Column

Emma Sharpe is an MA candidate in Ryerson and York University’s Communication and Culture program in Toronto. She’s interested in bridging the gap between creative practice and scholarship, and focuses on themes of tactility, printed matter and mediation in the visual arts.

> “You can lose yourself in folds of time such as these.”

> — _response to Les Levine “1/2 VHS Video Series” mock up, designed by Robert Flack, 1986_

In the digital age, our embodied experiences with media are becoming increasingly homogeneous. The lack of variety in touch and texture offered by smooth screens has rearranged and limited our sensory relationship to the media with which we interact. These rapid technological shifts have resulted in a push back: a renewed interest in full-spectrum sensations and in-person relations, prompting a resurgence in analogue processes and tangible, hands-on media. This looking back to look forward presents the physical archive as a particularly significant site for exploring just what gets lost in the shift towards digitization.

Using the archive as its focal point, “Feeled Recordings” explores these transitions – the gains and losses when material is translated from one medium to another and represented on different platforms. What gets lost when physical material is placed in an archive, organized into categories and flattened for digital representation? What happens when the material is no longer available to the body and the senses? What is captured for the record and what left out?

On December 18, 2017, 12 participants gathered for the “Feeled Recordings” workshop at Art Metropole. The workshop approached the questions above by reintroducing archival material to a contemporary setting, making it available for individuals to touch, feel, interact with and respond to. It focused on the archive as a site for disrupting linear approaches to time, muddling the boundaries between past and present, physical and digital, and incorporating a multiplicity of voices, bodies and feelings into the often singular narrative of an archive’s record. Working from pre-selected material from Art Metropole’s institutional archive, the group explored their embodied and affective experiences when interacting with ephemera. Mostly event flyers, mailers and catalogues spanning 1974–1999, the preserved material was examined for its form rather than its content and mined for new subjective triggers.

Individually, participants recorded reactions to their chosen material, limiting their perceptual observations to somatic and affective experience: how did their bodies behave in relation to the material? Did the smell of the paper remind them of anything? How did it dictate their movement? Did it feel familiar or strange? These observations were recorded, shared aloud and then distilled into keyword form using descriptors that capture the participants’ one-on-one interactions with the material. The keywords describe the type of data that isn’t typically captured in archival catalogues: the feel of the material against skin, the memories conjured, the smells, the sounds and the emotions stirred. The workshop’s results will be added to the archive’s digital storage system in a new category – “Feeling” – and will become searchable terms within Art Metropole’s online database.

By experiencing and augmenting the archive in these ways, “Feeled Recordings” approaches time not as linear or chronological, but instead as cyclical, circuitous and folding over itself. It treats the archive as a tool able to collapse the boundaries between past and present, bridging expansive temporal gaps. It speaks to the mutability of our recollections of history, and the inability of ever completing an archive. Moreover, the project attempts to reincorporate the messiness of human subjectivity – here associated with sensory and affective experience – into the physical archive and its digital platforms.

The workshop was also a chance to privilege experiences that are becoming increasingly rare in the digital age: contemplative moments of physical intimacy with archival material bred by the participation of the close senses – touch, smell and sound – through the feel of material, the smell of paper and the rustling of pages. It offered the chance to share these haptic interactions with others, activating the archive both personally and collectively. The project hints, too, at the impossibility of accurately recording time: how can one record something in constant motion? Feeled Recordings offers a chance to sink into the inherent failure of the imperative to preserve, playing within the space of what gets left off the record – the feelings, the messiness of subjectivity and the complexity of human interpretation.

Presented here is a selection of keywords generated during the workshop.

Writer

Time

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Interpretation

Collections

Conceptual

Inventory: Feeled Recordings: An Embodied Exploration of Archival Ephemera

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

> “Time is borrowed and it changes everything.”

> — _Wu Tsang, Wildness (2012)_

I’m not sure when I became aware of Wu Tsang’s film _Wildness_, though it was likely through its wide exposure in 2012 as a work included in both the Whitney Biennial and the New Museum Triennial. I was enamoured by the descriptions of the film’s namesake – a weekly queer party at which performance artists, drag stars and experimental musicians were exalted. What drew my interest the most, however, was the unlikely main character, the Silver Platter, the long-standing Los Angeles gay bar where Tsang and a collective of young artist friends chose to host Wildness. Rather than narrating the story of the party, Tsang gives the bar its own voice, in Spanish. I didn’t get to see it at the time, but I became convinced I needed the film, compelled by the wisdom that the Silver Platter may have imparted to the young artists.

Despite the various viewing schemes I devised over the past five years, as time would have it, I came to _Wildness_ late, using my status as a writer to finally gain access. This feeling of lateness is common in queer life: each time I have moved to a new city and searched for queer culture I have been told, with lament, of legendary parties and local watering holes that have closed shop, or collectives and associations that cracked under financial, political or personal pressures. Tsang’s instant affinity with the community she finds within the unassuming walls of the Silver Platter is familial, an unexpected homecoming. Her desire to produce a party in the trans “living room” of the Silver Platter is understandable despite her cultural differences from the Silver Platter’s long-standing community of primarily Latinx trans women and drag queens. In the production of queer public culture there is often a strong impulse towards the creation of something new, accompanied by the feeling of participating in something unending. As the narrator, the Silver Platter positions Tsang’s story as one of many young queer creatures who have arrived on its doorstep, idealism brimming in their glitter-speckled eyes.

Remaining with me from my overzealous undergraduate reading of José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia is the idea that queerness is glimpsed through moments. Muñoz instructs, “We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.”[^1] I have felt this warm illumination in the presence of others, often while witnessing strange performances or participating in sweat-infused, desire-drenched dance floors. These intoxicating experiences affirmed me and, in turn, fuelled my interest in queer histories and the production of queer publics. My own streak of young idealism and desire to create led me to organize parties, events, art shows and rallies with friends and lovers while attending art school in Halifax. Around the time I learned of _Wildness_, I was elbows deep in paint and local history, collaboratively reconstructing the Turret, Halifax’s legendary activist-run gay bar, in its original iconic location, which, at that moment, housed the Khyber Centre for the Arts. The experience of connecting to a living history through the activation of intergenerational community enthralled me. It inspired a subsequent exhibition at the Anna Leonowens Gallery in which we constructed a social space much like the Turret but set in an untethered future, a gesture through which we sought to make material our desires for an autonomous queer public place.[^2]

The pollination between what has been, what is and what could be compels _Wildness_. Inspired by the Silver Platter’s Friday night show, Tsang and her friends begin to produce Wildness as a weekly party on Tuesday nights, featuring performance artists and experimental musicians. In the film, a montage documents week after week of eclectic, strange and wonderfully bizarre happenings. As the party’s renown spreads, tensions begin to play out. While the staff and some of the Silver Platter patrons enjoy the different crowd Wildness brings to the bar, others feel their space is being invaded. Tsang herself becomes filled with concern that the party and the culture it brings to the Silver Platter will jeopardize the safety of the regulars. Care is given to contextualize the physical and social location of the Silver Platter, particularly the revitalization of the MacArthur Park neighbourhood and the threat of deportation and violence many in the community experience daily. The bar proceeds, in turn with Tsang, to narrate the tensions, follies, heartbreaks and triumphs of Wildness’s two-year tenure at the Silver Platter. The most compelling part of the film happens as Tsang hones in on what is at stake in protecting the Silver Platter. She realizes that she cannot control who attends Wildness, or who finds the Silver Platter, and comes to embrace the idea that those who need it as much as she does will find it. As the feeling of truly belonging settles, Tsang begins to collaborate more inside the Silver Platter, working on films and performances with a diverse mix of people who now frequent the bar together. She also works with activists, lawyers and legal scholars to set up a free legal clinic next to the Silver Platter to provide assistance with name changes, immigration and other legal needs for the community. The film becomes a portrait of different yet connected communities actively overlapping and expanding into each other.

Though my experiences of queer community come from different times and places, I felt connected to Wildness. I related to the feeling of connecting with a community that was mine and yet also not mine, the desire to create a space in which to host community and art, the awakening to the politics of place and space, the triumphs and inevitable heartbreaks of organizing, and the dawning realization that what you are creating is always temporary. After becoming entangled in the emotionally messy legal conflict that arose after Gonzalo – one of the owners of the Silver Platter – passes away, _Wildness_ comes to an end. While the documentary depicts the surface pain of this ending, the film itself becomes a testament to the continuation of the relationships _Wildness_ began. In a park, friends from the Silver Platter gather to share a picnic. Illuminated by sunlight, they enjoy each other’s company while Tsang’s voiceover reflects on the flaws and the beauty of _Wildness_. In parting, Tsang concludes, “I thought that _Wildness_ was about trying to create a movement, I didn’t realize until it was over, that we were already a part of one. It just didn’t fit with the stories I had been told about what we were fighting for.”

[^1]: José Esteban Muñoz, _Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity_, (New York and London: New York University Press, 2009).
[^2]: Genevieve Flavelle and Beck Gilmer-Osborne, “When the Glitter Settles,” in _OUT: Queer Looking, Queer Acting Revisited_ (catalogue), ed. Robin Metcalf (Halifax: Khyber Centre for the Arts, 2014).

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Collaboration

Video

Social

Documentary

This column revisits Wu Tsang’s 2012 documentary “Wildness” to examine themes of queer space, intergenerational community, and place-making. Genevieve Flavelle explores her own experiences of queer community organizing and the feeling of arriving late.

Artefact: Late to the Party

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Federation of Canadian Artists 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_.

Assembling a 72-page magazine on a broad and lofty theme like “Time” is no easy feat and the issue could have gone in many directions – to be explored in future issues. For now, however, there is something satisfying and generative about taking such an open-ended word and seeing where it lands among a diverse group of writers, artists, curators and organizers at this particular moment. 

Many commonalities emerged – for instance, the most tangible sub-theme in this issue is that of the archive. What do archives look like in 2018? Who is included and under which frameworks, rules and systems of classification? What might archives of the future look like? Maandeeq Mohamed’s essay on the ways in which black queer and trans art practices have (or have not) been archived imagines an archive that speaks to communities, stories and relationships historically excluded. Mohamed re-visits community gathering spots (the roti shop, for instance) and events from the 1980s, and these stories speak volumes to the artistic communities of that time, and to the ways in which black queer and trans artists have occupied public space and the space of the archive. 

In a meandering, energetic interview, Jesse McKee and Brian McBay of the non-profit art space 221A in Vancouver speak with Sepake Angiama and Clare Butcher of documenta 14’s education team. It’s an unlikely pairing – the non-profit in Vancouver re-thinking institutional models and the role of art amidst the all-consuming gentrification of the city, next to one of the world’s most powerful international institutions. But it works. The interview begins from a question about the use of the library in art, education and activism and ultimately unfolds prescient questions around the ways in which we work today, how we inherent institutional histories and how we can find new ways to navigate them. The through line in the interview is one of reading, thinking and re-imagining together; how a dusty book or curriculum can spark collective actions. 

In fact, most of the texts in this issue embrace this looking backwards to look forward. In an essay on a recent collaborative project by Postcommodity and Alex Waterman with Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective in Edmonton, Natasha Chaykowski untangles acts of memorializing through composition and sound (rather than in monuments of stone and bronze). In the project, Postcommodity, Waterman and Ociciwan created a new score and performance honouring the lives of Mary Cecil, Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt and Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau – three Indigenous women from what is now the province of Alberta. The score – which was performed collectively in Edmonton – adds to a set of scores by composer Robert Ashley in which he explored ways of marking history through music. Next to this, in an interview with Greta Hamilton, Vancouver-based artist Derya Akay speaks of developing a process-based sculpture and performance practice based, on one hand, in the ways that organic material and matter changes over its lifespan, and on the other, in the ways that Akay incorporates and thinks through traditional models of collective labour. 

Several reviews in the issue also re-visit histories that are still being resolved today: in this section Karina Irvine writes on Kapwani Kiwanga’s _Flowers for Africa_, in which the ongoing process of decolonization is addressed via representations of the moments that independence was achieved in nine countries throughout the African continent; Kapwani chooses to evoke these histories through images of the floral arrangements present during these celebrations, complicating the notion (and temporality) of an official historical document; Lee Plested reviews the new Polygon Gallery (formerly Presentation House Gallery) in North Vancouver, elaborating on the role that photography and conceptualism has played in shaping Vancouver’s predominant artistic discourse; and D.J. Fraser looks at the evolution of artists’ engagement with AIDS and AIDS activism since the 1980s, through the lens of the programming for the most recent World AIDS Day in December. 

This issue features a striking artist project by Rajni Perera, with an extended essay on her work by Negarra A. Kudumu. Perera’s paintings, from her _Afrika Galaktika_ series, draw from, as the artist says “the visual languages of Indian miniaturist art, Blaxploitation and the images produced by the Hubble Deep Field Telescope.” Through the figure of Afrika Galaktika, Perera critiques sexualized representations of the ethnic female body predominant in Western cultures, ultimately suggesting new possibilities for a radical future.

By way of conclusion: I’ve been reflecting on how the subjects in this issue – the archive, the library, the memorial – have been discussed _ad nauseam_; these are the predominant institutions meant to mark time and preserve some kind of historical record. But they are presented here as institutions taken for granted. The writers and artists in the pages that follow ask us look again – to look at the gaps in these institutions, the histories and communities and artworks and visual languages that don’t fit within their rigid parameters; to continue raising these histories, to continue raising these histories, re-thinking them in ways that work in 2018.

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Editor Kari Cwynar introduces the theme of Time in this issue, offering a strong focus on artists and writers that re-imagine traditional time-based institutions like archives and libraries. The issue invites readers to look at “gaps” in history and documentation and explore alternate voices and narratives. 

Editorial: Time

Feature

Maandeeq Mohamed is a writer and researcher. Engaging Black Studies and related cultural production, her writing is featured in _Real Life_, _C Magazine_, and _Canadian Art_. 

> _There are benefits to being without nostalgia._  
> — Claudia Rankine [^1]

While researching black collections at the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, I came across a curious object. Among the vertical files was a box containing a speech by Rinaldo Walcott, crumpled into a paper ball. Walcott, I was told, had crumpled the speech he had once prepared for a talk. After the archives approached him with interest in adding the speech to their collections, Walcott agreed on the condition that the speech remain in its original, crumpled condition. A single crumpled piece of paper preserved in a box is a refusal of legibility. When you take into account that black life has been so violently understood by centuries of essentialism, I would like to take our archival silences, gaps and ethnographic refusals (a crumpled speech of sorts) as a possible point of departure for thinking through blackness in the archive. 

