Column

Randy Lee Cutler is a Vancouver-based writer, artist and educator. She contributes essays to catalogues and art magazines as well as maintains an experimental relationship to pedagogy, gardening and walking. Her art practice takes up themes of food and sustenance through performance, video and textual strategies. In the intersections of gender, art, science and technology, she investigates the emergence of new cultural forms and expression. She is an associate professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, BC.

Writer

Trust

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Participation

Body

Education

In this column, artist, writer and educator Randy Lee Cutler disseminates a series of instructions for group exercises such as collective breathing, sound-making and gestural mimicry, framed within a question of how we might “think about bodies and time as core materials for generating trust and making form.”

Inventory: Group Exercise

Andil Gosine is Associate Professor in Artistic and Cultural Practices for Social and Environmental Justice at the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University.

Someone called me _coolie_, that n-word equivalence in Trinidad which was first used there to tag labourers replacing slaves on plantations following emancipation. Most everyone else said I was an _East Indian_, which was not, as many think, to distinguish us subcontinental-sourced Indians from the misnamed Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, but a reference to our ancestors’ shipment by the British East India company. We are cargo. Maybe just _Indian_ was better? We move to Oshawa and at the time there are barely any of those around. The closest mirror and spiritual salvation from the persistent racial violence is _Black_ culture, and for years, right to the end of my studies in the UK, I continue to think that’s my place – until my return to Canada demands adherence, from all sides, to its particular brand of bio-multiculturalism. _Brown_, or _South Asian_ is better for you, artists and activists alike say. They never fit. I haven’t even been to South Asia. _Indo-Caribbean_ is offered as a corrective, but it’s too uncomfortably _not-Afro-Caribbean_. Since I like men, and I work in academia, _queer_ comes to the fore, and I’m like “whatever, sure,” until Vivek Shraya asks me to participate in her What _I LOVE about being QUEER_ project and I decline. I explain that while I think sexual categories have some use in organizing political opposition, I actually believe sexuality is so individually wired that I don’t believe in nouns to describe it. And it just is, like the accident of birth that placed me in a particular body or geography. Am I just a _man_ then? Or – that gender-neutral word _person_? I adore how _person_ is so fully integrated into everyday language in the Caribbean. The region never gets credit for that progressive thinking. But no: I am _animal_.

This declaration feels like both a respite from the social demands to find home in a stable identity and a return to what always has been. Not-animal is the defining quality of humanness. Among humans, hierarchies of intelligence and worth have also been predicated on the degree of one’s animality, as we were reminded earlier this year by the furor over Roseanne Barr’s tweets likening black women to apes. Hers was hardly an original thought. America’s right wing had, for all of their White House residency, done the same to the Obamas, monkeyfying representations of Barack and Michelle in an effort to dehumanize them and all black Americans. In power, America’s right upped the ante, extracting children from their families and caging them like chickens. European colonizers’ investment in animalizing others was, and is, tied to anxieties about their own animalistic desires.

“Every culture feels that they’ve created these hard-won distances between themselves and the animals,” artist Lorraine O’Grady has observed, “and anything that reminds you that you haven’t come quite so far is problematic… \[it\] puts the culture in jeopardy.” Thus, laws about bestiality, interracial mixing and sodomy were bundled together, with the onus on colonized subjects to prove themselves not-perverse, not-homosexual, not-animal. Fears about the unbridled sexuality of Asians would become expressed as hysteria about them overpopulating like flies, and as the hypersexualization of women. Because of this history, it’s been all that much more contentious for non-white peoples to embrace our animality. But what would it mean to refuse to engage ever-persistent demands to prove our humanity and reply, _yup, we’re animals_.

Would it break, finally, states’ mimicry of former colonial masters? As I write there’s an enforced law in Guyana that forbids gender-crossing wardrobes, and in Jamaica, a strict dress code that forbids Jamaicans entering their own government offices from wearing, to quote one, “camisoles (sleeveless), tubetops, merinos, short shorts, mini-skirts, low cut garments exposing the bosom, tights, sheer (see through) garments, pants below the waist.” This excessive investment in “decorum” is entirely about proving ourselves not-animal. These rules were a cornerstone of the colonial project and target non-white and, often, white poor people, who are forced to double-down on the suppression of their animality, whether to access government services, be socially rewarded or claim basic human dignity.

What would it mean for each of us personally to acknowledge our animality? I was never not an animal but for most of my life joined most others in various states of make believe that deny this truth. In North America, non-white people are burdened with this task early on. As children and teens we learn that any “acting out” beyond the parameters of civility is evidence of our animality and will be punished. We never get to enjoy the kind of playful exploration that, with abandon, that our white peers experience and grow from. They get to hone their instincts while ours are pushed down.

Rather than subject ourselves to these politics of respectability, could recognition of our animality across the board – whatever the colour, gender, sexuality – offer, at least, a savvier constitution of contemporary politics? I feel certain that a large part of American President Donald Trump’s broad appeal is his unabashed animality. His ruthless, self-serving, naked opportunism speaks to a part of the human condition which seems “real” and through which his base finds a kind of liberation. For them, the call to civility, and denial of their animality, is represented by what they view as “political correctness.” At Trump’s rallies, you witness the joyful catharsis of his supporters from his racism/tribalism. Obviously, a counter-politics would draw upon other aspects of our animality – like our physiological dependence on each other – but wouldn’t it be better to craft responses that are aware of the parts of our animality, like our tribalism, our anxious fears, and our survival instincts, rather than remaining so fixed on a naïve program of ethical acculturation that dominates progressive circles? Might recognizing the animality of everyone be a pathway to fully claiming our humanity?

_I am Animal; what now?_

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Politics

Race

Sexuality

Identity

Artist and academic Andil Gosine articulates identity as its qualified within a binary of decorum—between animal and human—ministered by the colonial state in the name of civility. Reflecting on his own experiences, as well as on the current political moment, Gosine envisions a new kind of liberatory politic that wholly embraces the animality of humanity.

Artefact: Animal

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Editorial

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

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_.

**KC:** In her short text in this issue, poet Lillian Allen writes, “I remember a time when a person was as good as their word as a societal norm.” We asked Allen to write a short definition of “trust” – inspired by the anecdotal yet radically political definitions of common terms in the arts that Allen produced for Public Recordings _Performance Encyclopaedia_ project in 2016\. Allen’s new “definition” introduces the issue and establishes an important background – trust as community-based and relational, as a social system, as a financial system, and importantly for a publication that produces, thinks through and probes language – Allen ultimately stresses how trust is completely entangled with words, with one’s word.

In our call for proposals for C139, we posited some degree of trust as implicit in the production, presentation and language of art, writing of “trust as inherent to relationships, and a prerequisite for good ones – be they, in the arts, relationships with institutions, audiences, readers, editors, bosses, curators, artists or project partners.”

**JB:** But it didn’t take long to realize that an issue on trust would in fact equally be an issue on its opposite.

**KC:** The theme’s reach grew, with trust (and breaches of trust) revealing itself as a fundamental principle through and against which we are all working today, where public trust has been eroded, and where interpersonal trust must be being endlessly redefined.

