a sudden it was this year and something in my head somewhere said “wake up.”

I made myself very visible for a very long time because I cared deeply about disability and justice. I can’t tell you at precisely what moment I got lost, but I surrendered myself fully into a thesis I never completely understood.

In 2007, I was reading about disability and queerness on the internet. Also sleeping. Also drinking Pepsi.

I read a burgeoning theory then that donating my self portraiture to the movement was going to lead to freedom.

It led instead to a living performance of my identity. Disability studies academia, as it was then, a byproduct of post-modern feminism’s urgency, plucked my yearning and groomed me for a decade of mined creative labour abuse.

“Arts-based research.”

What did I sign? For how much? For how long?

I created in myself a feebly intersectional artistic prop that comforted and cosigned. I accepted any work I was offered. I thought that by serving those with power, that I was being considered, was being cared for, was even perhaps accomplishing something; that being repeatedly called upon despite little remuneration meant that I was successful.

The forcibly inherited weight of ongoing expectation that my work remain the same in its representation of my particular bracket of marginalization would be demanded of me again and again, readily and freely proliferated without me, because of the marketability of my marked visual oddness and palatability of my whiteness.

It is painful to be now able to acknowledge the strong-armed bequeathing of so much deeply personal creativity at the hungry hands of coercive and suffocating power. A bequeathing that is irretrievable; consent a conversation of erroneous ache. The MRPs are on shelves, the digital stories are disseminated, the blog posts collated on syllabi, the textbooks in circulation. But within that long stretch of denial too lies my privilege to say anything at all, and benefit in any way now.

Artists with disabilities are some of the most poorly compensated, often paid a small fraction. Especially when disability is in the title. A deceptive and enticing vulnerability; bodies and their performance a pedagogical tool owed.

“It’s the difference between representing yourself and being a representation of yourself.”[^1]

Francisco-Fernando is sitting across from me on the tenderly languid Tuesday patio of the Cadillac Lounge. We’ve been in conversation for most of this summer, working and fostering mentorship after a recent artist residency.

We share light beer and a complicated acknowledgement of the visibility of the artist: how there is no righteous benevolence of giving up your self-platform, rather, to engage in an act of affirmative sabotage.[^2]

Regret diminishes survival and dodges the responsibility of the present. Leading up to this summer, I made the choice to engage in a voluntary eight week protest installation in the atrium of The Museum because I was mad that the so-beloved adaptations for accessibility and universal design do not involve nurturing a care for or conversation with those very bodies.

I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing when I started showing up on the Wednesday free evenings, signing out a wheelchair (by turning over my I.D. & perhaps a small piece of my dignity), and pushing it in a circle for an hour at a time. I only had a sense of indignation about what I perceived as a right to take up space there.

The work of pushing in public was perhaps a simultaneously naïve and re-traumatizing approach to start actually talking to myself, but the work of pushing for private apologies is less safe, in my experience. Too much time travel.

I did learn that marble can actually be very calming to look at for two months of hour-long circular traces on hard tile. Colluded procession of sediments, sneakily eroded skeletons of the sea. It’s hard to think about marble as part of the legions of the once-living when a circling security detail makes a fortress of its forms. But the limestone and dolomite of quarries are ancient sea life resurrected, I found out on Wikipedia.

When individuals or organizations ask me for free labour in the form of answering questions and giving advice on access, they usually want to know who the bad ones are, so as to be awarded endorsement due to their shock, and to permanently escape any future liability. The quickest sound bite on accessibility I can offer is: just go to people, talk to them, ask what they need and be prepared to mess up, listen, don’t make them do the work. Don’t be more afraid of the appearance of making a mistake than you are of a body being harmed. This response most often sends administrators into confusion and panic.[^3]

Institutions in colonized Canada reflect white supremacy. Whiteness is the definition of gaslighting. If I understand anything about navigating these institutions now, it is that I must be accountable to their violence even when/if I too feel it in my body.

I owe the beginning of this conversation to my friendship with artist Joshua Vettivelu. I didn’t want to go to Toronto Pride last year. After nearly a decade of trying to fit into Pride, it was going to be my first refusal™.

But then came Josh’s email invitation, with a recipient list so thoughtful and long, asking if I would be on a float of community and wear a t-shirt with text bravely starting a conversation with those in the very towers that continue on undismantled, inflicting pain on those most marginalized.[^4] “How Foolish It Feels To Take These Steps Thinking You’d Protect Us. A message to those at the tops of towers,” my shirt read, as the large pine flat-bed turned onto Yonge.

“Wow, everyone can see me,” I turned sheepishly to Josh. I had been so excited to be elevated out of the stomped-on ribcage of the crowd that I had forgotten about this part. I think that’s when I started returning to poetry in my work, which now marries itself into still-emerging explorations of large-scale sculpture & installation.

---

It has been 24 hours since the panic attack that put me to sleep my first night in the fancy gay man’s condo hotel room. I was sipping a glass of white wine when JPKK arrived with the sweet offering of a cupcake in her hand.

I have been long been afraid of large bodies of water. As a tiny person, that includes public pools. After the cupcake we went excitedly down to the lobby, crossing in front of the immaculate front desk in our matching neon swim palettes toward the pool. With JPKK standing near me wading, all of a sudden my body took a run and leaped far in.  
I never jump. I always take 10 years to go down two steps. But hitting the water felt cooling. Like an exhale.

Her cellphone vibrates. 

“It’s J! They’re asking if we want Pizza Pizza or Pizzanova?”

“Pizzanova!”

I feel a bit erratic still remembering I have another long day tomorrow but there is now more than just me in the room. There is a kindness. And soon J. And a pizza.

[^1]: In conversation with Francisco- Fernando Granados, performance artist, July 2017.
[^2]: Spivak, Gayatri. _What Time Is It on The Clock of the World?_ May, 2017\. Wiener Festwochen. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f199qcIDZxw](“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f199qcIDZxw”)
[^3]: Mingus, Mia. “Changing the Framework: Disability Justice,” Feb. 12, 2011\. [https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/02/12/changing-the-framework-disability-justice/](“https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/02/12/changing-the-framework-disability-justice/“)
[^4]: Vettivelu, Joshua. “When We Are Welcomed Into The Fold, Where Do We Keep What Is Left Behind?,” _C Magazine_, issue 133 (Spring 2017).

issue-135-p44-47.pdf

Body

Representation

Story-telling

In this article, jes sachse weaves together personal anecdotes and reflects on their struggle to represent themselves and to create conversations about bodies in public/private spaces. 

nurture dance: a love letter to conversation and friendship in art

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Editor

Publisher

Designer

Artist Project

**Linnea Dick** was born in 1991 in Vancouver, BC to parents, Pam Bevan and Beau Dick. She is of Kwakwaka’wakw, Nisga’a and Tsimshian heritage, and her First Nations ancestry has largely influenced her. She spent her early childhood in Alert Bay, later relocating to Vancouver. Between 2004 and 2005, Dick spent time experiencing Haida culture and tradition in Haida Gwaii. Her ambitions in life are to help people, focussing on youth. She recognizes poetry as a form of art, enjoying the self expression and relatability. Since 2014 she has established herself as an activist, motivational speaker and writer. She draws her inspiration from the communities she’s been in and people she’s met. She currently resides in Victoria and is working on her first book.

Jeneen Frei Njootli is a member of the self-governing Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation and is a co-creator of the ReMatriate Collective. Based between the Yukon and unceded Coast Salish territories, she works collaboratively with artists, communities, youth and the land. Frei Njootli’s practice takes the shape of sound, performance, fashion, workshops and barbeques.

