Column

This text adopts the form of a Bongard problem, which is a kind of puzzle with two sides. In Bongard problems, the viewer is meant to decipher the singular difference between two sets of geometric forms. They have been used as a way to illustrate _meta-rational_ functioning, or the ability, cognitively, to move between systems and apprehend complex intersectional patterns instead of lapsing into either fundamentalism or nihilism. They have also been used as a primary training device in AI. My interest in Bongard problems emerged from my ongoing relationship to ideas of secular spirituality, meditation, Marxist-feminist discourse, non-hierarchical pedagogy and embodied abstraction.

In this context, in this contemporary art magazine, my only instruction to you, Dear Reader, is aspirational. Consider a wild imaginary in which the practices of artistic production, criticism, teaching and curation are ones of loving kindness, generative curiosity and radical surrender.

**References**  
• Excerpt of www.foundalis.com/res/invalBP.html  
• Luce Irigaray, “The Invisible of the Flesh,” _An Ethics of Sexual Difference_, trans. Carolyn Burke, Cornell University Press, 2014.  
• Pitch for the board game Zendo, produced by Looney Labs, [https://www.looneylabs.com/games/zendo](“www.looneylabs.com/games/zendo”)  
• Adaptation of Robert Kegan, _In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life_, Harvard University Press, 1994.  
• Definition of “retroflexion,” [dictionary.com](“dictionary.com”)  
• Excerpt of “peristalsis,” [Wikipedia.com](“Wikipedia.com”)  
• M. Tsakiris, A. Tajadura-Jimenez & M. Costantini (2011). “Just a heartbeat away from one’s body: interoceptive sensitivity predicts malleability of body representations.” _Proceedings of the Royal Society_, B. Biological Sciences. 278(1717):2470-6  
• Definition of “practice,” [oxforddictionaries.com](“oxforddictionaries.com”)  
• Excerpt of “skeuomorph,” [Wikipedia.com](“Wikipedia.com”)  
• Definition of “practice,” [oxforddictionaries.com](“oxforddictionaries.com”)  
• Definition of “curate,” [oxforddictionaries.com](“oxforddictionaries.com”)  
• A.C. Brown, “Biology of Sandy Beaches,” _Encyclopedia of Ocean Sciences_ (Second Edition), 2001.  
• Excerpt of www.foundalis.com/soc/whynomore- Bongard.html  
• Irigaray.  
• Kory Heath, Andrew Looney and Laurie Menke, Zendo, _Rulebook II: Going Deeper_, Looney Labs, 2003–2017.  
• Paul Klee, “Diagram: Wege des Naturstudiums,” _Staatliches Bauhaus 1919–1923_, Bauhaus Verlag, 1923.  
• [https://evolutioncounseling.com/retroflection-in-gestalt/](“https://evolutioncounseling.com/retroflection-in-gestalt/“)• Gary M. Yontef, _Awareness Dialogue & Process: Essays on Gestalt Therapy_. Gestalt Journal Press, 1993.  
• Excerpt of “interoceptive exposure,” <a href=“Wikipedia.com”>Wikipedia.com  
• Ibid.  
• Excerpt of “skeuomorph,” [Wikipedia.com](“Wikipedia.com”)  
• David Gordon White, _Yoga in Practice_, Princeton University Press, 2011  
• [https://news.artnet.com/market/auction-data-helen-molesworth-analysis-1255025](“https://news.artnet.com/market/auction-data-helen-molesworth-analysis-1255025”)

Writer

Games

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Spirituality

Philosophy

Collaboration

Conceptual

An experimental text on non-hierarchical pedagogy, theory and spirituality from artist Beth Stuart. It adopts the form of a Bongard Problem, a meta-rational puzzle in which the viewer is to deduce the rules of its game based on commonalities among its different sides.

On Writing: A Bongard Problem

Gabriela Aveiro-Ojeda is a Toronto-based artist working on _DON’T WAKE THE NIGHT_, a digital game about spirits and community, funded by the Ontario Arts Council and Toronto Arts Council. She tweets over at @babbygoth and runs @brujeriaatwerk, an art collective. Her latest works can be found at latinxmon.itch.io. In her free time, she volunteers as a co-director at Dames Making Games.

**Letting your creations fly**

At the forefront of my own creative pipeline, interactive fiction games serve as a vehicle for the presentation of a story. They make up the skeleton that holds all the components together and dictate how that story will grow and develop. If I think too closely about what “makes” something a game while developing one, it’s like setting an undefinable finish line for a project. One can contemplate and contextualize, something I do a lot myself, but at the end of the day I try to leave this question, what makes or what doesn’t make a game, for the post-mortem of a project in order to allow a creation to live, breathe and then die.

**Building a sustainable future for games**

Having been involved with the Toronto non-profit Dames Making Games as a co-director has taught me about sustainability and what exactly that means for video games as art and as commercial products, in an industry that seems to consume more than it prepares for longevity. A priority we take when preparing our curricula for workshops is to create a space that nurtures but also supports more marginalized populations (especially people of colour) who are at higher risk of being the targets of mistreatment and overwork in the game industry. To some, such a process may appear similar to something like radical self-care, but I see it as unearthing the potential for growth in which future generations can build off of a structure of sustainability. It wasn’t until my involvement in Dames Making Games that I took the link between how we play digital games and how we make them more seriously.

Consumption is something I think about almost every time I create something – I want the consumption of my art by marginalized individuals to result in the production of more art that can change the status quo. I initially began to develop more and more art that was attuned to my family’s stories related to _brujería_ (“witchcraft”) and Guaraní traditions not just because I wanted to tell an untold story, but because I also wanted to contribute to a future in which this kind of storytelling exists with great vitality. As well, in the medium of games – rife with colonialist mechanics (consuming, depleting, destroying) – I can use my stories to carve out a place where colonialism can be challenged and uprooted. When we rethink our interaction with games, we can also better understand what exactly we want to see done with games, and how we can project ourselves into that future.

**Delivering an impactful experience**

One of the concepts I struggle with in video games is the issue of time – both in creating and playing a game. In a world where pouring 80 to 100 hours of playing time into a single game is common, experiences that grace even under 50 hours seem like a godsend, not to mention that making games is even more of an arduous process. This again ties into consumption – while I have put over 100 hours into playing a game, and countless days making games, it is by no means something I like doing on a frequent basis. I also question games that force me to put in 80 hours just to finish the story, because at that point I feel I have overstayed my welcome in the game’s narrative – that I’ve remained there too long and I can’t exactly put my finger on how I got there in the first place. Of course, there can be exceptions to this rule but a long game feels like walking on an incredibly long tightrope – you’ll fall eventually. Some of the most important games I’ve encountered are much shorter experiences. These are games that are determined to tell you something immediately and as clearly as possible. Last year, I set aside some time to play _Thunderbird Strike_ by Elizabeth LaPensée, which I still think is the most important video game I made time for in 2017.

In _Thunderbird Strike_, a player takes on the role of the thunderbird from Anishinaabe stories, and they can choose to bring animals back to life or destroy pipelines that poison the land (an example of destruction in a context that challenges colonialism). _Thunderbird Strike_ shows what a powerful statement a smaller game can make with an action as simple as striking down pipelines with the electricity of the thunderbird. A game like this also ties in to themes of sustainability and the future we can build with games. Issues of colonization in games are prevalent in the very mechanics that are commonly used, which frequently encourage the player to continuously consume without much thought. While games don’t all have to challenge colonial consumption and attitudes, an overwhelming number of them ignore this issue entirely. I find myself more and more indifferent to games that involve exploration and looting of colonized cultures (series like _Tomb Raider_ and _Uncharted_ fall into this category) and don’t challenge themselves to rise above glorifying colonization and destruction. I often cannot bring myself to play games that enjoy themes of colonialism – mostly because I can spend that time exploring other games that provide a more fulfilling experience.

**Crafting a scene**

I recently had the chance to connect with gamemaker Jochi Araujo, who lives in Paraguay, where I was born and raised. He recommended another game I’m glad I made time for this year: _Jajoko Jakare Yrupe_ (in Guaraní, that roughly translates to “Let’s save _jakare yrupe_,” which is a precious aquatic plant often admired for its beauty and importance in nature due to its healing qualities). In this game, one plays a _jakare_ (“alligator”) who must protect the _yrupe_ from visitors trying to steal the plant. This particular game was inspired by events that transpired not long ago in Paraguay[^1] when waves of people stole and destroyed _jakare yrupe_. Again, we can confront destructive consumption through games in ways that challenge expectations.

**For further consideration**

It can be a struggle to work with video games, a medium in which colonialism is often not only ignored and never thoroughly addressed, but also used with implicit endorsement. However, there are still bright corners where those dominant narratives are shifting:

• \_Purity & Decay\_[^2] is a cybernoir game developed by Meagan Byrne and Tara Miller, two Indigenous game designers. It features an Indigenous cast and narrative, and plays out as a choose-your-own-adventure detective whodunit.

• For excellent articles and criticism of digital and video games, Dia Lacina[^3] writes about photography, grief and Indigenous representation in games, and mental health for Waypoint and Polygon (two editorial websites on games, their creators and gaming communities).

• Supporting your local arts and non-profit organizations is key, particularly producers of independent digital games. Groups like Dames Making Games support marginalized creators so they may thrive, and often need local support to keep that fire going.

If you’re inside the world of video games, look outside your circle – look to challenge the constraints and conventions of game design to address pressing issues. Let your creations live, breathe and then die.

[^1]: “Paraguay lagoon sees giant lily pads return.” BBC, January 9, 2018 [http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latinamerica-42620337](“http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latinamerica-42620337”)
[^2]: One can play _Purity & Decay_ at [https://byrneout.itch.io/purity-decay](“https://byrneout.itch.io/purity-decay”)
[^3]: Dia’s latest works can be found on Medium at [https://medium.com/@dialacina](“https://medium.com/@dialacina”) as well as at [https://www.waypoint.com/](“https://www.waypoint.com”) and [https://www.polygon.com](“https://www.polygon.com”)

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Storytelling

Technology

Indigenous

Co-director of the Toronto non-profit Dames Making Games, artist Gabriela Aveiro-Ojeda considers video games – their consumption and creation – as a form of play rife with colonialist mechanisms, but also as a medium of storytelling with potential to address colonialism and create new worlds. She shares examples of bright corners of video gaming where dominant narratives are shifting.

Inventory: Consumption

On the floor are three oversized cedar dice resting on a colourful blanket surrounded by people. The smooth, polished edges of each die invite touch. You feel the weight, perhaps lighter than you expected. Breathe the faint cedar aroma. Feel the grooves that define letters, words. The first die reads “I am,“ “We are“ and “They are,“ each repeated on two sides. The second die reads “fairly,“ “somewhat,“ “deeply,“ “so,“ “really“ and “not.“ Five sides of the third die read “sorry,“ and “tired of this“ on the sixth side.

A moderator explains that the dice will be rolled in sequence, and the participant will then read the words aloud as they come up. The third die completes the sentence and expresses an apology, or lack thereof. There is tension. Does the roll express how the player feels, or not? The game generates discussion about attitudes towards the Canadian government’s Official Apology (June 11, 2008) for its role in Indian Residential Schools. The dice may read: “I am so sorry,“ “We are not sorry,“ or “They are tired of this.“ The participant reflects aloud on the statement. Who is apologizing? Is it the individual, the Canadian public, the government, or the churches that ran the residential schools? What are they sorry for? How sincere are these apologies? How do we move towards conciliation? As players express their feelings on the apology, others are encouraged to join the discussion, contribute similar or conflicting opinions, and perhaps suggest personal and collective ways to move forward. 

Is _Apology Dice_ a game? I’m still not sure. Games combine pleasure with tension. _Apology Dice_ creates tension and a nervous sort of pleasure as participants share private thoughts and feelings, try things out, express themselves without having to be an authority. No one “wins“ _Apology Dice._

David Garneau (Métis) and I wanted, through a creative means, to generate informal conversations about everyone’s implication in the aggressive assimilation of Indigenous people, colonization, and the nature and limits of apology. I was personally moved to explore my understanding of the complexity of racism. As a young Chinese kid growing up in Calgary, I was ignorant about Indigenous people. I met my first “Indian“ classmate in Grade 6, and I’m pretty sure the first thing I asked him was, “Do you live in a teepee?“ My friends burst out laughing at me, and in retrospect I’m glad they knew better.

In high school Social Studies, we were taught that Plains Indian tribes such as the Blackfoot followed the buffalo herds, surrounded them with horses and ran them off cliffs. They used every part of the animal in creating housing, clothing, tools, crafts and ceremonial items. I don’t recall being told that there are 634 distinct First Nations in Northern Turtle Island, and that they are separate from Métis and Inuit Peoples. I don’t recall anything being said about what happened after European contact. Alliances were made between settlers and Indigenous peoples, treaties were signed and broken. Leaders such as John A. MacDonald concluded that the “Indian“ adult’s way of life and values were so oppositional to “Canadian“ ones that they could not be assimilated into broader society. However, children could be “saved“ if they were forcibly separated from their families, community and language. This is why the Residential Schools were created: to “kill the Indian in the child.“ In the prevailing climate, many members of the public and politicians of the time genuinely thought they were doing the right thing.

> “When the school is on the reserve the child lives with its parents, who are savages, and though he may learn to read and write, his habits and training and mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write. It has been strongly impressed upon myself, as head of the Department, that Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men.“

\- _John A. Macdonald, 1879_

Most reading this article now know this. Embarrassingly, I didn’t know this six years ago until friends and academic colleagues, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, helped fill in the gaps. I’ve since pursued my own research. I’m still meeting adults that have never heard of Indian Residential Schools. Some of them have an extremely, shall we say, narrow understanding of where the problems arose and why things still are the way they are. In the face of teen suicides and boil-water advisories on reserves, and an ever-growing body count of murders, it can be baffling and deeply frustrating to realize how much work there still is to do. How do we close a gap within education and understanding that stretches across both geographical boundaries and generations, especially when people are actively working to perpetuate these gaps? Perhaps we do it one person at a time—starting with ourselves.