**JB:** Popular opinion says an assault has been made on trust; people who aren’t not allowed to lie, but aren’t allowed to be seen lying, have been seen lying. Resultantly, the word “fake” has been redefined, from a word that has always been pejorative, to one that has become so exhausted by its usage as a weapon in the culture’s now-breathless fight that it seems to have become a parody of itself. How can you call something fake when all the world’s a stage? And by stage, of course I mean a late-capitalist, neoliberal, post-democratic landscape of veneers. In her review of Patrick Langley’s _Arkady_ (Fitzcarraldo, 2018), Alex Quicho quotes the author saying “\[The book\] has something to do with how global events trickle into and alter the psyche; how zeitgeists are felt in the blood.”

Where, as Quicho writes, Langley is seen anonymizing the city in which the novel is set, and “scalpelling out what over-serves, offloading words too bloated with connotation,” other projects in this issue engage the intense specificity of spaces where trust has been corrupted, and name repercussions. In his review of cherry kutti and Sanjit Dhillon’s _Biding my time / Biting my tongue_ exhibition at Whippersnapper Gallery, the 2018 New Critics Award winner Vince Rozario describes the subject of the central video work, Baba Ramdev, “a celebrity yogi and business magnate at the helm of a multi-million-dollar business in pseudo-Ayurvedic products and quack remedies.” As Rozario elucidates through the exhibition – which focuses on mental health in diasporic South Asian communities – “even the holistic modes of addressing trauma available to racialized communities are co-opted by larger social and political systems.”

Thinking further about co-optation and breached trust, we’re grateful to have Aylan Couchie reflect in these pages on _The Mush Hole Project,_ which aimed to “engage with the site of Canada’s first residential school (The Mohawk Institute, a.k.a. Mush Hole) as a space in which Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists and scholars can meet and 1) acknowledge the residential school legacy, 2) challenge the concepts of ‘truth’ and ‘reconciliation,’ and 3) practice interdisciplinary art and performative methods of decolonization.” After outlining many ways that the project, which was directly borne of the recommendations around the role of the arts in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, failed to effectively consider the humanity, histories and voices of its Indigenous participants, Couchie writes that “many Indigenous people maintain a distance from the reconciliation agenda. After all, they have nothing to reconcile for.”

So-called reconciliation, in that case, materialized as a self-congratulatory performance for settler organizers. The room for improvement – or flat out failures – of the well-meaning _Mush Hole Project_ make me think about something artist and curator Pamila Matharu brought up in the roundtable we facilitated about the role of trust in the artist-curator relationship. The term Cultural Safety came about in the late 1980s, in New Zealand, when Māori nursing students expressed concern about their safety in monocultural nursing schools. Cultural Safety is met when actions “recognise, respect and nurture the unique cultural identity of the patient.” Since then, the term has gained a versatility that can be applied across all kinds of groups that are seen to be marginalized; no one life can be generalized. Matharu writes, “These days, my fierce urgency is centred on the Cultural Safety of the artist-curator process; I have learned that the embodiment of this is equal parts action, reflection, empathy and compassion.”

**KC:** Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, in conversation with writer Lucy Ives, describes the ways in which we read others’ values and beliefs in the photographic moment, saying “the kind of social encounter I’m interested in by way of photography approximates one that precedes or can precipitate violence. I’m interested in the fact that people believe they know things about a person on the basis of the body that person is carrying around…”

Wolukau-Wanambwa’s statement pinpoints trust as embodied, as embedded in the face-to-face encounter with others, in the ways in which we “read” others and establish beliefs about them. In the issue’s final text, artist Andil Gosine takes up the role of naming, the “rules” through which identity is socially established, and the subsequent codes of conduct that emerge from this naming. He counters this with a proposition for animality, for the embrace of identities and politics that disrupt the colonial hierarchy of human over animal, and for the rejection of hierarchies of behaviour that govern class- and race-based acceptability. In the face of an uncertain future, he proposes an equally uncertain new world order: “I am Animal. But, what now?”

The issue opened with Lillian Allen suggesting the deterioration of long-standing social bonds and systems, and the difficulty of locating trust in the endless circulation of increasingly empty words. Her final line reads, matter-of-fact: “I think this is where we are in the world today.”

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Editor Jaclyn Bruneau and Editorial Director Kari Cwynar introduce the theme of “trust” in this issue.

Editorial: Trust

Feature

When I was growing up in Spanish Town, Jamaica,  
people had two different types of **currencies** in  
conducting **commerce**; you could pay in cash for  
something or you could trust it. “Mi madah sen’ mi  
fi **trust** a loaf of harddough bread and some **butter**  
’til Friday.” Trust was a popular currency and was  
both **transactional and relational**, the way it should  
be. In some communities it was more popular than  
cash. Trust was **metaphysical** in the way that it  
moved through space and time to **materialize** goods  
to sustain life. There was a rhythm and recurrence to  
the cycle of trust and predictability to the **promise**  
of payment. For these folks, the shopkeeper would  
just make a mental note. For others who had a  
harder **time** of meeting their basic needs and had no  
**rhythm** to repayment, the shopkeeper would keep  
a kind of ledger. It was such an **honour** system that  
those who were on rock-hard times and couldn’t  
deliver on the promise to pay were cause for great  
**sympathy** and even charity. What was owed would  
be suspended indefinitely or simply forgiven, and  
in **addition**, these folks would be given what they  
needed for free. However, if you were not a person  
of **accountability** and messed up, the consequences  
were great. Simply, you would not be given any more  
**credit**; your currency of trust could not be used  
again for anything or with anyone. You felt **ashamed**.  
There was an **instinct** that told you that you were  
part of an **ecosystem** and you had **damaged** it.  
In a rum shop where trust had been **broken**, a sign  
warned: “In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash.”

I remember a time when a person was as **good** as  
their word as a **societal norm**. Our need to trust and  
be trusted was once **fundamental** to who we are as  
**individuals** and as a **society**. **Accountability** was a  
badge of honour. I would venture to say that between  
immoral predator **priests**, crooked **politicians** and  
**falsehood** in advertisements, the **public** notion  
of trust took a **beating**. And not to overlook  
**dishounourable** authority figures, the **unconscionable**  
greed of business cultures, the **Madoffs of the world**,  
**alternative facts** and the all-too-commonplace Hydro  
One-type debacles further impugning notions of  
public trust and **normalizing** its demise. **Private**  
notions were always complicated and contested, what  
with the rate of **infidelity**, incest and sexual abuse all  
from the very **people** one should trust the most. A loss  
of private and public trusts is **psychic abuse**.

I am reminded of an anecdote of a man who had **fallen**  
down a cliff and had grabbed onto and hung from the  
branch of a jutting root, **dangling** above jagged rocks.  
He pleaded: “God, I know you’re up there. I have complete  
trust in you, please tell me what to do.” After a  
short electric pause, a **god-like** voice boomed back,  
“Yes, son it’s me God, just relax and let go. You’re gonna  
be alright.” **The man** glanced down at the eager  
jaggedness of rocks dozens of feet below then frightfully  
tightened his grip and shouted in an **existential**  
desperate tone, “Hey, is **anybody else** up there?”

I think that is where we are in **the world** today.