> <h5>we are covered in a veil of experiences   
> masked in the tapestry of our hair   
> woven into the world

> <h5>we will never be found empty handed   
> as our fingers wrap around ideas  
> and our hands carry creation

> <h5>we stand on past, present and future   
> it is never still beneath our feet  
> as they move us forward

> \*\*\*

> <h5>we are made of beads of experience   
> strung by the threads of our hair   
> woven into the world

> <h5>we are made of the traditions of our ancestors  
> stitched deep into the tapestry of skin   
> reminding us of our strength

> <h5>we are the vibrant colours of our memories  
> painted into the skies of our existence  
> creating our futures

> <h5>we are the movements of our being   
> choreographed history  
> dancing with life

> <h5>we are made of the music of collective voices  
> sung by connectedness of the earth  
> beating within our hearts   
> we are

Artist

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Memory

Cultural Studies

Jeneen Frej Njootli is a member of the self-governing Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation and a co-creator of the ReMatriate Collective. In her interdisciplinary practice, Frei Njootli’s uses media such as performance, sound and textiles.

red rose and lidii

Linnea Dick, a writer of of Kwakwaka’wakw, Nisga’a and Tsimshian heritage, writes words to accompany the works of Jeneen Frej Njootli, a member of the self-governing Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation and a co-creator of the ReMatriate Collective. In her interdisciplinary practice, Frei Njootli’s uses media such as performance, sound and textiles.

red rose and lidii by Jeneen Frei Njootli: Words

Review

Cason Sharpe is a writer currently based in Toronto. His first collection of stories, _Our Lady of Perpetual Realness_, was released by Metatron Press in 2017.

On a rainy March evening in midtown Manhattan, a few hundred guests filled the lobby of the MoMA for the latest iteration of the museum’s PopRally series. Demographically the crowd skewed younger and less overwhelmingly white, myself included, than one would expect to find at an event held by such an institutional heavyweight. Everyone in the crowd was dressed to the nines. I had anxiously debated my outfit before arriving, untucking my shirt and then tucking it back in again until I got the look just right. On this particular evening the MoMA had been transformed into the hottest club in town, a far cry from the quiet place of reverence it had been earlier that afternoon when field trip classes lined up in the same lobby to take the museum’s official tour. This is the goal of PopRally, a series of one-night-only events which “serve as a gateway for young and diverse audiences to engage… with modern and contemporary art.”[^1]

On this particular evening, we huddled together for _In Search of Us_, presented by New York-based photographer Petra Collins and Montreal/Toronto-based artist Madelyne Beckles. An orangey-pink sunset backdrop hung behind a stage, flanked by a plastic palm tree on one side and a Grecian column replica on the other, framing a living room scene replete with plush, beige carpeting and brightly upholstered couches. The living room was cartoonishly messy: oversized Cheetos bags and larger-than-life books of feminist theory were strewn around the space alongside shoes, dresses, flowers and other domestic detritus. Music blared from speakers overhead: bass-heavy rap and R&B. The lights were dimmed, leaving the installation soaked in a soft glow. Three performers cloaked in flowing robes lounged on the couches, flipped through feminist texts and danced along to the music. Spearheaded by Collins and Beckles, In Search of Us included a digital salon with video work by Beckles, Grace Miceli and Aleia Murawski and a musical performance by Brooklyn rapper Junglepussy. The living room/stage, which served as the focal point of the show, was brought to life by Beckles and Collins in conjunction with designer Samira Alfarius, who participated in a three-hour tableaux vivant within the installation, alongside fellow performers Monica Hernandez and Kalena Yiaueki.

_In Search of Us_ used Lorraine O’Grady’s 1992 essay “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity” as a point of departure. The focus of O’Grady’s essay is Manet’s _Olympia_ (1865), in which a Black maid bows behind the eponymous white sitter, her arms outstretched in offering. Such figures are a common visual thread within Western aristocratic portraiture: Black servants, most often women, are placed at the periphery of the image with heads bowed in submission.

By virtue of being housed within a major art institution, _In Search of Us_ put itself in dialogue with a Western art canon. The show issued a challenge to the MoMA: if the museum wants to attract the mythic Young and Diverse Audience, it has to grapple with the history of racism and misogyny reflected in and perpetuated by a large body of its collection. The living room set, exaggerated in both its opulence and disorder, parodied the domestic spaces of a white elite, spaces where, historically, Black women could only enter as servants or sexual objects, spaces where portraits were painted that would be subsequently hung in museums. The outfits of the three performers – long dresses of white chiffon, lace trim and colourful, patterned overlays – looked as though the maid from Manet’s _Olympia_ had walked out of the painting to style a collection with Rihanna, thereby recasting herself as a central character rather than peripheral object.

The anachronistic aspects of the installation bridged a history of politicized representations with contemporary concerns. It’s worth mentioning the MoMA’s proximity to Trump Tower, only a few blocks away. When Junglepussy’s backup dancers waved signs emblazoned with the lyrics “this pussy don’t pop for you,” it could have been a direct address to the current US administration. The shadow of Trump Tower lent the evening a sense of urgency, a reminder that the critiques raised by _In Search of Us_ are of particular importance in a political climate in which state policies on health care, immigration, the economy and the environment continue to disproportionately jeopardize the lives and humanity of women and queer people of colour.

The three performers, all women of colour, appeared to perform to and for each other rather than for the audience. They sat down, they talked to one another, they looked at their phones. The parameters around the piece – the raised and therefore distanced installation, the capped audience size (tickets for the event sold out), as well as its one-night-only ephemerality – gave the performers an agency that otherwise may have been lost in the eyes of an infinite and unknowable public. These boundaries made it clear that the performers were not present to be gawked at — or to serve. Their only obligation was to feel themselves, and they were generous enough to share those feelings with us in the audience. Our obligation in turn became to recognize that generosity and mirror it, to give them back that respect. In her essay, O’Grady writes, “…self-expression is not a stage that can be bypassed. It is a discrete moment that must precede or occur simultaneously with the deconstructive act.”[^2] By undoing the figure of Olympia’s subservient and peripheral maid, _In Search of Us_ planted seeds for new modes of self-understanding. As the title of the show suggests, this search for selÎood is ongoing.

[^1]: Taken from The Museum of Modern Art _PopRally_ program page. [https://www.moma.org/ calendar/programs/38](https://www.moma.org/calendar/programs/38) 
[^2]: Lorraine O’Grady, “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” Afterimages 20.1 (1992): 7.

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This is a review of “In Search of Us” which was a digital salon event conceived and developed by Madelyne Beckles and Petra Collins. The event was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on March 18, 2017 as part of the PopRally event series.

Madelyne Beckles and Petra Collins: In Search of Us

Elora Crawford is a writer and artist living in Toronto.

There are so many ways to touch, I am reminded as I move through the rooms of Daniel Faria Gallery on the occasion of _Unruly Matter_, the so-titled solo exhibition of works by Chris Curreri. A series of polished brown, slick-looking ceramics slouch and collapse into their fixity on plinths upholstered with fine white linen canvas. _Sixes and Sevens_, a series of new sculptures, moves me in a way I struggle to locate. The sizes and shapes appear at once mechanical and human. Like fittings for soldered joints, “elbows” and “nipples” – names sourced and gendered from parts of the body – the engorged, deflating boulders approximate something intestinal or testicular, like sleepy stomachs or flaccid penises. Their height reaches my navel. I crouch to attend them closely, my gaze a sort of graze.

Surrounding them, printed monochromatic photographs no bigger than the size of my open hand punctuate the tall walls with moments of flesh falling into flesh, the embrace of two masculine faces pressed into what could be just one feminine form. Kiss Portfolio – eight silver gelatin prints with sharp facial hair piercing skin, wet lips and tongues, a finger slipped in – is rinsed with a cool eroticism. Its prickly, wet textures feel close enough to touch, and I am reminded of what film theorist Laura Marks has called “haptic visuality” – a term she employs to describe the kind of seeing that involves memory, senses of touch and of smell.[^1] Convincingly, she suggests that film is a kind of skin. The skin extends itself to the viewer, with scars and defects, offering itself for inspection or comparison. Touching, in the history of looking at photographs, also recalls Barthes’ punctum, that abstract element of an image that emerges to strike something familiar, internal, a tremble of resemblance outside the reach of words; “that accident which pricks, bruises me.”[^2]

Curreri’s photographs are as touching, physically, in the event of their capture, as they are touching, provoking a physical reaction as I linger over them. Still, the formal abstraction works to maintain a certain distance. A queered Ed Weston _Pepper_. In each image, the two faces combine to mimic the folds of the ceramics, like the optical illusion of two line-drawn profiles interpreted otherwise as a vase. Indeed, so much of Curreri’s body of work brings to mind the ways in which clay behaves like flesh. His image series _Virginia_, large-scale photographs of cave interiors from 2013, read like stills from an endoscopy exam, the pictured monochromatic hallows remarkably similar to cavernous esophageal walls. _Puppet_, his 2008 image series shows a nude man arranging himself around a red, bottlenecked vase. He wears the vase on his body in different contortions, on his leg, on his genitals and above his neck. Curreri’s work in a recent group show at Scrap Metal, _Proud Flesh and Vase Collection_ (ongoing), was an evolution of this comparison; found red glassware and a red, mouth-like cavity centred in a cast cube of cement. _Unruly Matter_ is a material consideration of this relationship, between bodies and sculptures (or sculptural media), informed by his training as a darkroom photographer.