But there is also a melancholy in not knowing your own history. And the archive, or the possibility of recovering some knowable historical subject, seems seductive when so much of black diasporic history is predicated on a collective “not knowing.” I am thinking of the career of a romanticized Africa in the imagination of the diaspora (negritude, panafricanism, and its various relatives), or the popularity of various online services that “trace” your DNA to a specific part of Africa, and other similar historical recovery projects that gesture towards some coherent origin story. Origin stories are comforting, but not all stories fit so neatly into the limits of what an archive can do (which is, preserve, catalogue and ultimately offer information about our pasts – usually state sanctioned). I want to look at black lives as the excess of the archive, the messiness of histories that cannot be so easily recorded and understood, simply because there is far too much at stake to ever assign anything like humanity to black life. 

If the melancholy of not knowing is the “stuff” of black diasporic histories, are we to think through this historical loss solely in terms of negative affect? While the loss is a profoundly painful one with which to reckon, in addition to the violence of being absented and/or always-already spoken for, might we have other associations with loss? Could we look at the lack of any one cogent origin story as providing other modes through which we story black diasporic life? The writer Édouard Glissant, for example, looked at the site of the slave ship as also being “a womb abyss. It generates the clamor of your protests; it also produces all the coming unanimity.”[^2] In other words, if loss gave us our collective trauma, it also gave us the conditions for the birth of black diasporic life in the West – something radically unknowable, that excess of the archive that included infinite exchanges between enslaved people from West Africa, indentured workers from Asia and those who have always been indigenous to the land (Carib, Taino and many others), brought on by slave economies and settler colonialism – those “intimacies of four continents.”[^3] 

We know that the archive will never be sufficient – if we are accounted for, it is via the violence of fact: scientific racism, and catalogues listing enslaved people as property. Mostly, we are an “absented presence[^4] – Katherine McKittrick’s framework for thinking through the ways in which blackness had to be disappeared to construct the fiction that is so-called Canada. Perhaps not knowing can be useful, insofar as it allows for a recognition of the fact that what is/isn’t archived is but one of many fictions (a dominant one to be sure, but still fiction nonetheless) that constitute blackness in public life. 

The fiction of whiteness, then, is a masochistic one, transforming humans into enslaved property, assigning black life to social death. That essentialism has been so violent. Returning to Glissant, “we demand a right to opacity,”[^2] and I am tired of being interpreted and assigned a final signified. Much more interesting, are the ways in which black people have reckoned with the collective melancholy of not knowing, the centuries of stories we have told ourselves about ourselves. Other (hi)stories like Saidiya Hartman’s _Venus in Two Acts,_ wherein she thinks through the what-could-have-been of black girls rendered as objects in slave ledgers; Charmaine Nelson’s reading between the lines of runaway slave ads, reading for some of the earliest examples of black portraiture in the West; M. NourbeSe Philip’s total break with language when she makes poetry out of the legal text for the 1781 Zong massacre case; and Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley's exploration of what queer bonds might have looked like for black folks in captivity. 

\*\*\*

In early December, we met as a group at the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives (CLGA) to think through black archival practices. The site was a loaded one to be sure: the CLGA shoulders the difficult task of recording salient LGBTQ\+ histories while at the same time catering to the state’s demands for a specific queer history centring the recent extension of citizenship rights to queer subjects, now invited to be a part of the settler colonial project. Where do black queer and trans histories fit into this narrative, especially when “LGBTQ+” as a political identity only represents a very recent category emerging from Western queer liberation contexts – a context that may or may not apply to any number of non-straight identities, as not all black diasporic communities look at sexuality as a publicly articulated, individualist identity. Needless to say, the archival objects our group took up were limited to ephemera from those who were publicly “out” and legible as queer subjects within the framework of emergent LGBTQ\+ identities. Understandably, this misses a lot of black formations. 

In “In the Wake,” Christina Sharpe asks, “what, if anything, survives this insistent Black exclusion, this ontological negation, and how do literature, performance, and visual culture observe and mediate this un/survival?”[^5] Thinking through the contradictions of the archive, at the CLGA we were especially interested in those “unscientific methods” (Dionne Brand) that allowed us to use artistic production to, at the very least, attempt to gesture towards a different (hi)story about all that has been lost (and birthed) for black diasporas. The archival objects with which we engaged included flyers from MPENZI: Black Women’s International Film and Video Festival’s programming throughout the 2000s on black women in film, documents related to Dionne Brand, Grace Channer, Makeda Silvera, Sister Vision Press and Faith Nolan, as well as zines, publications and posters from various black queer and trans collectives through the decades. During our time at the CLGA, Michele Pearson Clarke touched on her “Parade of Champions” series, and how she wanted to document black grief beyond the usual tropes of suffering and social death that make up a huge chunk of our archives. We were also joined by Ahlam Mohammed, who performed in Deanna Bowen’s work _~~On Trial:~~ The Long Doorway_ at Mercer Union, as a black lawyer representing a white student charged with assaulting a black peer – a performance that reworked a long-shelved 1956 CBC play. Also present were Nadijah Robinson, who uses photography and collage to place black subjects in different, often fantastical historical lineages, as well as Kim Ninkuru, whose performance via online spaces is its own archive. We recognized that countless other activations could not possibly have made it into the archive – those practices that attend to blackness as archival excess. 

One of the objects of particular interest to the group was a zine by Zami – a loose collective of black gay and lesbian communities in Tkaronto, formed in 1984 and once profiled on the front cover of _Xtra_ as “combining potluck suppers with peer counselling.”[^6] Leafing through the collection of zines produced by Zami throughout the 80s, I could touch and feel a history that felt something like coming home. Desire, nostalgia and related effects as produced by the archive become more noticeable when you occupy the curious position of both researcher and subject of the history you wish to examine. It’s a tenuous relationship – the excitement of recognizing yourself in decades-old artifacts from black queer and trans communities, while at the same time witnessing your own black communities documented via an all-too familiar state-sanctioned narrative arc (namely, activism around gaining rights and visibility under the state, as a legible LGBTQ\+ subject). 

Still, Zami offered its own instances of useful queer interruptions into the archive. The zine featured a “scene report” – a sort of community bulletin on news and events, often found in DIY zines of the period. Zami’s version of a “scene report” read like a poetic and fervent love letter to the roti shops of 1980s Tkaronto – something that would not seem all that relevant to any sort of official state narrative on black queer and trans histories:

> “COUPLE DOORS DOWN IS **TIGERS,** THE PLACE FOR CHILLING OUT WITH TROPICAL SHAKES…MY FAVE…SOURSOP…COMMONLY HEARD HERE… “…A NO EVERYBODY MI GIVE SUCH GOOD SERVICE YOU KNO’.” THE BEST RICE AND PEAS AND STEW PEAS (MADE WITH PIGS\-TAIL) IS AT THE REAL JERK. THEM OVER EXPOSED. BUT WHEN YOU GET TRAPPED IN THE AMBIANCE OF JUST “SO” LOUD DANCE HALL, REGGAE, ZINCED WALLS AND RUSTIC FURNITURE, YOU CAN UNDERSTAND WHY. THEM FAR ALL THE WAY TO HELL OUT AT GREENWOOD AND QUEEN. BUT WELL WORTH THE TRIP. RAPS, MR. JERK, SPENCES (MI HAVE FE HAUL MISELF OUTA BED EARLY ONE MORNING FE HAVE THEM “LIGHT” (AS IN LIVER) BREAKFAST. DO YOU KNOW OR REMEMBER THAT SPONGY MEAT THAT YOU CHEW AND CHEW THE JUICE OUT OF AND SWALLOW ONLY IF YOU LIKE TO BRING IT BACK UP). AND YOU CAN’T GO UP TO EGLINTON WEST\- NOT THE CLEAN, STERILE, TREE LINED PARKETTES EAST OF THE SUBWAY\- WITHOUT STOPPING IN FRONT OF MONICA’S “WANABEE” FILLED WINDOW…FOR A TREAT.”[^7] 

What can a rave review of the Caribbean restaurants and roti shops of ’80s Tkaronto tell us about non-straight and non-cis histories of black communities in Tkaronto? Not much, perhaps, but it can also gesture towards our desires, community haunts, even what kept our bellies satiated – the quotidian and everyday that an official archive would not have much use for. 

Zami’s text on the Caribbean restaurants of ’80s Tkaronto also speaks to the ephemeral history of place-making for black queer and trans subjects. We can learn a lot from the ways black queer and trans folks experience desire publicly in sites as innocuous as roti shops, as well as other, sweatier forms of desire found in the various rented basements that housed monthly black queer parties until the rent got too high. How are we to document histories that lack the “rootedness” of buildings like the ROM or CLGA, or the “rootedness” of so many streets in Tkaronto named after slave owners (Jarvis and Peter streets, for instance)? Black queer and trans communities have much more precarious, always-already fleeting claims to public space. Keeping the ephemeral nature of queer space in mind, the Marvellous Grounds collective recently released their QTPOC interactive story map, which allows users to map their personal recollections and associations with specific public sites.[^8] The end result is a way of talking about history rooted in affect, as the stories on the map are organized more by specific feelings (such as “QTPOC joy” or “QTPOC grief”) than they are by geographic site. Most of the user-generated recollections of decades-old QTPOC parties, correspond to now-defunct spaces and newly built condos. So, in addition to mapping our public articulations of desire and joy, the map could also serve as a history of gentrification (displacement marks so much of our black histories and geographies). I wonder which of the now-defunct queer spaces mapped out by Marvellous Grounds correspond to the pages of Polaroids in the Zami zine that capture stylish scenes from black queer and trans parties of the 80s. What became of the people and spaces in those pictures? This is the sort of archival excess to which I keep returning: less tangible, not so easy to record. 

As a conclusion, I’d like to touch on one more archival object – a flyer for a panel discussion titled “Lesbians, Gays and Race” and jointly hosted by Zami and Gay Asians of Toronto in 1985 (the event featured a screening of Orientations – Richard Fung’s film on queer Asian communities):

The discussion held by Zami and Gay Asians of Toronto in 1985 is not unlike ongoing conversations we are having today on the politics of desire and race. How are we to understand the archive and its contents as “past” when black folks are still living out the afterlife of slavery and settler colonialism? Roughly three decades after the panel, Richard Fung premiered _Re:Orientations_ (the follow-up film to 1984’s _Orientations_) mere weeks before Black Lives Matter Toronto brought the 2016 Pride parade to a halt to protest police violence. Perhaps, black folks’ relationship to history could be described as what Christina Sharpe calls being “in the wake,” which is to say that as black people, “our individual lives are always swept up in the wake produced and determined, though not absolutely, by the afterlives of slavery.”[^5] Would it not be dangerous then, to memorialize the present as “past?”

[^1]: Claudia Rankine. _Citizen: An American Lyric._ Minneapolis, Graywolf Press, 2014.
[^2]: Édouard Glissant. _Poetics of Relation._ Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.
[^3]: Lisa Lowe. _The Intimacies of Four Continents._ Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.
[^4]: Katherine McKittrick, “Nothing’s Shocking: Black Canada” in _Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle._ Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
[^5]: Christina Sharpe. _In the Wake: On Blackness and Being._ Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
[^6]: Tim McCaskell. “Finding a Space of Our Own: Getting Together with Zami and Lesbians of Colour,” Xtra, 1984
[^7]: Ken Ya, “Of Note: Poppy Show” in Zami. _don’t ben’ down: words,_ Newsletter 3, Summer 1988\. 
[^8]: <http://marvellousgrounds.com/map/>

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Race

Identity

Critique

Activism

This essay considers black lives as the excess of the archive, and contends with the messiness of histories and affects that cannot be easily recorded and understood. Building on a workshop she hosted at the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, Maandeeq Mohamed considers how artists can respond to the complex feelings that arise when viewing an archive’s holdings and absences.

Somehow I Found You: On Black Archival Practices 

Sepake Angiama is a Research Fellow at bak (basis voor actuele Kunst). Through her research, Her Imaginary, she is addressing science fiction, intersectional feminism and architecture. She is a co-founder of para-instituut and previously she was the Head of aneducation for documenta 14.

Clare Butcher was a member of aneducation for documenta 14\. She is a cook and is thinking about how to para-instituut.

Brian McBay is a co-founder and the Director of 221A, a non-profit organization that works with artists to research and develop, social, cultural and ecological infrastructure.

Jesse McKee is a curator and writer in Vancouver, where he works as Head of Strategy at 221A. Previously he was the Curator of Banff Centre’s Walter Phillips Gallery and a curatorial resident with tranzit, Romania and Things that can happen, Hong Kong. 

issue-137-p14-22.pdf

Relational art

Cities

Artist-run centres

Infrastructure

Libraries

Dialogue

In this conversation, Sepake Angiama, Clare Butcher, Brian McBay, and Jesse McKee discuss 221A’s recent transformation into “Pollyanna,“ a research-focused library that took part in documenta 14’s experimental education program “aneducation“. “Pollyana“ highlights the value of libraries as public spaces of learning, organizing and imagining.

Pollyanna and Peppermint: Libraries as a Site of Praxis

Natasha Chaykowski is a writer and curator based on Treaty 7 Territory in Calgary. Currently, she is the Director of Untitled Art Society.