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Poetry

Diary

Economy

Writer Lillian Allen describes trust as a currency made manifest between systems of commerce and sociality, beginning with examples from her hometown of Spanish Town, Jamaica. Through diaristic reflection, Allen resolves that trustful accountability, once “societal norm,” has been encumbered, result of its ministerial abuses. This, she concludes, to the effect of greater existential precarity.

Who can we trust? Whose words will rescue us?

Aylan Couchie is an interdisciplinary artist and sometimes-writer hailing from Nipissing First Nation in Northern Ontario. She is a NSCAD University alumna and received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Art, Media and Design at OCAD University, where she focused her studies on reconciliation and its relationship to monument and public art. Her written, gallery and public works explore histories of the colonial landscape, Indigenous erasure and issues of representation and cultural appropriation. Aylan currently lives and works in Toronto.

“Creative expression supports everyday practices of resistance,  
healing, and commemoration at individual, community, regional,  
and national levels. \[…\] The arts help to restore human dignity  
and identity in the face of injustice.”

These words, found in volume six of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report, recognizes reconciliation achieved through the arts as a method integral to healing. Through its inquiry, the commission identified core problems within Canadian societal and government structures and released a subsequent 94 Calls to Action to implement systemic changes to policies and practices that discriminate against and harm Indigenous people. The Calls to Action are laid out with the intention to be implemented through personal, group, community, federal, provincial, territorial, municipal government and national action. As a result, commitments to working with Indigenous peoples were swiftly produced, such as the Government of Ontario’s “The Journey Together: Ontario’s Commitment to Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples” in 2016, the Canada Council for the Arts’s _conciliation_ project (May 2015-June 2016) and Universities Canada’s “Principles on Indigenous Education” released in June 2015.

The University of Waterloo organized _The Mush Hole_ Project in September 2016 in collaboration with 11 Indigenous and non-Indigenous organizations as one of their TRC responses. The project’s objective claimed to “engage with the site of Canada’s first residential school (the Mohawk Institute, a.k.a. Mush Hole) as a space in which Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists and scholars can meet and 1) acknowledge the residential school legacy, 2) challenge the concepts of ‘truth’ and ‘reconciliation,’ and 3) practice interdisciplinary art and performative methods of decolonization.”

The Mush Hole Project brought together a juried selection of multi-disciplinary Indigenous and settler artists to create and perform site-specific installations within the walls and grounds of the Mohawk Institute residential school in Ohswekon/Six Nations, Haudenosaunee territory in Ontario. The “Mush Hole” acquired its nickname from its former students who were served mushy oatmeal for their meals. When I applied to the project, I felt it was a unique opportunity to engage with this history, one shared by my own grandfather, as well as to engage with the site-specificity of the installation space. What I experienced during my participation in the exhibition, however, made me critically reassess my involvement in, and thinking towards, future reconciliation projects.

When I was asked to write about _The Mush Hole Project_ for this issue, a nagging inner question was whether writing about a two-year old reconciliation project was even relevant anymore. I dedicated a portion of my thesis, parts of which are excerpted here, to researching and thinking through the lack of responsibility and accountability found in this and similar projects. I’ve been openly vocal about my concerns with the ways in which well-intentioned initiatives, such as _The Secret Path_ (2016) and The Gord Downie & Chanie Wenjack Fund (DWF), have effectively displaced Indigenous artists and authors from TRC\-based education. These initiatives were launched after the story of Chanie Wenjack was relayed to singer Gord Downie by his brother, Mike, who heard it in a CBC documentary. This single residential school narrative, pushed forth by the DWF and _The Secret Path’s_ book, film and album, have taken space where Indigenous-authored stories should be heard. Indigenous authors in the children’s literature industry are already vastly underrepresented; _The Secret Path_ exacerbates this lack of representation. Equally as concerning, the DWF does not reference or link to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission or its Calls to Action on their website; instead the organization has chosen to brand their version of “reconciliACTION” through the sale of concert-style merchandise emblazoned with Gord Downie’s iconic hat. The project highlights one story and one symbol in its narrative, overshadowing the TRC and the testimonials of thousands of survivors who had the courage to tell their truths. To add to this insult, in 2018 the Liberal government earmarked five million dollars of its federal budget to the DWF for “reconciliation efforts.” Keep in mind, this is in addition to monies donated to the Fund through corporate and private donations. Meanwhile, grassroots organizations who’ve been boots-on-the-ground involved in community for years make miracles happen on shoe-string budgets.

In watching many of these initiatives move forward while dismissing, overshadowing and erasing Indigenous voices, I’ve become critical of the ways in which reconciliation has rolled out across the country. I’ve watched as non-Indigenous Canadians assail and disrupt the process of reconciliation with their own, already dominant, voices. On a personal note, it has been particularly hard to imagine any sort of conciliation this past year after witnessing an exceptional increase in the levels of online racism heaped upon Indigenous communities following the trial outcomes in the murders of Colten Boushie and Tina Fontaine. Taken as a whole, these occurrences have left me feeling drained and cynical of the concept of reconciliation and I know I’m not alone.

In the days leading up to writing this article, however, I had the opportunity to participate in group conversations with the “Creative Conciliations” team during an Indigenous Summer Arts Intensive held at UBC Okanagan. Here, there were discussions – at times, emotional – about the personal impacts of the residential school legacy alongside conversations about where reconciliation has been and where it’s heading. On the final day, Anishinaabe artist Susan Blight beautifully voiced her thoughts on our collective responsibility to be good ancestors here and now: What are we leaving behind for generations to come? With Susan’s words in mind I’ve decided to write about _The Mush Hole Project_ with direct honesty – not to chastise or demean the good intentions of the project, but to highlight shared concerns so future projects may avoid these issues. This is important because two years later, some of us still look back on the project with a sense of anger, disappointment and distrust of future reconciliation initiatives in the arts.

For many who experience intergenerational trauma emerging from the histories of residential schools, attending sites like the Mush Hole can be triggering. Yet the opportunity to address the care and well-being of the Indigenous artists participating and entering this site of trauma and violence seemed to be overlooked by the organizers. This key concern was brought forward prior to the start of the project by a number of Indigenous collaborators because many artists have personal and collective relationships to the residential school legacy. The concerns voiced went unheeded over the two days of installation and throughout the subsequent two days of the exhibition. Since no counselling was openly offered, several Indigenous artists found comfort in one another and we worked through our shared grief together.

From a curatorial perspective, the exhibition neglected to recognize these complex histories and overlooked an opportunity to educate through the installations on display. Upon completing my installation, I made inquiry as to whom I should approach to obtain labels to identify my work. This is a standard curatorial practice; however, I was informed artworks weren’t being labelled but I could create and print my own if I wished. I was hours away from home, with no access to a printer and I was surprised to hear the organizers planned to exhibit work without identification or contextualization. Instead of labelling, their strategy for disseminating information to viewers involved providing a session for Mush Hole tour guides to listen to the artists speak to their works. From this, the guides were expected to describe the art to viewers. I dropped in on several tours over the course of the weekend and can testify to the fact that this was ineffective and misrepresented many of the works, including my own. I found it irresponsible to present an exhibition in a space holding such deep-seated trauma without proper contextualization of its contents. The artists involved could have and should have been given an opportunity to tell our stories through standard exhibition practices, but instead the work was silenced, identities erased. This considerable oversight negated the curatorial mandate laid out by the project and missed an opportunity to educate its audience about how Indigenous artists respond to the residential school legacy and its continued effects upon our communities.