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Government

Relational art

Participation

Text

Clement Yeh describes his collaborative artwork with David Garneau, _Apology Dice_ (2014-2018) – three dice which, when rolled, complete a sentence to express an apology or lack thereof, based on the language used in the Canadian government’s Official Apology (June 11, 2008) for its role in Indian Residential Schools.

Artefact: Apology Dice

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MOCA Toronto Sept

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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_.

Months ago, at our editorial advisory meeting, the idea for an issue on the theme of “games” came up in conversation and it spurred, among the group at the table, more enthusiasm than I could have predicted. As we talked, games seemed to hold under one word many of the issues and themes we’d been circling around – ideas of fantasy, futurity, participation, community and play. Games offered themselves as both finely tuned structures and as platforms for the destruction of existing structures. Dozens of projects, texts and artists’ names were put forth and in that two-hour conversation came the realization (for me, at least) of the ways in which an issue on games could move between communities, real and imagined worlds, pasts and futures.

Several of the texts in the issue look at artists using games as strategies for decolonization, and there could have been many more such artists featured. Games – to be very general here – are an ideal form for raising difficult subjects, in that they are by nature participatory and designed to be engaging, to hook you in. Mainstream games often inherently contain the language of colonization, whether it be in conquering, defeating, destructing or building new worlds. Artist and game designer Gabriela Aveiro-Ojeda – a co-director of the collective Dames Making Games – addresses the impetus to vanquish as an outdated standard of video games; she suggests new frameworks for evaluating games and details existing alternatives to expected game narratives, goals and conclusions. In her work _Unsettling Settlers: Intervention Game_, Golboo Amani riffs on the board game Settlers of Catan as a way of disrupting predominant conversations around settlement and land use. During her interview with Farah Yusuf in this issue, Amani discusses the development of the project and the ways in which she brings games, as sites of peer-produced knowledge and experience, into her broader socially-engaged art practice.

At the end of the issue, Clement Yeh reflects on _Apology Dice_, his collaborative project with David Garneau, which unfolds as a participatory dice game. Naturally, it is organized around chance, but in this case the seemingly simple act of rolling dice elicits responses suggestive of the Canadian government’s 2008 formal apology to Residential School survivors. The outcomes encourage participants to question whether these statements reflect their true feelings: “They are somewhat sorry;” “We are so tired of this;” “I am not sorry.” In his text, Yeh discusses the importance of engendering direct conversation as part of reconciliation efforts, acknowledging the still-widespread lack of information around Indigenous history in most parts of Canada.

Skawennati is well-known for her ongoing work with Second Life avatars and her creation of radical virtual worlds that layer Indigenous histories with imagined and possible futures, such as in the machinima _She Falls For Ages_, a sci-fi retelling of the Haudenosaunee creation story. Her work with avatars led her to make the triptych _Generations of Play_ – the issue’s Artist Project – in which she imagines three dolls: the corn-husk doll, the Barbie and herself as a Second Life avatar, all wearing the costume of xox, Skawennati’s long-standing avatar. Together they represent Indigenous pasts, presents and futures seen through the lens of play.

Artist Beth Stuart approached this issue’s On Writing column in the form of a Bongard problem – a kind of meta-rational puzzle in which items on the left side of the problem have something in common, as do items on the right, though the problems on each side are opposite. Whereas in most games the rules are predetermined, in a Bongard problem one must figure out what those rules are, what form the puzzle takes, to begin piecing together its content. Bethany Ides and Mitchell Akiyama’s text also derives its structure from games, with a theoretical, poetic narrative that weaves together art, gentrification and the neoliberal economy via a series of proposed games, players and actions. And in Maryse Larivière’s essay on Joyce Wieland, she begins by interviewing architect and close friend of Wieland’s, Phyllis Lambert, to propose the importance of role playing in Wieland’s work and the ways in which her role plays with three particular men offer a vital – and over-looked – way in to her practice and her politics.

Games can be sneakily powerful tools to facilitate unconventional, proactive confrontations with oppressive histories, uncertain futures and a fraught present. Each game can be thought of as an intricately crafted microcosm, designed to assess a particular facet of human behaviour. As seen in the issue, and in the enduring popularity of innumerable games circulating today, games offer the potential of imagining otherwise. In the best cases, they stimulate self-reflexivity about each player’s embodiment of their roles, both inside the game and out. This issue surprised me. To think through games in relation to visual art is to think through aesthetics, interactivity, social structures and representation on a plane that extends far beyond the usual limits of the “art world.” It’s exciting and I wish this issue could be twice the size.

I’ll end with a note on the collaborative nature of this issue, which is to acknowledge the important role of the editorial advisory committee in coming together around games. I’d also like to take this moment to welcome Jaclyn Bruneau as _C Magazine_’s new Editor and newest collaborator, as I shift into my next role as the magazine’s Editorial Director.

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Editor Kari Cwynar introduces the theme of “games” in this issue, as well as welcoming Jaclyn Bruneau as C Magazine’s new editor and collaborator as Kari takes on a new role as Editorial Director.

Editorial: Games

Feature

Jovana Stokic is a Belgrade-born, New York-based art historian, educator and curator. She is currently on the faculty of the MFA Art Practice program, SVA and NYU Steinhardt Department of Art and Art Professions.

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Curator and Art Historian Jovana Stokic gives an art historical recount of the work of Michael Portnoy, beginning with his “choreographed salon” titled “Strangergames” which was shown at MoMA PS1 in New York and moving into more contemporary projects. The works engage with games and play in unconventional ways and seek to re-imagine participatory and literary strategies.

Portnoy’s Game

Farah Yusuf is an independent curator and writer based in Toronto. She holds an MA in Experimental Digital Media from the University of Waterloo and a BFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice from OCAD University where she was the recipient of the Curatorial Practice Medal and Governor General’s Academic Medal.

Few people question the socio-political biases embedded in the games they play. And yet, because games are part of our popular media culture, they reflect and codify societal norms, often reinforcing problematic views in the guise of inconsequential play. Golboo Amani is a multi-disciplinary artist who situates part of her social-pedagogy practice on the ready-made site of a board game. Her work _Unsettling Settlers: Intervention_ directly challenges the colonial narrative of the popular board game Settlers of Catan by leveraging the game’s capacity to disseminate ideas about trade, capital and colonization experientially through simulations of various economic and political strategies (resource extraction, territory takeover, construction, theft, warfare). Amani’s “intervention pack” for the game includes new pieces, cards and rules that allow players to work through strategies of allyship through peer- produced aesthetic experiences that combine game play with critical reflection. 

For several years _Unsettling Settlers: Intervention_ was only circulated through “play test” sessions. Amani is now releasing an artist multiple of the intervention game, which I had the opportunity to preview when I met with the artist in Toronto to discuss its evolution. The aesthetics of the current design are a radical departure from previous versions of the intervention pack. “I wanted to create something that felt really new and fresh, but also really distinct, so when the game is being played on the board, we can identify the difference between the intervention pack and the base game,” Amani explains. Her motivation behind the new aesthetic is to subvert the underlying impetus behind the original game – to disrupt expectations and social patterns by making visible the narratives and conditioning that we, through socialization, come to accept as the “rules of the game.”

**Farah Yusuf:** Can you talk about why you decided to critique this particular game and why you chose to do it through the medium of a game?

**Golboo Amani:** I like to play games. Also, my practice focuses on pedagogy and the tools of knowledge production. I oftentimes use the tools of knowledge production as ready-made sites for interacting with folks. During my graduate studies, I started working with games and realized that games are already performative, they’re already pedagogical and they’re already social engagements. Games created a really fertile opportunity for people to slip into the conversations and actions of co-creation. And as someone coming from performance art, it became an easy way for people to slip into performance art – instead of creating that distance between audience and performer. I’ve always been interested in that slippage. Most of my work is about arriving in this place – maybe purposely or accidentally – where we’re making the work together.  
At that time I was also playing Settlers of Catan a lot. Immediately I was hooked; I was totally entertained and sucked into this game. The more I played the more I became aware of all of the oppressive narratives that play out on this board. Actually, the “Aha!” moment for me was when a player in a game that I was playing built a road that split the board in half – the Longest Road is a power play mechanism in the SoC game. By doing so, the player was able to own half of the board. It confined the rest of the players, it forced a particular kind of resource management and competitive engagement among the rest of the players that put the person who built the road in a position of power. Looking at the board after we had lost the game, I realized that the economy of this road was parallel to the economy of an apartheid wall. That’s when I realized that this game was actually a virtual space capable of simulating real-life scenarios. It begged the question, “Can we simulate an alternative narrative? Can we simulate a narrative of dissent or a narrative response to this extremely oversimplified, highly problematic narrative?”

**FY:** You describe _Unsettling the Settlers: Intervention_ as a slow artwork. To date, you have spent three years engaging diverse groups of participants in “play tests.” Can you explain what goes on during these sessions and how they relate to your social practice?

**GA:** I’ve been doing social practice for a while. I’m really interested in how people slip into social practice work and what level of investment and engagement they bring to that work. I’m trying to produce deeply invested social engagement, \[so\] I view my participants as co-creators. When it came to building this game, I knew that my voice couldn’t be the only voice included in this intervention. I approached this work as a social practice work from its inception, including audience participation in the research and development stages of this work.  
In the beginning, I hosted safe game spaces where BIPOC folk could come and play Settlers of Catan. I hosted about four and a half months of play sessions where folks – who had maybe never played Settlers of Catan – could come and play. We would talk critically about the existing game and discuss potential interventions or changes. I would ask things like, “What would you want to see brought into this game? What would you want taken out? What do you think are the most problematic components of Settlers of Catan?” It was always incredibly discursive. The feedback informed all changes and additions made to the base game. I would release the suggested changes in beta play test sessions where people would play the intervention game. Beta play tests would end in feedback sessions where people talked about their experience, what they would improve, include, exclude, whatever.

**FY:** You bring up an important point about game mechanics right there. What you’re doing is changing the rules of the game, thus directly affecting how people play the game. Can you speak to specific changes you’ve made to the game mechanics and how they set up the conditions to generate new perspectives?

**GA:** One of the first things that was addressed was the role of “Robber.” There were a few problems folks had with the Robber. The Robber is the only existing entity on the landscape prior to settlement in the base game. It gets manipulated by the settlers to block other players from gaining resources. Questions came up like, “What if the Robber wasn’t alone and passive? What if it was more active? What if this entity was a group as opposed to this outnumbered individual?” So, I replaced the Robber with a group of players called Allies. The Allies play a collaborative game on the same Settlers of Catan board. There are two things happening on the board simultaneously: the Settlers are playing their game with most of the original rules and mechanics; and the Allies are playing the intervention game, as a team, with the new rules and new mechanics. While the Settlers are still competing as individuals, the Allies play a collaborative game; they’re not playing against each other, they are able to trade amongst themselves, strategize with each other and work collaboratively to make moves on the board. In some cases, all Allies need to gather together on one board tile in order to enact more powerful mechanics in the game like building treaties and reclaiming land tiles.  
Another game mechanism introduced into the game was \[the concept of\] Crisis, both as a way to slow down the game and as a way to create opportunities for conflict and negotiation between players. It seemed unrealistic that the only obstacles Settlers faced in the base game were resource management and development issues with each other. Where were the environmental factors? The conditions of the landscape that are less predictable? And more crucial to survival? None of this gets addressed in the base game. The intervention pack forces players to address and negotiate solutions when entering uncharted land and being faced with, for example, a long winter, a spoiled crop or a plague.  
Indigenous communities have always contributed to the survival of settlers. They offered the first settlers knowledge and resources for the production of food and medicine and they provided the tools and materials required to survive on the land. To address this in the game, I produced a new set of resources to be collected throughout the game. The resources in the base game are very much non-renewable and extraction-based (ore, lumber, et cetera) so creating a set of renewable resources felt crucial to the survival of both Allies and Settlers. The new resources include agriculture, medicine, game (fur or meat) and navigation. The Crises that come up in the new game for both Settlers and Allies require elements from both sets of resources to produce a remedy. The Allies collect the new (renewable) resources, and the Settlers collect their own resources, but the Crises and Treaties are situations where both sets of resources are required and Settlers and Allies need to negotiate trades with each other throughout the game to play out these more powerful game mechanics.

**FY:** You talked about “slipping into performance” in the context of games. There’s a gaming concept that I find quite evocative called the “magic circle,” which essentially is a transformative space of play. The game board, arena and virtual world are all spaces where people can perform differently than they would in real life.

**GA:** I think there’s a huge value to virtual space because there’s less at stake for us in simulated space. We can really play out versions of ourselves or narratives that are newly imagined, experimental, potentially chaotic, even irrational. In that simulated space, we can see how certain decisions or characters might play out in a social sphere.

**FY:** And, it’s absolutely porous – the imagined barrier of that performative space.

**GA:** Totally! The emotional impact is very real. We don’t slip into games with complete emotional detachment. We usually slip into game spaces with all kinds of emotions that we’re probably not even aware of, that then play themselves out on the board game.

**FY:** I would imagine that builds empathy toward situations you’re not readily a part of, which would feed into the discursive aspect of the play test sessions you conducted.

**GA:** There were scenarios in our play test sessions where people who were very familiar with the original game would say things like, “as Settlers, we felt a huge disadvantage,” even when the game ended with Settlers in the lead in terms of points. They noted that the conventions of the base game privileged them to such an extent that any factors that slowed their progress or felt like resistance were interpreted as a complete disadvantage.