On what was maybe an otherwise unremarkable afternoon in 1885 on land newly minted as Treaty 6 territory in St-Paul-de-Métis (in what is now Alberta), Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau calmly went to the kitchen cupboard where her husband, Laurent, who was in league with the Métis resistance, had stashed a letter written by Louis Riel. The buffalo were disappearing, the treaty-promised medicine chest proved insufficient in the face of settler-introduced small pox and English colonial forces were defaulting on all manner of promised land. The treaty was broken, is broken. When a sergeant and four constables from the North-West Mounted Police, clad in Imperial red, self-righteousness and inane waxed moustaches, barged through the Garneaus’ doors to take away Laurent, Eleanor took the incriminating pages and softly, carefully submerged them in the hot, soapy water of her wash basin, where they were subsequently scrubbed until all but disintegrated. Drip, drip. What letter? Eleanor was leading the Quiet Resistance.

\[spoken out loud\] \[Ell. enn. or. Ell. enn. Taw. muss. Gar. no.\] \[drip drip\]

Many years later, Eleanor’s name would be conjured in our present. Her story, along with those of Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt) and Mary Cecil, became the basis for Postcommodity and Alex Waterman’s \_…in memoriam project.\_[^1] What follows, is a story about remembering.

\[drip\]

A page is a fragile thing. Paper: a vulnerable surface. To employ it for the task of memorializing is a rather radical gesture. Stone and bronze are the typical, hardy materials used to memorialize. Statues of genocidal generals and tender epitaphs on gravestones. The rationale is simple enough: the heavy, dense meat of these materials endures more or less as years drip by. And to memorialize means to encase a person, an event, a thing in some sort of time-travelling device (stone, bronze) so that it might endure. So that they might be remembered.

\[drip drip drip\]

On what was maybe an otherwise unremarkable morning in 1963, Robert Ashley, a prolific experimental American composer, sat down with a piece of paper and a black pen and wrote a symphony in a circle. A symphony of drones. A symphony of infinite permutations. A symphony outside of time. A symphony for Crazy Horse (Th?ašúŋke Witkó), the famed Oglala Lakota warrior and leader, known for his ability to liaise between the spirit world and this one. _in memoriam…Crazy Horse_, along with Ashley’s three other _in memoriam…_ compositions (an opera for Kit Carson, a concerto for John Smith and a quartet for Esteban Gómez – all noteworthy figures for their direct and often violent contributions to the colonization of Turtle Island) are stones in the foundation of Ashley’s lifelong work to create an encyclopedia of American consciousness. What is the American consciousness if not a din of violence, an ode to colonization, a song deeply woven with the prosperity of settlers via the disenfranchisement of others, namely Indigenous people whose land was stolen, and Black slaves and Asian immigrants who worked that stolen land? Yet, within the chorus of this song is persistence, resistance, resilience and hope. “What else would you call ‘night-fishing’?” asks Lee Maracle.

\[drip drip\]

In South Dakota, 30 kilometres from the hubristic and heavy-handed presidential faces carved into the side of the illegally occupied Mount Rushmore (a mountain known by the Lakota as “The Six Grandfathers,” who comprise the earth, the sky and the four cardinal directions) by a famous American sculptor and Ku Klux Klan member, lies the workings of a colossal stone monument to Th?ašúŋke Witkó, which, once completed, will likely be the largest sculpture in the world.[^2] In 1876, Th?ašúŋke Witkó led more than 1,500 members of the Lakota and Northern Cheyenne nations to a battle fought and won against the United States Army, in the Black Hills – Paha Sapa in Lakota the present-day site of rocky memorializing of all manner and perennially sacred Lakota territory. The battle was fought over the breaching of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868’s land agreements. There was gold in those mountains. The treaty was broken, is broken.

\[sym·pho·ny. Greek: sun (together) and phōnō (sound)\] \[drip\]

To employ paper for the task of memorializing is a rather radical gesture. In a matter of seconds, it could be reduced to smoke and ash, or become disparate pulpy particles in soapy water. In 1963, Robert Ashley sat down with a piece of paper and a black pen and wrote a symphony in a circle. A symphony for Thašúŋke Witkó. A symphony to remember. A symphony for time travel. But what exactly did he compose? A circle on a piece of paper? Or, does _in memoriam…Crazy Horse_’s essence exist in its potential to create various disruptions in the air when activated? A series of fleeting sounds? Or further still, is it the way in which those soundwaves agitate the thin membranes of the inner ear, triggering electrical impulses in each unique brain that receives them, activating memories, feelings, a shimmering network of affective associations? Ashley’s symphony has infinite permutations; each iteration, when performed, is necessarily singular. Performed infinite times, each time different – an idea can outlast stone and bronze. Or maybe the essence of the composition lies within those who perform it. The symphony. The together sound.

\[spoken out loud\] \[Ell. enn. or.\] \[drip drip\]

On what was certainly a remarkable afternoon in 1962, Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt) was dancing the Red River Jig at the party for her 100th birthday. Sixty years earlier, she was in the prairie grass, on land not-so-newly minted as Treaty 6 territory, petting that really soft spot of her horse’s nose, and packing a cart with Hudson’s Bay Company goods, to be transported from Edmonton to Athabasca Landing. The buffalo she’d hunted as a young girl were gone. Traditional Indigenous ways of supporting a family or community were either made impossible by encroaching settlers and their institutionalization of the land, or were outlawed as a colonial war tactic. Yet, as a mother of 12, Victoria had to work to support her family. And, as a Métis woman, she knew the land and knew the horses. Women have always known, always worked, even if their labour hasn’t always been recognized.

\[spoken out loud\] \[Vic. tor. ee. uh. Cal. ee. hou. Nay. Bell. kor.\] \[drip drip drip\]

Before she died in 1966, Victoria made a point to tell her stories, which spanned more than a century, and unfurled on land that had witnessed multiple statehoods. She had 165 great-grandchildren, within whose bodies and minds, and whose children’s bodies and minds, her stories live now. A web, a shimmering network, an oral history. Can a sound be destroyed? Robert Ashley didn’t think so. Can a story told be burned? Victoria knew it couldn’t. To tell a story, to speak, to dance, to make music is to travel in time: an idea can outlast stone and bronze.

\[spoken out loud\] \[Vic. tor. ee. uh.\] \[drip\]

On what was maybe a chilly morning, sometime around the turn of the century, on the Stoney Nakoda reserve, Mary Cecil was called to the missionary’s house. Eliza, his wife, was in labour, and Mary was a Cree midwife. She brought that baby, and countless others – settler and Indigenous alike – into the world as, in those early settler days, there were no doctors to be found. Black women and Indigenous midwives birthed the settler-colonial nations now occupying Turtle Island. Their ways of healing were often more sophisticated and caring – _are_ more sophisticated and caring – than the crude and frequently violent protocols of Western medicine, which have mandated practices such as bleeding, lobotomization and sterilization. Yet, we seldom know the names of the Indigenous midwives who so caringly gave life. Women have always known, always worked, even if their labour hasn’t always been recognized.

\[spoken out loud\] \[Meh. ree. Sea. sill\] \[drip\]

Robert Ashley said of his _in memoriam_ … compositions that they are, “an attempt to allow performers to recompose the music in a way that the composer is practically absent …in the end, the music is determined by the musicians themselves.”[^3] For performers to recompose the music themselves, without a composer, sounds like sovereignty. In this sense, Ashley understood the limits of authorship, its relation to power, and the importance of undermining this power.

\[drip\]

The singular genius is a Western invention. 

\[drip drip\]

There has always been power in the collective. 

\[sun (together) and phōnō (sound)\]

On a remarkable evening in 2017, Indigenous musicians from across what is now called Alberta, gathered at the Winspear Centre in Edmonton (_amiskwaciwâskahikan in Cree_), on land long ago delineated as Treaty 6 territory, land which is also home of the Métis Nation of Alberta, Region 4, and of Inuit who reside there, to perform two of Robert Ashley’s _in memoriam…_ compositions, and a third, new composition. Curated by Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective (an Indigenous curatorial collective comprised of core members Jade Nasogaluak Carpenter, Tiffany Shaw-Collinge, Erin Sutherland, Becca Taylor, and Kristy Trinier \[a non-Indigenous member\], and program coordinators Jessie Short and Missy LeBlanc) and lead by Postcommodity (an Indigenous artist colective comprised of Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martínez and Kade L. Twist) with experimental cellist Alex Waterman, the project brought together eight Indigenous musicians to re-imagine the possibilities of memorializing. To re-interpret Ashley’s ode to the American consciousness. To create Indigenous sovereignty in colonial architectures – both physical and immaterial. Strings, drums, voices, electricity, synthesis, wind: the way in which soundwaves agitate the thin membranes of the inner ear, triggering electrical impulses in each unique brain that receives them, activating memories, feelings, a shimmering network of affective associations. A sound can be more powerful than stone and bronze.

\[spoken out loud\] \[Oh. tits. ee. wan. Post. com. mod. it. ee.\] \[drip drip drip\]

There has always been power in the collective. The symphony. An alchemy. The together sound.

\[drip\]

The first performance was of Ashley’s _in memoriam… Esteban Gómez._ With Indigenous voices, Indigenous instruments, Indigenous musicians, this memorial to Gómez – a 15th-and 16th-Century Portuguese explorer and “Indian killer,” as Candice Hopkins poignantly describes in the accompanying publication – reinterprets the story of colonization, through drones, through sounds, through music, performed by those who were colonized. For Gómez, the east coast of Turtle Island was land suitable to bear his name as he myopically considered it Terra Nullius, and viewed the Indigenous people who called this land home as a rich, new source of potential slaves. In this iteration of in memoriam… Esteban Gómez, there was discord, anger, enmity. A drumbeat on hide, throat singing, strings plucked urgently, the blows of a retrofit recorder. Protests against, a remembrance of, the colonial violence perpetrated by Gómez and other early European colonizers. These expressions reverberated beyond the droning sonority, which is the underlying default sound of the composition, established by the musicians, and unchanging in tone and timbre in this iteration. The musicians moved through the circular composition, diverging from the sonority for 16 beats of time, then re-joining it, outside of time. The sonority is the together sound. The sonority is without time. The sonority is a place of power. And here, perhaps, the sonority is a place of healing. What does it mean for Gómez’s story to be told by those he envisioned enslaving? _This performance was not a celebration of his story. But rather a quartet to tell the story of the violence of colonialism in Indigenous voices, and a drone outside of time as a possible way to heal from it._ A story can be more powerful than stone and bronze, depending on who is telling it.

\[drip drip\]

Fifty-five years after Ashley wrote a symphony in a circle for T?hašúŋke Witkó, that symphony of infinite possibilities was performed by Indigenous artists for the first time in the second performance of the evening, _in memoriam… Crazy Horse_. The two Indigenous collectives took the space that Ashley left for musicians (“in the end, the music is determined by the musicians themselves”) and filled it with Indigenous voices and presences, a gesture that asserts agency and sovereignty within colonial structures. These structures include art forms that borrow heavily but without acknowledgment from diverse Indigenous epistemologies, the hallowed reverberating halls of the opera house and the European symphony, all on land forcibly taken by settlers. Alex Waterman, Cristóbal Martínez, Raven Chacon, Jared Tailfeathers, Malaya Bishop, Jaynine Lena McCrae, seth cardinal, Matthew Cardinal, Kris Harper, Marek Tyler, Curtis Lefthand, Mark Taylor, Amber Paquette, Keanu Shaw, Raven Shaw, Chandra Shaw, Kristy Trinier, Tiffany Shaw-Collinge, Missy Leblanc and Jessie Short performed the piece together, at a pace gracefully set by conductor Becca Taylor. Incorporating five discrete groups of musicians, the performance is designed to tend towards achieving a pure harmony or a complete dissonance within each group: a group of ideal densities, a cacophonous kind of magic. A gestalt, in a sense, but one that does not disregard the importance of the parts. There was an energy in the performance unlike any iteration that preceded it. It was a galaxy of disparate stars, swirling proximate to each other, around a dissonant centre, with the occasional slipping of musicians between worlds– an appropriately ambulatory remembering of T?hašúŋke Witkó.

\[sun (together) and _phōnō_ (sound)\] \[drip\]

If the stone monument to T?hašúŋke Witkó in Paha Sapa is an addition of sorts to the four stone presidential faces, an attempt to start to counter a one-sided story of American history, then the fifth _in memoriam…_ work, composed by Postcommodity and Alex Waterman, is an additional chapter to Ashley’s likewise necessarily incomplete portrait of the American consciousness. To add as a critique of incompleteness, as this project did, rather than break apart that which is there, is a gesture generous beyond description. _in memoriam… Mary Cecil, Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt), and Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau_, the final performance of the evening, was not only a together sound, but a together being. Clustered around six stations, which formed a circle, the musicians started the performance by submerging white fabric in silver wash basins, evoking Eleanor’s Quiet Rebellion, and then hanging these saturated pieces above other basins before moving on to a different station to repeat the action. Drip, drip: the sounds of Eleanor’s Quiet Rebellion were the sonority, the constant to which to return, outside of time. Three groups of four singers orbited this circle: each stop they made contained another circle within it, whose quadrants were the syllables of a name to be sung, written on a thin piece of paper torn from one of the accompanying publications. Each member of a group sang one syllable at a time, 16 times before moving on to the next syllable. Once the name was spoken in full by each musician, the paper on which the name was written was also washed and hung up to dry. Drip. Each group completed a full circle, speaking every name. The together sound. A choir of utterances. And, with that, the performance began to conclude: the musicians slowly left the stage, one by one, names rhythmically rolling from their mouths still, walking up the aisles of the audience, and exiting the theatre through the back. Syllables still reverberating through the plush seats and the bodies filling them. We were left only with dripping: the sonority, the echoes of voices sung. A sound can be more powerful than stone and bronze. A sound is a way to remember.

\[Spoken out loud\]

\[Ell. enn. or. Ell. enn. Taw. muss. Gar. no.\] 

\[drip drip drip\]

\[Vic. tor. ee. uh. Cal. ee. hou. Nay. Bell. kor.\] 

\[drip\]

\[Meh. ree. Sea. Sil.\]

\[drip drip\]

Eleanor (Helen) Thomas Garneau. Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt). Mary Cecil.

“Their names are worth repeating and with this repetition they are conjured in the present.”[^4]

[^1]: The biographical and narrative information about each of these three women woven throughout this text was largely sourced from the project’s accompanying publication, “In Memoriam… Mary Cecil, Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt), and Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau,” Postcommodity and Alex Waterman, uh books, 2017.
[^2]: <a href=“http://cabinetmagazine.org/ issues/7/sixgrandfathers.php”>http://cabinetmagazine.org/ issues/7/sixgrandfathers.php</a>
[^3]: _Yes, But Is It Edible?_ Will Holder and Alex Waterman, eds. New Documents, 2014.
[^4]: Candice Hopkins, Afterword, “In Memoriam… Mary Cecil, Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt), and Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau,” Postcommodity and Alex Waterman, uh books, 2017.

issue-137-p22-31.pdf

Music

Memory

Performance

Indigenous

Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective’s recent performance program _in memoriam…_ added a new score and production by Postcommodity and Alex Waterman to a suite of four scores by the American composer Robert Ashley. The fifth score honours the lives of three Indigenous women from territory at the turn of the Century as it became the province of Alberta. Natasha Chaykowski’s article weaves together the histories of the scores and the commemorated individuals to further the work’s conversation regarding whom and how we memorialize.