This silencing continued into the opening ceremony, where there was a distinct lack of voice given to survivors or any of the Indigenous artists and performers. Instead, the public witnessed a group of self-aggrandizing non-Indigenous organizers standing on stage alongside prominent local leaders and politicians who self-congratulated the success of the project. Following this display, the Waterloo Regional Police Male Chorus were given the stage and though their first song was sung in collaboration with Mino Ode Kwewak N’gamowak (Good Hearted Women Singers), the rest of their time on stage was not collaborative and took an exorbitant length of time. Their final song choice, Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” felt ill-considered, dismissive and trite. It drew audibly frustrated reactions from many Indigenous people in the audience. Kanien’kehá:ka artist and curator Lacie Burning reflects, “When they performed, I had the awful and familiar feeling of feeling helpless, angry and frustrated so I had to leave. \[…\] My mom asked me why they performed and was also upset.” To this day, I question how a large group of male police officers had been invited into a space where Indigenous community members have and continue to experience disproportionately high incarceration rates and cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women have been ignored for decades.

This pretentious, tone-deaf behaviour coupled with the failure to recognize the experiences of Indigenous participants made it seem as though the primary objective “to acknowledge the residential school legacy” had been lost. In fact, the silencing and angering effects of the legacy felt reproduced. Kanien’kehá:ka artist Jodi Lynn Maracle reflected, “That wasn’t healing for us, that wasn’t healing for those stuck \[in the school\], that was healing for settler egos.” A chapter of the TRC dedicated to Public Memory states that “the core values that lie at the heart of reconciliation” are based on the Seven Grandfather teachings which are: “wisdom, love, respect, courage, humility, honesty and truth.” Yet few of these values were upheld. The shared experience amongst the disheartened artists was best summed up by Ntlaka’pamux/Irish artist Tara Beagan, who stated: “care for our spirits was neglected in spite of repeated reminders and bids to teach. The invitation yielded strong work, but the thoughtless execution continues to inspire incredulity.”

Kuna and Rappahannock playwright, director and actor Monique Mojica refuses to take part in future reconciliation projects following her experience. On the night of our return from Mush Hole, Monique’s son, Bear Witness (of the Producer and DJ crew A Tribe Called Red), told her he and the crew had decided reconciliation projects weren’t for them. Monique recently expressed her decision to not take what she describes as a step backward from her son’s stance on this matter. She respects his strong position and “has a responsibility to him…a responsibility not to go backwards.” Monique and Bear aren’t alone; many Indigenous people maintain a distance from the reconciliation agenda. After all, they have nothing to reconcile for.

Whether Indigenous people engage with reconciliation projects or not is a personal choice each and every one of us has a right to make. It’s a decision to be respected without judgement from each other, without judgement from Canadians. Reconciliation is an important next step in Canada’s history, but it doesn’t always look the same for settler-Canadians as it does for Indigenous nations. For many, it means the return of land, autonomy over our languages, arts, culture and people. But far too many Canadians see reconciliation as saying sorry for the past while overlooking the many continued oppressions still facing Indigenous people from coast to coast.

When reconciliation projects ignore present-day truths – say, by inviting a group of police officers into a space which should have been trusted and safe – they overlook the realities of the people they’re attempting to reconcile with. Syilx/Okanagan Elder Eric Mitchell recently called acts of thoughtless reconciliation “zeal without wisdom;” these words will stick with me for a very long time. I know along the way there will be bumps on this path, I know mistakes will be made. This writing isn’t about getting it wrong, it’s about getting it right. The only way to accomplish this is to allow Indigenous voices to be open about their experiences, to be critical of the ways in which reconciliation rolls out across Canada. Expecting silence reinforces the colonial project; it allows the dominant culture to continue speaking on behalf of Indigenous people, moving us backward while facing forward.

People sometimes say “truth before reconciliation” but we also need more truth _in_ reconciliation.

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Indigenous

Curatorial practice

History

Artist Aylan Couchie reflects on her participation in _The Mush Hole Project_—a site-specific art installation within the Mohawk Institute residential school—organized in September 2016 by the University of Waterloo. As the project was produced in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report, the initiative’s failures are fleshed out as a means of guiding future initiatives to better outcomes. 

'Zeal Without Wisdom': Rushing for Reconciliation

**Pablo de Ocampo** lives in Vancouver and is the Exhibitions Curator at Western Front.

​​​​​Erika DeFreitas’s multidisciplinary practice includes performance, photography, video, installation, textiles, drawing, and writing. Placing emphasis on gesture, process, the body, documentation, and paranormal phenomena, DeFreitas mines concepts of loss, post-memory, legacy, and objecthood. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. DeFreitas holds a Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto. 

Currently based in Chatham, Ontario, **Pamela Edmonds** is Curator of the Thames Art Gallery, Co-Director of Third Space Art Projects and a founding member of the We Curate, We Critique Collective. More of her work can be viewed at www.pe-curates.space.

Multidisciplinary artist **Vera Frenkel** is a Governor General’s Award and Gershon Iskowitz Prize laureate, currently re-creating as a website the September 2017 installation of her multi-channel Body Missing project inside the Altaussee salt mine where the Nazis stored looted art.

**Ayumi Goto** is a performance artist, currently based in Toronto, traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, Wendat, Anishinaabe and Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nations. Her practice is deeply influenced by Roy Miki, Shirley Bear, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Adrian Stimson and Peter Morin.

**Tarah Hogue** is a curator and writer based on unceded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh territories/Vancouver, BC. _Ayumi Goto and Peter Morin: how do you carry the land?_ (2018) was her first exhibition as the Vancouver Art Gallery’s inaugural Senior Curatorial Fellow, Indigenous Art. She is a citizen of the Métis Nation with French Canadian and Dutch ancestry. 

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

**Pamila Matharu** is an artist, educator and cultural producer living in Toronto. Her upcoming solo project debuts at A Space Gallery (Toronto) in spring of 2019.

**Peter Morin** is a Tahltan Nation performance artist and writer. His work focuses on decolonization through the centering of Tahltan knowledges and practice.

**Lou Sheppard** (he/him) is an artist and settler on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq in Mi’kma’ki/Nova Scotia. “Phase Variations” is on view at Saint Mary’s University Gallery in Halifax from February 18 to April 17, 2022\. @shep\_shape

**Geneviève Wallen** is a Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal-based independent curator and writer interested in issues of ethnocultural representational spaces in Canada. Wallen’s practice is informed by diasporic narratives, intersectional feminism, intergenerational dialogue, and alternative BIPOC historical timelines.

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


**Erdem Taşdelen** is a Turkish-Canadian artist who lives and works in Toronto. His practice is rooted in conceptualism and involves a range of media, including installation, video, sculpture, sound and artist books. His diverse projects bring structures of power into question within the context of culturally learned behaviours, where he often draws from unique historical narratives to address the  
complexities of current socio-political issues. His work has been shown in numerous exhibitions internationally and across Canada, and he was long-listed for the Sobey Art Award in 2019.

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Collaboration

A compilation of varied responses from artists and curators to questions posed by the editors of C Magazine concerning the significance of trust in artist-curator relationships.