In the second room of the gallery, _Seem_, a 12” x 12” gelatin silver print much larger than those of _Kiss Portfolio_, occupies a wall of its own. On the surface of the upside-down image, the curve of two noses meets the bowl of the eyebrow bone and the eyes of two different men stare at the lens, and the eventual viewer. A black line, a seam, maintains a separation between their faces.

With touching, there is an undeniable intimacy and an ever-present impossibility. Touch contends with the physical truth that two things can never truly touch, a swooping asymptote, the space between atoms of things can only become infinitesimally close. Touch, instead, is a kind of reaction of proximity. The gelatin silver print is made when paper sensitized with silver salts is exposed to the variances of light that a scene visibly casts. The latent image is then developed and fixed, like the firing of ceramic clay in a kiln, by a chemical solution in the darkroom. Both, a document of touch fixed in time.

In the small back room, a third photographic work, _Lifecast_, fills a room of its own. It feels different; its touch is different. The plaster bust of a young boy, his eyes closed as in sleep or in death, is cradled by gloved hands whose beholden arms extend beyond the frame. A tumour on the boy’s neck bends his head under its weight. This work’s sensitivity is distinct from the others in the exhibition, the body is weighed differently, against the tenderness of grief, that which sensitizes the neck, the shoulders and the hands. _Lifecast_ is the only photograph of a clay object exhibited, and draws upon previous works like _Corpus_, which pictures the head of Christ-like figure cradled on conservationist’s foam, its unknowable weight pressed into it. Curreri has been cited for his subtle use of solarization, a developing-out process that inverts the negative and positive tones in the image. In the darkroom, he treats the image like clay, working to draw out the latent object from somewhere within the material. With such care, he achieves a specific tone, texture or tooth. Varied pressure pushes different marks into clay. Touch has different textures. Surfaces are malleable until fixed (a mechanical-like tick line ladders the surface of the ceramic protrusions). There are so many ways to touch.

[^1]: Laura U. Marks, _The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses_ (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
[^2]: Roland Barthes, _Camera Lucida_ (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 27.

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This article reviews Chris Curreri’s “Unruly Matter,” which showed at Daniel Faria Gallery in Toronto from May 5-June 10, 2017.

Chris Curreri: Unruly Matter

**Kendra Ainsworth** is a curator, writer and arts administrator based in Toronto.

Suns. Moons. Seasons. The sun passing over the yardarm, the moon gibbous or crescent. Measures of time passing and being renewed, before the idea of time was made linear, abstracted and mathematically partitioned. How might we perceive, experience and think differently had these primordial, diurnal and seemingly mystical rhythms remained our standard mode of parsing the universe around us? What systems, understandings and senses might we still have access to? In _Suns also Seasons_ at the Kitchener- Waterloo Art Gallery, Maggie Groat has crafted a quiet, contemplative space in which to ponder these questions.

Groat’s conceptual collage and assemblage-based practice has always been concerned with how images, objects, places and ideas can be recontextualized to form new or revisit old narratives, looking awry at the sometimes-unseen systems that structure our world. Perhaps the most entrenched of these systems is that of a modern, Western, teleological, progress-driven concept of time. Groat taps into the current cultural fascination with the idea of deep time, apropos at a moment when disconnect between the frantic pace of life in the digital age and the attenuated processes of the geological, environmental and biological seem both yawningly great and poised for a collision in the era of the Anthropocene.

At the centre of the exhibition sits _HEXAGON for ALMANAC_, a large, low enclosed form, delineated with unfinished wood beams and filled with industrial grey carpet padding. It calls to mind the area where children gather at the local library, seated in a circle, patiently awaiting Saturday-morning storytelling. It exerts a subtle gravitational pull on the exhibition, drawing us into and around it. Like the library, it is a place to gather, to tell stories, a circle cast by witches and druids long ago, the standing stones that once described its circumference long fallen, leaving only ridges in the ground. The gallery has become a sacred site with visitors making seasonal pilgrimages, each time to the same space, which has been changed in the meantime, repurposed, filled anew with objects of worship. The other large installation element of the exhibition, _RISER for SET_, is an altar of sorts, with three stairs leading up to meet the back wall of the gallery on which are hung small found metal elements, arrayed in an arc, varying solid and open circular forms suggesting the lunar cycle.

Orbiting this central point are constellations of Groat’s signature collage works, small sculptures, design interventions in the gallery space and a cleverly integrated selection of works from the KWAG permanent collection. The collages are spare, with muted colours and repeating forms. Circles, ellipses, squares – arcing and angling geometries forming concentric rings – hint at connections between tenets of mathematics, philosophy, physics and religion. Many of Groat’s titles reference set theory, using elements of mathematical notation, creating tension and connection between Euclidean and pagan symbolism. The use of botanical and biological forms that have strong mathematical referents – the golden ratio in the whorl of snail shell, the tessellations visible in flower centres – make understated appearances in some of the collage works, but they are most present in what is perhaps the most challenging piece in the exhibition, _KIT_. Its dense busy-ness almost at odds with the rest of the works on display, it initially seems to elude interpretation. A hexagonal polyhedron, constructed of plywood, it rests on the ground in one corner of the gallery. A _National Geographic_ \-like collection of images of plants and planets are arranged on the top – perhaps the wholes from which the collaged snippets in the framed works are derived from or reference. One side is open, unfurling a yellowing sheet of foam with small spherical and crystalline objects gently sinking into its surface. Is this perhaps a toolbox, revealing objects that hold the power of the earth, the crushing weight, and heat that turns ancient decaying organic matter into mineral forms which are then mined and held aloft as talismans of that eternal mystery, time?

Groat offers up a sense of order, providing a guide or codex for these new (old) ways of looking, through circular, cyclical references and the titular iterations of the seasons. The gallery’s own seasons are reflected here, with components from previous exhibitions unearthed, reconfigured, yet not quite shaking off the imprints of their previous existence: institutional history as collage. Particularly adept is how Groat has positioned SET, a grouping of nine works selected from the KWAG collection – by Jack Bush, Barbara Hepworth and Arnold Shives, among others– all in the same roseate palette, alongside a collage work that serves as an abstracted legend. In another oblique reference, the walls have been painted using leftover of paint from previous exhibitions, and the yellow bands painted vertically along one wall reference the light cast by the gallery building’s exterior windows. The colour variations suggest the slow movement of the sun across the sky, but these forms also bring to mind the patterns created by photons in the double-slit experiments demonstrating that light behaves as both a particle and a wave. Like the possible waves that interact with each other, forming quantum interference patterns, historical and formal references interact, amplifying and modulating each other.

Groat’s work, her considered collections of objects, has always been reaching for something, teasing at the edges of some inchoate realization. With _Suns also Seasons_, she comes closest to coaxing forth an epiphany (about life, the universe and everything? It is hard to resist the temptation to wax transcendental here), each work playing off the other, building to a harmonious resonance. If there is one piece that is perhaps superfluous it is _SIX BLOCKS_, a small collection of found objects sourced from the gallery. Its small size and unobtrusive placement, while a slyly humorous contrast to the more monumental pieces, makes it seem like something of an afterthought. Regardless, Groat’s subtle, poignant meditation on the unseen forces that pull us into orbit and unconsciously structure our thinking comes across as perspicacious, and it leaves us with an exhortation: to harness the talismanic power of the images and forms that shape the narratives of nature, time, science and art, and to begin again, again, again.

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This article reviews Maggie Groat’s “Suns also Seasons,” which showed at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery from March 24-June 11, 2017\. 

Maggie Groat: Suns also Seasons

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

We do not look forward to sitting in waiting rooms. What amenities are in place to abate our boredom? An inoffensive selection of general interest magazines await captive bodies, confined minds. Articles about burning fat, supernatural encounters, sugary cocktail recipes, a life-affirming human interest piece. Oh god. How time slips like a slippery and bone-addled fish. Nothing to sink our teeth into anyway. Julian Hou’s solo exhibition at Artspeak, _Milman Parry’s Waiting Room Rhapsody_ is a waiting room constructed against this purgatory of waiting, because we are stripped of knowing for what it is that we wait. A room with artwork is as much a testing ground for patience, a site prior to some sort of vaguely imminent, Beckettian non-arrival, be it diagnosis, consultation, or meaning of the work itself.