**FY:** _Unsettling the Settlers_ has attracted players from across the social spectrum. What are some of the reactions you’ve encountered from different groups?

**GA:** Gamers, educators and creatives have interacted with this game the most. For a very long time there were a lot of broken mechanics in the game (“broken” meaning that they just didn’t function in clean and concise ways). That was incredibly frustrating for gamers. They would say, “if you just fixed this,” or “you can change this and it would work.” But also in those discussions, there were folks who experienced this frustration as productive, as unsettling our expectations of game play and developing a new “puzzle to solve.” This idea of slowing things down, of frustrating folks who felt incredibly proficient in this space to produce something unexpected for them, was wonderfully productive.  
The second group of folks was educators. A lot of educators have specifically sought out this game as an educational tool, and to me that came as no surprise. That’s how I arrived to this work myself. They’re interested in this interactive narrative that is different from the dominant narrative of colonization as a teachable moment in classrooms. They are interested in the game as a tool that allows people to slip into conversations and play out alternatives in a live, simulated way.  
The creatives or cultural producers are often the ones that are more sensitive to the narrative of the game and its implications. Many have not played the base game and are challenged by the mechanics. It’s not easy to pick up all the rules of a game, let alone the rules of a game and its intervention – even if you’re familiar with gaming. That really slows down the progress of the game and forces people to help each other – people who might normally be competing with each other. In play test sessions with broken mechanics, players have had to let go of their drive to compete with each other in order to help each other just to get the game moving. This disrupts the expectation that competition is the only way to experience game space.

**FY:** Could you talk about your positionality as a non-white settler colonizer responding to the settler colonial narrative of Settlers of Catan?

**GA:** The truth is, it came out of a desire to be a better Canadian, in a way. This is the only homeland I know. My identity is tied to this place; I consider it my home. The more invested I become in this place, the more invested I become in being a better ally to the people of this place. I couldn’t invest in this place without investing in allyship. The whole process of building this game came out of wanting to have conversations with settlers who identify as allies. I felt like I needed to build this game for people like myself as a way to implicate ourselves, but also as a way to create a space for something else to happen, where we could practise something else and just see how it plays out on the economy, on the geography, on the social engagement of this space.  
**FY:** Are there any strategies that you have seen players employ that stand out to you?

**GA:** One of the things that I say in the rules is that everything is negotiable, unlike in Settlers of Catan where the rules of engagement are predefined. What ends up happening is that people become a lot more imaginative and inventive about what they are willing to negotiate in a situation. Players have even negotiated removing entire settlements from the board as part of their survival strategy. This game allows players to play with the rules of the game even after the rules are set out. I think, at least for me, that’s a very useful muscle to exercise.

issue-138-p20-26.pdf

Colonialism

Education

Farah Yusuf interviews artist Golboo Amani about her work “Unsettling Settlers: Intervention” which challenges the colonial narrative imposed in the board game Settlers of Catan. Amani’s strategies include an “intervention pack” for the game with add-on pieces and rules that invite the player to explore notions of allyship and critical reflection in their gameplay.

Unsettling Settlers: An Interview with Golboo Amani

issue-138-p26-34.pdf

Women

Film

History

Dialogue

Maryse Larivière interviews Phyllis Lambert, a longtime friend and collector of the works of Artist and Filmmaker Joyce Wieland. Through conversations and recollections, Larivière explores Wieland’s illustrious career and contributions to Canadian art, as well as offering an intimate lens into Wieland’s impact as a community member and friend.

“Phallus in Wonderland”: Role Plays with Joyce Wieland

Mitchell Akiyama is a Toronto-based scholar, composer and artist. His eclectic body of work includes writings about sound, metaphors and animals; scores for film and dance; and objects and installations that trouble received ideas about history, perception, and sensory experience. Akiyama is an Assistant Professor of Visual Studies in the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto.

Bethany Ides is an artist, writer and scholar who works with communities to design iterative forums for becoming ante-institutional. As Director of DOORS UNLIMITED, she organizes projects that foreground ad-hoc collaboration by combining tactics of theatre and festival with political thinking and planning in shared ritual practice. She is an Adjunct Associate Professor in Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute, and Faculty in Bard College’s Language & Thinking Program.

**A game**

I met a woman at a gallery opening who asked if I was an artist. I said, “Yes, and you are, too?” She answered that she used to be, but now she upkeeps short-term rentals and rental agreements in addition to a confident stance of willingness to invent new types of upkeep that will attract the sort of stranger who does not wish to be recognized as a Stranger. This takes up most of her time.

In this game, the players are divided into two teams: Guests and Hosts. The objective of the game is to streamline the ambitions of the other team while also pleasing the Dealer. The task of the Dealer is to keep track of all transactions. The task of the Hosts and the Guests is to also keep track of transactions. The Dealer comes built into the game. Some people call the game or game board “The Dealer” while other game enthusiasts will point to a part of their own body whenever they get the urge to play. They will point to their stomach or their open hands. This is part of the fun of the game, trying to figure out who or what or where the Dealer is – either philosophically or legally. For each player’s turn, a message is passed and it is always intercepted. Beginner versions of the game come with a standard Task Deck with cards marked “Market,” “Manage” or “Turnover”. Advanced players may make their own decks, though to compare them, they are remarkably the same. All cards must be touched by all players at all times. Experienced players may use external implements or other players to extend their reach. An experienced player playing a Host might even double back and host themselves while maintaining complete composure and believability, both inside and outside of the game.

The objective of the game is to become indistinguishable either from the Dealer or the rules.

Another game: A sentimental object is passed around in secret from player to player. Nobody knows whose object it is, to whom this object is most particularly valuable. Some fake passing it in a rough manner to test the other players’ composure, to see who winces in worry. Someone guesses where the object is. Someone guesses whose it is, guesses why it is precious while closely monitoring the vulnerability and sympathy levels of other players. Someone else inspects the condition of the object to assess what damage has occurred in the passing transaction, what traces of anxious or exuberant handling have been left visible. The objective of the game is to be able to become expert in identifying the present status of the object at any moment while also appearing to not be present oneself.

**A thrill**

Someone asks if this really is a game. Leisure ought to feel sudden, outside of time.

Anticipating the desires of others can feel wildly proliferative and veering, like seduction. An activity like this is most satisfying when the initiator’s own needs are already sated, so that any goods or services exchanged feel more like spoils. The pleasure of the seizure comes because a certain touch performed upon a thing promises to be subsumed into the performance of the beneficiary. This remains the case whether the touch is performed by a person imbuing the thing with personality, or by a machine conferring its own rather untouchable quality. It is pleasurable to imagine an other filling one’s own space, touching all of one’s things and placing proxy things in their places that perhaps _no one has touched_ to confuse the difference.

A thrill-seeker reaches almost peak dizziness anticipating the desires of another while anticipating the subsequent desires those desires might trigger in oneself, getting a shiver of alarm losing balance, nearly overcome, and getting to wonder, a little crazed, whether either party will ever sleep again.

A website called Afford Anything suggests objects to ease the dizziness. Artificial orchids will please others in photos. They will please others upon arrival. Others will recall their experience with the orchids as one of having been pleased, and later long for that feeling to return, even restlessly.

In order to make a game of anything, one imagines controlling a proxy object while hiding and monitoring and accounting for the damage incurred to the other, real object – whichever object one is actually most vulnerable to. In this way, gamification delays grief. The game insists that it operates within its own temporal register, impervious to the one that ages us. A player keeps one’s head in the game by resisting emotional responses to actions and events that may have devastatingly rearranged resources.

**A good player**

Roger Caillois uses the Latin Alea to refer a mode of play that “signifies and reveals the favor of destiny.” These sorts of games require passivity, surrender. A player need not be practised, studied, qualified or even patient – in fact such players may fare worse in games of Alea due to the anxiety such involvement would likely provoke. Alea “tends rather to abolish natural or acquired individual differences, so that all can be placed on an absolutely equal footing to await the blind verdict of chance.” It is not so much a play of losing control, as when boarding a roller coaster, as having never been subject to it. It is to play object.

Caillois’ close friend and colleague Georges Bataille, however, reported torment and exhaustion incurred by the suspension of anguish required in order to play thusly. “The human mind is set up to take no account of chance, except insofar as the calculations that eliminate chance allow you to forget it: that is, not take it into account.” Bataille instead lays claim to a fantasy of his own body that reveals “the nakedness of chance – which in the last resort is definitive – is obscene and disgusting: in short, divine.” The contours of such play so cruelly mimic those wave patterns charted by scholars of fascination and depression.

**The accident formalizes the rule**  
Common law doctrine of _infra hospitium_ mandates that an innkeeper is liable for loss or damage to the property of a guest, barring inevitable, “natural” events. This liability takes effect the moment a stranger’s goods appear on the premises.

Unfamiliar and disoriented, a Guest is considered particularly vulnerable to the “danger of plunder.” Were a local thief to be in collusion with a Host, to whom could the stranger turn to be believed? So acute is the risk to private possessions out of place – and to a Guest’s sense of safety being violated – that the standard presumption of innocence typically structuring Anglo-American law has been historically inverted for hosts intending to be Hosts.

A Host may not be considered responsible for the property of one who never intended to be a Guest. But, then, isn’t it always a mistake to assume one can meaningfully identify who is hosting? Context being relative, how could it be clear in which direction either risk or responsibility is flowing? Michel Serres observed that, depending on one’s position in the signal chain, any player could be construed as a parasite: “It might be dangerous not to decide who is the host and who is the guest, who gives and who receives, who is the parasite and who is the table d’hôte, who has the gift and who has the loss, and where hostility begins within hospitality.” And yet it is this very chaos – this very misrecognition of hostility and hospitality – it is this noise that allows for something new, something different, for _difference_ itself to arise.

The phone vibrates out various requests in quick succession: recommendations for local food, beautiful views, other rentals, other cultures. If the signal interrupts the noise, the character of both sounds are mutually brought into question. “The noise is the end of a system and the formation of a new one.”

**A buyer**

There is a voice on the telephone that is garbled – a different kind of garbled from what used to pass as static, the sound of so many generations of telephony having processed the inadequacies of their progenitors. And yet, the receiver of the message does not interpret this present message as meaning _nothing_. Rather she intuits that however nonsensical the message sounds, it _feels_ familiar. It sounds so much like something everyone has been trying to say or hear through.

**Risk**

Generosity will always overwhelm a network; every transmission necessarily requires a limiting, a reduction in the richness of the offering from sender to receiver. Call it compression, encoding, translation, et cetera – the thought is jammed into language in order to be spoken, a song is striated into slivers of binary code in order to be streamed. There is profit to be made at every stage in the pruning down of the real.

An earlier version of a similar game imagines a group of telephone engineers each holding a mouthpiece and wagering how much clarity can be forfeited before the speaker’s voice is not recognized. Each player, allocated their own channel, together make up the Telephone System. The signal is so streamy, the fidelity so faithful; it’s hard not to imagine that this voice still belongs to _that_ body. As the rounds of play progress, individual bodies begin to recede, to be distanced out, then another, then another. As more players join, channels become scarcer, their capacity more squeezed. The objective is to flood the system with messages in excess of anything that could reasonably be comprehended or assimilated so that the bodies need not feel so bodied anymore.

The technological infrastructure developed in service of the telephonic was always too capacious, historians would later observe, too generous to not be parcelled into more profitable tranches: “…from the standpoint of perception (and more specifically, intelligibility), the phone system produces a form of surplus value. It produces more sound than its users’ ears need to hear.” Several slim signals can shimmy down a tube, tinny to be sure, but the voice’s loss is corporate gain. Developments in perceptual coding give way to further editions and adaptations; ridding the message of redundancies in order to make relay more profitable as well as adaptable.

**Economical phrasing**

Another game: pretend we’re at an art opening. You are going to tell me something and I am going to repeat it to someone else. You say something about the time it takes to get an idea, about “the slow work of taming the unknown” before “the unease \[gradually\] fades away.” You are just in town for a conference so in a heady mood. You describe having entered an unfamiliar room last night with no one else in it. There was an electronic lock outside the door. Inside, the place smelled fresh; there was a side table next to a freshly made bed. On a shelf above the kitchen sink, there were orchids that, upon further inspection, you realized were fake. The shower curtain liner crinkled like no one had ever showered with it before, but in a drawer you found a small handful of transit stubs and various receipts, even a little of the lint that must have derived from the same pocket as these documents. It occurs to you that your environs, in their resistance to annunciate any form of particularly, are telling you nothing, but telling it to you so blaringly that your own chamber feels resonant with its noise.

I’m struck by your story. It reminds me of something Anne Dufourmantelle wrote about being a guest, about “the fear provoked by our incursion into an unknown place whose strangeness freezes us before we get used to it.” How it made me wonder what happens next, after the acclimation. I try to remember the passage as she wrote it, in the way that she framed it, but I can only recall how it made me feel the moment I read it, so I approximate a hybrid of the two and say: “to sense strangeness is a kind of paralysis, an inability to sense what’s present.” My sentence seems fuzzy to you. You ask what I mean. “Consider a telephone,” I say, “how you might hear carrier leakage on the line and complain of interference in the exchange between you and your loved one, but inasmuch as the mediating device frames the integrity of the exchange, it is all part of the same urge.” Later, you message me from your Airbnb pretending to be someone else: “Because I found this phone in the gallery and yours was the most recent contact…”

**Dislocation**

A room that nothing happens in. A room that replenishes indefinitely.

A child learning Monopoly is told that four houses equal one hotel. Then, later at bedtime asks: “But how many hotels are in this house?”