…in memoriam: The Sonority, the Together Sound, Outside of Time

**Greta Hamilton** is a writer and artist working between Toronto and rural British Columbia. They are an editor of _Silverfish Magazine_.

Derya Akay researches the rituals of making a thing, eating a thing, letting a thing die, loving a thing and destroying a thing. His practice straddles process and product through meticulous acts of representation and destruction. These acts appear organic, with loose gestures, food and flowers, but they are almost always practiced. Derya’s process-based way of working emphasizes the reality that practice is both a noun and a verb. In this interview, Derya discusses cooking as a metaphor for the process of labour – both collective and singular, immediate and over time.

> **GH:** When we first met a year and a half ago, something you said to me about cooking was “time, not temperature.” I’ve found this to be really resonant when considering process and practice, which I think are about time rather than temperature.

> **DA:** Did I say that? That’s nice, I should remember that. I think process is about time, and temperature with wisdom – time before temperature. My relationship to time is one that I’ve revered and have wanted to master. I think internally it gives me a lot of satisfaction to set the timer to 13 minutes and let something cook and know that 13 minutes is a good time for that dish at that temperature, rather than 16 or 11\. But also, the satisfaction is in the moment when, 12 minutes and 40 seconds later, I think about that food and how much time is left, and there’s six, five, four, three seconds. Then I’m satisfied. There’s also an idea that cooking without a recipe is intuitive and that you’re not concerned with precise measurements like time and temperature. In my experience, this isn’t true. I think people think this about process-based artworks, too, that a lot of it is intuition based. But I don’t think intuition is a substitute for measurement.

> **GH:** How does time play out for you in the studio? Or process as a methodology?

> **DA:** Cooking is a good metaphor for how things work out in the studio. I had a camellia that I dipped in beeswax. It was pink and beautiful at first but started to get mouldy over a few months. I put it in a bucket of sawdust because I was trying to get rid of it, and later I put it into the burn pile. Then I found it when I was digging for something a few years later. Time had changed it obviously, but it was so beautiful and full of meaning. It had become the thing that I wanted to make and couldn’t replicate. It cooked, essentially. At first everything is fresh and hasn’t developed its flavour. Then you let it sit and it does its thing – releases, absorbs, binds, settles, cools down – and it tastes good. I stumble upon this pattern a lot in my process. There’s often a process of objects and past works resurfacing, or something that has been “cooking” on a hidden shelf in the studio. A work gets made for an exhibition, then dissolved back into the studio, then solidifies again into a different work, which may or may not stay as is. This is another familiar pattern. Something new that I’m doing is using resin, which ends up encapsulating these objects and gives a sense of freezing time. In that process, materials get stuck in moments of time and I’m not able to disassemble them.

> **GH:** What is your interest in making objects permanent? Or your interest in preserving objects in resin or beeswax, or through fermentation?

> **DA:** One thing is a desire to preserve a moment. It’s an obsession of trying to freeze time with alchemy in the kitchen/studio. When you have a flower, it’s impossible to keep it the way it is – fleshy and plump and full of life and juice. It only stays like that for your eyes as long as it’s not plucked from the plant, and even then, it wilts. And with these preservation materials, you always have to sacrifice one quality of the flower in order to keep it in that moment. If you want to keep the flower in its beauty and colour, you can take a photograph, but then you give away its form. Whereas if you dry it or preserve it in a liquid, like resin, you give away its texture or its colour. Or you can forget the actual flower altogether and try to make a replica of it using another medium. Then you’ve sacrificed the whole flower in its reality. It’s really hard to freeze time. So, that’s one thing – a desire to understand the relationship between myself and reality in time. It’s also a way of exposing my unconscious, and a way of self-reflection from observing my desires. I observe that my desire isn’t about wanting to appreciate the flower’s beauty without touching or preserving it; it’s about control. Working with these materials allows me to work on myself. The trial-and-error process, the appreciation of atmospheric changes, chance, oversights. All the consequences of time I exercise with allowing something to rot or letting something go wrong. It’s not so much the desire of getting the perfect thing, but failing and learning.

> **GH:** What is your process of representation like when you’re dealing with organic materials? How do you create objects with a specific aesthetic when they all decay differently?

> **DA:** It becomes a game of being able to predict how a material is going to react while preserving it. With flowers, you can learn which ones dry better. You can look at a flower and understand that it will never stay how it is – if there’s too much moisture, it will decay. Which is totally fine sometimes, and you get the craziest mould patterns and mould dye, or a mush that keeps its form. When I look at work by other people who use similar aesthetics or looseness – like rougher gestures, flexible outcomes, or people using decay and organic materials – it always looks good, or real. Somebody else’s relaxedness with their execution, or their incorporation of time and life into their works, always looks less contrived than mine. I have a lingering neurosis about how _real_ my work is. Like when you bump a glass by mistake and break it, versus breaking it on purpose by dropping it. Is one more real? I give value to the _real_ thing, the mistakenly broken glass. The purposely broken glass, the artwork – or my artwork – becomes a mimic. Or like, when you have a plate of food and you eat it and there are juices left on the plate, that’s such a beautiful painting. But the moment you try to replicate the juices of a meal, it looks contrived. It’s not the thing itself, it’s trying to be the thing. You can get good at replicating it in a different medium, but I get into loops about representing something – is it true to what it is? Does it have to be the thing itself to be the truth? Is there a way of making it more true? Is that important, or can it be a representation? This brings me back to observing my relationship between myself and reality.

> **GH:** What is it about organic objects specifically that move you to re/create them in line with reality?

> **DA:** It’s kind of an obsession of observation, looking at things and wondering how to incorporate them into my practice. Everything is a metaphor, or everything is an idea for a sculpture. I think about my studio work as 100 per cent of my being – everything is constantly in relation to studio work. I feel pretty inspired by the world and all the things that are walking and moving. I said this initially a few years ago, but I feel like I’ve been on the Earth for a long time, but not as a human. I think in the past, I was a rock in a desert or on a cliff that was sun- facing. I feel like I had millennia of observations, but only hearing and feeling. All the other senses are new to me. I feel like I get to have this body for as long as I get to have it, so I need to smell and taste and see and touch things on my own time. And I don’t know how much time that is. I need to do it all as soon as possible all of the time. I need to break fears and get into the dumpster sometimes to ask, why is this thing slimy and why does it gross me out?

> **GH:** Your practice is intertwined with processes of labour, in that the objects created are ephemeral, or in an endless cycle of decay, consumption, preservation and destruction. Can you speak about your practice within a context of labour?

> **DA:** One thing that comes to my mind, is that I’m interested in labour that is inherently feminine. Labour in relation to the social, or collective labour. I have been investigating that by inviting people to share their labour and their work and their practices with mine. I did a show with my mom recently, and a lot of that work was needle work, or pleating table skirts and using flowers and food. Those practices are undeniably culturally associated with women’s work. There is a certain kind of collectivity with that work. That feminine space of collective learning and sharing, and sharing labour, is something that I find really valuable. So, that’s kind of one of my motivations – to share these practices and learn from them in relation to how I want my own labour to be, and how I can share processes in my life, and what setting that can be in. Rather than a hierarchy, how can I create a space for an equally shared labour experience? The metaphor for the shared meals was always in relation to the preparation for meals at the end of the summer in Turkey, when women meet up in a yard and prepare food for the winter, like _mantı_ or _tarhana_ or something else. One station does the mixing of the dough, one thins the dough, one station does the filling. They all bring materials, they all provide labour. And at the end of the day, there’s a really big pile of food that they all share equally and take home. Rather than 10 different homes trying to do the same thing, they make their actions collective. It’s social, it works for the division of labour and speed. People get more food by joining forces. That is a method of labour that I strive for and try to understand and fit into my life. I don’t know if I do it successfully all the time, but it’s something I reflect on.

> **GH:** Does this distribution of labour also inform your intergenerational practices? Can you talk about your interest in collective and intergenerational practices of sharing?

> **DA:** Something that comes up during or after collaborative projects is how collective labour unlocks the layers of stories, secrets and knowledge associated with the medium. Food really has this ability to carry all of its cultural heritage with it. Not just its recipe, but almost like a poem in a different language of execution. The way some- one’s hand moves, or their method of organizing, sorting, preparing the process of making a dish. When I observe someone else cooking, I feel like I am reading a poem in a different language and understanding it. I think, in retrospect, this was one of my motivations for creating an opportunity for intergenerational projects. To be able to create a space for participating, observing and learning other people’s poetry.

> **GH:** How about your process of destruction, like the burn pile?

> **DA:** The burn pile is a pile in my studio of things that become the ashes of my work. It’s another way of organizing in my studio when I don’t know how an object is supposed to function and I don’t know if I want to see it again or not. I put it in the burn pile to cook. Not a delicate cook, but a rough cook. It’s a “last chance” pile.  
> The last burn I did was all these parts of chairs that I didn’t want to see again, and broken sculptures. A lot of first attempts and a lot of things that I didn’t want to take up space in my world. The idea is that, I look through the pile and find things to rescue, then burn the rest of the pile to ashes, collect the ash and make a glaze out of it that gets fired onto ceramics. It’s as magic as art can get. You have a thing that you apply energy to, it turns into something else, then you apply energy again and it turns into glass. It’s a beautiful form of transformation.

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Sculpture

Nature

Greta Hamilton speaks with Derya Akay about decay, reality, time, artifice and aesthetics in her process-based art practice. 

Derya Akay, on Process, Labour and Time

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Artist Project

Rajni Perera was born in Sri Lanka in 1985 and lives and works in Toronto. She explores issues of hybridity, sacrilege, irreverence, the indexical sciences, ethnography, gender, sexuality, popular culture, deities, monsters and dream worlds. All of these themes marry in a newly objectified realm of mythical symbioses. They are flattened on the medium and made to act as a personal record of impossible discoveries. In her work she seeks to open and reveal the dynamism of these icons, both scripturally existent, self-invented and externally defined. She creates a subversive aesthetic that counteracts antiquated, oppressive discourse, and acts as a restorative force through which people can move outdated, repressive modes of being towards reclaiming their power.

Since becoming attuned to Rajni Perera’s works, I have been made keenly aware that any attempt to read them means signing a pact and agreement to be simultaneously read myself. Attracted by her centring of the female body, one engages with Perera’s oeuvre seeking understanding of her technique and conceptual sensibilities. Perera’s works offer themselves for our consumption; however, as we go deeper, we ourselves become the desired sacrifice to be consumed on the altar of the divine feminine.

To read Rajni Perera is to look into her mind, only to have a mirror appear and reveal all of the preconceived notions, ideas and contorted fantasies one projects upon her work. Her works are not for the faint of heart, nor for those who enjoy the trappings of ethnography and waxing nostalgic about the Empire’s glory days. Perera is wholly contemporary; hence, why she is considered futuristic to those who revel in the past. And for those seeking to satiate their fetishism, their hunger is met with beautifully rendered, conceptually rigorous disregard.

In 2011, when Perera graduated from OCAD University in Toronto, she presented a series called _The New Ethnography_ as her culminating body of work that won the university’s Medal for Painting and Drawing. Early in her career, Perera’s investigation of the representation of the coloured woman’s body took centre stage. The title of the aforementioned series offers intriguing entry points for assessment. For centuries, the coloured body has been a focal point and an object of intense and violent scientific study. For instance, modern gynecology stems from brutal experiments on the bodies of enslaved African-American women. Similarly, women of colour throughout the world have been used, abused and disposed of for the purposes of research and experimentation by colonialist exploiters and their advocates.

Do not think for one moment that Rajni Perera has not read these histories.

_The New Ethnography_ inverts these tropes and presents portraits of women in control – present, embodied and unbothered by spectators. In magnificently executed strokes of vibrant colour and the luxuriant lines of the female form, Perera does away with the objectified subject and delivers whole women, bold women, women who may have suffered abuse but who are neither powerless nor permanently damaged.

Concurrently, Perera is being a little cheeky with her audience. She knows that viewers expect – subconsciously or not – to ogle these women and project onto them their shame, misogyny and/or fetishism. As a counter, Perera’s women are unbothered: too busy admiring themselves, each other, centring their needs, desires and pleasure. This proactive positionality renders these women protected against the obtrusiveness of past ethnographies that still linger on – even in the contemporary art world.

_The New Ethnography_ represented– and still represents – an intellectual excavation to debunk and reveal the monstrous results of centuries of scientific investigation done to Brown and Black women, at the expense of their lives. Moreover, for Perera, fresh out of art school at the time, this series was a springboard that positioned her as a painter with an enviable technique and aesthetic. Additionally, she revealed herself as a historiographer and ethnographer adept at illuminating Black and Brown women’s experiences as a way of restoring harmony and balance to a still disjointed historical narrative that relegates Brown and Black women to the status of wretched detritus.

Unsurprisingly, much of Perera’s subsequent work has been associated with Afro-Futurism, particularly her _Afrika Galaktika_ series. This series centres a Black heroine in combat with other Black and Brown women warriors against an invisible other. The bodies of these women are lush, mature and fecund. They are in complete opposition to the pubescent, vapid and meek women painted by Orientalists, and offered as the standard in contemporary pop culture. These women occupy powerful stances, intense gazes and intentional movements. They embody the qualities of the Mino, the all-women army regiment active during the period of the Dahomey Kingdom. They are as fearless as Queen Nzinga[^1], known for advocating and fighting for the freedom of her people from the Portuguese. Like the bird form of the Ìyàmi Àjé[^2], they feed upon the innards of those whose transgressions have caused disharmony in the world. They are tantricas, protectors and warrior women in the tradition of the Hindu goddess Ka¯ l¯ı, who stands upon the demons she conquers in a defiant show of victory.

To imbue _Afrika Galaktika_ with these qualities one must know the various histories of warrior women throughout time and across cultures. Where Afro-Futurism has claimed its role, in part, as a tool for creating new histories due to the alleged erasure of the history of people of African descent, Perera has searched the historical record, and her own blood’s memory, for a reconnection to the source. This source, as Perera relays to us, rightly centres women as the progenitors and protectors of families and communities throughout the world. Perera’s portraits pay tribute to the Black woman as the original ancestor of all humankind. Aesthetically, she shows women as they are in environments where they remain supreme. These women are not objects to be manipulated, devoured and disposed. Rather, these women are active participants in, and collaborators and creators of, their environments and destinies.