But still, we wait. In a freshly carpeted gallery, five red office chairs, unchained from their imagined desks, are provided to seat, swivel and ferry ourselves between artworks displayed under halos of LED along the walls of the space. These chairs have a very forlorn quality. They never had desks to begin with, and are forced to wander the volume of the gallery, never to meet their white collar. The carpet hinders the mobility of those plastic wheels, and the sound of their travel. Some of the chairs wear woven patches expressing their inner purposes: “Progress Not Perfection,” “Embrace The Grind” and “Pressure makes Diamonds.” Progress, grinding and pressure do not suit the mood of this waiting room – for these chairs, a purgatory.

Hou’s 12 works on paper (all 2017) are applied to a white fabric, which is pulled taut by zig-zag lacing to a rounded metal frame. Quarters wrap around the curve of the white metal tubing, like a pet ladybug, an abandoned piece of gum or the deposit for a handful of old candy. Each of these abstract compositions is illuminated by a halo of LED, a spotlight, the quintessential indication that you’re on. In this instance, they’re all on at once, a chorus! Each of these works is simultaneously delivering, but the individual lighting implores you to make a selection. At a glance, most of these works resonate optically as abstract, but as some of Hou’s titles suggest, some are vaguely figurative, such as _Splayed Clover_, which calls the eye to the shape of the plant (not the plant itself). _Blood Segment_ rhetorically privileges a section of red that covers the most surface area of the drawing (albeit by a small margin). _Coping Style_ and _The piano bar at the centre of my mind_ are calculated non-referential compositions. _The piano bar’s_ near-parabolic shapes seem to be fitted into a logic of columns interrupted by the dominant swerving shape that has its own sectional logic. _Coping Style_ calls nothing to mind at all and it’s really much better, sincere, that way.

Recently, I have found that abstraction is often as flippant and inoffensive as dated magazines, but included in the field of its installation, the composition becomes complicated by what’s around it. _Milman Parry’s Waiting Room Rhapsody_ implies composition of the aural kind as well. In his essay “Experimental Music” (1955) I read John Cage’s finger wagging: “We have eyes as well as ears, and it is our business while we are alive to use them.”[^1] And this has, for me, also conjured the opening of David Joselit’s text “Painting Beside Itself” (2009). Joselit starts off quoting Martin Kippenberger saying to Warhol: “Simply to hang a painting on the wall and say that it’s art is dreadful. The whole network is important! Even spaghettini… When you say art, then everything possible belongs to it. In a gallery that is also the floor, the architecture, the color of the walls,”[^2] because it asks for our sensorial faculties to mingle with our worldly ones. Cage’s distinction between noise and music are a pair intertwined in contention, mirroring that of abstraction and figuration.[^3] Cage argued that _music_ results from formal apparatuses such as notation, measures, bona fide instruments, while _noise_ comes from the activity of sounds from nature, life and silence, so the composer of sound (rather than music) is an “organizer of sound” who is “faced with the entire field of sound, but also with the entire field of time.”[^4]

Since aural activity always measures temporality, Hou’s five tracks composed for this exhibition (a score is often characteristic of his installations)[^5] play for the waiting and emphasize the passing of time. Stretched tones formally mimic the droll of seemingly suspended time, but still minutes descend in spite of our feelings of inertia. How does this assertion of activity attest to the stillness of works on paper? Much like old magazines, they are there to take up our time and space, which is all we ask for while waiting. It’s a debasing thing to say about art: “It’s taking up precious space and occupying my precious time!” However, in a waiting room, there is no such preciousness or possibility for Productivity, and there, we are grasping at opportunities to occupy physical and mental space-time. I realize, as a critic, that it’s a simplistic, or obvious, conclusion to draw; I hope it’s the sobering kind of conclusion that is so simplistic that we initially had overlooked its necessity.

Thankfully, Hou’s installations are never simplistic or obvious. How could I do justice to all the forms present? In writing this review of a solo exhibition, I admit that I had thought to approach it as a group show, but to do so would mean dissecting tones and shapes from their deeply networked operations. Two-dimensional abstraction (not to mention the craft and sculptural element of the frames that at once recede into and enhance the presentation of the drawings), experimental music, classical poetry scholarship, and even office furniture and architectural intervention (the carpet) are all so individually attached to discourses of design, literature, art and music that a holistic approach risks a fragmented or plain evocation of discourses. This exhibition presented itself as the task of grasping all the different elements at play, but they can’t be rigorously separated in order to understand them in chorus. I take Julian Hou to be an organizer; an organizer of sounds, shapes, furniture, architectural accents.

[^1]: John Cage “Experimental Music” in _Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage_, Wesleyan University Press (1961). p. 12
[^2]: David Joselit, _“Painting Beside Itself,_” OCTOBER 130, Fall 2009, p. 125–134.
[^3]: “…in the past, the point of disagreement has been between dissonance and consonance, it will be in the immediate future, between noise and so-called musical sounds” “The Future of Music: Credo” in _Silence_, p. 3
[^4]: Ibid.
[^5]: Over the past few years, Hou’s past installations in Vancouver, _Window-bended Harmony_ (CSA Space, 2014) and _Help Me Remember_ (Vancouver Art Gallery, 2016) included thin fixtures made of steel or metal tubing, textured and illustrative graphics sublimated on textile or wallpaper, and each was accompanied by a window and score that swirled together text-to-speech cadence dialogues, futuristic tones, cynical pop music sound-bytes, keyed in ambience, jazz, whispering, interludes of vaporous yet catchy compositions.

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This is a review of “Milman Parry’s Waiting Room Rhapsody,” a solo-exhibition featuring the works of Julian Hou that was on view at ArtSpeak in Vancouver from April 1-May 20, 2017.

Julian Hou: Milman Parry’s Waiting Room Rhapsody

Aisle 4 (Emily Fitzpatrick, Shannon Linde, Patricia Ritacca and Renée van der Avoird) is a Toronto-based curatorial project that initiates and promotes socially engaged artwork.

It’s a 30-degree June day in Athens, Greece, and we are climbing a long, winding path to the Hill of the Nymphs in anticipation of a large-scale site-specific installation by Argentinian artist Adrian Villar Rojas. _The Theater of Disappearance_ is the result of a multi-year collaboration between the artist, a state institution (National Observatory of Athens) and a local non-profit contemporary art foundation (NEON). Villar Rojas mounted two monumental installations under the same title earlier this year, one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and the other at Kunsthaus Bregenz in Bregenz, Austria. In this third iteration, the artist continues to mine the fraught and complex processes of preserving, recording and interpreting histories, transforming the National Observatory of Athens and its grounds into sites of inquiry.

The site of the National Observatory of Athens is one of ultimate national significance, home to the first astronomical observatory (built in in 5th century BC), with inscriptions of mythological nymphs in the surrounding caves. The present-day Observatory and grounds were constructed in 1842 following the country’s independence a decade earlier. As Greece’s first research institution, it was the most advanced cosmological laboratory in the world at the time. The elevated peak on which the landmark sits is ideal for stargazing, but also offers a panoramic view of the city, and a direct sightline of the Acropolis. Villar Rojas considers these historical, mythological and geographic facets in his installation, layering new meanings that extend from the political to the poetic. Villar Rojas is known for his elaborate, often immersive, sculptural installations that combine imagery from disparate realms – sci-fi, post apocalyptic, prehistoric and futuristic – to challenge the authoritative narratives of history. In this iteration of _The Theater of Disappearance_, the artist shifts our focus from the stars to the ground, prompting us to reflect on what significance the soil beneath our feet might carry. He considers the act of digging as political: what histories are uprooted from the earth? What is the social function of remembering?

We reach an ornate set of steel gates and pick up a map marking each component of Villar Rojas’ installation. The project stretches throughout the grounds, inside the Observatory, to the caves beyond that comprise the Hill of the Nymphs. Passing through the entrance to the grounds, we are engulfed by maturing stocks of corn, field grasses and other unfamiliar cultivated vegetation. The Neoclassical details of the Observatory building can be admired at a distance at the end of a modest gravel path, partially obstructed by mounds of eradicated roots that disrupt the grounds’ natural navigation. Docents kindly ask visitors not to stray from this narrow route: everything outside of the path is the installation.