The Artist-Curator Relationship

Lucy Ives is Editor at Triple Canopy and author of Anamnesis, a book-length poem published by Slope Editions on the last day of 2009.

Lucy Ives: In a piece of criticism you wrote, there’s a quotation from Susan Buck-Morss. She talks about the artwork in modernity as having “the power to interpret reality itself as an illusion.” In my own peculiar reading of the present, we’ve dispensed with reality. But I still see art as a form of critique. You often write about a “logic” associated with photographs; I wonder if you could say something about that, as well as how you understand photographs’ relationship to reality, so-called.

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa: I think the photograph has become an almost zero-level instrument of communication with which to reshape the real, with a rate of acceleration and diffusion that’s really hard to wrap one’s mind around. This has happened somewhat independently of society’s collective work of developing widespread visual literacy, so pictures are always acting on us in ways we’re not attuned to or willing to consider. “Logic” has been a term for me to clarify that there’s a calculus at play. By making a series of photographs for a book, I’m also trying to valorize and interrogate a certain logic, or way of approaching reality.

LI: I’m curious about the significance of the book as a vehicle for photographs. I think of Stéphane Mallarmé’s utopian idea that “everything in the world exists in order to end up in a book.”

SW-W: A photographic book is as close to the actual thing the photographer wants you to hold in your hands as they can get. A photobook affords a photographer more narrative control than an exhibition affords an artist. It’s also as close as we can get to giving people democratic access to a photographic experience, with the understanding that most people cannot go to the places where our work is shown. This is why I love writing about photobooks, because they represent what the photographer wanted to put into my hands, from first image to last, from the cover to the end papers. I fell in love with photography in book form long before I went to go see it in museums or galleries.

LI: I want to move beyond the material nature of publishing to the interpersonal. How do you interact with someone, in the course of making a portrait?

SW-W: I make photographs with a 4×5 view camera, which is a modestly transformed version of a 19th-century camera. Its design is almost as old as the earliest cameras we now think of as producing photographs. It sits on a tripod. The one I use is made of beautiful dark wood. A dark cloth snaps on the back, and I put my head underneath. It’s an odd spectacle to see me out on the streets making photographs, as there aren’t a lot of people who are both able and crazy enough to spend the kind of money it costs to make pictures this way, and who do it on a regular basis. I’m always aware that my decision to make an image out in public turns me into an image for others.

When I ask people if I can make their portrait, the question or approach is always the same. I say, “Excuse me, I’m sorry to bother you,” and then explain that I’m working on a portrait project. I’ll say, “Would you have some time for me to photograph you?” Those are basically the only elements of the request. The whole thing is over in 10 seconds. I’ll walk directly toward the person I want to photograph. I don’t dawdle and flit around. I want to be straightforward. I also want to leave myself as few options to chicken out as possible.

Once someone says yes, I’m interested in everything that prevents them from becoming overly invested in the outcome. I don’t share cellphone pictures of the frame. I don’t carry Polaroid film. I try to dissuade anyone who might want to come gather around. I try to create a bubble in which there’s just myself, the person or people I’m photographing and the camera. One of the main ways I do that is by being quiet, and letting silence grow. I concentrate on how people move, and I think about light. I jealously defend the moment, but I don’t say what I want, because the truth is that I’m not sure. I’ll ask whomever I’m photographing to do things that seem like a variant of what I’ve seen them do before. Like, I would ask, how would you sit if you’re waiting for a friend to pick you up – or, if you’re leaning against this wall, what’s the most comfortable way for you to lean, is it on this side of your body or that. But I don’t say, “Sit here, move your leg, now think about your dead grandmother!” I worry that that would signal something that constructs an anticipation of the image.

Unless you know the weird optics of the view camera, which you can morph in profound ways by adjusting the relationship between the lens and film plane, you don’t really know what I’m seeing. And I don’t want you to obsess about it. When a person turns their gaze on the camera lens, a lot of these little inflections can change, but I’m still drawn to something that seems to belong to people before I even utter the question of whether I might photograph them. There’s a kind of accident that can happen, and it might be a fleeting half-expression utterly unrelated to the moment we’re experiencing together, but nevertheless resonant and compelling. I’m most invested in getting close to that. In a weird way, a person’s anticipatory sense of the image we’re making together gets in the way of me making images, at least in the way I’m trying to.

LI: If, as you say, images get in the way, how did that play into your decision to include archival photographs in _One Wall a Web?_

SW-W: The appropriated archival photographs turned up by accident. It began when I encountered photographs owned by a man who had lived in Richmond, Virginia, in the special collections at the Virginia Commonwealth University library. He was a member of the FBI who ended up being murdered with an axe in his own house. He had collected these mugshots of people who had been arrested. And there were candid portraits mixed in. It was apparent that these were photographs of people who were bound up in the criminal justice system in some way. I made enlargements of the portraits and mugshots and put them up in my studio. Then a friend urged me to look for found photographs on eBay, and I started looking for 4×5 negatives. I knew I didn’t want prints. That was one of the first things I determined, that I wanted to buy archival negatives that were materially equivalent to my contemporary ones.

But when I’m talking about images getting in the way of me making images, I’m thinking narrowly about not wanting people I’m making portraits of to respond to a pre-existing expectation; that’s the sense in which I try to keep images out. What I would say about the archival images is that as it became clearer to me what kind of work I was making, I understood that my own words or pictures were never going to cover all the terrain I was interested in. Other voices would be needed. The archival negatives immediately gave me a clear sense of a set of histories and genealogies by way of which contemporary conditions in which I was living and working had become normal and, in some sense, invisible. Maybe, in contradistinction to what I said earlier, this means other images also freed me to make images differently. 

LI: How?

SW-W: I got more and more interested in describing the world in attenuated ways. The photographs became more oblique. Where I stood and how I made a picture shifted. And the way I made landscape photographs changed a lot. I have to add a caveat to this and say that I am an unreliable critic of my own work. However, I think the landscape photograph became a way for me to get at the pathological investment in violence that I understand to be central to American history and culture.

LI: I think about one archival photograph you include, of a white woman who has a neck wound, being treated in a hospital.

SW-W: The caption for that photograph is _Armed Woman Shot by Police, Chicago, 1957_. The woman is white, being attended to by an all-black staff. She’s framed centrally, looking out directly at the camera, on her back. Her face is plaintive, and wracked with pain. She’s surrounded by these black hands. They’re not exactly forceful, but what they’re helping to make happen is painful. 

I think – to clarify what this image is doing in my book – that the kind of social encounter I’m interested in by way of photography approximates one that precedes or can precipitate violence. I’m interested in the fact that people believe they know things about a person on the basis of the body that person is carrying around and are often impelled to act on the basis of that “knowledge.” I think the bulk of what informs such violent acts is broader and deeper than individual bias. The kind of power we’re reckoning with here can’t be ratcheted down to the manageable abstraction of an individual. Anti-black violence is much bigger than that. 

We’ve gone through this period in America where people were trying to say, “It’s the economy, stupid.” But it’s not the economy. It’s racism, which not only buttresses the capital economy but has its own economies of desire. These things are important in relation to portraiture because how we look at one another has enormous bearing on how we act.