The history of Sri Lanka, Perera’s homeland, is one coloured, in part, by Indian influence and engagement. This is to be expected, in light of the geographic proximity between the two countries, and Perera’s knowledge of the Indian aesthetic trends that emerged during the colonial occupation of South Asia. Together, they provide a rich landscape for her excavations around mythmaking, masculinity, the divinization of monarchy and the image as a performance of power.

Of her diptych _Royal Couple_, Perera states, “The medium of self-portraiture and portraiture is investigated as a window into the practices of the glitterati who commissioned a lot of the first portraiture around turn of the \[20th\] century \[in\] India.”[^3] Perera’s dives deeper. We know the monetary value of a given artwork is often relative. It depends as much on the artist’s labour and pedigree, as well as it does on his or her gallerist’s monthly rent and aptitude for deal making.

In the series _Royal Couple_ and _We Come Alive From Eating Your Flesh_, Perera critiques the mythology of value from three angles: that of the maker, who, like any artist, wants her work to be commercially viable; that of the historical consumers of embellished photography, who buy to flaunt their spending power; but also that of the individuals who played decisive roles in complicating the colonial and post-colonial realities of South Asia. These perspectives converge on Perera’s canvases in an analysis that is as much about aesthetic tendency, as it is the socio-political realities of power, which, was, and still is, in constant flux.

Mythmaking is how people make themselves relevant in a world of ever-competing interests and trends that wax and wane. Perera also investigates the associated expenses of creating these great stories. In _Royal Couple_, the expense is the destruction of the natural world and a kind of comatose nostalgia for the days of old, as those in power actively destroy the environment, in the name of progress. But what truly is progress, if in the end there is nowhere to sustain existence and thus, no one left to read the myth?

In the 2012 Royal Ontario Museum exhibition _Embellished Reality: Indian Painted Photographs_, curator Deepali Dewan noted that in India, unlike the West, photography did not replace painting as the most accurate depiction of reality. In India, photographs were used to augment the aesthetic quality of painting, which was accorded a status indicative of a higher plane of existence, also referred to as “hyper-reality.”[^4]

Perera’s _Maharanis_ series is a 21st-century nod to embellished photography as a tool for exalting individuals, namely the monarchy, to the status of divinity. This is another instance where women are intentionally centred and are metaphors for the divine. Black and white photographs are layered with rich colours intertwined with profound symbolism. Each subject wears a crown atop her head painted in gold. In two images, the subjects hold snakes in their hands, a symbol of rebirth, transformation and fertility.

That a technique developed in the 19th century as a show of wealth and privilege by the wealthy and powerful in their homeland would now be used to exalt women to the status of divinity reveals the layers of social and history Perera has excavated. Be clear that Perera understands her audience. Many, particularly in the West, may see these images as an unimaginative application of Orientalism. In reality, we are witnessing Perera’s vision for the world expertly performed through the lens of a genre typically used to exalt the powerful and the, primarily, male. Perera uses the genre to subvert the western gaze. These women gaze calmly, but confidently outward, making eye contact with the viewer. This is an active, critical engagement in which the viewer is invited to participate in the adoration and admiration of the divine.

As an artist, Perera is ever growing: always moving, always planning, always MAKING. The narratives we read about her now, will not be the narratives written and spoken about her a few months from now. Why and how should we read Rajni Perera today? To offer suggestions, I must examine the reasons why I continually come back to Perera’s oeuvre. In an era of social media celebrity, internet spirituality, fake news and a litany of various categories of toxic distraction, Perera confronts and interrogates the historical archive, which reminds her and us that where we are now has happened previously. Perera takes that information to her canvas and offers up a vision of what is possible, replete with suggestions for how to turn this potential into reality.

She centres Black and Brown women. More saliently, she centres self-determined Black and Brown women who have dominion over their bodies and minds. These women, in turn, centre each other. This act of double centring is where, I believe, Perera proffers time and place for substantive, generative engagement about women’s work for each other, for our families and communities. The existence of this visual example is, in and of itself, powerful, but it will be our implementation of Perera’s vision that spurs the profound transformation we so dearly need.

Reading Perera reminds us to be unabashed, unafraid and unapologetic. There is no transformation without effort, no result without belief. Perera’s works exemplify a self-determined and self-disciplined praxis, fully cognizant of history, and willing to problematize it. The result is an abjectly beautiful, multidisciplinary, nimble and accessible narrative – a seminal text, if you will – that aligns with and offers a relevant, meaningful vision for the now.

[^1]: 17th century Queen of the Ndongo and Matamba kingdoms in present-day Angola.
[^2]: In Yoruba spiritual cosmology, they are the Divine Mothers of Unfathomable powers, a reference to the biological and spiritual power, and potential, of African women across many domains, especially where creation – biological, artistic and ideological – is concerned.
[^3]: _Royal Couple_, [https://rajniperera.com/the-royal-couple/](“rajniperera.com/the-royal-couple/“) accessed Feb 1, 2018.
[^4]: Deepali Dewan, _Embellished Reality: Indian Painted Photographs_. Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 2012.

Artist

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Artist Rajni Perera uses an ethnographic lens to confront the historical archive and mythology and to recentre Black and Brown women. 

Artwork by Rajni Perera

Negarra A. Kudumu is a Seattle-based independent essayist and curator. She works as Manager of Public Programs at the Frye Art Museum, and is founder and owner of Perpetuity Healing Arts, a holistic wellness practice.

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Negarra A. Kudumu, an independent essayist and curator, traces the oeuvre of artist Rajni Perera and presents ways of reading Perera’s work. In her painting practice, Perrera uses an ethnographic lens to confront the historical archive and mythology and to recentre Black and Brown women. 

Reading Rajni Perera

Review

Sally McKay is a Canadian artist, art writer and independent curator. She has a PhD in Art History and Visual Culture from York University and currently teaches art full-time on a contractually limited appointment at McMaster University. 

Lisa Myers’ latest curatorial project, _Carry Forward_, presents works by 11 artists, addressing themes of deeds and documents. Myers explains that the title references “passing or transferring something on to the next generation, yet also refers to taking account of gains and loss.” For me, it also suggests momentum; this show has lift under its wings, much like an owl or an airplane.

Myers’ curatorial focus here is on how documents accrue and transmit forms of value “outside of the paradigm of things.” Writing about Mike MacDonald’s video installation, _Electronic Totem_, for example, she suggests that “Shots of berry picking, fishing, waterways, language, and song together create a document of relationships and bond to territory.”

The didactic information in the show is excellent. Myers provides deeply researched context and gentle suggestions for ways to relate the works to each other. I will describe some connections that particularly stuck out for me.

Works about wampum by Nadia Myre open the exhibition, announcing that documents come in many forms. _Monument to Two-Row_, Revised (2000– 2002) is made with genuine wampum beads, and represents the diplomatic arrangement of two peoples (Haudenosaunee and Dutch) travelling two parallel paths. In _Portrait As A River, Divided_ (2002), these parallel paths resemble scars burned into the land; the Two Row Wampum Treaty has been eviscerated. These works challenge Canadian colonial complacency by registering the acute, persistent pain and anger of broken treaties. The invocation of wampum also sets an aesthetic precedent, assuring us that documentation can impact the non-linguistic dimensions of lived experience.

Nadia Myre’s wampum thus informs Dana Claxton’s series of magnified documents from FBI surveillance of members of AIM (American Indian Movement). Here, the documents point to a particular kind of language: the cold, bureaucratic voice of government. Yet, sections have been heavily redacted with black marker, and, because each page has been magnified, these black stripes convey the indexical wobbles of the human hand that made them, the impersonal voice of the state expressed by living beings. By claiming and magnifying these documents, Claxton renders them legible as tangible behaviours of violence and erasure.

Other paper documents include Deanna Bowen’s “\_1911 Anti Creek-Negro Petition” from Immigration of Negroes from the United States to Western Canada 1910– 1911\_ (2013), which hangs in a grid of 233 pages, bearing the signatures of Canadian racists. Again, the human hand produces indexical evidence – clear, direct and awful – the signatories blatantly stating their prejudice in ways that affirm the experience of those who know that mainstream Canada has been trying to deny a deeply racist past.[^1]

Claxton and Bowen’s pieces recall the language-based aesthetics of conceptual and neo-conceptual art, but without the detachment of modernist formalism or post-modern irony. Here, there is no expectation that written words or concepts could be considered as distinct from politics, emotions and lived experience.

For me, these works by Myre, Claxton and Bowen operated as conceptual touchstones throughout the exhibition. Joining this conversation was Marjorie Beaucage’s 1992 video documentary about Rebecca Belmore’s project _Speaking to Their Mother_, which was projected in another gallery across the hall. If Claxton and Bowen’s documents seemed pulled from the filing cabinets and office spaces of settler institutions, this video document is firmly located in the voice of the people on the land.

In the video, Belmore describes her decision to create a giant megaphone in response to the Oka crisis. She explains how she initially wanted to direct it, in anger, at the government buildings in Ottawa, “because they don’t listen.” But, instead, she chose to bring the megaphone to the people.

The Cree community recorded by Beaucage are members of the Protectors of Mother Earth Wiggins Bay Blockade, gathered next to a clear-cut. People stand in front of Belmore’s megaphone and speak from the heart – in Cree. There are translations of their words on the wall of the gallery. Myers explains that the decision to provide translations was not an easy choice, but was made at Beaucage’s request. The video has no subtitles, but none are needed: the communicative affects of speakers’ gestures, body language and intonation, combined with the contexts of community gathering, the clear-cut and the land, powerfully convey the transformative aspects of the event, even to the English-speaking settler viewer.

I was struck by the fact that, while the early 1990s still feel like yesterday, they are fast becoming long ago. Beaucage’s video refreshes that moment for viewers who remember it, and perhaps the decision to translate speeches from Cree into English speaks to the continued urgency for action around land claims and resource extraction. As Myers suggests,  
“If we think of land as a document that can be read, imbued with meaning and understood, then every change also alters its legibility.”

It is fitting that the show effectively ends with a documentary video, because Myers cites Mike MacDonald’s video documentaries as her initial inspiration for _Carry Forward_. There are two of his installations in the show. In the label for _Seven Sisters_, Myers notes, “Considering land as document, MacDonald reminds us that deforestation and other forms of ecological degradation function as a kind of redaction.”

Themes of redaction, or erasure, resonate with Claxton’s _AIM_ series, but also with works by John Hampton and Maika’i Tubbs, while works by Jamelie Hassan and Brenda Draney read as affirmative expressions of situated identity. Objects that buzz with loaded presence include Maria Thereza Alves’ giant bronze jackfruit seeds – referencing Portuguese slavery in Brazil – and Krista Belle Stewart’s reworking of an archival photograph from the Nisga’a museum as a jacquard weaving. When this image of Nisga’a chiefs was displayed at the museum, a figure in Western dress had been cropped out of the frame. That same figure was again cropped out by a technical glitch in the process of weaving, a section that Stewart chose to keep hidden in a mailing tube. The two-sided tapestry hangs next to a red wall, steeped in radiant red light that recalls darkrooms, negatives and the shifts of value that occur in the processes of bringing images forth into the world.

At every turn, these works remind us that history is a living process. Through a thoughtful examination of documents to reveal and reconfigure relationships of power, this exhibition tallies, lifts and carries forward the value of past, present and future acts.

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Sally McKay reviews “Carry Forward”, a group exhibition curated by Lisa Myer at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery featuring the work of Maria Thereza Alves, Marjorie Beaucage, Deanna Bowen, Dana Claxton, Brenda Draney, John Hampton, Jamelie Hassan, Mike MacDonald, Nadia Myre, Krista Belle Stewart and Maika’i Tubbs. The exhibition took place from September 29, 2017-January 14, 2018.

Carry Forward

**Karina Irvine** is a writer based in Vancouver.

_Flowers for Africa_, an exhibition by Kapwani Kiwanga and organized by Kathleen Ritter at the Or Gallery in Vancouver, showcases nine floral designs. Each design rests on its own plinth, representing the moment when an African country gained independence from colonial rule.

Looking through photographs and film footage of the celebratory events that took place in each country, Kiwanga’s attention focused on the floral arrangements: on a speaker’s lapel, a bouquet or a wreath. These arrangements are taken out of their original contexts – groups of people, grinning faces, microphones and shaking hands. They represent an archive as a physical corpus, not of humans but of plants, animated by duration as they lose their vibrancy and wither throughout the course of the exhibition. As with the physical photograph, this living and fictive archive resurrects the past while being vulnerable to its own temporal degradation – quickened in this case and questioning the lack of fixity a document really has. Kiwanga’s act of selecting a single reoccurring element from a photograph or film still also brings to mind how history is a constructed discourse – in this case, recalling “celebrations” haunted by systems of oppression.

The context of this encounter is presented as a sort of showroom, brightly and evenly lit, with floral designs placed on plinths throughout the gallery space. A local florist was asked to interpret the photograph or film still chosen for each of the nine countries represented: Tunisia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Algeria, Nigeria, Mozambique, Uganda, South Sudan, Tanganyika. Portrayed as documents, or witnesses of an event, these flowers similarly shape an experience. As if materialized from a photograph, they emphasize affect over what might otherwise be seen as evidence, representing not a direct copy but an interpretation. Henry Fox Talbot, one of photography’s pioneers, understood photography to represent similarity over sameness, where the interplay between fact and fiction becomes blurred. In this sense, perhaps it is more useful to think of them not as documents at all but as analogies, as described by Walter Benjamin in _Little History of Photography_ (1931). Benjamin suggests that rather than thinking of the photograph as a facsimile, or exact representation, it is disclosive and concerned less with a stable image than with its development or, in the flowers’ case, its regression. These floral arrangements are presented as documents in and of themselves, derived from photographs and film footage. But, they are unstable documents threatened by the processes of duration and a flower’s natural inclination to dry up when cut from its source.

Kiwanga’s taxonomic approach blurs the role of the archive, questioning representation, visibility and what constitutes the production of knowledge in exhibition display. Each arrangement in _Flowers for Africa_ has been extracted from its historical context. In so doing, what can we understand from the event and those preceding it – the struggles, assassinations and coups that led to it, and after? How do these flowers function when removed from their surroundings? The absence of the political leaders affiliated with each country’s Independence Day, bringing an accessory or background decoration to the fore, lends weight to the celebratory moment while acknowledging its presence as memorial.