46,000 plants from 26 different species of grains, fruits, vegetables and graminaceous shoots have been transplanted throughout the grounds, bound to survive and coexist for four months in Villar Rojas’ installation. Rather than digging, the artist has constructed a system of raised beds in which a dense layer of fertile soil rests. His unorthodox system of cultivation emulates the balance between harmony and struggle as a symbol for culture. It speaks, too, to the anthropomorphic binaries of nature, prompting us to question our active and passive relationships with our “natural” surroundings.

We pass into the shade of the Observatory with the compounded garden behind us, to enter a museum void of artifacts. Villar Rojas removed the scientific instruments and objects of civic and national pride that are normally on view. What remains is a constellation of selected telescopes and reference books from the museum’s collection, positioned throughout the heavily curtained interior, steering us to observe specific areas both inside and outside of the building. A docent invites us to peer through the telescopes positioned at the Acropolis; however, we cannot find an unobstructed view.

Villar Rojas’ experiments in editing continue when, upon exiting the building, we find a large-scale model of the Observatory that reveals its original landscaping, sparse and austere. As the silent director of this theatre, the artist challenges the institution’s authority by staging all aspects of the site. He employs museological strategies to undermine powerful national narratives, deconstructing the significance of objects displayed and preserved in official collections. In doing so he contradicts the original purpose of the site, questioning the city’s lineage and inserting physical barriers that render the landmarks of Athens invisible. 

Outside, our awareness of the horticulture as an artistic intervention, and the ecosystems created as a result, is heightened. A bright orange pumpkin emerges from the lush groundcover, and we all gasp in a way that our recent Venice Biennale and documenta 14 experiences couldn’t conjure. We later learn that through Villar Rojas’ temporary, diversified environment new species of animals have migrated to and inhabited the site.

We follow a lush path to the final site of Villar Rojas’ inquiry, the dusty and somewhat treacherous Hill of the Nymphs. This cavernous landscape is an unlikely one to host 11 museum-quality vitrines, which sprawl across the steep terrain like stars in the sky, tucked away in caves or precariously planted on rocky hills. There is a dress code for this portion of the exhibition: “Those wishing to explore the full site-specific installation are advised to wear flat shoes, preferably trainers.”

Collectively, the contents of the vitrines hint at disparate historical or futuristic moments in a non-linear timeline. Each contains an unusual collection of cultural, historical or military artifacts mixed with organic materials – plants, moondust, stalactites and stalagmites. These multilayered ecosystems suggest a cross-section and evolution of time and space. But this is a fabricated authority, boasting a false authenticity. Relics and objects from different periods are displayed uneasily, side-by-side. By obscuring the boundaries between fact and fiction, Villar Rojas addresses the problematic nature of recording history: how war and violence tend to be misrepresented; how political agendas inform the way history is presented.

Attuned to how nations interpret their histories, Villar Rojas highlights an ever-present paradox of Greek politics – the tension of being pulled between East and West. Greek identity, of course, finds roots in the soil, dense with physical traces of thousands of years of human civilizations. By contrast, Argentina has a low historic density. Conscious of this disparity, Villar Rojas characterizes his home country as “a modern biopolitical experiment of self-denial and self-edit- ing with the ultimate objective of constructing a white European identity.”[^1] Soil, in both countries, is tied to struggles of identity and ownership. For Argentina, soil is a means of production: crops and cattle, progress and prosperity. In Greece, soil is a document, a source of pride, longevity and perseverance.

Villar Rojas’ metamorphosis of the Observatory and its grounds is a colossal task, as the site occupies an overall area of 4,500 square metres. The scale of this project challenges expectations of what is possible for contemporary public art in discourse with sites of historic significance. It also represents a rare relationship where state, private foundation and artist come together to create a highly sensorial experience free of charge to the public. Ultimately, _The Theater of Disappearance_ focuses our gaze on Villar Rojas’ cunning acts of transgression: he silences authoritative historical narratives while generating a vast ecosystem that disconnects the earth we stand on from the central axis of the city.

[^1]: Elina Kountouri, “Adrian Villar Rojas: An Essential Negotiator,” in _Adrian Villar Rojas: The Theater of Disappearance_, exhibition brochure, NEON, Athens, 2017.

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This is a review of “The Theatre of Disappearance,” a site-specific installation by Adrian Villar Rojas at the National Observatory of Athens, Hill of the Nymphs, in Athens, Greece, from June 1-September 24, 2017\. The installation was commissioned and organized by NEON. The review is written by Aisle 4, a Toronto-based curatorial project. 

Adrian Villar Rojas: The Theater of Disappearance

Fabiola Carranza (b.1983) is a Costa Rican/Canadian visual artist living in Southern California. She holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Carranza recently attended the Chris Kraus Summer Institute at Plug-In, Winnipeg and the Summer Program at SOMA in México City. She is currently at work on an English to Spanish translation of _Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration_ by David Wojnarowicz.

##### Steffanie Ling is the author of two books, _Nascar_ (Blank Cheque, 2016) and _Cuts of Thin Meat_, (Spare Room, 2015). She writes criticism and essays on subjects that range from contemporary art and cinema to professional wrestling, microwaves and the K-pop awards. Her latest work, _Uber Everywhere_, is a short play commissioned by the 2nd Kamias Triennial in the Philippines. Ling has worked as a curator at CSA Space and as an editor of _Bartleby Review_. She writes a monthly Vancouver arts column for Akimbo, organizes a reading series with Emma Metcalfe Hurst (_LIT LIT LIT LIT_), and co-edits a new journal (_Charcuterie_), which she founded with Bopha Chhay. I spoke with Steff about her most recent book, _Nascar_, sometime in December. It is now June and Blank Cheque has just released the second printing of the book.
  
  
_Smoking is the ritual that flows from one story to the next in Nascar. It acts as some sort of frustrated resistance to the responsibilities of adult-hood and professionalization. With the advance of vaping, your embrace of smoke as the ongoing thread in the book becomes a funny but also poignant marker. Blah, blah, I’m blabbing. Did you know right away you were writing a book about cigarettes?_

I was blabbing the book until it was all out of me, like a person who can’t stand awkward silence. I just kept talking. I did readings of some of the texts in _Nascar_, and many I wrote to accompany exhibitions. I managed to talk about some of the things that you mention, like resistance or hesitation to professionalize – a dangling carrot which isn’t a carrot but some other thing that stands in for our various and amorphous ambitions and desires.

In the book, smoking is a motif that indicates social awkwardness, the performance of maturity and/or worldliness and the traffic of judgment coming from, or directed toward, the narrator, rather than smoke as a noun where cigarettes are the object of study. When I look back on it, the book starts to depict how I experienced the wake of PC culture, seeing my neighbourhoods get gentrified, trying to find jobs and fulfill a sense of productivity, all the while, smoking and feeling this pressure to perform/succeed and be charming, be present and stay connected. All of this millennial-as-scum-of-the- earth type stuff.

_The book borrows its title from the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, a family-run organization that basically establishes when, where and how car races are sanctioned. NASCAR runs the second most highly televised sports franchise in the United States. Why did you choose this as the title for your book of stories?_

Wow, I didn’t know it was family-run. That makes it seem quaint. The title, _Nascar_, was my way of identifying a form that interests me by way of how it alienates me: the sexy race car. I started to refer to fancy people as fast cars, because “fast cars” are often expensive to maintain, really clean, ostentatious and, more than likely, non-smokers.

I had also read Renata Adler’s _Speedboat_, a collection of loose prosaic, intimate episodes in the milieu of a female journalist working in the ’70s. There is nothing specific in her book that hearkens to speedboats either – the book is punctuated by vignettes of the socially anxious and upwardly mobile variety, wading in and out of a certain class of people who have speedboats, or friends who have speedboats. When I first read Adler, I couldn’t get into how “about” nothing her book felt. It was well written but it didn’t keep my attention for long. I picked it up again while I was working on _Nascar_ and changed my mind about it, finding it brutally honest, sad at times, written with a smart set of eyes. I wonder what changed in me that shifted my appreciation of the book. I think whatever that was must have occurred sometime between starting to write and publishing _Nascar_.