So, if people travel to the image index in the back of my book and see the titles of the photographs there, they might discover Armed Woman Shot by Police, Chicago, 1957, and they might intuitively think they know what kind of guilty perpetrator will appear in that photograph. But it’s that particular elegant yet pained white woman. She’s being made to suffer by black excellence, being cared for by people who are structurally subordinate to her. What might those black nurses and doctors have been thinking about what would happen if they were doing the same thing as their patient, bearing firearms in front of the police? You have to work to understand what is going on in that room, which is about much more than just one person’s pain.

LI: Your inclusion of the archival photographs activates them as records of the society that produced them. I’m wondering how you see documentary photography’s relationship to the work of deploying images in an evidentiary way, and how you understand the term “documentary,” more generally.

SW-W: Documentary, at least etymologically, has to do with pedagogy. In the American history of photography, the Farm Security Administration photographs from the ’30s play a pivotal role. Documentary photography was used to re-adhere the public to the state, as a scaffold within which national recovery should occur. The images were meant to be transparent, their meanings stable. Of course, they aren’t and never were, as _Armed Woman Shot by Police, Chicago, 1957_ also shows.

When we get to the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, there’s this crop of new documentary photographers including Robert Frank, and in 1967 there’s this seminal exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, _New Documents_, that features Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus: a generation of photographers whose “aim has not been to reform life, but to know it, not to persuade but to understand,” as John Szarkowski said at the time.

Szarkowski’s commentary effects a clear ethical and artistic division between documentary practice in the ’30s and in 1967\. At that point, individual creative genius was to be valorized over and against the public sphere or the national body. I have just as much criticism for that notion as I do the statist model. It’s an evasion to claim that rhetorical objects like photographs do not seek to persuade their viewers.

A lot of people in contemporary practice have rejected the term “documentary photographer.” I don’t have any problem with it. I’m willing to speak candidly about the ways in which my photographs are constructed fictions. I can speak to that person who’s invested in a statist model, who would look at a photograph and say, “This person = good, this circumstance = bad,” as though the photograph always only confirms its caption or my best intent. And I’m willing to have an argument with another person who claims that _all_ my book contains is my own creative expression. It plainly does not. Both positions tend toward an anti-social absolutism – one by closing down interpretive responsibility, one by ignoring the politics of the material world.

What I’m trying to “document” isn’t reducible to the individual people who loaned their time to me so I could make their picture, nor is it reducible to the places where I made landscapes. It’s not reducible to singular images. I’m trying to photograph a non-figurable operation of power. I’m trying to photograph the literal fact of something evanescent: the violent operations of white power in a process of normalization and legitimation, which is experienced radically differently, depending on one’s race, class, gender or sexual identity.

Plainly, while the term documentary stays stable, what defines it as a practice varies over time. Sometimes a historically normative form of artistic expression is useful as a way to communicate, in part _because_ of the limitations of its values and rules, as in _Armed Woman Shot by Police, Chicago, 1957_ for instance. I happen to agree with many critiques of humanist documentary photography, and I am also equally committed to describing what’s happening in the world because it’s fucked and we need to do something about it. I’m trying to work out a way as an artist of holding to both of these positions simultaneously, because they’re not contradictory. How we see and how we act have a history. The images I make or appropriate, and the texts I write or appropriate, are also working in relation to those histories, sometimes in sympathy, often by way of subversion. This is the material I have to work with and this is the best way I know how. I’m simultaneously marveling at the world, and being quite frank about terror.

LI: Do you think the people you photograph are aware of these goals? Can they be?

SW-W: It’s a lot to saddle somebody with. And this comes back to my concern about pre-empting an incident in which something else might occur. I know what I believe, but I don’t know what’s going to happen when I photograph. That not knowing is vitally important, because I can be right about a person and categorically wrong about the portrait that might ensue. If someone asks me what I’m doing, I’ll say I’m interested in how people are living in this particular moment. I’m interested in what it feels like and what it looks like. I’m interested in what it means. I’ll always be interested in that because I make portraits. I’m interested in complex moments of shared relation. I don’t outline my politics, because the risk is that then you’re not only asking that people collaborate, but also endorse your views. And they may not! In sharing my beliefs, I might also imply that the portrait we make will necessarily confirm my views, and that in that sense they will be willing accomplices to my politics. I’ve photographed people with whom I disagree profoundly. Whether that disagreement has anything to do with how they look in a given place and time is rarely, rarely relevant.

LI: How can it be that that’s not relevant?

SW-W: I made portraits of this young guy for a period of about a year when I was in Richmond. He harboured some deeply anti-Semitic beliefs and conspiracy theories about world governance. At certain points I was trying to find a way to photograph those beliefs, but they weren’t visible. Other things were visible – scorn, disdain, a kind of aloofness and insecurity – but, those might add up to something different in an image. So, what’s my responsibility? If this person isn’t covered in swastikas, how do I photograph his anti-Semitism? Is it enough to define him? I could use a caption. I could quote him. But then what am I asking you to bring to this photographic encounter except an excommunicative judgment? And what work does the portrait do to reckon with the complex structures of feeling from which views like this grow? Since the photographic portrait approximates and at the same time creates a certain social encounter, it’s important to deal with the uncertainty inherent in our relations with the unknown and to question how we think and act in that suspended potentiality.

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Photography

Cities

Cultural Studies

Dialogue

An interview with photographer and writer Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, discussing methods and politics of documentative photographic practice and its link to Wolukau-Wanambwa’s practice in written criticism, as well as the publication of his debut photobook.

It’s Not the Economy: An Interview with Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa

Simon Fuh is an artist and writer based in Toronto. His work spans a wide range of media, but coalesces around sound, installation, collaboration, and drawing. He tends to build relationships with friends and community through his work, often incorporating a performative or narrative element that influences the  trajectory of projects that explore themes of place, memory, and microhistory. 


I arrived in Taipei to heavy rain. My Dad had messaged me a set of instructions to get to his apartment in Neihu, and I followed them closely – I wouldn’t have been able to ask for directions in Mandarin. He met me at the bus stop with an umbrella and a pair of flip-flops and showed me to my new room: a beige paneled square, with half-unpacked suitcases strewn on the floor amidst a maze of clothing racks and plastic-wrapped suits. Pressed into the corner was a new mattress, without sheets or a pillow.

It was in this room that I first met Ken – the artist Kenneth Jeffrey Kwan Kit Lau – over Instagram. His profile, @fy\_ca, was recommended by a mutual friend from his BFA graduating class in Guelph. Ken quickly inquired over direct message as to how I’d discovered the relatively obscure account. The conversation flowed from there. The NBA finals were on, so we talked about our favourite basketball players, hip-hop, contemporary artists and Asian street foods. He was in Canada, so his messages kept me company at odd hours.

He’d turn out to be a confidant while I was in Taiwan, where I came after my estranged father invited me to work alongside him in his rooftop studio for six months. Although he and I had become closer over the last few years, we’d never spent much time together. He had outed himself as an art school drop- out, which surprised me at first, as I knew his mother, my Amah – a tough, financially successful Taiwanese immigrant – would never support her children on a path that almost guaranteed instability. Though his invitation was nerve-wracking given our lack of history, I went, intrigued by this unexpected familial encouragement for a career I knew to be a tough sell.