_Flowers for Mozambique_, for instance, makes visible a floral decal tea cup, holding a small bouquet on a tall plinth just wide enough to accommodate its saucer. This is perhaps the most peculiar arrangement in the gallery space. Why a tea cup? The florist Kiwanga worked with saw in the grainy image for Mozambique a small indication of what could be a bone china tea cup and saucer. This process of moving from interpretation to representation demonstrates the ease with which material evidence can oblige different truths.

Mozambique gained its independence on June 25, 1975, following four centuries of Portuguese rule, becoming the People’s Republic of Mozambique. Preceding this day was a decade of war between the guerrilla forces of the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) and Portuguese Armed Forces (PAF). At least 10 years were marked by village massacres, rape, mass murder, disease and starvation. It is in recognizing this history that the dried-up flowers occupy a position of remembrance, while also pointing to the vulnerability of memory. In Kiwanga’s representation, or resurrection of these flowers, we are reminded of these events and of the ongoing process of decolonization.

In _Flowers for Africa_, the relationship between the original photographs and the flowers they represent has been reversed: the photographic document is absent here, and so is its authority, the flowers take its place. With this gesture, Kiwanga underscores the instability of the photograph and emphasizes its affect by focusing on a reoccurring motif. The floral designs on display are impressions of introduced species, materialized from the ones seen in the photographs and film stills. If we begin to recognize that these objects are present and very real, as is made apparent through their degradation, we can, as Benjamin suggests, begin to redeem “what is” with “what was.” With these flowers, the main question that persists is how it is that we can recognize and feel what is not made visible?

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Karina Irvine reviews Kapwani Kiwanga’s exhibition “Flowers for Africa” that was on view at Or Gallery in Vancouver from September 9-October 14, 2017.

Kapwani Kiwanga: Flowers for Africa 

**Sylvie Fortin** is an independent curator, critic and editor who is now researching the contemporary currency of hospitality.

Curated by Trevor Schoonmaker, _The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp_ – the latest edition of the New Orleans Triennial – assembled works by 73 artists. While the works were presented in 17 venues around the city and across the Mississippi River in Algiers, the majority were concentrated in New Orleans’s three predominant art institutions. Such institutional dependency significantly impacts Prospect.4’s approach to display, with two strategies dominating: tightly confined solo presentations sequentially organized and easy juxtapositions relying on material resonance, formal play or thematic connections. The selection of artists, more diverse than prior editions of Prospect, was very promising yet the exhibition failed to mobilize the full meaning and potential of diversity. Too often, we are served up orthodoxies that arrest the potency of the works. This is all the more surprising in New Orleans, where cultures of display reign supreme.

Gracing the walls of the New Orleans Museum of Art’s Great Hall, Barkley L. Hendricks’ 11 portraits– black, beautiful, confident and in control – welcome viewers. Half of these works are from the mid-1970s, and half from the 2010s, confining Hendricks’ five decades of practice to a familiar narrative arc that is also a current market favourite. The curator clearly intended to celebrate community and redress historical omissions with cool, matter-of-fact understatement, but the dynamics of the space trumped curatorial intention. Tightly squeezed between pilasters and often visually bisected by Ionic columns, the portraits are arrested, isolated and at times amputated. This great white-marble edifice of culture prevents the subjects from coming together – and with us – to issue a challenge. In addition, NOMA’s Great Hall is a highly sought-after entertainment space. This means that Hendricks’ works will unforgivably serve as a “cool” background for many weddings and corporate events. Elsewhere, Hendricks’ still-life _Innocence and Friend_ (1977) is installed amongst 15th-century works. While this type of intervention was once provocative and playfully critical, it has now devolved into curatorial fashion – an easy, convenient way to feign institutional self-reflexivity or innovative scholarship.

Ambivalent engagement with the collection continues upstairs, where we traverse permanent collection galleries to get to Dawit L. Petros’ extraordinary _The Stranger’s Notebook_ (2016). Here, the juxtaposition is startling: after strolling through works by late-19th-century painters – paeans to modernity and industry, and portrayals of women in elaborate interiors tinged with orientalist fantasies – we arrive at Petros’ photographs of contemporary migration. Petros’ images displace the gaze – and the crisis – from the shores of the Mediterranean to the multiplicity and complexities of African departures. His figures look away, to unknowable distant shores. Some hold up a mirror on their shoulder, stressing both the burden and the need to deflect our gaze. They leave behind the wrecks of our modernity.

In _Historical Rupture_ (2016), 12 prints of various sizes are clustered on two adjoining walls, from floor to ceiling. Water, sparkling, everywhere: opaque and transparent, in and out of focus, tranquil or agitated, viewed from the shore, from above, in the wake of a boat or meeting the horizon line. The work evokes the migrant’s experience of the journey at sea: the dizzying succession of views and impressions, the loss of stable references, the indeterminacy of arrival, the slowing of time. Two small silver images “bracket” the work: close-ups of silver emergency blankets, barely different from the shimmering sea. Nearby, the collaborative work of Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad, exquisite black-ink drawings over black-and-white pigment prints similarly recast the relationship between two modes of image- and world-making. Leaving this gallery, one traverses a gallery of post-impressionist French and American works, drawing on photography and the science of vision. And so, one way or the other, the works of Petros, Gill and Vangad are framed by the fantasies of Western modernity, squeezed between orientalism and affirmative science.

In Prospect.4, the unease of institutional collaboration is most acutely felt at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, where the institution’s welcome is, at best, lukewarm. Here, Prospect.4 is given the top-floor space and a handful of small galleries two floors down, amidst – and barely discernible from – the museum’s collection. The Contemporary Art Center (CAC) remains Prospect.4’s main partner, with two floors dedicated to 26 participating artists. Visible from the street, Rina Banerjee’s fantastic new work \* _Viola…_ (2017) entices walkers-by, connecting city and gallery, as the work unearths a fascinating connection between Bengal and Louisiana, casting both communities in a new light. Walking into the lobby, the soundtrack of Evan Ifekoya’s _Disco Breakdown_ (2014) welcomes viewers.

The ground-floor space cramps together all of Prospect.4’s large-scale sculptural works. Next to Banerjee’s sprawling, evanescent sculpture, Rebecca Belmore’s _Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother_ (1991) is shoehorned into the space, reduced to an object, with little room for either audience participation or amplification.

In the second-floor space, Kader Attia’s _Halam Tawaaf_ (2008) greets viewers with a large, circular floor installation of 2,978 bent, empty beer cans installed around an empty square – a critical commentary on consumption, spirituality and religion, which also animates Brad Kahlhamer’s _Super Catcher, Relay Catchers_ (2017) and Jillian Mayer’s video _You’ll Be Okay_ (2014). Here, however, and much like on the ground floor, material and motif overdetermine and limit the reading of the works: Kahlhamer’s bells and wire, Attia’s beer cans, and the found objects of Penny Siopis’ _World of Zulu_ (2017); Minerva Cuevas’ Hershey labels versus Attia’s beer cans; and so on. Uneasily reduced to such homology, the works of Abbas Akhavan, Zineb Sedira and Cauleen Smith get short-changed. By contrast, the work of Alfredo Jaar is allocated disproportionate space.

Many of the strongest works in Prospect.4 are found outside of institutions. In Kahlil Joseph’s three-channel installation, _Wildcat (Aunt Jane)_ (2016), presented at Prospect.4’s welcome centre, three transparent screens suspended in a triangle create haunting image and sound overlays, reminding us of the now-little-known quest to make Oklahoma a free Black state, and pointing to the rich community-constituting interplay of Indigenous and African cultures in New Orleans, historically and today. Other standouts include Hồng-Ân Trương’s installation _To Speak a Language_ (2012), which amplifies New Orleans’ multiple connections to Vietnam in Crescent Park, a new park along the Mississippi River, where Jennifer Odem’s and Radcliffe Bailey’s standout public sculptures are also found.

Odili Donald Odita’s exemplary project _Indivisible_ and _Invincible: Monument to Black Liberation and Celebration in the City of New Orleans_ (2017) truly engages the city, drawing an alternative map by connecting 20 sites with boldly coloured abstract flags. Odita’s project reminds us of our debt to New Orleans’s African American community, to its resilience, fierce openness and hospitality, celebrating places and events with the ever-changing fluttering and flapping of cloth in the wind, instead of the burdensome vulgarity of monuments.

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Sylvie Fortin reviews _Prospect.4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp_, the fourth iteration of the Prospect New Orleans triennial that took place from November 18, 2017-February 25, 2018\. 

Prospect.4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp

Zeenat Nagree is a writer and curator living between Bombay and Montréal.

To speculate about the future is to imagine other possibilities of what the present holds and how it might progress. Such exercises of the imagination allow one’s narrative to stray from the ordinary to the unexpected, even while taking into consideration our current fears and fantasies. As they magnify and mutate, we become spectators of our own transformation, experiencing the electric thrill of contemplating what might likely never happen, while accepting that it just might. To speculate, then, is to play with the parameters of history before it comes into being.

Artists operating in the speculative mode today are working perpendicular to widespread disagreements about what constitutes fact, and its deliberate manipulation for economic and political gain. In India, for two decades now, Hindu nationalist groups have attempted to rewrite history textbooks with a view to developing a majoritarian national consciousness. Three years ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi went on to claim that evidence of advanced scientific developments can be found in Hindu myths and epics, such as in the purported use of plastic surgery to attach the head of an elephant to the body of a deity called Ganesha. Within such circumstances, as playful as artistic speculation might be, it may also need to hold onto tools of criticality. This delicate balance between demonstrating evidence and indulging in reverie makes speculation a particularly challenging artistic device.

Last December, Indian artist Amshu Chukki presented two speculative projects in his debut solo exhibition, _The Tour_, at Chatterjee & Lal Gallery in Mumbai. One of the projects, which shared its title with the show, comprised a roughly 20-minute two-channel video and a series of fibreglass sculptures. In the video, a tour guide named Nagarajuna takes viewers through a deserted city without ever appearing on screen. We are tourists amidst empty buildings and shuttered shops – a rather neat and ordinary setting for an apocalypse – hearing Nagarajuna explain a circuitous chronology of events. The sea overtook the land, and then rocks fell from above; aliens used to live there and then they disappeared; the arrival of aliens caused the city’s inhabitants to forget how to speak English.

As the camera moves from the city to an airport, it becomes clear that we have been wandering through film sets all along, looking at facades that try to but never quite entirely resemble the structures they represent. In the closing sequence, the narrator proffers, “All the people who lived here watched a lot of films. They would imagine these films. Did these imaginations doom them? Or did these films lead to their doom?” With these words, the story loops back on itself. The generous pans of slightly odd yet generic architecture and design elements combined with Nagarajuna’s bizarre narrative highlight just how objects that lend verisimilitude to the cinematic image can be detached from their intended signification at whim. All editing, after all, is a form of manipulation. Alongside the video, Chukki presented fibreglass casts of rocks, hollowed out and coated with an iridescent tint on the inside.

The 26-year-old artist has been working in the speculative mode at least for the last two years now. As part of an ongoing artistic exchange between Quebec and India, Chukki was invited to Montreal’s Darling Foundry in 2015, to realize his project of researching and filming examples of utopian architecture in the city. Of these, he chose Montreal’s Biodome, originally constructed as a velodrome for the 1976 Olympics, for a roughly 12-minute video titled _Mountain, les invisibles_. Like _The Tour_, this video’s narrative takes a bizarre turn, as the Biodome’s employees – much like the tour guide – begin fabulating using the surrounding landscape as speculative prompts. We hear overlapping tales of war, an apocalypse and extraterrestrials, and through them, the strangeness of the Biodome itself is thrown into relief – an enclosed space that recreates diverse ecosystems using live animals and plants. In several frames, we also see the Biodome’s _trompe l’oeil_ architectural details, which serve no function other than to make the dome visually coherent for the viewer. Here, the strange is contained within the ordinary; it merely requires the off-camera speakers to make it evident. Chukki thus highlights the blurry boundary between plausibility and implausibility in our daily lives, and the instrumentalization of the image in making an argument one way or another. Both _The Tour_ and _Mountain, les invisibles_ rely on the awe of storytelling, showing that whether or not the image co-operates, it can be co-opted for any purpose.

Like Chukki, several young artists in India are increasingly engaging in speculation in their work. Critic and curator Nancy Adajania describes this tendency among Chukki and others like Sahej Rahal, Pallavi Paul, Rohini Devasher and Neha Choksi as “a philosophically informed approach to history that is playful in terms of its handling of material, its fusion of fictive scenarios and the evidentiary. Yet, this tendency insists on rigour and criticality, in working from a commitment to what history is for from a liberal-progressive point of view.” An exemplar of such an approach can be found in Tejal Shah’s _Between the Waves_, shown at dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012\. Shah’s post-apocalyptic world is a queer utopia, where the tasks at hand are to reconnect with a devastated, garbage-filled landscape and with the other one-horned creatures that inhabit it. They work, they dance, they express corporal desire. Owing to the explicit nature of the project, the film was only screened privately in Mumbai after being exhibited in Germany, its speculative scenarios having been deemed too offensive. What, perhaps, could be added to Adajania’s description of the speculative – and seems to be somewhat elusive in Chukki’s speculations – is Shah’s use of transgression, which lays bare limits of freedom in the present.

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Zeenat Nagree reviews Amshu Chukki’s exhibition “The Tour” that was on view at Chatterjee and Lal Gallery in Mumbai from November 10-December 23, 2017.

Amshu Chukki: The Tour

Charmaine Li is a Canadian writer and journalist living in Berlin. Her work has appeared in _Newsweek, Maisonneuve, AnOther Magazine, Kinfolk Magazine_ and _CNN Travel_ among other publications.

> “Just then I found a strange refuge – ‘by chance,’ as they say – though I believe there is no such thing. If you need something desperately and find it, this is not an accident; your own craving and compulsion leads you to it.” — _Hermann Hesse_ \[1\]

If a coincidence is in the eye of the beholder, then reading such chance events involves being attentive enough to notice as the fragments of our lives collide. In Moyra Davey’s work, chance propels her artistic impulses. And through these chance encounters, she comes to engage myriad writers, photographers and filmmakers in telling her personal histories. In the exhibition _Portrait / Landscape_ at Galerie Buchholz in Berlin, the artist presented two of her films alongside a suite of photographic works, most of which are rooted in the minutiae of her everyday. 

Like several of Davey’s previous films, _Hemlock Forest_ (2016) is largely shot in her New York apartment and weaves together her reflections on literary and artistic figures with intimate revelations from her personal life. The 41-minute film, a sequel to her 2011 work _Les Goddesses_, has a simple camera setup – it depicts Davey with earphones on, pacing in front of incongruous shots of windows, corridors and shards of sunlight emblazoned on walls, while reciting an essay she has written. 