_In the title story, you describe the performance and appearance of an opera singer at the same time as you describe the sight of a sexy car in a speedy race. The narrator is bored by these performances, but boredom itself is interfered with in the story as it oscillates between high and low culture. Does excellence bore you? Do you perceive mastery as straightforwardness, a linear trajectory?_

Conventional excellence bores me, but I also think we have a somewhat empty relationship to mastery. Boredom isn’t the counterpoint to excellence. Boredom might be a muffin-top, but excellence is the display of flexing sweet abs – which is cool, thumbs up, but I can’t really relate to this muscle. Is there such a thing as a sincere six pack? I would find more interest in it if we thought of it in terms of someone who is constantly flexing underneath their clothes, while trying to maintain a casual stance. I want the narrative or psychology of this character. I keep returning to the metaphor of physique – also echoed through the motif of back pain spiking up every time the narrator gets caught in a painful or anxious social dynamic. This logic around the repetition of what we do, or don’t do, accomplishes a certain affect on our behalf. In _Nascar_, smoking is portrayed as both action and reaction. She has a cigarette when she feels anxious, when she feels annoyed or smokes in place of placing a harsh judgment. There is this thing that happens \[where\] every time she smokes, a character is conjured: the woman with the black SUV, the man with the gash on his head. For the most part, smoking acts not so much \[as\] a forthright rejection but rather as a deep suspicion of excellence.

_You graduated from art school two years ago. You’re what 23, 24, 25? How did you respond to the experience of being a student? Is there a diaristic impulse for you to read life as you write about it?_

I felt like a fraud being an art student and making people critique my work and hear me talk about it or make it seem worth their time. When I was in school, we were being asked what our “practice” was, and my impulse was to interpret this quantitatively. You know, that logic behind “practice makes perfect” implies that repetition leads to mastery. We all felt this amazing, motivating pressure to become interested in things and express all this knowledge at the drop of a hat. I didn’t feel any confidence or expertise about any given subject, though, but I told myself and others that I did, to keep going. I have talked about pressure a lot, haven’t I? It’s all I feel sometimes: pressure to do this and that. What did I spend the most time doing? Smoking. Was I an expert smoker, a _master_ smoker? I preferred committing to that practice than to any other grandiose idea. I was sincerely into things like theory, philosophy and other rhetoric as seen through the scope of contemporary art, which resonates with me only briefly compared to more blatant or pedestrian practices \[of smoking, pathologically rearranging furniture, lying to customer service people, flexing underneath one’s clothes. Edification isn’t discernable in these practices but I don’t think they’re trivial ways to pass the time. These things just excited me in an unexpected way\]. I haven’t been able to judge whether what I’m feeling is a certain amount of real disenchantment with art content, or just getting a bit older and becoming less generous or open to want\[ing\] to spend time with really esoteric things.

_In “The Convenience Store,” the narrator gets asked where she’s from during a point-of-sale transaction. She says she’s Asian and describes how she often wants to lie when answering this type of question. It’s later revealed that the question was asked of her by a newcomer to Canada and not by an established white Canadian, as one would be all too quick to assume. In either case, the question usually runs from privilege down in real life, but not in this story. To me, this is a sort of subversion. Was writing about “where are you from?” something you felt you had to write about? Did the idea come from a real experience of being asked this yourself?_  
I wrote it when I realized how we are well prepared to have our nuanced identities belittled or reduced; we even have rhetorical defence mechanisms set in place. For me, lying is a way to get through this repeated and impersonal-but-personal conversation while we conduct banal commerce, because the conversation doesn’t carry any consequences – like giving a fake name for a food order or a drink. Insincerity meets insincerity. But is it possible that the question comes from another complex and nuanced identity? Fewer and fewer white people ask me this question now; it’s more often not. I wanted to portray how assumptions about this particular question undermine the possibility of letting a sincerity – however naïve– prevail over an episode that usually ends in our affirmation of another person’s conversational tactlessness, general insensitivity or ignorance. We just leave the exchange feeling violated and righteous. That’s the power dynamic that we sustain, which is borne from the otherness.

_In “The Editor, The Painter and The Merchandiser,” the narrator contemplates writing a personal essay and titling it, “In Defense of Some Straight White Males.” Like “The Convenience Store,” this story refuses to give a negative representation of white people using the usual stereotypes: racists or misogynists, or anti-feminist, or all too accepting or unquestioning of white privilege. Although it does seem to suggest that quite a few, if not all, of these white friend characters, are apolitical. In either case, both stories tend to throw fixed identity out of circulation. Did you ever worry that the book would come across as being a bit apologetic of whiteness?_

_You write: “The more I linger on this presumed rejection of the straight white male, the more the defeatist stance he takes sounds less like a legitimate attempt to excuse himself and more like a deep expressed lack of authenticity felt standing before the threshold of cultural participation. I don’t feel equipped to try and encourage him, or myself, to be more outspoken about a garden variety of things.”_

There was a worry coming from the same place as the apprehension I recognized among my Caucasian peers who felt like they couldn’t participate, or that their opinions were not valid, appreciated or could be taken seriously because of sudden cultural guilt, and persecution on top of that. That alienation, confusion and then passivity ultimately leads to business-as-usual art making. Lines get drawn, and it’s a radical sentiment to know what we want, who we are and what we stand for – but you can’t motivate someone to engage until they are ready or compelled to, otherwise, that participation is subject to righteous ridicule or ignorance. The cultural climate is more alienating or hostile than it is inviting to handle the tension of sharing discordant positions and experience. I don’t have the answers. I guess I wrote \[that\] to try and put the feeling in front of me that I’m surrounded by good, intelligent people, who are arrested by the pressures I described earlier: to be successful, to gain recognition, to be a good friend, to do unpaid work, to seek meaningful employment, to retain authenticity, to be politically correct, to speak their mind, to resist dogma, to have sex, to attend openings, parties and lunch. What does that have to do with smoking, again?

_I want to go back to the motif of physique, as you’ve called it. Is it of essence to the stories?_

It is a reaction to an emphasis on fitness that pervades mainstream lifestyle cultivation. Fitness grated up against the more poetic righteousness of my own smoking and self-deterioration. A fruitless and absurd protest, but protest is bound by absurdities. The only “pragmatism” we get is the pleasure of the act. That’s a naïve and predictable sentiment that I’ll wilfully prop up as an essence to the stories.

_Why?_

I know I have a lot of hubris about how I can, and do, abuse my body at this point in my life, but not enough to feel like I am capable of writing something \[that\] could accomplish lasting, robust, sturdy, agile, efficient meaning – on purpose, anyway. Those are all things I feel bound to when I’m writing as a critic, essayist, admintrator or job hunter, but excellence without the requisite sincerity comes from a sickening place of having to prove oneself without knowing to whom one is talking to exactly. I guess, at this point, I associate physical excellence with a kind of morality, a respect for an ambiguous oppressor – an abstract boss, gatekeeper, rubber stamp wielder. The “mood back pain” from overexerting myself emotionally and physically through rampant participation strikes as physical, but it stands in for pain and all the various forms it could take. Writing about your twenties is not so much hanging dirty laundry to fly, as it is the airing of a dated wardrobe.

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In this book review, Fabiola Carranza speaks in conversation with Steffanie Ling about her most recent book Nascar (Vancouver: Blank Cheque, 2016).

On Ling’s Nascar 

Katherine McKittrick is Associate Professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University, in Kingston, Ontario. She is the author of _Demonic Grounds_ (Minnesota, 2006) and edited the collection _Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis_ (Duke, 2015).

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

##### Katherine McKittrick and Rinaldo Walcott re-visit Black Like Who? (1997), Walcott’s seminal examination of Black culture in Canada, at a time when it continues to resonate loudly.
  
  
_This issue of C Magazine focuses on voice, so I would like to begin there. As you know, the question of voice is central to Black Studies and practices of liberation: the longstanding histories of racial capitalism and racial violence have generated different kinds and types of Black voice; the question of being unheard or illegible is underpinned by different modes of speakability. In Black Like Who?, you analyze a range of Black voice – enunciated through film, poetry, fiction and more. In many ways, the book theoretically voices Black Canada. Can you talk about your work in relation to Black voice, Black voices and what Toni Morrison calls “unspeakable things unspoken”?[^1]_

In _Black Like Who?_, I was attempting to demonstrate what a Black Canadian voice might bring to the table of diaspora. In the 1990s, the diaspora conversation in Black Studies moved between the USA and Britain, and occasionally a nod to the Caribbean or some other place would occur. I was interested in exploring what would happen to diaspora discourse and claims when the unique Black Canadian voice intervened into it.