When I arrived, he was attempting to coat horseshoe nails, bent and soldered in the shape of human figures, with nickel stripped from Canadian coins via electroplating. His wide-ranging creative interests also included model airplanes, puzzles and candle-making. Occasionally, he would unsuccessfully try to monetize them by selling them on the street, or in a market. He would become fixated on the branding of his product, designing custom presentations and logos. Eventually, his interest in a new project would outweigh the old, and he would move on. I told him that he should just experiment without sale as the final goal. “Like an artist?” he responded, knowingly. I was reminded of what a friend once told me: being an artist doesn’t make you any freer, it just exchanges one set of problems for another.

We eventually negotiated common ground in our shared studio, exchanging compositional advice and opinions on each other’s work. I once asked him if he had ever asked his mother for her thoughts on his work. “She told me: ‘It’s still not too late to become an architect!’”

My mother didn’t want me to be an artist either. We only spoke about it once, but her rejection still stings. I was 17, and though I had grown up with almost no exposure to art, the idea of becoming an artist – the supposed freedom and commitment to learning that I felt it espoused – was something I dreamt of. When I finally told her that I intended to switch out of studying engineering and into visual art, she responded, “And then what?” A single mother of one, my mother had been recently diagnosed with terminal cancer, and was not in a state to consider decisions she deemed risky. I sunk into the couch while we sat, speechless, staring blankly at the TV.

A few months after returning to Canada, I saw a call for submissions posted by Can’t Complain Gallery for an exhibition with the working title _Only My Parents and My Sister Will See_. “Yes, only my mom, my dad, and my sister will be the visitors,” the post read, “Can you make them understand and appreciate more about contemporary art?” I laughed out loud, and then sent in my submission. Sardonic though it seemed, there was something about the call’s buried sincerity that touched me and reminded me of my own struggles with my parents around my pursuits. I also happened to know who posted it.

“I can’t bridge my world with theirs with just one exhibition,” Ken told me, “but, I can say it was like a big family gathering.” _Only My Parents and My Sister Will See_ was the working title for what became the exhibition _Under One Roof_ in May 2018, hosted in Ken’s family home in Mississauga, where they moved from Hong Kong when Ken was a pre-teen. It included works from 12 artists from Canada, USA, France, UK, Iran and Mexico, spanning what seemed like every corner of the house.

The installation was informal and casually decorative, not imposing too much on day-to-day life in the household. Some works played with the functionality of specific rooms and appliances: Brent Cleveland’s small, colourful portraits lived amongst the yard tools in the garage, and Glenn Espinosa’s silver necklace, with a pendant image of a person reading, hung in the freezer. My contribution, an inflated smiley-face balloon trapped in a glass bell jar, sat neatly on the coffee table. “When you put art in a home setting, it’s completely different,” Ken said. “You can sometimes feel tense and self-conscious in the white cube. I wanted to bring \[my family\] closer to my idea of what art could be.” I initially perceived Ken’s initiative as forceful in its drive to “make them understand and appreciate” contemporary art, but viewing the artworks revealed that Ken, and many of the artists involved, were genuinely interested in offering a more accessible variety of art to his family.

This premise reminded me of Jeremy Deller’s _Open Bedroom_ (1993), a tongue-in-cheek response to the open studios that his peers were hosting at the time in London. Deller waited until his parents were away on vacation, and then replaced all the artwork in their home with his own, reframing his embarrassment at living and working at home in his mid-20s as a “feature.” _Under One Roof_, on the other hand, involved Ken’s family all along; his dad helped install some of the sculptures, while his mom chose the placement for most works in the show and helped document the installation. Ken’s mother enjoyed the process so much that she even requested that they open their doors on Saturdays for public viewing.

I asked him what his parents think of his career choice, and he told me that his mother, despite her recent enthusiasm, still believes that “the artist thing” is merely a dream. He and his parents rarely discuss his career path, and when they do, it’s not always completely transparent. Of his recent three-month residency in Paris, he said: “I didn’t even tell them it was a residency. I told them it was an internship with a studio space.”

So often what artists do gets translated into the language of professionalization, especially in the presence of skeptics, outsiders and funders. While a great deal of artistic practice is simply absurd in any other context, masking that absurdity by reframing every action through the lens of productivity or innovation feels like a cop-out. At the same time, for many artists, financial precarity is a given condition, and eschewing a supposedly more financially secure future in the name of one’s art practice can seem deeply hubristic, or selfish, especially to the artist’s family – who may or may not be relying on their child’s income as part of their own life plan. For artists, gaining parental trust often means asking them to take a leap of faith into contemporary art itself – which, in a world that prefers the measurable, is no easy sell to those who aren’t already initiated. Each artist, then, is forced to form language around what they do, based on the languages they know their families understand. While such earnestness may be rewarded in moments, I realize now that the lack of permission granted, the impatient lines of questioning and the failure to relate to my biological family almost completely disappear in the company of my peers: my chosen family.

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Internet

Family

Language

The artist Simon Fuh details the reluctance felt by his family when confronted with the instability of his artistic career. Participating in Kenneth Jeffrey’s group exhibition _Under One Roof_, Simon Fuh and others explore how contemporary art can be translated for and brought closer to an artist’s family.

Me, My Parents and My Art Practice

**Kerri Flannigan** is an interdisciplinary artist currently living on the traditional territories of the Lekwungen and Coast Salish peoples, including Esquimalt, Songhees and W SÁNEC First Nations.

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

**Megan K. Quigley** is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and sometimes writer, living and working as a guest in beautiful unceded Lekwungen Territories.

<h5>“Caring is not abstract. The circle of ecological compassion we feel is enlarged by direct experience of the living world, and shrunken by its lack.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer, _Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants_</h5>

##### This conversation is a reflection on the possibilities of queerness as discussed through the collaborations, conversations and gestures of labour enacted throughout the ongoing project _Feeling Measurements_, facilitated by artists Kerri Flannigan and Megan K. Quigley, among many collaborators and co-conspirators located on Lekwungen, W\_SÁNEĆ, T’Souke and Sc’ianew territories in Victoria, BC. The project has included pierogi-making, relational mapping, knot-tying, creating cordage from invasive species and making jam as gestures that ground and materialize the project’s theoretical negotiations of queerness. Each of these activities was selected organically during the process, based on the varying interests of the participating artists and collaborators. _Feeling Measurements_ attempts to consider queerness not only as an orientation, but also as a framework for the ways in which we experience and enact care to each other, and to the places around us. The \_Feeling Measurements \_methodology hinges on the possibility that queerness can exist as a framework for intimacy, enacted through lateral collaboration and partnership, as well as through privileging embodied knowledge. Below, the artists discuss these methodologies through the metaphor of the “fathom,” a concept that reveals our sometimes complicated and contradictory relationships to queerness.
  
  
**Greta Hamilton**: To begin, can we discuss how queerness and queer intimacy have been approached throughout the _Feeling Measurements_ project?