In the middle of the night, I lay awake and wonder: How many under-used assets do I wash away in the shower if I run out of non-soap cleanser and am forced to use the regular?

**A platform**

To “jaunt” is to make a motion that is propulsive, even if it is planned; it does not drag or creep. Similarly, hops or skips, while characteristically uneven, are perfectly adequate methods for covering a short distance, particularly if one is travelling for pleasure.

I met a man who used to be an artist but is now the purveyor of a global hospitality brand liable only indirectly to non-partner providers and users who both separately and together assume the majority risk while accruing value for the brand and wealth for the man. He wistfully recalled to me the moment when it had suddenly become very difficult for him to discern the parameters of the game he’d been engrossed in – blissfully or wistfully. What distinguished playfulness from not-playfulness, he mused. Leaning in, he described the vaults and jolts, the wild veers of his wondering and his career. If he heard a breathless gasp, he said, then he knew it was the sound of desire. But couldn’t it also be shock or dismay?, I interjected, unheard. As he spoke, he used the pronoun “we,” which struck me as a way of explaining his own total dedication to game play, of total immersion. The market mandates that we stay loose, he continued. But also ready. A practised passivity to whatever jostling forces might occasion fortune. It would be silly – “unrealistic”– to operate any other way. We’re not in the business of home, we’re not in the business of space, we’re in the business of _trips!_

It struck me that a unit so small as a trip is by contrast quite manageable compared to most matters of uncertainty. A trip’s disorientation is decidedly temporary. A trip’s length more like a cut than a gash. But bewilderment-by-a-thousand-cuts – or the misery of perpetual uprootedness parcelled in so many packets of moments… I burst: “But we must prevent \[such dilution\] _in order to that it should_ be intolerable!”

**Speculation**

A site collects pictures and profiles of properties in such overabundance that a visitor to the site registers a complimentary disposition of internalized scarcity. Existing everywhere, the site presents no new risks from a legal perspective, only new parties. So that these parties function duly within the perceived network civilly – cheerfully adjusting pricing, purchasing wider-angled lenses to manufacture a heightened promise of spaciousness – their communication must be limited to as small a unit of conveyance possible. Within this network, a message is most viable that imparts the minimal amount of content. The Guest should not stress the Host by necessitating safe care for packages that would not be mistakable for the product being produced.

Surveying the landscape, one sees the intersections of phone lines built where people once haggled, where others were dispossessed. Even if it’s true that the content of a medium is always another, earlier medium, materially it’s always been the other way around. The internet is contained in the telephonic and televisual infrastructure that was staked along the rail paths that were formed by foot traffic. So as these pricing schemes, targeted advertising and filtered photos migrate through channels that are themselves just the ruts left by earlier forms of infrastructure, they corrode the very container that makes content feasible.

**A seller**

A patient of D.W. Winnicott is reported to have asked him once during an early session if she dressed too much like a child. “In other words,” he writes, “she was very near to recognizing that she has to dress for this child as well as for her middle-aged self.” It is a similar mindset one must maintain whenever one sleeps in a spot that someone else might instead sleep in more profitably.

**Efficiency as super-efficiency**

There is a sense in which the reorganization of perception, of encoded sensation, of aesthetics can feel like a requirement for transmission itself: an imperative to harmonize one’s content. To bring the contents of one’s home into accordance with a home slightly less attainable, just slightly off from this one. Beige as the sound of future fungibility; neutral walls and granite countertops that bespeak a pre-flipped context of the always about-to-be-satisfied; all in hum.

I met a woman in my apartment who was renting out her side of the sofa that I had rented her while she upkept my side so that I could save sleep, spend more time reading books.

**Iffy transactions**

I know a game called Telephone or Broken Telephone or Whisper-Down-the-Lane. It is a game for playing through the impossibility of a loved object maintaining its integrity, of remaining recognizable to itself after having been processed and repurposed by an attentiveness both wholly consumed and wholly consuming; dislocated, neither here nor there; experienced only as perpetual possibility. Like the money Marcel Mauss claims the Fijians treated “like dolls” – oiled, polished and cherished in part for the charge they carried, for being constantly in and out of possession – the message passes between players in a series of small, very intimate transactions. In the moment of exchange, the carriers must lean close, attempt to close the circuit, secure the transfer. In the length of a breath, the trip is complete, unfathomably, inevitably.

**Reserves**

A player replaces a broken telephone with a new one that promises to be less likely to break. The new phone cares for the quality and safe-assuredness of all messages exchanged by its users by treating them as if they were its own.

Who will authenticate the message whose origin is unknown when everyone’s signal is wandering?

**An invitation**

To inner picture, crystalline, the flint of initiation of reciprocity: “an infinite extension of perspective and possible relations of perspectives: ‘as the horizon when you are moving can oppose the horizon inside.’”

To inner picture a pocket, the inside of your pocket, your good ear. How there is a message softly embedded there that has been touched; it is about touching and has a sibilant fluency to it; it is delicate.

To inner picture a refusal to authenticate the message.

A thatch of so many invitations that cannot be parsed or otherwise broken into parts that would be independently valuable or useful.

A thousand roles and plots, routes and ruts, inferentially activating rehabituated alliances.

issue-138-p38-44.pdf

Themes of communication, art gallery/institutional experience and navigation, and re-imagination of the social order of art institutions are explored in this experimental text.

Lossy Relay

lg_138

Editor

Designer

Publisher

Artist Project

Skawennati makes art that addresses history, the future and change. Her new media projects are included in both public and private collections and have been presented in major exhibitions such as On Desire at the B3 Biennale of the Moving Image in Frankfurt, Germany; Now? NOW! at Denver’s Biennial of the Americas; and Looking Forward (L’Avenir) at the Montreal Biennale.

Born in Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Territory, Skawennati holds a BFA from Concordia University in Montreal, where she is based. She is Co-Director of Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC), a research network of artists and academics who investigate and create Indigenous virtual environments. Their Skins workshops in Aboriginal Storytelling and Experimental Digital Media are aimed at empowering youth. In 2015 AbTeC launched IIF, the Initiative for Indigenous Futures.

For years I’ve had a fascination with two specific types of dolls, the Barbie and the corn-husk doll. While the popular 11-and-a-half-inch fashion doll needs little explanation, the corn-husk doll may require a word or two. Once a toy for Iroquois children (and, certainly many other Indigenous nations, as I’ve seen examples of them from the Navajos and the Aztecs), these little human-shaped figures assembled with dried corn husks are nowadays usually not made as playthings, but as decorative figurines. While the oldest examples had either no clothes, or wore garments made from corn husk too, as time progressed, the dolls’ outfits began to mimic real human beings’ clothing in shape and material.

Today, the most sought-after Iroquois corn-husk dolls are dressed in highly detailed miniature traditional regalia, adorned with tiny, gorgeous beads. There are also legends of the corn-husk dolls, the most well-known of which explains why the corn-husk doll never has a face (a consequence of its vanity!).

In _Generations of Play_, a triptych, I add a third “doll”: my avatar. Each are dressed alike, and each, like the traditional corn-husk doll, have no face. _Generations of Play_ draws a link between the corn-husk doll, the Barbie, and the avatar, all playthings that allow us to imagine ourselves in other bodies, with other abilities and limitations. I think about it as, “What my ancestors played with; what I played with; and what my descendants will play with.” This piece helps to illustrate that timeline I’ve been imagining, the one that stretches from the deep past to the far future, with Indigenous people alive and kicking along its entire length. 

— Skawennati

Artist

issue-138-p34-38.pdf

Internet

Skawennati, Montréal-based Kanien’kehá:ka multimedia artist, describes her fascination with two specific types of dolls, the Barbie and the corn-husk doll. The dolls are representative of what she played with and what her ancestors played with, respectively. In the featured triptych, _Generations of Play_, Skawennati presents photographs of the two dolls and a third “doll”: her Second Life avatar, that with which she imagines future generations will play. 

Generations of Play

Review

At the beginning of the 1994 documentary _Hoop Dreams_, William Gates and Arthur Agee, two promising young basketball players from poor Chicago neighbourhoods, dream of what they’ll buy once they’re drafted into the NBA: a house for Mom, a Cadillac for Dad – an exit, in short, from the cycle of poverty, addiction and systemic racism that’s defined their lives so far. As Gates explains, “Basketball is my ticket out of the ghetto.”

The boys have just finished middle school and are soon recruited by St. Joseph’s, an upscale suburban high school, to fulfill the glory dreams of an abusive white coach. Agee gets cut after his freshman year and his family can’t afford a rise in tuition, so he transfers back to his neighbourhood school. Gates is kept on, supported by a private sponsor, but a knee injury plagues him throughout his junior and senior years. Somehow, despite the odds – the absent father figures, the lure of quick cash made by peddling crack – Agee and Gates both graduate and earn college basket all scholarships.

By this point, however, their disillusionment is visible. Their talent on the basketball court was supposed to deliver a better life for them and their families. Instead, it’s gotten them stuck in a web of contradicting expectations, burdened their families with debt and forced them to conform to others’ aspirations as they become pawns in the policing of black bodies through sport. “You have to realize that nobody cares about you,” yells a coach from a prestigious training camp, where the top universities are scouting high-school talent. “You’re black. You’re a young male. All you’re supposed to do is deal drugs and mug women. The only reason why you’re here \[is\] you can make their team win. And \[when\] their team wins, these schools get a lot of money. This whole thing is revolved around money.”

Neither player ever made it to the NBA. Gates became a pastor in a Chicago housing project; Agee tried and failed to launch a movie career. (Last November, Agee was charged and held on bail for punching a woman in a public park.) “What would have been ideal was for me and Arthur’s family to live happily and that we have enough money to do whatever we need to do,” Gates told the _Washington Post_ in 2004\. “But it didn’t pan out that way. We never caught that next wave.”

In 2016, Toronto-based artist Esmaa Mohamoud created _Heavy, Heavy (Hoop Dreams)_ (2016), a sculptural response to _Hoop Dreams_. It consists of 60 deflated basketballs cast in solid concrete, uniformly arranged on a black Plexiglas platform. Each of the heavy, misshapen orbs stands as an effigy to the promise of economic success through basketball which, for men like Gates and Agee, remains unconsummated. They are frank material metaphors: fragile, dull and colourless – just like these men’s deflated dreams.

In February, _Heavy, Heavy (Hoop Dreams)_ made its way to southern California, where it formed the basis of _Three-Peat_, Mohamoud’s first solo exhibition at ltd los angeles. It lay at the centre of ltd’s main gallery, flanked on either side by _One of the Boys_ (2017) – a pair of bouffant ball gowns crafted from Vince Carter-era Toronto Raptors jerseys made in collaboration with artist Qendrim Hoti. In a performative gesture characteristic of Mohamoud, models wore the gowns to the gallery on opening night. Instagram shows them lounging on a set of bleachers installed for the occasion, their high-chroma evening wear spread out around them like puddles.

When I visited in early March, the bleachers sat vacant and the gowns, absent performers, had acquired a sturdy, museological aspect. Four photographs documenting _One of the Boys_ – two printed on silk, two on vinyl banners – adorned the space, alluding to the garments’ performative possibilities. The silk photographs were taken in the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Grange Library, a private sanctuary of historical white privilege. Against this backdrop, Mohamoud’s models – who are young and black – cut an image both subversive and undefinably elegant.

Where Mohamoud takes up these specific issues of racialized bodies as commodities in the sports industry, Toronto-based painter Oreka James deals with the social construction of blackness itself, as refracted through the lens of the othering gaze. Her exhibition, _If the other does not see me, I do see myself_, installed in the gallery adjacent to three-peat, featured unstretched paintings on canvas floating slightly off the wall. Echoing the motif of raw execution, stacks of bricks and brick fragments were scattered around the room.

The paintings themselves are figurative and fraught with symbolic drama. A snake writhes up a lamppost; arms reach through portals and wrap around walls; a pair of hands smudges eyeballs onto a hardwood floor. James’ figures are naked and have no heads, only elongated necks. Except for patches where white paint peeks through – “to implicate the viewer’s projected whitewashing,” according to the press release – their bodies are rendered in a flat, absolute shade of black. There is an intimacy to these pictures – their subjects are shown relaxing in the bath, lounging against window sills – but also an obliqueness. They are caught in a balance between the visible and invisible, and marked by a refusal to reveal themselves.

Upstairs, in the gallery’s low-ceilinged film room, Toronto-based Michèle Pearson Clarke’s experimental documentary _All That is Left Unsaid_ (2014) played on a two-and-a-half-minute loop. The video is Clarke’s personal tribute to Audre Lorde, the poet, librarian, intersectional feminist and civil rights activist who passed away in 1992\. It’s also a tribute to the artist’s mother, who, like Lorde, lived with cancer for 14 years. A loving meditation on what these women left behind, _All That is Left Unsaid_ speaks of loss, disappointment, loneliness and resilience.

Most striking, however, is the fact that it hardly speaks at all. Clarke’s video, comprising interview clips with Lorde, is almost entirely non-verbal. Its source material is the 1995 documentary _A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde_, of which Clarke has essentially cut out the speaking parts. The symphonic result – a coup of video editing – is emotive in the most unexpected ways. Lorde inhales. Lorde exhales. She smiles, then laughs. She gesticulates wildly, then makes a face of incredulity, then seriousness, then concern. We hear her lips open and close, then the soft, drawn-out “ssss” from the ending of a word. “Mh,” she says, “p-ck” – “pshhh” – “ahhh.” When the rare full word pops out, as does “aight?” and an emphatic “we,” it’s almost jarring to behold. In the spirit of Lorde, who once declared, “I am defined as other in every group I’m part of,” _All That is Left Unsaid_ asserts the value of marginalized speech. In those brief moments when language has subsided or has yet to appear, Clarke captures something Lorde’s own words never could have.