_Do you think quietness, or the unsaid, is relevant to this intervention?_

_Black Like Who?_ needed to be loud. To be, even at times, wrong – so that it could penetrate circuits of empire. Nonetheless being loud does not mean that you will necessarily get heard. Some folks in Black Studies are discovering Black Canada now, as if we are “new” here. What I was trying to do was reveal a little of our connections. And, more boldly, I was suggesting that there is no such thing as a Black world without coming through us. You can’t be quiet about that when both Canada and others would mildly ignore you and more viciously deny you. You have to kick, shout and scream. _Black Like Who?_ is my Black Canadian scream!

_Screaming is a breach of sorts, I think. It is a refusal of respectable talk – a kind of shouting of the possibilities underpinning un-belonging. A Black Canadian scream is disquieting precisely because black in/and Canada is here in such impossible ways. To think about Black Like Who? as a scream maps this! Thank you for that. This speaks – loudly! – to what you term “grammar for black.”[^2] Grammar points to sentence structure, language rules – syntax and all of that. The authors you engage in Black Like Who? – I am thinking specifically of M. NourbeSe Philip, given her wonderful work on “languish,” but most of the other folks you discuss, too – are interested in the overlapping workings of colonial knowledge systems and the ways Black diasporic communities navigate these systems. How are you thinking “grammar” – in relation to colonialism, anticolonialism, diaspora, whatever? Can you talk about grammar in relation to Queer Returns, too?_

I was first inspired to use the idea of grammar from Gayatri Spivak.[^3] I think grammars are really important. I think grammars drag history with them but also orient us to the world. I think grammars are central to voice, too. For me, grammars are how we imagine the world: the kind of structure we want to give it, a kind of flow we want to have. That is, grammars are ethical for me. Grammars function to help us imagine what is possible – and that includes the fullness of Black life, including queer and trans people. _Queer Returns_ functions as a grammar of memory, a return to debates not yet resolved, so that we might use our histories more effectively in these newly brutal times.

_As you know, one of the things I love about Black Like Who? is your deep and very nuanced engagement with Jamaican intellectual and essayist Sylvia Wynter. Can you talk a bit about her influence on your work? And to keep with the theme of voice, maybe you can share a bit about Wynter’s voice! You and I interviewed her in 2007, and when I think back on the time the three of us spent together, I hear her generous brilliance, the sound of redoubled urgency as thought. For me, the sound of her voice brings a different kind of joy than her written words. We can think of David Scott’s recent book Stuart Hall’s Voice.[^4] I saw him give a paper from that book at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York a few years ago, and he talked about Hall’s voice as intellectual style, with an emphasis on intellectual praxis. So, the voice is the project. Of course, Wynter and Hall are two very, very different thinkers, but I like the possibilities Scott offers in his discussion. What does it mean, for you, to hear Wynter’s voice?_

Both Sylvia Wynter and Stuart Hall have and had some of the most beautiful speaking voices I have ever heard. Their tones, measures and pitches are just extraordinary. I had been reading Wynter since my undergraduate education at York University in the ’80s and Hall in my graduate education in the 1990s. I did not realizehow much impact Wynter’s work had on me until my first job at York University. All of a sudden, I found her work necessary for framing my attempt to teach across national boundaries about Black life. I did not realize the ways in which her ideas influenced _Black Like Who?_ until you pointed it out to me. Wynter’s voice is utterly unique and challenging; you live with her for a long time, internalizing her and then repeating and living her without even knowing that is what you have done. In essence, once you engage Wynter, you always return to her in some fashion. Her voice inhabits yours.

[^1]: Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” _Michigan Quarterly Review_, 28:1, (Winter 1989): 1-34.
[^2]: Rinaldo Walcott, _Black Like Who?: Writing Black Canada_, 2nd Edition, Toronto: Insomniac Press, \[1997\] 2003: 145-156.
[^3]: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, _Outside in the Teaching Machine_, (New York: Routledge, 1993).
[^4]: David Scott, _Stuart Hall’s Voice_, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).

issue-135-p70-71.pdf

In this book review, Katherine McKittrick and Rinaldo Walcott revisit Walcott’s Black Like Who? (Toronto: Insomniac Press, 1997). 

On Walcott’s Black Like Who?

Emily Dickson is an aspiring art critic interested in how art may compliment or confront contemporary politics. She is taking a year off between studies to focus on finding her niche as a writer.

##### C New Critics Award 

The winner of this year’s _C New Critics Award_ is Emily Dickson, for her text on Camille Seaman’s photography series, _We Are Still Here_. _C Magazine_ would like to thank all those who applied, as well as the 2017 award jury: Writers Andrew Berardini and Corrine Fitzpatrick, and _C Magazine_’s Editor, Kari Cwynar.  
  
As a young child Camille Seaman’s grandfather once said to her, “Look, do you see that? That’s part of you up there. That’s your water that helps to make the cloud that becomes the rain that feeds the plants that feeds the animals.” In her recent project _We Are Still Here_ Seaman extends this logic. Seaman was initially drawn to Standing Rock and the controversy around the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016 both because of her career-long fascination with the many lives of water – a calling which has brought her from the polar ice caps of the Canadian North to the back end of superstorms – and because of her identification as Shinnecock First Nations. In the process of photographing the Standing Rock water protectors at the Oceti Sakowin Camp, Seaman developed a radical idea – why not ask the sitters to send a message to their future ancestors of what they want them to know about this watershed moment?

It is along these lines that _We Are Still Here_ has developed. Seaman imbues her photographs with agency by creating the space for transaction to occur between present and future families. In a  
sense each photograph is given a mission. Seaman’s sitters demonstrate their membership in a collective, multi-generational family whose momentum is ever driven into the future. The development of this momentum provides the space for new channels of future action to develop, despite the camp’s closure.

Not only has the government response and the closure exposed the fallacy of equality under democracy, as well as Indigenous rights to reserved land, but the media’s photographic coverage demonstrates how the “partition of the perceptible” orders popular political polemics and determines what counts as viable democratic participation. That the photojournalistic coverage of Standing Rock has been largely framed in humanitarian terms – with tear-gas, batons, attack dogs  
and riot police taking centre stage – focuses public concern on the protestors’ physical suffering, and away from thorny spiritual and ecological issues, not to mention issues of political accountability to Indigenous sovereignty, which should be central to the discussion.

Seaman’s portrait of Sarah Jumping Eagle demonstrates how the water protectors at Oceti Sakowin refused to frame their experience as one of physical oppression, or of pitting “unavoidable” “progress” against ahistorical “tradition.” Her future message reads, “We are here because we care about you and care about the future. We are going to keep fighting for you. These are tears of hope and of strength and of love. We know that our path is good.” Sitting in a stoic pose, hands folded and crying eyes affixed on the lens, Sarah Jumping Eagle’s self-presentation registers  
metaphysical pain and sorrow at the same time that it asserts hope.

The widely-known practice of settler photographer/ethnographer Edward Curtis, who snapped thousands of images of Indigenous peoples in the name of “salvage ethnography” predicated on the vanishing Indian myth, contributed to a white imaginary where a whole continent of peoples were consigned to an aesthetic of passing. The aestheticization of the Indigenous body was handy – it served to absolve the public of guilt, thereby allowing the expansion of capital.

The media’s visual narrative of Standing Rock extends the historical impulse of deterministic portrayals of Indigenous peoples. By pigeonholing public focus on humanitarian and therefore individual concerns, the mass images of the protests similarly consign Native identity to the past by framing its agents as ahistorical, and resistant to progress writ in neo-liberal  
terms. Such representations create both distance and empathy in a mass spectatorial body which reads Indigenous peoples’ lot as a tragic yet inevitable pathology of modernity – their solidarity with the earth a quaint historical footnote.

In _We Are Still Here_, Seaman establishes a discourse resistant to such essentialist, paternalistic and oppressive constructions with the affective power of one force – family. Seaman asserts that family is broader than the nuclear unit. We may at times forget how our destinies are mutually determined. By building her project out of portraits of individuals, couples, family units and friends, Seaman asserts that family is an extensive network of affective and empathetic trajectories bound by blood, culture, shared concerns and memory, which expands far beyond the nuclear.