In a measured and dispassionate tone, she contemplates the value of art where little is at risk; a subway scene in Chantal Akerman’s film _News from Home_ (1977); anxieties about her son leaving for college; Karl Ove Knausgaard’s shame; her judgements of her sister’s drinking; Mary Wollstonecraft’s family history; her own addiction to her work. The array of references reveals Davey’s proclivity for following resonant bits of material and wayward events to uncover more of her truth – like a kind of salvation. In an age saturated with blogging and oversharing, confessions can easily teeter on the edge of self-indulgence and solipsism, but in _Hemlock Forest_ they seem necessary in confronting painful experiences and finding order in chaos. Although Davey’s revelations are often steeped in her own concerns, there’s a sense of detachment in her voice that establishes a distance from her material. She speaks candidly about her deep anxiety of shooting scenes in public, exposes intimate details about her opinions of family and friends, and recalls an instance when she urinated in front of an ATM machine due to her deteriorating health – all in a slow, nearly robotic, tone. This distancing brings to mind Vivian Gornick’s notion that a writer needs to fashion a persona out of one’s self in order to tell a personal narrative that’s of value to the disinterested reader.[^2] What’s left in is just as important as what’s ignored. 

As _Hemlock Forest_ unfolds, meditative sequences punctuate the film and inject the feeling of slowness – wavering treetops, Davey’s restaging of Akerman’s NYC subway scene, her son posing, flipping through a series of old photographs. Slip-ups and stutters remain in the final cut, amplifying the disquieting energy reverberating throughout. During the making of the film, the news breaks that Akerman has unexpectedly committed suicide. This drives Davey to revisit the Belgian filmmaker’s work and throws _Hemlock Forest_ into a new direction, which she discloses in the narration. 

_Hemlock Forest_ unveils the reading, writing, thinking and connecting involved in telling a story, even including a bibliography at the end. In this way, it’s concerned with filming the process of making as a means to an end. “I’m piecing together fragments because I don’t yet have a subject,” she says monotonously before referring to Roland Barthes. 

Choosing is easier than inventing and he wondered how he might pass from notes and fragments to the novel. He speculated that he was breaking the ultimate rule of writers, speaking about a nascent work, and that his work might in the end be the notes on its making. 

Nevertheless, as Davey speaks, the threads come together to form a non-linear storytelling that is singularly her own. 

In a similar vein to her films, Davey’s photography tends towards quotidian details and against the monumental. Two separate rooms at the back of the gallery are lined with clusters of her “mailers” – small chromogenic prints left unframed and pinned to the wall. She mails each of them, folding the poster-sized prints up, hand-writing the address of specific galleries on the image side and sealing them with squares of brightly coloured tape. What began as an efficient way to mail photographs to a friend in 2009 has developed into an ongoing component of her practice. These prints leave vestiges of their epistolary journeys, introducing new meaning to the photographs. _Hoardings_ (2016) is a series of 12 modestly sized images – close-ups of bare trees in winter, gnarled tree branches, converging tree trunks – arranged in a 3 × 4 grid. In some photos, Davey has saturated and manipulated the colours to the extent that they’re reminiscent of infrared photographs. This effect, alongside the geometric patterns of the tape on the surfaces of the images – which resemble a camera’s view finder – draws the visitor’s attention towards the details and textures of the natural phenomena that might be overlooked in a larger tableau. Accompanying these folded images in the exhibition are more traditional black-and-white photographs held in glass-clip picture frames, taken by Davey, her partner, Jason Simon and her son, Barney Simon-Davey. 

The exhibition takes its name from Davey’s photographic installation _Portrait / Landscape_ (2017). A constellation of 66 mailers features portraits of Davey’s son and his friends taken from different angles, detailed shots of various names written in cursive as well as photographs of negatives and old photos of her sisters. Here, the artist incorporates the practice of repurposing existing photographs by re-photographing them. It unveils yet another way to look at her subjects – subjects with which the viewer is familiar as Davey circles back to them again and again in her work. _Wedding Loop_ (2017), situated across from _Portrait/Landscape_ also illustrates the cyclical nature of Davey’s work. The film follows a formal strategy similar to _Hemlock Forest_ and _Les Goddesses_ but this time it is loosely centred on family tensions at a wedding and linked with corresponding events from the biography of 19th-century British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. 

Subways – which inspired her 2011 photo series _Subway Writers_ and became a large part of _Hemlock Forest_ – reappear, but are captured from a voyeuristic perspective. Other themes that interlace her previous works also return in _Wedding Loop,_ but here Davey presents them slightly altered: self-doubt; family drama; the investigation of artistic work; motherhood; the difference between documenting a life versus living it. The works in _Portrait / Landscape_ offer no resolution nor totality, but there is a sense of Davey’s becoming. The artist is concerned with bringing the process of making into focus through a labyrinthine artistic framework that unfurls across the personal and the historical in slow motion. What is tangible here are the ways in which voracious reading, writing, photographing and filming are Davey’s methods to grope her way through her inner life and excavate meaning from detected coincidences and connections. 

[^1]: Hermann Hesse, _Demian_ (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Incorporated, 1965).
[^2]: Vivian Gornick, _The Situation and the Story_ (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).

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Charmaine Li reviews Moyra Davey’s exhibition “Portrait/Landscape” which showed at Galerie Buchholz in Berlin from August 30-October 21, 2017.

Moyra Davey: Portrait / Landscape 

Opening its doors this fall with enthusiastic aplomb, the new Polygon Gallery marks an important moment in the history of Presentation House, the name by which this photo-focused gallery has been known for the past 40 years. After establishing itself as an international participant in the presentation and discussion of the discipline, the gallery has grown out of its historic home up the hill and has stepped into a new spacious, purpose-built site down on the energetic Lonsdale Quay. Perched at the edge of the harbour, the building’s new metal-clad surface reflects the land, water and people around it. It’s a suitable effect for a gallery that has been committed to focusing on the mirror of mediums, photography.

_N. Vancouver_, the first exhibition here, has an appropriately conceptual sound to its name. It feels similar to the name of Lucy Lippard’s Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition, _955,000_, which drew its title from the population of the city in 1970\. The latter was the first survey of conceptualism here, and its impact was profound. As noted by local art critic Michael Turner, Lippard’s exhibition and ideas are “a big reason why Vancouver art looks and feels the way it does.”[^1]

North Vancouver is not technically Vancouver[^2] but it has nonetheless been home to many Vancouver artists, including Iain and Ingrid Baxter when they worked together as N.E. Thing Co. Participants in the _955,000_ exhibition, they are represented here in Polygon’s main gallery through vintage works in which they document the city’s car lot canopies, simulated tree structures, cement transfer walls and yard-front statuary shops. Their cool observation and dry articulation of the urbanized environment was an important precursor to much art that followed. This mode of historical materialism is a trenchant discourse in Vancouver art, and major works by Jeff Wall and Rodney Graham, as well as commissioned pieces by Stan Douglas, Steven Waddell and Greg Girard, are installed in the exhibition to create a literal horizon, circling the gallery. Their pictured places alternate back and forth between resource extraction and sites of leisure, a sweeping sky often framing their foregrounded locals in an expanse of natural sublime. This is the photography for which Vancouver is known, and which the gallery has helped champion. More than a literal picturing of this place, it is a background of ideas and an acknowledgment of the history of art in this area.

Since his arrival at the gallery over a decade ago, director Reid Shier has pushed the envelope of the galleries photo-based mandate, expanding ideas of lens-based practice. Shows like _Male_, from the collection of disco connoisseur Vince Aletti, with more drawing and painting than photography, and the resurrection of Glenn Lewis’ large ceramic wall work _Artifact_ (1970), installed in his 2010 retrospective for the first time since its censorship,[^3] present physical traces of the photographed image’s aura as it manifests in a wide variety of contemporary forms. _N. Vancouver_ pushes this expansion forward with the extensive inclusion of sculpture, with strong work by relatively emerging artists within the gallery and newly commissioned works sited throughout the building itself.

Lippard’s conceptual influence again reverberates here. Both Holly Ward’s _Raw Goods_, equal portions of locally sourced sulfur and coal (known to locals from waterside processing plants) are poured onto the concrete floor of a vacant ground-level window space and Tim Lee’s inverted video image of the sign over _Lonsdale Quay_, _North Vancouver_, _August 25, 2017_ appropriate Robert Smithson’s strategies of displacement and inversion, respectively, to realize aesthetic allegories from recognizable elements of the city’s landscapes. Also in the lobby, Myfanwy MacLeod’s newest Hogarthian caricature is a monumental scorched wooden boat, modelled after Captain George Vancouver’s ship, and draped with a Union Jack. The charcoal surface is pungent, a ship burnt with exploit. Also exploring the colonial past is a new, permanent work by Brian Jungen, another inverted readymade.

The stark white _Upside down flagpole_, 2017, has, at its base, a sculptural clump of dirt, uprooted, molded and hard-coated with polyurea. The work currently lives in cement supports, awaiting erection following the completion of the sidewalks outside, when this evidence of deracination will be heisted into the air, its flag end planted in the ground. Collectively, the scale and siting of these works established a phenomenological dimension to the exhibition, that made me aware of my own physicality in the space.

This feeling was enhanced by the integration of sculpture with photography upstairs. Cameron Kerr’s table of _Untitled_ abstract interpretations of North Vancouver overpasses lent a tangible physicality to Babak Golkar’s photographs documenting his artist friends’ works, on loan, in his North Shore home (including one by Kerr). Their projects seem to emphasize the role of artist as an autonomous transgressor – of ideas working themselves out, things being made here through artistic conversations. In these galleries, discoveries were made by the inclusion of weavings by Xwemilut, Katxinamet, Melvin Williams and Sesemiya in this dialogue. These works – by artists from the Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish nations, having reserved land in the area – added another material layer, presented not so much as a parallel language to conceptual art, but a moment to sound voices as critical inclusion. One feels a distance between the work of these artists and the conceptual projects nearby; I wondered if this is because their original purpose is in their potential communal (often ceremonial) use. Here, they are presented as representational artifact.

These divergent perspectives of traditional and contemporary approaches seemed to convene in the work of Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, which offers here a way of coming together. Hill is a sophisticated sculptor with a lot to say, which she manages to do with very little. In her _Four Effigies For the End of Property: Preempt, Improve, The Highest and Best Use, Be Long_ (2017), she gathers the discards of the urban environment and harnesses them in sculpture. The nearly usable _Preempt_, whose hose continuously flows back into itself through a series of gradated funnels, or the latent potential of _Improve_, a woven fence of found fences, hold onto an aspect of their use value. Assembled as linguistic systems of failure, there is a practicality to the reuse and re-evaluation of material; it is presented as myth and still somehow feels available to use, for daily life. Hill’s _Effigies_ succeed in realizing resonate visual models through which to consider our shared materiality.

[^1]: Michael Turner, “Lucy Lippard”, (March 7, 2016), [https://mtwebsit.blogspot.com/2016/03/lucy-lippard.html](“https://mtwebsit.blogspot.com/2016/03/lucy-lippard.html”)
[^2]: North Vancouver is a city on the north side of the Burrard Inlet, established in the 1880s; its primary economies today are shipping, chemical production and film.
[^3]: The work was commissioned for the Canada Pavilion at the 1970 Osaka World Fair.

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Lee Plested reviews “N. Vancouver”, the inaugural exhibition at the new Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver that was on view November 18, 2017-April 29, 2018\. 

N. Vancouver

**Gloria Hickey** is an independent curator and writer living in St. John’s, NL. In 2017, Routledge published her book chapter on curatorial strategies in _Exhibiting Craft and Design: Transgressing the White Cube Paradigm_.

At the tail end of a year characterized by personal and political anxiety, Logan MacDonald’s _The Lay of the Land_ offers a surprisingly gentle investigation of the harsh realities of cultural erasure and assimilation. MacDonald self-identifies as a queer visual artist with settler/Mi’kmaq ancestry and the body of work in the exhibition reflects two years of recent travels to Indigenous communities across the country. In _The Lay of the Land_, curator Jason Penney supplemented MacDonald’s work with a selection of videos ranging from the sauciness of Kent Monkman to the poignancy of Erika MacPherson and Katherena Vermette (_This River_) to the DIY zeal of Thirza Cuthand and others. Taken together, the project accomplished its intent to tackle “the complex politics of how media characterization, Canadian history and institutional prejudice have impacted the Indigenous experience.”

The concept of “land” was the uniting theme of MacDonald’s sculptures, drawings, paintings and mixed-media works. In 2015, he set out to look at the manipulated landscapes of earthworks, structures and signage created in Indigenous communities and how they established property against government and corporate encroachment. Images of landscapes, regardless of the employed media, are most often depictions of the relationship of the viewer-artist with the landscape. Perspective, for example, is an indicator of whether the artist holds nature at arm’s length or in a more intimate stance. What evolves out of MacDonald’s work is an investigation of his own shifting perspective. The tone is at times probing or playful but is consistently lyrical.

The title of the exhibition, _The Lay of the Land_, suggests a process of determining orientation and identification. “What is the situation?” MacDonald seems to ask as he visits Indigenous communities from coast to coast. He presents the viewer with the general appearance of the landscape and we join him in trying to figure out the situation. In a pair of impressive graphite drawings, we are struck with an inextricable duality rather than an either/or situation. _Monumental_ depicts the conquering hero on horseback memorialized in an urban park, while _Wolverine_ shows an indigenous hunter with a carcass. These are large, subtle drawings built up with shadow-like strokes, like the impressions of a memory or whisper. This is a reflective process rather than a shrill or long-simmering statement of anger. What might be characterized as a pleasing formalism rather than a hard-hitting graphic style is in reality more seduction than submission.

The exhibition is dominated by the presence of large (4 or 6 × 8 feet) photo installations of landscapes that are alternately wall mounted or suspended from lumber trestles that evoke A-frame structures with their three-dimensionality. The images are built up of 8.5 × 11 sheets in a grid – a device present in many of the works, be they photographic installations or as more forceful, drawn interventions on historical reproductions. Here, the grid is reminiscent of the longitude and latitude of mapping and other colonial forms of commodifying the land. MacDonald confirms this with the occasional title like _Parceled Land (Kwanlin Dün)_, which offers a quiet view of a sand dune meeting the edge of a forest. Only a patch of erosion on the dune suggests possible human presence.