In Toronto, Mohamoud, Clarke and James are well known. Along with artists like Deanna Bowen, Bushra Junaid, Sandra Brewster, Syrus Marcus Ware and a long list of curators, activists, writers and educators, they are at the forefront of an institutional shift – one that works to recognize the historical presence and systematic erasure of Black Canadian identity. They have recently been included in major museum surveys, such as last year’s notable _Every. Now. Then: Reframing Nationhood_, at the AGO, and _Here We Are Here: Black Contemporary Art_, which toured the Royal Ontario Museum and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts this spring. 

I spoke with Shirley Morales, the founder of ltd, during my visit to the gallery, and asked if she’d intended to foreground this cultural movement. Her priority, she answered, had been first and foremost to “expose” these artists’ practices to a wider audience. “It doesn’t matter where they’re from,” she said. The fact that they share common cause and an artistic community was simply an “added bonus.” Morales also noted that she’s visited Toronto on a handful of occasions; “Toronto has been very good to our program,” Morales emphasized. “And I want you to acknowledge that.” That galleries and collectors across North America are taking notice is a testament to the force of these artists’ ideas.

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A review of Toronto-based Esmaa Mohamoud’s exhibitions _THREE\-PEAT_, Oreka James’s _If the Other Does Not See Me, I do See Myself_ and Michèle Pearson Clarke’s _All That is Left Unsaid_, which ran concurrently at ltd los angeles, Los Angeles (February 16 – March 30, 2018). 

Esmaa Mohamoud: THREE-PEATOreka James: If the Other Does Not See Me, I do See MyselfMichèle Pearson Clarke: All That is Left Unsaid

Jenine Marsh (b. 1984, Calgary, AB) is an artist based in Toronto.

Brooklyn-based artist Brie Ruais recently participated in a residency in a Nevada desert where she lived and worked in isolation for two weeks. This experience provides the context for her recent solo exhibition at Cooper Cole, _Attempting to Hold the Landscape 2016–2017_. The desert seems to ask: _How far could you make it? How long? Could you survive here, with us, or will you have to destroy us, clear us away and fill us in?_ Most desert-dwelling animals live in holes they make or find in the earth (a cave, a dug-out shelter, a secret hiding place). And while many humans also live in homes made of earth (brick, ceramic tile, adobe), very few of us live in homes of our own making or occupy spaces that were truly made for us.

As a historically patriarchal and privileging medium, Western architecture does not build its spaces for non-members, and despite its assumed capacity for specialization, makes few spaces that seem intended to nurture life of any sort. The scale is often wrong, the light is filtered and the hard-edged spaces do little to hug our flesh or spoon our movements. And so, because so few spaces are for us, and no space is our own, we can only temporarily occupy, trespass and borrow. In _Attempting to Hold the Landscape_, Ruais’ sculptures seem to feel this lack, and make moves to spread out another kind of space.

The artist’s clay-based practice, founded in solitary studio work, finds a parallel in the vacant desert landscape. The clay she uses are dug from holes in the ground, and brought to her studio where they are spread out and opened up to light and touch. Not entirely barren, but difficult to grow things in, not a resource, not a mother, this clay is an _other_, a mirror body and an open space. The process of the sculptures’ construction, their earthly materiality and the event of our physical encounter with them are held together in the present tense, where somewhere in this three-way between artist, sculpture and viewer, is a figure in a landscape.

Most prominent of the works that populate Cooper Cole are Ruais’ signature wall reliefs. In her studio, clay is pushed and spread horizontally across the floor by her body. Predetermined actions that test the limits of limb length and body strength are performed in collaborative resistance with a weight or volume of clay that closely echoes her own. Practical gestures of hands scooping, pushing, knees and feet dug in, her whole weight against the same weight of clay, invoke the struggle of moving a burdensome corpse, and, contradictorily, of tractionless sliding in mud or oil. Action and resistance fluctuate and flip.

While still wet, each of the large clay pieces is cut into grids of rectangular and circular tiles. This common practice of ceramic tiling allows works that are too large for a kiln to be disassembled and fired. Although tiling these works is necessary, the cuts break up the pieces just as much as they seem to complete them, not in the sense of arrest, but of activation. The cut grid allows the pieces’ surfaces to be crossed as an inhabitable space, like a spider’s web built over a hole, or a horizontal line drawn through a blank sheet of paper to signify a horizon. Made on the floor, cut up, fired and then hung on a wall, these works merge the horizontality of traversable space with the facing verticality of a figure.

The keystone of the exhibition is itself a horizon: _Landscape Painting with 130lbs of Clay (Dark Sky Law), 130lbs (aka Black Horizon)_ (2016). The lower half of the sculpture is matte black like charcoal, and the upper half is brightly reflective gold. Running lengthwise between them is a single finger streak of unglazed terra cotta-coloured clay. The two oval divots where Ruais’ knees pressed in to the clay and the radiating finger trenches suggest kneeling, reaching forward and pushing the clay out from her body again and again to the furthest reach of her back and arms. She performed this move twice from the centre, once to the left and once to the right, with the orange horizon running between the marks of her left and right hands. Cutting herself in halves and quarters, between left and right, top and bottom, land and sky, latitude and longitude, Ruais creates something between a divided landscape and the four quadrants of a fluttering butterfly’s wings.

Two other works in the exhibition splay arm’s-reach and leg-stretch into striking X shapes that might be more glisteningly fresh and fleshy butterflies’ wings. But maybe I am seeing butterflies now, here, everywhere, since reading a section from a text Brie sent me. In “Her Body, Her Boundaries,” Christine Battersby writes: “(a)pplying insights from the new topologies allows us to see how patriarchy might itself be inherently unstable as a system and hence how the slight flapping of the wings of a feminist butterfly might – metaphorically – provide the trigger that would enable it to flip over into a state of radical change.”[^1] The private performance of a singular body may still be the space from which all action must emerge and to which it must return: a figure in a landscape, a studio, a nest, a cocoon. The process is one of constant metamorphosis.

Alongside these large tiled pieces are smaller works, which punctuate and soften the exhibition: silver-glazed impressions of clenched fists that punch clay from the walls like tactile, sparkling holes, and three delicate wreathes or nests of white and red paper pulp, spindly weed, root and horse hair. In the basement space are six “Affirmation Pots,” white porcelain pinch pots that defy gravity in equal proportion to how much they slump. They have been smeared with red and black glazes, and scrawled with hash-taggy phrases – _me too, grab back, I decide what goes inside, my body, my choice_ – which are vivified by the visceral materiality of hand-formed clay. Their thin, finger-formed walls lump around tenderly gaping cavities, which seem as big as is structurally possible, and each pot is balanced upright by two or three or four mismatched legs. If this precarious vessel were a woman, her body would be improvised around not a hole, but a space in the middle. She is unfillable, and this _#affirmation_ is as revitalizingly spacious as a deep breath. _Attempting to Hold the Landscape_ spreads out a temporal space of organic agency that wasn’t there before, in which the present tense is pushed to its tangible horizon.

[^1]: Christine Battersby. “Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader” in _Her Body/Her Boundaries_. Edited by Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick, Edinburgh University Press, 1999.

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A review of Brooklyn-based Brie Ruais’s exhibition _Attempting to Hold the Landscape_ 2016–2017 at Cooper Cole in Toronto (January 26 – February 24, 2018).

Brie Ruais: Attempting to Hold the Landscape 2016–2017

Georgia Phillips-Amos is a British-American writer. Her art criticism has appeared in Border Crossings, The Village Voice, BOMB, and Signal. She lives in New York and Toronto. 

The Ear of Society, a foam rubber ear fashioned by art collective Chto Delat?, is big enough for a grown woman to curl up inside for a moment’s rest, or perhaps to die. It beats like a heart, held up by human hands. Voices catch and stammer as they speak, shout and even scream into it. But while it might provide a comfortable mattress, The Ear of Society offers no real respite, no answer in return to all those who plead with it, no helpline. The people’s protest needs a new form of address, and Chto Delat? – whose video _The Excluded in a Moment of Danger_ (2014) dramatizes all of this – turn instead to “paradoxical breathing,” designed by opera singer Alexandra Strelnikova in 1945 to assist both singers with laryngitis and cosmonauts in airless conditions. In the film, participants in the Chto Delat? School for Engaged Art stand in for the people of Russia, whose throats are sore, even torn, from protest and who can’t get enough air. Using Strelnikova’s grunts and gasps – which now fill the back gallery of vox: Centre de l’image contemporaine, in Montreal – Chto Delat? find a way to express the absurdity and violence of their political, and personal, situations.

Chto Delat? are an activist collective of nine Russian artists, writers, philosophers and dancers formed in St. Petersburg in 2003\. “Chto Delat?” (“What is to be done?” in Russian) is a question that insists something else is possible outside of the wall of cant and corruption in Vladimir Putin’s increasingly militarized, racist, violent and ruthlessly capitalist post-Soviet Russia. For 15 years, Chto Delat? have been answering their own call as a collective, publishing a free bilingual newspaper featuring writing from radical thinkers and poets, creating performances and films in which participants write their own lines, building monuments to the Bolshevik revolution and running their own art school in St. Petersburg.

Inspired by the theatre of Bertolt Brecht and the pedagogies of Paulo Freire, the members of Chto Delat? are self-declared internationalists. They exhibit and collaborate in cities from New York to Ljubljana, and they have in recent years both boycotted and participated in international biennales. Their work offers no utopian resolution, but rather operates as an undercommons[^1] brimming with contradiction and mess. “We are usually fighting,” Olga Egorova said recently, lovingly, when asked by Nato Thompson about the collective’s ability to collaborate for so many years without breaking up. _Performative Practices of Our Time_ is the collective’s first solo show in Canada, and it is polyphonic throughout.

Prints of 56 found images of varying sizes and resolution are stuck to the walls of the exhibit’s opening room. Some are serious: Russian cruise missiles fly over the Mediterranean Sea, imported tomatoes banned by Putin are bulldozed en masse, a woman’s head is decorated to look like a military assault tank. Some are amusing: a man, wearing only underwear and a choker, rests against a bale of hay holding a chicken to his breast. Others are inscrutable: a young girl straddles a brown bear on a picnic blanket, a group of children lie in a heart formation on an oversized Ukrainian flag with an image of Jesus Christ at its centre. To source these images, Chto Delat? went fishing on the internet: the result is a grotesque and terrifying wallpaper of pop culture nationalism.

In 2011, Chto Delat? collaborated with the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, Netherlands, to create _Museum Songspiel: The Netherlands 20XX_ (2011). Also on display at vox, the film opens with an attendant wandering through the museum. He passes an image of Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) and El Lissitzky’s _Proun Room_ (1923), before finding a group of six refugees huddled behind glass. They are escaped deportees who have come to seek asylum, having mistaken the radical works on display for the institution’s own mission. The film critiques the duplicity at work within most art spaces: while capitalizing on socio-political struggles through their exhibitions, these institutions ignore opportunities to offer sanctuary, unwilling to offend corporate donors and powerful board members. _Museum Songspiel_ collapses the imagined divide between the art world and the world outside, revealing the hypocrisy of institutions that refuse to ask what structures of support they might provide in the face of rampant xenophobia and increasingly insidious deportation practices worldwide. Again, Chto Delat? ask what alternative visions of the social constructs and institutions we know might be possible.

At vox, _The Excluded in a Moment of Danger_ plays on, looping every hour. The breathers eventually recover their voices, but one person, Anya, decides the whole project is bunk. Haunted by the injustice beyond the world of the collective, she leaves the group to protest alone. Since the mass arrests in Russia on May 6, 2012, rights to assemble have been severely restrict- ed, and when Anya rejoins the group, she has been beaten. Images of police brutality fill the screens. The streets bleed into and saturate the installation. Anya’s body collapses on the Ear of Society. In 2016, Hito Steyerl asked, “If art is a currency, can it be an undercurrent?” Chto Delat? answer that it must be. In a statement about _The Excluded_, they write: “We used to think that collectivity is necessary in order to be strong, but now we realize it is necessary simply to maintain one’s sanity.” Operating outside of and within the international art world, Chto Delat?’s insistence on creating collectively – no matter what– models an alternative to the myth of the singular artist-genius. While simply trying to maintain their sanity, they undercut the dominant system of cutthroat individualism that circumscribes our institutions and our lives. In doing so, they remind us to ask what else we might do together.

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A review of the exhibition by Russian art collective Chto Delat? at VOX: Centre de l’image contemporaine in Montreal (February 14 – March 31, 2018).

Chto Delat?: Performative Practices of our Time

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

**Aamna Muzaffar** is an artist and technologist based in Toronto. She is TD Assistant Curator at Mercer Union, a centre for contemporary art, and a member of the Board of Directors at Art Metropole.

A floating foil balloon in the shape of an angel fish was gently moved by our arrival. More helium sea creatures drifted lazily through the dark gallery and its episodic beams of light. A few dozen folding chairs were scattered in front of a massive projection and sheets of colourful printer paper peppered the floor. In the centre of the room was a floor-to-ceiling glass case containing an array of technologies that frankly seemed too elaborate for what appeared to be happening: the projection of various films, one at a time. Also present were: a grand piano, a rotary phone, a stereoscopic projection of an analog clock, plus the Yeast and the Host the titular characters in this work by an artist for whom exhibition _is_ the medium.

**THE YEAST**  
Philippe Parreno’s yeast are cared for by a bacteriological computer that monitors their activity and feeding schedule based on scripted and environmental variations. Many of the exhibition’s elements are altered by the Yeast’s activity by way of feedback-dependant outputs. In essence, the museum has been rendered as a kind of Smart Home, tuned to the rhythmic respiration of these microorganisms. Transplanted from previous exhibitions like one baker’s sourdough starter to the home of another, the Yeast passes on a memory of the show’s sequence to subsequent generations. This stored knowledge sustains the work.