Looking at family and ancestry in Indigenous art-making presents a complicated counterpoint to the West’s obsession with unique individual identity. Mohawk photographer Shelley Niro has said, “If you’re searching for your identity, that sounds kind of hopeless, doesn’t it? It just seems to have a connotation that you’re lost or you’re trying to find your way back to someplace.” By resisting the notion of the isolated, finite individual, Seaman refuses the inevitable philosophical isolationism which we invite when we lose sight of how intrinsically integrated we are with each other, and with the earth.

As activist photographer Ariella Azoulay maintains, the material photograph is only ever one potential outcome of the event of photography, and many outcomes are still to be determined. Seaman takes on Afro-futurist writer Kondo Eshun’s assignment to concern herself with “the predictive, the projected, the proleptic, the envisioned, the virtual, the anticipatory and the future-conditional,” by teasing out future messages to generations not yet born from a family of peoples who refuse to be past/sed.

If art in the public realm traditionally defines photography as indexical, as metaphoric, as aesthetic – and politics to a “what was” – then the re-defining of photography as an inter-generational familial contract releases the image from these constraints. By co-mingling affect and Indigenous futurity, Seaman secures for memory a vigour beyond the stationary planes of the photographic frame where the political (and not an aesthetic of the political) takes the front seat.

While at the camp Seaman witnessed the water protectors take part in an intervention organized by artist Cannupa Hanska Luger, where, standing before riot police, they insisted, “We pray for you and your children’s children” while holding mirrors facing the barricade in all its fury. They asked, “\_Is this what you want your grandchildren to know?\_” This attenuation to a broad familial responsibility, and the hope for what hope may produce, is what renders Seaman’s project ever more useful as we face an unsure political future.

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This is an exhibition review by Emily Dickson of Camille Seaman’s project “We Are Still Here” which can be viewed online. Dickson is the 2017 recipient of the C Magazine C New Critics Award.

We Are Still Here, Camille Seaman’s Portrait Photography from Oceti Sakowin

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

From a new café in Winnipeg’s east Exchange District, I followed Andrea Roberts through their fourth solo exhibition by way of a video with sound recording. _The Stridents_ is a sparse presentation of three projects that mediate sound and language, print, textile and sculpture. The works’ rectangular formats and modular frames anticipate their own portability, as distributed editions or products of neoliberal flexibility that are nonetheless “anchored” by the weight of a concrete bench near the gallery entrance. The works refract the space, evoking, in turn, the cold segregation of Medieval stone cells or anchorholds for Christian recluses, contemplative reading rooms, and the emptiness of recently bankrupt and abandoned businesses. Each imaginary space is shrouded by the artist’s investments in shadow feminisms, as theorized by Jack Halberstam, with the exhibited media offering liminal surfaces where non-normativity, negativity and failure are presented as viable and desirable ways of life.

_A Mirror for Recluses_ consists of a looped and duplicated audio recording emanating from two subtle ventilation grates on either side of the bench. The composition gathers performed incantations, echoing anchorite/esses reading from the 15th-century _Speculum Inclusorum_, an instructional manual for anchoritic life. Their voices, which Roberts post-produced to emphasize sibilant speech sounds, form a chorus of hisses deviating towards drone. The effect is sombre and ominous, and while I would not blame an alienated visitor for leaving early, a slower engagement affords the possibility to discern the politicity of these aesthetic decisions.

Roberts describes sound, in this case, as spatial artifact. And I hear “artifact,” in this case, as a valued object as much as an error in (digital) information, a trace of intention or failure to communicate. The plastic ventilation grates, which at first seem irrelevant as infrastructure, establish the unstable spatial aesthetic implicit in the exhibition, each emulating a church hagioscope while disguising a speaker. The concrete sculpture is also emulative, of an anchorite’s bed or a gallery bench. Rather than being narrowly interpellated, the visitor is welcome, by the presence of these artifacts, to imagine a fluidity of identity or movement through spaces, whether standing, seated, asleep or walking; listening, reading or speaking.

_A Mirror for Recluses_ has been modified since it was first installed for _Superimposition: Sculpture and Image_ – a 2016 group show at Winnipeg’s Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art. For _The Stridents_, Roberts has installed the speaker-grates beside rather than in front of a seated guest, emphasizing sonic rather than visual mirroring, an effect that parallels Montreal-based artist Adam Basanta’s split sound-related sculptures. Roberts’ investment in demoting visuality revives the multisensory nature of “visions” experienced and sometimes recorded by Medieval mystics; paradoxes of feminist history are embodied by an anchoress herself, who retreats from the world by remaining in one location, the isolated inhabitant of a small stone cell that nonetheless remains attached to the congregation’s church, communing with her God and the angels.

Roberts and I share a certain secular indifference to Christianity while also being oppressed by some of its structures and affects. Rather than creating a space for religious devotion, _The Stridents_ draws these minor, material histories (of women, of outcasts) from European metanarratives to trace feminist and queer/trans archaeologies of reclusion, retreat or refusal. Here, mysticism is a challenge to perceive without reductive, forced binaries of gender, space, sense or value, offering the phenomenal instead of deconstruction. The installation works in contradistinction to contemporary sound projects that amplify aggressive masculinism or white pain while it also turns away from the assimilationist imperative to present oneself in order to claim a voice in representative regimes.

_Say it Ain’t So_ is a print series contending with recording technologies and their capacity to mourn, memorialize and resurrect or, rather, to stay silent or indecipherable in melancholia. The five framed prints, installed along one wall, hold a more intimate space. Each rhythmically lists four words as pre-Linnaean signifiers of plants, animals and minerals: spells to reach across death, or recipes for invisibility. The words are drawn from the _Lingua Ignota_, a 12th-century glossary and notation system written by St. Hildegard of Bingen that remains, since the mystic’s death, as an unheard language. The colourful text is silkscreened across lampblack-covered drawing paper, a process that both shadows and illuminates as it displaces the sooty carbon pigment on which sound waves were registered by a 19th-century phonautograph. If the reader were to speak these words, the agency of the obsolete recording instrument to speak to the future (realized belatedly in the 21st century) would be foregrounded, meeting the immortal silkscreen. Such enunciation is, however, suppressed by the conventions of many art galleries. The series becomes a record of an incantatory silence or quietly cast hex, as though intended to secretly assist someone coping with personal loss or to make something right (again).

Roberts’ interest in self-help cultures is also legible in the infrasculptural textile works displayed throughout the other sides of the gallery, a showcase of precarity. Ironic banners, as though salvaged from the site of failed commerce, are laser-cut with text and patterns and stretched across welded metal frames. The forms synthesize a provisional approach to sculpture, recalling the arrangements of Montreal-based artist Marie-Michelle Deschamps, with a formalist humour and pleasure in materials that nonetheless respond to the aesthetic of capitalism particular to California, where Roberts studied. The central banner, displayed vertically across the room from the bench, repeats the list format of four words as sibilant sounds, associating the textiles with the prints and sound installation. Another textile, horizontal, reads “Total Insolvency.” This strangely literal, if honest, conflation of commodity-production and destitution, pronouncing bankruptcy in one location only to be folded flat and shipped to the next site, suggests that there might be a beautifully pathetic dignity in declaring one’s own debt. A final textile is suspended from the wall above the entrance’s interior: a floral print stating, “There is gold dust in the air for you.” Drawn from the self-help book _The Dynamic Laws of Prosperity_ for its new-age promise of willed wealth, the tinged phrase casts a dizzy sensation of metal fume fever over the entire show.

While it might seem like the artist is shifting away from the body-centric practice of their first solo exhibition in favour of text or dislocated conceptualism, the voices in _The Stridents_ chant in all of their harsh and uncooperative dissonance to remind us of our corporealities. And yet Roberts’ tracings of queer temporalities and shadow feminisms perform someone’s conditional choice to throw the baby out with the bathwater of reproductive futurity; at the shifting centre (the wandering womb) of _The Stridents_ is an imperfect desire to reject the gentrifying effects of normal life while searching for elsewhere. As to the question of whether these works materialize the threshold across which a voice becomes a heard message, or establish a gravestone where so many unreceived sounds accumulate in a dead sounds office, I hear the possibility of taking a vow of silence that refuses the culture of silence and of creating a culture of speech that affirms the abolitionist (re: carcerality) and transformative possibilities of a feminist politics.

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This is a review of “The Stridents,” an exhibition of works by Andrea Roberts which took place at the TRUCK Gallery in Calgary from June 2-July 15, 2017.

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C Mag

Issue 135