Coast to Coast, a photo installation, is shown horizontally on the floor, slightly raised by its supporting lumber mounted into concrete foundation blocks. It presents three images from Newfoundland and Labrador, Ontario and Yukon-Kuskokwim, respectively. The central image of a graffiti-sprayed patch of concrete proclaiming “Native Land” is flanked by images of juniper brush (NL) and birch forest (YK). The strident voice of the graffiti is then carried forward in a series of acrylic paintings. _No Access Without Consent_ portrays a protest sign of a skull image on a “cross bones” of a leaking pipeline. It is stark but a shadow silhouette suggests the artist’s presence with an arm upraised in a gesture that conjures both rebellion and selfie. Status Update shows a hand holding MacDonald’s status card. There is an eerie resonance between the grid in the other works and the bar code in this self-portrait – as if to say, first they parcel off your land and then they put you behind the bars of a UPC.

The exhibition is accompanied by a short text by Camille Georgeson-Usher, a Coast Salish/Sahtu Dene/Scottish scholar, artist and writer from Galiano Island, BC In it, she offers a personal reflection on her struggle with Indigeneity and on the nature of intentionality and home. She acutely observes, “Indigeneity takes consistent intention, care and work.” Georgeson-Usher concludes with a question, “How do we form ourselves and our homes on someone else’s land?”

As mentioned earlier, a selection of videos curated by Jason Penney complements MacDonald’s work and extends the discussion of cultural erasure and appropriation with pointed views from four diverse artists. In _The Lay of the Land_, text and video come together around MacDonald’s thoughtful investigations of the land in this country, to form a complex but cohesive exhibition that made this European Canadian ask herself, “what grounds you?”

_The Lay of the Land_ is scheduled to travel to aceartinc in Winnipeg from March 29–May 4, 2018.

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Gloria Hickey reviews Logan MacDonald’s exhibition “Lay of the Land” that was on view at Eastern Edge Gallery in St. John’s from October 27-December 8 2017.

Logan MacDonald: Lay of the Land

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

The 2017 edition of Day With(out) Art was the 28th annual Visual AIDS event marking World AIDS Day. Over the course of the last three decades, the New York-based organization has used art to raise AIDS awareness. Initially, they marked the public crisis of HIV/AIDS with the temporary disappearance of meaningful works from museum collections. Day Without Art was meant to symbolize the death of many people in the New York community. But as the cultural community dealing with HIV/AIDS changes and transforms, the understanding of Day Without Art has changed as well: in 1998, for its tenth anniversary, Day Without Art became Day With(out) Art, and the focus shifted from those lost to the enduring community of artists living and dealing with HIV/AIDS.

The most recent showcase built upon the 2014 theme, _ALTERNATE ENDINGS_. This focus on continuation and reiteration stressed the dire need to remember and recognize HIV/AIDS as an epidemic that is persistent, despite numerous treatments that manage it effectively and new PrEP (Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis) strategies. Advances in HIV treatments over the past 20 years have lessened the impact of grief, have eased somewhat the death toll in North America, but it still must be acknowledged that whiteness and wealth often dominate the ability of those who have contracted HIV to receive adequate care and management.

The program for _ALTERNATE ENDINGS, RADICAL BEGINNINGS_ – curated by Erin Christovale and Vivian Crockett – reflected this reality with biting commentary and a desire to overwrite past and present through art. Visual AIDS’ mandate for this Day With(out) Art explicitly focused on the work of Black artists living and contextualizing the ongoing health crisis in the United States. It is in this particular vein that Christovale and Crockett’s work is not only timely, but also recognizable as part of an effort that asserts and repositions the work of Black artists affected by HIV/ AIDS. Christovale and Crockett commissioned seven new short video works from artists Mykki Blanco, Cheryl Dunye & Ellen Spiro, Reina Gossett, Thomas Allen Harris, Kia LaBeija, Tiona Nekkia McClodden and Brontez Purnell. The resulting program was screened on World AIDS Day by more than 100 partnering institutions around the world. In their works, the artists performed and employed multiplicity, remixes and surrealisms, seemingly with a profound desire to dig into radical reminiscences of the past and possible new beginnings that are only now being acknowledged by institutional mainstream audiences.

Reina Gossett’s work, _Atlantic is a Sea of Bones_ (2017), begins in a biopic style, but the film soon shifts to capture a past and present dream about Egyptt Labeija – her histories and self-realization, hauntings and desires coalesce into a dark palimpsest of what could be the AIDS crisis in the ’80s alongside the current criminalization of people living with AIDS. Spirits collide with images to reimagine pasts, alter egos and strategies of self-actualization.

Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s greyscale _The Labyrinth 1.0_ (2017) is an elegy to Brad Johnson and part of her trilogy dedicated to Black gay men producing art at the height of the American epidemic. McClodden documents a part of gay life in the United States that led to the moral and epidemiological aspects of the crisis following the discovery that HIV was transmitted sexually: tea rooms and bathhouses. Using a mix of racialized and explicit poetry, with the analogue workings of video as material, McClodden’s work is a trip back to the era of Johnson’s life and death, tracing the trajectory of the sexuality of the masculine Black body.

Other works in the program similarly re-work or remix past work, conversations and materials. Cheryl Dunye and Ellen Spiro’s _DiAna’s Hair Ego Remix_ (2017) references Spiro’s 1989 work _DiAna’s Hair Ego_. Travelling to South Carolina, Cheryl – the head investigator – enters the long-standing hair salon of DiAna, a veteran and self-styled HIV/AIDS activist. Dunye and Spiro intersplice old footage with new conversations under the hair dryers. And Thomas Allen Harris’ _About Face: The Evolution of a Black Producer_ (2017) uses his personal archive from his early days as a producer working at the height of the American AIDS epidemic in New York. The short film uses humour and chronology to demonstrate his progression from novice Black gay producer in New York to veteran artist working on his own path in visual arts and filmmaking. In Kia Labeija’s _Goodnight Kia_ (2017), the artist repurposes her family’s archival footage from a record of the past into transformative material through which she can grapple with personal loss, with her childhood recorded on camera.

Brontez Purnell’s _100 Boyfriends Mixtape (The Demo)_ from 2017 is part of a longer, ongoing oeuvre developed from a dance piece at Counterpulse in 2013\. This black-and-white “demo” is anchored in the ’90s’ New Queer Cinema’s interest in DIY, lo-fi, low-budget film and video work (see _Go Fish_ and _The Watermelon Woman_ for a sister aesthetic). The entire film is shot in a bathtub while Purnell’s character DeShawn is shrink-fitting the jeans he’s just shoplifted and talking on the phone. The monologue is an index of ex-boyfriends whose spirits are long dead, even as their ghost bodies walk the streets. If the emphasis on past, present and future in the 2017 Day With(out) Art program emphasizes long duration, Mykki Blanco’s _Stones and Water Weight_ (2017) appropriately explores the concepts of endurance and appearance as coterminous but also profoundly disjointed. In this performance, he lays conventionally gendered slips and frocks on a rocky foreground, and then proceeds to lift and hold a large rock for an extended duration. Blanco’s attempt to test and record his physical presence imagines representational role models of HIV\+ people working through quotidian struggles and health obstacles, set against outward projections of wellness, fitness and self-advocacy.

The work for 2017’s iteration of Day With(out) Art takes the material archive and mines it for resistance and ruptures; through it, we can trace a history of AIDS art and activism that has been largely out of public view. In the U.S., African Americans are reporting a higher incidence of HIV and this is also reflected in Canada – marginalized populations across borders are affected more than white counterparts. Indigenous communities are also experiencing HIV at a rate greater than white communities, and as Lindsay Nixon noted recently, an entire generation of Indigenous artists was lost to HIV. Although we understand this generally, the narrative given through accessible media doesn’t give depth to the lived realities of marginalized communities dealing with HIV, nor to the artworks created from these stories.

The commonalities between experiences of people living with HIV/AIDS across national lines becomes clear when class, race and gender are counted. Artists in Canada living with HIV are producing works that riff along similar lines as those in the States, with an ongoing interest in the archive, whether it’s in the online group collaboration work that arose from Paul Lang’s _BigRedDice_ (2005); projets hybris’ second work documenting the complex relationships to the HIV/AIDS crisis in Québec, _(MORE) PROPOSITIONS FOR THE AIDS MUSEUM_ (2017); or the AIDS ACTION NOW affinity group art initiative _Poster/VIRUS_ (2011–2016). These projects all put the past in dialogue with the present. Rather than consigning HIV/AIDS art and activism to a historical and ghostly past of (white) bodies represented in absentia or memorial, the work happening in the contemporary moment brings together the growing – _and living_ – archive of performance and media practices together to confront the shifting place of HIV/AIDS discourse in art.

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Illness

D.J. Fraser reviews “ALTERNATE ENDINGS, RADICAL BEGINNINGS” presented by Visual AIDS for the 28th edition of their annual video art program “Day With(out) Art” which took place on December 1, 2017.

Day With(out) Art 2017: ALTERNATE ENDINGS, RADICAL BEGINNINGS

**Jac Renée Bruneau** is a writer, editor and organizer based in Toronto. She was formerly the editor of _C Magazine_.

k.g. Guttman was a student when she first met her friend Nancy Ring. Years later, in 2009, she asked the professor, art historian and writer the same seven questions every day for seven days. From their conversation emanates a complex, constellational rapport, surpassing the likes of even a strong professional mentorship (which itself is rare, particularly among women). They talk as if in past lives they’d taken long trips together, shared clothes, lovers, losses, and were kept awake at night by questions of a similar character.

Ring had cancer when they spoke and she passed away six months later. Guttman sat with the 120-page transcript for years before its release as _It’s like hammering into nothing when I speak it_ in late 2016.

Beyond Guttman’s interest in, first, Ring and second, the outcomes of replicated questioning in a concentrated period, the project feels like an effort to stock up on something before it’s gone. A framework to capture a cross-section of a woman, a life of the mind. It’s clear that the project – or more broadly, “art” – became an excuse to undertake something that otherwise might just have been too much to ask. Hence the lack of any specific, tangible end in these means. (Says Guttman: “Like when does this become anything but us, fucking spending time together.”) The dialogues were a pre-emptive defense against memory, with the wisdom that nothing moves grief along like the decomposition of details. The cooling embers of grief edge the deceased further out of those who outlive them, too near extinction.

_What questions does one ask at the end of a life_? Guttman asks Ring about having once said, “I have no reaction outside of language,” and about the folding and fluidity between life and teaching. She asks what things Ring returns to, and if that’s what she does with what she loves. There’s one question that involves a dictionary and another wherein a recording of Duchamp from 1968 is played. But at a certain point, The Questions become indistinguishable from whatever was borne of circumstance. Guttman and Ring routinely break the fourth wall. They veer into the meta, following suit with the project’s dubiousness about interviews. They’re playfully combative. They contradict themselves and take up the contradictions with earnest curiosity, as if they were sweet, cake-y little UFOs that had just floated in through the window.

Five days in, Ring says, “I think we are talking really, really personally.” Guttman responds saying that she doesn’t know how that happened; she remembers that Ring agreed to participate as long as she wouldn’t have to talk about herself. And then, as if reflecting on measures she took to respect that boundary, Guttman says, “My questions to you were about professionalism in a certain way.” While it’s not entirely untrue, this intention stationed at this point in the book, though well-meaning, is kind of charmingly null. They’re not trying to decide who is to blame, nor is Ring reprimanding Guttman for going back on her word. Rather, they seem to be marvelling together at the inverse question of my own: _How does one respond to questions at the end of one’s life_? The subjective, come hell or high water, is what’s at stake.

“Whether we are talking about ourselves or not, we are showing up in an intimate way, as much as we are showing up in an intellectual way… I don’t think that really happens in interviews,” Ring adds.

Furthermore, it’s Guttman’s decision to confront the fraught nature of her relationship to the resulting document– or, more broadly, the material leftovers of a life – that gives the book its conceptual heft. The book is not bound but instead is a folio of folios. Each day’s conversation is printed on 8.5 × 11-inch printer paper, laid out in a standard Q&A format, and tucked into a larger, folded paper of slightly heavier coloured stock. Five days in five shades of yellow. A yellow light makes people feel more comfortable than a white one does and, in many languages, words like “brilliant” and “bright” refer not only to a quality of light but also to an exceptional mind, grounded and sound. The two other days are two shades of grey: an overcast day, a colour without colour, a space between two things, a no-man’s-land, ashes. These seven yellow and grey folios rest in a larger folio of a yet heavier stock.

There’s something seductively unpolished about this book, its loose printer paper giving it an iterative quality, like one attempt in a realm of many. Guttman’s redactions are excessive. While the markings of each speaker’s turn are maintained throughout, the transcript drops off without warning. Blank tracts, a sentence, a paragraph, some paragraphs, or several pages long, omitted according to an esoteric criterion reserved for the bereaved.

There’s a tendency for writers who write about grief to decry the text _in_ the text, disavowing their own effort to force language through, just as they’re letting it be read. In Barthes’ _Mourning Diary_, wherein he writes about his mother’s death and his resulting condition, he writes, “I don’t want to talk about it, for fear of making literature out of it – or without being sure of not doing so – although as a matter of fact literature originates within these truths.” Although it’s a complete published work, this book is tenuous, like a case that can never feasibly be closed. Like a person who paces the room. It denies the primacy of a final draft.

The reader’s frustration and impatience with Guttman’s redactions are tuned precisely with the frustrations and impatience we have with our own memory, especially after a death. The omissions are so glaring, so deeply disruptive that it’s questionable sometimes whether this could even be called a process of sharing, of externalizing. Anne Carson, in _NOX_, a book-length eulogy for her brother, offers one translation of the Latin word _mutum_ that reads, “likes to show the truth by allowing it to be seen hiding.” This thoughtful contradiction is reflected in Guttman’s way of articulating the simultaneous speechlessness and need to speak that characterizes profound loss.

I give the last word to Ring, who says: “You know, I have these memories, I have very fragmentary memories of certain things, that I equate to bliss, but they are very evanescent, and if I put them into speech, the bubble would pop… you know, it’s like hammering into nothing when I speak it…”

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In this book review, Jaclyn Bruneau visits k.g. Guttman’s accumulative interview project with Nancy Ring entitled “It’s like hammering into nothing when I speak it” (2016).

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C Mag

Issue 137