But while non-human biological memory remains an interesting area of scientific inquiry, the Yeast’s labour could easily have been performed by hardware and software alone. By weaving these yeast and their life-support system into the fabric of this production, Parreno introduces the kind of practical magic we once attributed to our computers and networked devices. His film _Anywhen_ (2016) frames a similarly enigmatic encounter with yet another living organism: a lone cephalopod. Just like the backdrop in _Anywhen_, darkness is the natural home of cephalopods, the choice condition for bacteria and the default light setting in the gallery. Darkness is the semicolon repeated throughout the exhibition’s script, reminding us of the Yeast’s control as it intuits and calibrates the next stimulus. It is in darkness that we experience the Yeast and the cephalopod’s eerie marriage of the natural and technological sublime.

Mark Fisher’s working definition of “eerie” is two- fold; first, _something where there should be nothing_ what a cephalopod and a closed mouth should have in common is silence, but the disembodied voice of ventriloquist Nina Conti over the moving image of the cephalopod in _Anywhen_ denies us this logic. Alternatively, _nothing where there should be something_, we can meet the human Host and comprehend their role, but struggle to grasp an assembly of bacteria, liquids, tubes, vessels and probes as their collaborator and the executor of this script with control over our experience.

**THE HOST**  
A middle-aged man wears a suit, holds an iPad, plays the piano, whispers to visitors about what is happening. He, our host, is one of many who play the Host, a term that conjures multiple meanings:

> \-the person on a talk show who interviews guests  
> \-a living thing that a parasite treats as house and home  
> \-the one who kisses you on the cheek, takes your coat and puts a drink in your hand  
> \-a computer storing data accessible by way of a network

The identity of Parreno’s hosts is compounded. They receive prompts from the Yeast via the iPad about what should happen next and can decide whether or not to abide. This recalls yet another definition of host: “the larger, stronger, or dominant member of a commensal or symbiotic pair.” Let’s _pause_ on the suggestion of power. Like the Yeast, Parreno has written a part for the human despite the fact that the exhibition does not “need” a person. At one point, the Host plays the piano according to sheet music, only for the piano to begin playing itself later on (and the show’s sophisticated technology quickly eclipses the pianola, whose sales peaked, after all, in 1924). As suddenly as a piano key can pro- vide its own weight, the Host’s impotence – like the factory worker’s – becomes plain. By interrupting the show’s operational workflow to make room for the intervention of a relationship between the Yeast and a human operator (and ensuring the visibility of this unnecessary favour), Parreno reduces human influence to the symbolic, or to that of a caretaker, depending how sentimental you tend to be.

Another of the projected films, _No ghost just a shell_ (1999–2003), echoes this threatened obsolescence and illusory importance of the individual. Its sole subject is Anlee, a “now-deceased” manga character purchased by Parreno and Pierre Huyghe in 1999 from a Japanese animation company. Over the years, files containing Anlee’s image were passed to 16 artIsts, giving license for various permutations of her image to be crafted. _No ghost just a shell_ is her monologue: an intense, achingly self-aware meditation on her infinite malleability and yet non-existence. She evokes in us an empathy otherwise reserved for sentient or fictional beings, neither of which quite describe her. “My exhibitions often hinge on characters, but they’re never in a fictional story,” says Parreno. “In fact, I’ve never told a story. Anlee tells her literal reality; there’s nothing fictional about it in the least.”[^1] It’s this absurd slice of truth that unveils what first appears to be our empathy for this puppet as identification with an existential melancholia that is so essentially human.

**THE PUBLIC**  
In _The Crowd_ (2015), we watch from above as people laze around in daylight on an expansive hardwood floor: lying down with a book, napping, talking on the phone, sipping coffee with a friend. As the light wanes, and with the urgency of a torrential down- pour, they get up, collect their things and leave.

Next, they are reassembled as a standing mass in the dark. Their faces dimly illuminated by a lava-red hue, they stare in the same direction, and then another. They move as one, here and there, as if prompted by a catalytic force just outside the frame. They are submissive and emptied, but attentive. There is a feeling, in watching this herd, of having joined them. When daylight inexplicably returns, the crowd is seen leaving with the same easy composure as before, the spell broken. While Parreno’s ties to relational aesthetics are something of the past, the word “participation” continues to buzz around dialogue about his practice. Though his work has regularly subjectivized the various goals of people assembled, it doesn’t evoke the word in the tune of relational aesthetics (wherein the artist makes a small request but ensures the audience/“participant” that the possible outcomes are infinite; the audience/“participant,” overwhelmed by the lack of parameters, performs even less than the small request). Instead, participation in the context of this exhibition might be read as post-relational aesthetics in the high time of the internet, where people are granted the privilege of occupying a space and observing and engaging the features therein, only to happen upon clues that seem to imply that a free lunch is never free. _The Crowd_ is one such clue. Visitors do not become characters in a parallel world but material for an artist whose very medium is the exhibition.

**THE BLACK BOX**  
Much like the concept of exhibition-as-medium, the film _Continuously Habitable Zones_ (2011) evokes the artist’s fascination with world-building. A foreboding score accompanies moving images of a complex, shadowy and shimmery landscape suggestive of a celestial body. Informed by five disparate sites and realized through interventions such as controlled burning of vegetation, uprooting of trees, scattering of stones, and pigmentation of plants, _chz_ is artifice of the highest order but the rigour of its construction remains concealed. If the scientific practice of developing terrestrial analogues (sites on Earth bearing the assumed characteristics of ancient places or celestial bodies) aims to overcome access limitations to time past or space untravelled, then _chz_ might be understood as an analogue mission to a territory found in Parreno’s imaginings.

Between our bodies and the stage of theatre or frame of cinema, the delineation of realities is represented spatially: ours become relative to those of the performers but remain perceptibly divorced. It’s no wonder that 3D cinema’s attempt at forcing a co-mingling of realities through leaping images often results in a migraine a testament to the material resistance of these realities to one another. In Parreno’s use of the exhibition, as with the aims of total virtual reality, this margin is narrowed to the site of the body itself, swallowing the stage, frame, actor and audience into a single, immersive milieu.

But as long as the division between realities remains perceptible, mixed realities can only be achieved through novel suspensions of disbelief. In immersive environments like those that characterize Parreno’s practice, there is no marked threshold where you can check your disbelief along with your coat before entering. Across science and philosophy, black box theory maintains that the efficiency of a complex system’s functioning is inversely proportional to our ability to grasp its internal processes. The better it works, the more invisible its labour becomes. Parreno’s interest in automatons and autopoietic systems is fetishistically on display in the glass case in the centre of the room, replete with bioreactor, scientific instruments and a muse- um’s worth of audio, video, network hardware and peripherals. For Parreno, blackboxing is a device to summon the spirits in whose name the exhibition’s script attributes action: a film, a light, a piano, a rotary phone. The complex systems controlling our experience of _La levadura y el anfitrión_ are hidden in plain sight: a black box in glass clothing.

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A review of French artist Philippe Parreno’s exhibition _La levadura y el anfitrión (The Yeast and The Host)_ at Museo Jumex in Mexico City (October 26, 2017 – February 11, 2018).

Philippe Parreno: La levadura y el anfitrión (The Yeast and The Host)

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

What would provoke a painter to dabble in perfumery?

In 2010, Megan Hepburn received the Joseph Plaskett Award for excellence in painting, and in 2015 she was shortlisted for the RBC Painting Competition. Her abstract oil paintings employ vibrant colours that add subtle movement and drama to otherwise dark and arrested palettes. The works lead you to humid environments in shades of green, and dimly lit, sophisticated spaces with purple, red and deep warm tones.

When Hepburn and a number of other painters were surveyed for a feature on Canadian painting in _Editorial Magazine_, the first thing they were asked was to describe the landscapes in the places they grew up. Hepburn’s reply was still life, Impressionism, bored teenager and maybe a bit of Emily Carr too:

> I grew up near Brisbane, Australia, \[and\] Toronto and Vancouver. The landscape\[s\] \[were made up of\] oceans, fish, wet pavement, magnolia, hibiscus, huge trees, leaves for umbrellas, stump houses, lizards, torrential rain storms, slugs, spiders, spider webs, trucks, quiet people, primary coloured toys, jungle gyms, oversized t-shirts, shorts, friends’ pets, cliffs, swimming pools and the smells I hate the most: skunk and wet dog rain coat.

Recently, Hepburn started a perfume line, Cracher Dans La Soupe. For her exhibition at Spare Room, _Banana Dust_, Hepburn presented three olfactory works that attempted to recreate the smells she encountered in three different areas of 222 Georgia Street, a studio building in Vancouver’s Chinatown where Spare Room is located. Each perfume is made with natural materials and housed in one of three “olfactory tubes.” I initially thought this was some sort of specialized terminology in perfumery, but it actually refers to three curtained booths within the gallery space. Each houses one liquid perfume, alongside a set of three solid perfumes. Each central liquid perfume is named after a specific spot in the building. _Studios Main Floor, 222 East Georgia St, 20:27 Friday, 22/12/2017_ cites industrial house paint, wax and citrus cleaner, and turpentine and mineral spirit; _Storage Room (osb), Main Floor, 222 East Georgia St. 21:44 Friday, 22/12/2017_ portrays stale incense, rat piss and moldy food; and _Basement Storage (Central), 222 East Georgia Street, 20:59 Friday, 22/12/2017_ calls up plastic cardboard, dusty old wood and PVC flooring. The solid perfumes parse the particulates of that zone, as well as speak to the age of the building, the challenges with maintenance that come with it, and ultimately the indifference such variations make to the people who work there.

222 is a kind of unofficial institution, the junction of artist-run culture and studio life in Vancouver. The place is peppered with storied objects – furniture that belonged to artists who went post-studio, became curators and ditched a lamp in the basement (a trove of post-exhibition and ex-tenant bric-a-brac). The ground floor is mainly occupied by painters, and the second floor by designers and bookish types. The building has its own Instagram account (@222oohhhhh). Hepburn doesn’t have a studio here and is therefore perhaps more sensitized to the human (and occasionally animal) activity that gives the building much of its personality. The odours she creates are ones she returns to in memory – cedar, pine, moisture on cement, rotting vegetables – and also reflect a recurring motif of general dampness that is palpable in many of her paintings. Between her remarks in _Editorial Magazine_ and _Banana Dust_, one can discern that Hepburn’s personal history of smell went from “the smells I hate the most” to “while objectively unpleasant, these odours are comforting to me.” Scent clearly resonates with the way she registers atmospheres, and with her concerns about the impossibilities of representation, both of which circle back to her occupations with abstraction. _Goat Hair_ (2015), a discrete oil painting with loose strokes of grey and pale yellow (which was exhibited in a group exhibition last year at Access Gallery, downstairs from Spare Room) is an example of Hepburn’s abstract evocations: looking at it, you run through everything you might know or think about goat hair, and the work’s title is suddenly and immediately manifest. Scent panders very much to this same kind of associative reflex; it’s an internal, psychological exercise. With the added layer of language in the pieces’ titles, Hepburn’s scent works prompt us to see something episodic, a story or place.

A smell is perhaps the most literary of senses because it often requires description and that description often relies on a confluence of experiences that architects narrative potential. Every occasion of naming and describing a scent is both an abstraction and a conjuring. When that confluence of experiences mingles with language, it becomes hearsay, a dramatization, an adaptation of that lived experience. You’ll never be able to accurately imagine how this building smells, and the perfumes don’t always have a forthright power of suggestion. Duplicating the scents fills in an exciting gap in the formation of social memory. The exhibition’s title, _Banana Dust_, refers to Hepburn’s “utopia of natural perfumery” because the scent of fresh banana cannot be reproduced with natural materials (though artificial banana has become a scent unto itself). As she describes in the exhibit’s press release, an orange may turn to dust in southern Spain, retaining much of its fragrant intensity, but a banana peel wouldn’t smell like much of anything, nor could it turn to dust in dank Vancouver.

Perhaps luckily for manufacturers of synthetic banana, naming is a force that pushes beyond the threshold of artifice and enters our consciousness in its own right, openly asserting the fakeness of a simulated sense. Giving something a title, or a name, is indicative of a mission or goal – to show goat hair without goat hair, to taste strawberries without strawberries, to go to the storage room without going to the storage room, and to smell 222 _without_ 222\. Everyone knows that Vancouver does not allow new and old to co-exist for long. Without necessarily trying to _replicate_ the odours she encountered at 222, Hepburn has created perfumes that become signposts for a foray into scent archiving.

issue-138-p54-56.pdf

A review of Megan Hepburn’s exhibition _Banana Dust_, shown at Spare Room, Vancouver (April 1 – May 20, 2017).

Megan Hepburn: Banana Dust

Ruth Jones is a Toronto-based writer, curator and Co-Editor-in-Chief of _The Site Magazine_.

The anchor points of Catherine Telford-Keogh’s _Source Supplements_ are four round objects, sheets of glass and Plexiglas covering the contents of grey and speckled containers in the shape of chunky, plastic dive-bar ashtrays. Sitting on the gallery floor, they’re immediately intriguing, while Plexi boxes hang on the wall like windows. Katie Lyle’s text for the exhibition calls the floor works “islands,” but when I walk over and look down into them, they resemble pools to me. The things they contain (Unico® Stuffed Manzanilla Olives, Maynards Swedish Berries, White Wood Letters by Artminds®, 9” pigmented FlexFoam-iT!® iii, lego® found objects and 3D-printed cookies – six of the almost 20 that make up _The telephone melted into a pond of blue goo in Jasmine’s clammy palm after a caller’s obscene message)_ seem to float at different levels in the coloured resin that encases them in swirls of colour. The wall boxes hold lavender soap, dishwashing liquid and laundry detergent, in typical shades of purple and green and blue, which tint the digitally eroded images behind them. Their tops have been left open, and the purple liquid wafts its inorganic version of lavender scent into the gallery when I walk through the show, in contrast to the contained and odourless floor works, hermetically sealed underneath their glass tops. Words and letters float to the surfaces of the floor objects and drift across the images behind the wall boxes like messages from another world.

It’s difficult to catalogue all of the objects Telford- Keogh’s sculptures reference, but this exhibit isn’t simply a puzzle to be solved. Instead, the objects’ combination, solidification and eventual decay has the power of a chemical – or even alchemical – experiment, an attempt to bring together elements and catalyze a reaction. Telford-Keogh engages us in a dissociative game. As you lose track of the things you have counted, lose a thread of associations that would hold them together, lose the division enforced by clear, hard surfaces that keep everything contained under glass, you move closer and closer to the worlds released by the breakdown of all of this accumulation.

For example, the fictitious universe of _Modern mathematics and sullied diapers was all Hal needed to formulate the abstruse and truly terrifying theological models that characterize Contemporary Life_ (the title of an orange-hued specimen with Mickey Mouse hands on its top that seem to embrace its contents) is governed not by physics nor geography, but by the ways in which life’s ordered systems dissolve when we re-write the rules of association between disparate things. The brand names that appear on labels and in the works’ titles, or the ones that suggest them- selves in familiar attributes (is that Tide blue and Gain green? Are those Froot Loops or Fruity Os?) are artefacts from a world built on one-to-one relationships between words and things. In symbolic shorthand, they write cleaner, happier, wealthier, brighter versions of ourselves. While product placement in movies helps us imagine these cinematic worlds are our world much like how romance novels tell you explicitly what kind of car the hero drives as a form of characterization, Telford-Keogh’s works combine the specific language of branded objects with indefinite, generic, endlessly repeated terms like, for instance, the fractured scrawls of “community” behind her wall boxes. This is a constant additive process that pushes against the border of Hal’s world and ours. _Protect your mother and the community_ orders the title of a Plexiglas box of lavender soap behind which lies a layered image that includes a Shop-Vac, half-obscured words and bits of a body. But how do these things, these words and names, interact to produce this kind of command?

In Wittgenstein’s later work, the philosopher describes language’s meaning in terms of its use, a practised understanding of social codes and rules of engagement filtered through experience both personal and shared. His language games – questions, commands, jokes, experimental results or directions for a recipe – adhere to rules that create context and alter meaning by being surrounded with patterns of use; dozens of questions teach us what a question is, and likewise, studying recipes for cakes then experiencing the cakes themselves tell us (if we needed to know) that we have to crack the eggs before we add them to the batter. By dissolving the rules and grammar that make us think, we know what names and objects mean, how they combine, what’s good for us and bad. Telford-Keogh’s dissociative game tests how far we’re willing to go. Incorporated into each other by the medium that binds them together, exposed like specimens under glass, cleansed by lavender soap and digitally corroded, the images and objects calibrated to fulfill our needs and Hal’s needs become subject to breakdown and decay.

But who is this Hal? _The democratic model of upward mobility saturated his fantasies of the good life, where Hal could languish in bed for years at the Holiday Inn watching National Geographic on piles of damp laundry and money_ is a fantasy that traffics in the decay of soft and liquid foods already starting to shrivel and crack, as an entry point into ideas made meaningless by their endless proliferation. Telford-Keogh’s work is a response to our construction of ourselves, endlessly languishing, like Hal, supported by the churning, world-building consumption of everything in easy reach. The descriptive titles of the works are the final clue to their world-making outcomes. _Add two tins of Tropicana, half a gallon of black berry ice cream, blend thoroughly, and it’s ready to serve from the bowl_ is (maybe) a recipe for a very sweet smoothie or a vitamin-injected frozen treat as well the name of a greenish-yellow sculpture that sits on the ground, clouds of mayonnaise billowing through its layers. The juxtaposition of title and object, of words and things, creates scenes, characters and whole complicated worlds without exposing the rules that govern them. Specimens of an unknown world borne from the words and names that populate ours, they show us our own insides.

issue-138-p57-59.pdf

A review of Catherine Telford-Keogh’s exhibition _Source Supplements_, shown at Evans Contemporary in Peterborough, ON (Feb. 2 – 24, 2018).

Catherine Telford-Keogh: Source Supplements

**Sydney Hart** is a settler artist, cultural critic and Cultural Studies PhD student at Queen’s University, ON.

Throughout national events for Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), a bentwood box created by Coast Salish carver Luke Marston accompanied testimonies across the country. Carved following Northwest Coast traditions, _Medicine Box_ (2012), also known as the “TRC box,” took on an important role, and contained material offerings, such as paper notes and photos, left by the TRC’s speakers.[^1] _Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action in and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada_ (2016) primarily engages with such cultural forms occurring against the backdrop of the TRC – forms that include songs, performance, spatial design and visual culture drawing from First Nations, Métis and Inuit modes of practice. _Arts of Engagement_ focuses on the particular social, political and affective impacts of these cultural forms as “sensory engagement.” It is this notion of sensory engagement that brings the book’s various inquiries into art and aesthetics together. Crucially then, the book’s articulation of aesthetics does not refer to philosophies of taste or beauty (in the Kantian sense), but instead encompasses the realm of the sensory and the philosophy of the sensible. “Aesthetic action,” as the title suggests, refers to practices that are more than simply “representational, or for contemplation and reflection,” but which can contribute to enacting law, and documenting history.[^2] The book thus asks its readers to consider the potential of aesthetic forms as actions, and to consider how these actions carry affective, social and political meaning, both through the immediate context of the TRC’s events, and wider discussions on the topic of reconciliation. This framing of aesthetics notably shifts the reader’s attention away from the discrete aesthetic categories of cultural objects, towards the social and political context of particular aesthetic relations. These relations encompass, for instance, the sensory memories of residential school survivors, the process of hearing a voice sharing testimony, and the spatial proximity of settler publics in witnessing.

_Arts of Engagement_ is edited by Keavy Martin, a settler scholar of Indigenous literatures, and Dylan Robinson, a Stó:lō scholar of Indigenous art and music. The book forms part of the Indigenous Studies Series published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press, a series focusing on discussions in the humanities inspired by Indigenous epistemological frameworks. _Arts of Engagement_ combines scholarly research in Indigenous studies, cultural studies and anthropology with creative writing and interviews; sparse illustrations throughout document TRC national events. With passages at turns documentary, performative, critical and conversational, the book is reflective of the varying tones of the aesthetic actions addressed.

While the book underlines the invaluable work of people who attended and shared testimonies at TRC national events and the ways in which survivors “remade the TRC process as their own,”[^3] the TRC’s frameworks, including the discourse of reconciliation, appear as prominent objects of critique. In their respective contributions, artists David Garneau and Bracken Hanuse Corlett question the Christian connotations underpinning the term “reconciliation.” The word’s roots connote the objective of “restoring one’s relationship to God,” and can thus elicit questions regarding _whose_ conscience is to be cleared by such “restoration.” In opposition to settler discourse stressing the need for “healing” and “forgiveness” from survivors, Martin and Robinson argue that discourses of reconciliation can risk placing the burden of restoring relations “squarely on the shoulders of survivors” – and instead stress the concept of “intergenerational responsibility” for the settler public.[^4] Garneau, on his part, prefers the term “conciliation,” arguing that the temporality of “reconciliation” implies that once-harmonious relations between settlers and Indigenous people should now be recaptured. For Garneau, this is historical revisionism, a fiction that further “constricts our collective sense of the future.”[^5] Jill Scott and Alan Fletcher, in their contribution, address how the term “redress” invokes more concrete demands focused on accountability, justice, compensation and reparations. Furthermore, they delve into corresponding Haudenosaunee traditions, to find that terms such as “atonement” and “condolence” appear as more culturally relevant alternatives to “reconciliation.” This example highlights the discrepancies in meaning between federal discourses, and their pertinence across hundreds of Indigenous languages and related worldviews.

Throughout _Arts of Engagement_, the body appears as a prominent site, notably a site onto which processes of witnessing, and expressions of sovereignty, are registered. For Tahltan performance artist Peter Morin, for instance, the body appears as a “resonant chamber,” which “sounds out,” echoes and transfigures the legacy of residential schools. As Morin writes: “I carry the voices of the residential school survivors, / I carry their testimony with me / I put them on a shelf inside my body / you should too.”[^6] The power inherent in witnessing through aesthetic action is further elaborated on by Indigenous theatre practitioner Lisa C. Ravensbergen. Writing about how “witnessing empowers change,” Ravensbergen outlines the radical potential of Indigenous theatre, describing how it can become a tool for “decolonizing the performer-audience relationship.”[^7] In the context of the book’s allusions to witnessing in the TRC framework, Ravensbergen’s claims draw attention to how aesthetics can enable particular affective relations through proximity and distance. As the editors remind us, architectural features of TRC events “spatialize connection,” and spatial arrangements – whether audiences are confronted with a formal panel on a raised stage or an intimate musical performance – have an “explicit relationship to the types of togethering that are possible.” \[8\]

Jumping amongst the various cultural forms addressed in _Arts of Engagement_ easily conjures the potential in a plurality of forms of sensory engagement, and the ways that different media and practices have their own advantages in acting on an embodied relation to colonial injustice. The volume thus outlines many paths for supporting aesthetic action against colonial injustice through a prefigurative, politicized and ultimately invigorated understanding of aesthetics. Furthermore, _Arts of Engagement_ foregrounds the relational and contextual character of its aesthetic actions, and several contributors centre principles of reciprocity, witnessing and intergenerational responsibility. In the Canadian national context, the book arrives at a pivotal time, as settler awareness of the injustice inherent to colonial structures grows along with an immense expectation – and apprehension – concerning the potential of state initiatives aimed at reconciliation to heal colonial wounds. _Arts of Engagement_ is a vital examination of the aesthetic stakes surrounding the TRC’s discursive framework; beyond it, however, this book boldly maps the inherently radical and transformative character of Indigenous aesthetic actions.

[^1]: Elizabeth Kalbfleisch, “Gesture of Reconciliation: The TRC Medicine Box as Communicative Thing.”
[^2]: Dylan Robinson addresses this potential in the context of Northwest Coast First Nations’ songs, stories, oratory and regalia in Dylan Robinson, “Acts of Defiance in Indigenous Theatre: A Conversation with Lisa C. Ravensberger.”
[^3]: Dylan Robinson, “Intergenerational Sense, Intergenerational Responsibility,” p.44.
[^4]: Keavy Martin and Dylan Robinson, “The Body is a Resonant Chamber,” p.6.
[^5]: David Garneau, “Imaginary Space of Conciliation and Reconciliation.”
[^6]: Peter Morin, “this is what happens when we perform the memory of the land.”
[^7]: Dylan Robinson, “Acts of Defiance in Indigenous Theatre: A Conversation with Lisa C. Ravensbergen.”
[^8]: Keavy Martin and Dylan Robinson, “The Body is a Resonant Chamber,” p.12.

issue-138-p62-64.pdf

Activism

Politics

This is a review of _Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action in and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada_, edited by Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin, Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2016\. 

Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action In and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, edited by Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin

**Jessica Thalmann** is an artist, curator and educator currently based in Toronto and New York City. She received an MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies from ICP\-Bard College and a BFA in Visual Arts from York University.

<h5>“I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.  
I do not think that they will sing to me.  
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves   
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back   
When the wind blows the water white and black.   
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea  
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown   
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”

— “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot</h5>
  
  
I often wonder how to make a photograph invisible. How to clear a path – to see past the photograph as an object and to reach deeply into the image, extend a hand and touch what is inside the frame. While Roland Barthes claims that a deep love for a photograph’s subject matter enables him to erase the weight of the image, to see only “the referent, the desired object, the beloved body,”[^1] I wonder if it isn’t photography’s flatness, rigidity and lack of haptic sensibility that epitomizes its failings and prohibits me from seeing, touching and possessing what I desire.

As if answering these thoughts like a siren’s call, Steven Beckly’s solo exhibition _Meirenyu_ on view at Daniel Faria Gallery addresses questions of desire, touch and photography’s materiality through the lens of mythology, fantasies of modern mermaids and the sublime nature of the sea. In the exhibition, images interweaving fragmented hands and fingers in various forms abound. For example, a white plaster hand extends from one gallery wall with a glimmering, flat object covered in fish scales. A blue finger pierced by a long thin pin points downwards. The shadow of a hand tenderly grasps a young man’s stomach. These photographic and sculptural hands are groping for intimacy and are hungering to touch something just out of reach. The materiality of each piece exhibits the same kind of longing depicted in the images, as photographs desire to be transformed, into something outside of their stillness and flatness. 

For Beckly, photographs are rarely flat. Some are hung high with a delicate silver chain from the ceiling in the middle of the space, and sway gently in large curls, while others twist and squirm underneath their pins against the walls. The photographic materials used (transparency, tissue paper and iridescent pearlized paper) make the images more multifarious than traditional darkroom or digital papers by providing an entryway through their materials. In many ways, Beckly has literally and metaphorically rendered the photograph invisible. While light passes through the transparency, offering a kind of access that differs from traditional photos, reflection and glare obscure the image at the same time, acting as barriers or veils. Here, in _Meirenyu_, is the dual nature of photography: a medium that conceals as much as it reveals.

Conceptually, this idea of duality in photography is reflected again in the mythos of the mermaid that occurs throughout the exhibition, an oft-rep- resented beautiful creature who also inspires terror and intimidation. After all, _meirenyu_ is a transliteration of the Mandarin word for “mermaid.” One of the first works in the space, _Under Six Feet Under_, is a small colour transparency pierced with a pearlized pin that depicts a deeply saturated blue image of a fragmented finger. Here, Beckly imagines mermaids, primarily acting as an image of transformation and transition, by drawing on various cultural creation myths involving water – in particular, the Inuit mythology of Sedna, goddess of the sea and underworld. While variations on her story exist, one element remains consistent and holds resonance for Beckly. Sedna, taken out to sea by her father, is thrown over the side of his kayak. As she clings to the sides, her father chops off her fingers and she sinks to the underworld. Her huge fingers become walruses, whales and sea creatures while she ultimately grows a fishtail. These types of narratives exemplify the simultaneous beauty and terror of nature: two co-existing aspects that Beckly explores in his recent body of work. Hence the highly embellished pins that both  
hold up and violently pierce his prints. In _Meirenyu_, photographs – much like Sedna – become fish: caught in delicate chainmail nets, pinned and held against the wall or hung from the ceiling like a prized catch.

The magic of Beckly’s work resides not in the dead or flat photograph but in the coloured glow of his images, the rays of light that they exude from the transparent or iridescent paper. In Beckly’s photographs, colour dances, seeps, spills and soaks the gallery walls, only amplifying the confusion about where the images begin and end. Perpetuating Beckly’s interest in duality, two works in the back room depict two diametrically different kinds of light. Untitled (O) is a slim colour transparency curved gently away from the white wall illustrating the blinding reflection of the sun in a small pool of water amongst grey and blue rocks. Small lens flares glimmer and encircle the pool of water like a necklace of pearls against the rough texture of the rocks, but a trick of light creates a shadow of the original image against the wall, forcing the viewer to move back and forth, left and right to understand this trompe l’oeil that adds space and depth. A larger image on the left, _Pool of Andromeda_, is caught behind a big silver-chained net. At first glance, it suggests a vast galaxy of stars, gas giants and asteroid belts with its colour field and reference to the Andromeda constellation. But we are tricked again by the optics of light and water. Andromeda is transfigured from an elliptical galaxy of swirling dust and gas to a naked and chained mermaid, and finally to a small soap bubble sitting in a freshly washed sink.

As images (and by extension, image-making) become increasingly more ephemeral, accessible and universal, _Meirenyu_ complicates our relationship to them by re-prioritizing the photograph as a many-sided object for contemplation. And by re-examining our interpretive and perceptive relationships to them, Beckly offers a pensive and sensual experience to render the photograph invisible, to bring us closer to what we desire.

[^1]: Roland Barthes, _Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography_. Trans. Richard Howard. Reprint edition. New York: Hill and Wang, 2010.

issue-138-p58-60.pdf

A review of Steven Beckly’s solo exhibition _Meirenyu_, shown at Daniel Faria Gallery in Toronto (Jan. 18 – March 10, 2018).

Steven Beckly: Meirenyu

Jesse Cumming is a writer and curator based in Toronto.

“The sea is history,” wrote Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott, referring to the site of so many lost souls in existential terms as a “grey vault.” Conversely, photographer, filmmaker and theorist Allan Sekula wrote in 1995 that, in fact, “the sea is money,” describing both the real and imagined geographies of maritime spaces under late capitalism in his seminal work _Fish Story_. The Sekula quote appears in _okeanos_, a new publication produced on the occasion of a 2017 Sekula exhibition of the same name at Vienna’s Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum. Part catalogue and part reader, the book assembles writings by Sekula himself along with critical texts about works in the show and related scholarship on the exhibition’s themes of ocean, the industries it hosts, and their role in global political economies. _okeanos_ editors Daniela Zyman and Cory Scozzari each contribute texts to the volume: Zyman in an essay on _Fish Story_ that doubles as an introduction to the book and the exhibition, and Scozzari in a transcribed conversation with curator Filipa Ramos about _Sekula after Sekula_, a film and video series that ran adjacent to the exhibition and profiles contemporary artists whose work carries on Sekula’s project in various ways.

Alongside the essay films _Tsukiji_ (2001) and _Lottery of the Sea_ (2006) and photo projects like _Black Tide/Marea negra_ (2002/2003), a key piece in Sekula’s body of work is the aforementioned _Fish Story_. This multi-faceted and multi-year project consists of photographs and a publication that variously introduce the concerns to which the artist would return repeatedly for the rest of his career: global economic systems and the movement of goods, bodies and labour in the context of “the imaginary and material geographies of the advanced capitalist world.”[^1] Two of _Fish Story_’s essential texts are republished in _okeanos_, including the titular essay and “Dismal Science, Part 1,” in which Sekula considers the shifting concepts of marine time and marine space by way of j.m.w. Turner and Friedrich Engels. “Dismal Science, Part 1” also serves to situate Sekula’s project in the context of contemporaneous cultural interests, namely the 1990s obsessions with the “information super-highway” and the digital realm, as well post-modernist academic scholarship on globalization.

Sekula and several of the book’s contributors who advance his concerns to the present day argue for a serious (re)consideration of the material realm in lieu of electronic, emancipatory fantasies. We’re reminded in _okeanos_ that the sea is the means of transportation for over 90 percent of the world’s goods, and various texts in the book return repeatedly to concerns with multinational corporations, their ports and workers and the ships whose official “flag of convenience” registration in nations likes Panama and Liberia facilitates tax avoidance and low-wage employment, predominantly for labourers from the global south.

Theorist Laleh Khalili carries forward several of these structural concerns in her essay on ports and prison ships, “Carceral Seas.” One of the leading voices in contemporary geography studies and a key figure in that field’s burgeoning turn towards concepts of “logistics” and “infrastructure,” Khalili’s contribution is impactful as a text that doesn’t engage directly with Sekula’s artistic or theoretical practices, but rather proves the longevity and interdisciplinary nature of his research.

Sekula’s own writing in the publication includes a selection of high-resolution scans from the vast collection of personal notebooks he kept throughout his life, full of doodles, quotes and offhand reflections (several of which later found their way into his films), accompanied by a detailed analysis by researcher Sally Stein.

The notebooks are where we first encounter Sekula’s designation of the sea as “the forgotten space,” a phrase utilized for the title of his 2013 feature-length essay film, produced in collaboration with Noël Burch. The book dedicates an entire section to the film, with images, excerpts from the film’s narration and critical reflections, including a provocative essay by Philip Steinberg. Unusual and refreshing compared to most artist monographs, Steinberg’s analysis is ambivalent and at times critical, foregrounding the film’s inadequate parsing of capitalism’s inherent contradictions. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, the book stops short of full-throated critiques, and while Khalili’s essay includes a citation from Christina Sharpe’s 2015 book In the Wake, she doesn’t draw from that book’s own extended and incisive critique of the maladroit consideration \[or lack thereof\] of race in _The Forgotten Space_.)

The first publication and one of the few major exhibitions dedicated to Sekula’s work since his death in 2013, _okeanos_ thankfully evades proposing a tidy and comprehensive summary of his career, leaving room for consideration of his non-ocean-oriented projects, such as _A Short Film About Laos_ (2007), the essay “The Body and the Archive” (1986) and the photo series _Waiting for Tear Gas (white globe to black)_ (2000). Likewise, as hinted at in both the _Sekula after Sekula_ film series and Khalili’s essay, there are plenty of opportunities to advance and adapt Sekula’s work into the present and the future – taking his oeuvre from Fish Story to new, myriad stories.

[^1]: Allan Sekula, _Fish Story_ (Dusseldorf: Richter Verlag, 1995), 202.

issue-138-p63-65.pdf

A review of the monograph _Allan Sekula: OKEANOS_, a book published in 2017 by Sternberg Press on the occasion of photographer, filmmaker and theorist Allan Sekula’s exhibition of the same name at Vienna’s Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum.

Allan Sekula: OKEANOS

Maeve Hanna is Assistant Curator at Two Rivers Gallery in Prince George, BC. She has studied at York University (Toronto), the University of Leeds (UK), Université du Québec à Montréal (Montreal) and the University of Manitoba (Winnipeg) on site in Iceland.

The art writing symposium _Never the Same: what (else) can art writing do?_, organized by Contemporary Calgary, posed a selection of provocative questions around an ever-changing and nuanced form of writing. The symposium brought together a diverse gathering of national and international writers and artists to ponder what (else) art writing can do, as well as how and why art writing exists in the art world. In silently conversing with myself, my surroundings, my notes, I realize that art writing is not always a discipline that can be learnt or taught but is often _felt_. Sensed. Experienced. It seems more of an experiential form of creation, a moving equilibrium of words. My theory was evoked unequivocally through each of the symposium’s panels, workshops and events.

The weekend opened with a launch of Chris Kraus’ new book _After Kathy Acker_. The biography, according to Kraus herself, is not just about Acker or even her artistic lineage. It’s as much a phenomenological artwork as it is a biography, one where art writing, fiction and non-fiction mingle through Kraus’ own perspective. Kraus’ keynote address set the stage for an investigation of the nuances of art writing, including its experiential and sensory aspects. In discussion with Jennifer Krasinski, Kraus stressed the importance of writing the other’s voice. “You can’t speak of others. To bridge this, quote the other, ventriloquize them.” Similarly, she asserted that an essay on art is a space that should be used to give the artist room to speak and tell their story, again foregrounding the subjective and experiential aspects of art writing.

As I write this compendium of reflections, I am deeply immersed in Kraus’ book _I Love Dick_. In her afterword, Joan Hawkins sums up the author’s commingling of art writing and non-fiction/fiction: “It seems as though reading the ‘real’ Dick Hebdige’s work enables Kraus to find a way of talking about art, a way that makes sense to her.” The book is a fictionalized romance as well as a novel of art criticism in which Kraus reveals her true prowess is writing about art. Hawkins continues that Kraus’ “Kike Art” in _I Love Dick_ “is easily the best thing on Kitaj I’ve ever read. …She invokes theory, _seems to feel comfortable in a theoretical skin_, without using theoretical language.” Reflecting on the symposium, I remain submerged in _I Love Dick_, allowing it to act as a guideline, a bible on art writing.

In “Performing and Materialising Art Writing,” moderator Amy Fung framed the panel with the notion of “gastromancy,” asking “how does language hold up the body?” Queer artist, writer and art historian Mark Clintberg, presenting on this panel, expanded on this idea of “gastromancy” by speaking about his vision of writing as a membrane through which contact occurs. “I think of writing as a means for the erotic because it involves the thrill of unexpected touch,” he said. For him, writing is itself a bodily function as well as a means for creating friction and contact between bodies. Clintberg assembled the experiential and sensory elements of art writing and criticism that are arguably most salient to all acts of writing: the messy, the erotic, the frottage of writing, all of which are integrated into his practice.

Stó:lō writer and scholar Dylan Robinson spoke on several topics related to his research into sovereignty in “Making Space, Place and Time through Art Writing.” He opened his talk by speaking of “gathering, sovereignties of doing, \[the\] performativity of doing, \[and\] when saying something is also the action of doing it,” thereby framing writing as, again, an embodied and sense-based practice. A particularly powerful aspect of Robinson’s discussion was his suggestion of strategies for slowing down the processes of reading and consuming the written word. One such strategy is to ask the reader to stop reading in order for the author to assert textual sovereignty for Indigenous peoples. In “Welcoming Sovereignty,” he wrote: “If you are a non-indigenous, settler, arrivant or ally reader, I ask that you stop reading by the end of this paragraph.” Asserting oneself against or challenging this form of power in order to preserve textual sovereignty was a key element in Robinson’s talk. Ultimately, the goal is to ensure that Indigenous knowledge is not being “…extracted or treated as content for an instrumentalized end.” Robinson’s writing conveys the sensory experience of a gentle kind of friction, rubbing or nudging readers (and other writers) towards consensus and conscientiousness.

In the concluding panel, “New Modes of Publishing and Distribution,” David Garneau presented his lecture “Talk Sweetly to Me: Critical Fear and Indigenous Art.” He ferociously leapt into the topic, outlining what is missing in art criticism today, in particular the lack of criticism on Indigenous art. When asked about this lack, Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore jokingly responded to Garneau: “who would dare?” Indeed, the audience seemed to agree, shown by their attentive acknowledgement as well as a subtle laugh that spread through the room. Garneau continued by acknowledging that there is plenty of “sweet talk” but very little deep, thoughtful criticism on this topic. Contradictory commentary from Chris Kraus at the opening of the symposium became an interesting counterpoint here. When asked why she doesn’t write about art she dislikes, Kraus answered that, first, she simply doesn’t care enough about the art world to write about such art, but second, that one should pick one’s battles. Here it seems key to ask: what is considered thoughtful and nuanced art criticism, as opposed to criticism of a patronizing tone? How do we differentiate between the two? What kind of language or form does each use? What sense does each convey?

Garneau concluded by raising a broader issue within the state of art criticism, and acknowledging that “…Indigenous artists and art are not best served by settler-style, adversarial, shame-based, modernist criticism, even if written by Native critics. What we now need to develop are non-colonial modes of extra-rational critical care.” Art writing is a subtle, developing form of writing that comes from the writer’s experience of art as much as from a desire to reflect on art itself. Bridges and roads reach from the end of each letter of art writing like trail heads – but with no predetermined destination – as writers attempt to carve out new paths for both art and its criticism. Its future course will be paved in varied directions as the field unravels before us.

issue-138-p64-66.pdf

A review of an art writing symposium titled _Never the Same: what (else) can art writing do?_ held in Calgary, September 15–17, 2018, and organized by Contemporary Calgary. 

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C Mag

Issue 138