**Megan K. Quigley**: While working on Feeling Measurements, we were continuously negotiating our intent in enacting queerness, and naming queerness as a framework, to in- form the project’s methodology of collaboration and of partnership. This was rooted in a struggle to embrace and deploy queerness as a tangible and continuously moving series of frameworks, moments, methodologies and intimacies. I think what Kerri and I have been trying to explore is an expansive, but still material, queer methodology that simply asks: what are some spatial, emotional and embodied intersections of queerness in our experiences? Some of the ways this emerges is through the politics of accessibility and representation. In others, it is a commitment to slippery spaces between each other’s stories, histories and bodies. For me, a starting point to negotiating a queer methodology is: what are some languages of intimacy? What are the ways we enact care?

**Kerri Flannigan**: The intimacy present in this project came up through collective conversations around experiences of space. There’s a willingness to be vulnerable within these conversations in order to share not only the ways we have common experiences, but also the ways we diverge in our experiences within the queer communities we access. What is the distinction between trust that is inherent and trust that is built? We have held conversations focusing on the somatic knowledge of navigating and negotiating being in public or private spaces. We became curious about a sort of relational mapping, through stories and through actions like indexing conversations with the acts of making or doing.

**GH:** Can you speak to the methodologies developed around queerness? The idea of the “fathom” as a unit of measurement, as a gesture and as a metaphor generated a lot of conversation regarding embodied knowledge.

**KF:** The “fathom” is an early form of measurement that was based on a person’s body in relation to the land around them. A “fathom” is the distance between arms outstretched from fingertip to fingertip. A knot would be tied into a rope for every _fathom_ measured against one’s body. The word derives from the Old English word _to encircle or embrace_.[^1] It speaks to what is graspable or imaginable. What is fathomable can be understood and embodied. Megan and I have had conversations about whether queerness is fathomable or not, and we migrated from it being fathomable to unfathomable. What then are the things that are imaginable or possible to understand in our bodies?

**MKQ:** One of the more complex and beautiful aspects of this project has been making sense of the implications of the _fathom_, as a measure of both intimacy and distance. It is difficult to put in context, because the project included such an expansive range of gestures, actions, skill shares and dialogues, but each of these pieces are anchored in the _fathom_. Whether through learning to make Kerri’s grandma’s pierogies together while sharing our own stories of dumplings, or gathering to make cordage from scotch broom, these seemingly disparate actions create points of connections and divergence. The act of gather- ing and sharing stories felt very much like an emotional gesture of fathoming, of stretching one’s arms from fingertip to fingertip, together.

The project deals a lot with ideas of distance – emotional, historical, geographical – and thinking through distance as intimate, allowing room to hold our colliding stories with care. I’m interested in considering more expansive alternatives to empathy that offer the capacity to encircle one another’s stories. Within this framework of the _fathom_, there’s a complicated liability in our proximity to each other, in our intimacies to each other, and in the possibilities of undefined space.

**GH:** Your work together has also centred the idea that embodied knowledge or physical gestures of intimacy have the capacity of being transgenerational, intergenerational and possibly beyond language.

**KF:** We’ve often opened up shared space with a prompt, like “What is your relationship to a specific plant?” or “When was the last time you cried in public?” I feel like this practice has really helped ground the space we have been holding in a kind of collective intimacy, and that these prompts tend to decentralize the authority of any particular narratives. I think storytelling like this opens up a space that can acknowledge the many ways we car- ry familial and cultural histories and knowledge in our bodies. Often while working with these prompts, we’ve provided everyone with something to do with their hands, such as making knots in rope.

**MKQ:** By listening to and privileging embodied knowledges, I think there is space to de-centre and also decolonize both theoretical and empirical approaches to personal and shared histories. Through sharing stories while using our hands, I think we can create intimacy with our bodies in transformative ways. More personally, as a mixed-race, migrant person, there are many barriers to accessing the language that my ancestors spoke, or the foods that my grandparents would have eaten. But I have faith that my body carries this knowledge and language over distance, and understanding that these histories live, sometimes unnamed, in my body, is liberating. I loved the prompt about relationships to cultural pocket foods, where stories of dumplings ranged from gyoza bought in the frozen food aisle to Kerri’s grandma’s recipe of dumplings made with Bisquick. Everyone had a unique experience, but we gathered to learn to make pierogis with our hands, together. In that way, thinking of the body as a transgenerational vessel feels very intimate. The unfathomable might not be discernable or measurable, but can still be tangible and physical.

**GH:** What other gestures have been shared? How has sharing influenced the methodology of friendship and collaboration throughout _Feeling Measurements_?

**MKQ:** Something moving about the project for me has been the fluidity of collaborative actions that dip in and out of actions of care, of feeding each other and of learning together. Each of these pieces is anchored in a particular sort of labour and reciprocity. This calls to mind Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writings around invasive plants, which collaborator Alexis Hogan introduced. Kimmerer talks about certain invasive, immigrant plants that participate in a sort of ecological reciprocity, making sense of their new contexts and learning how to be useful.[^2] I think that’s been part of the methodology of _Feeling Measurements_: complicating a singular narrative of his- tories and responsibilities. In some ways, I feel like the gestures over which we gathered in the project are always rooted in a tangible and physical care – whether that’s an action of nourishment like making food or jam, listening for urban birds, or an act of care for the land by extracting invasive species, or by learning the names, histories and uses of plants.

**KF:** I want to mention the word “conspiring.” My friend Kim Smith introduced it to me, using it as a way of thinking through collaboration. Kim uses the word conspire because it implicates the body in collective work. Etymologically, conspire means to breathe together, which I thought was such a beautiful way to think about collaboration and intimate collaborations between friends. Friendship has been a huge part of _Feeling Measurements_ through the support and lateral learning that’s happened.

**MKQ:** I am excited about conspiring and collaborating through queer friendship as a way of enacting intimacy. One aspect of friendship I’ve been thinking about is pushing through the boundaries that are imposed on intimacies – not only in the spaces in which we are allowed to be intimate, but also in what sorts of relationships we can do so. I’ve begun to think of intimacy as a methodology instead of as an economy of desire, which is maybe more queer. I think about this a lot in relation to mentorship – envisioning mentorship not as mentoring or being mentored, but as multidirectional, generating radical and abundant growth, care and generosity.

**GH:** We’ve spoken previously about crying in public as a gesture of intimacy with the space around us. How does intimacy play out in public spaces? Can gestures of intimacy be expanded into systems of intimacy?

**KF:** I was doing a lot of public crying when I first moved to Victoria and would go on these ritual cry walks. Because of the way my day was structured, I allowed myself to feel things when I got off the 14 bus route and walked home. In the span of a month I was routinely walking down the same street and crying, always around a similar time of night. I imagined that there was someone living on this street noticing this person walking by crying every day. I was crying on these walks, crying at school and in front of my supervisor. I told my friend Kim about it, and she said, “Oh good.” At the time I was surprised by that reaction, but I think it was wrapped up in the value of bringing our whole messy selves into spaces that aren’t supposed to be intimate.

**MKQ:** I think there are architectures of intimacy. This emerged through the _Feeling Measurements_ walk facilitated in collaboration with Laura Gildner, who talked about the history of malls as spaces that were originally conceived as gathering places, community centres and art spaces, a vision that has become distorted through commerce and development. We talked a lot about the collisions between emotional and physical space, and how particular spaces in certain contexts can facilitate or restrict access.

One of the things I found very stark when I moved from Istanbul to Victoria as a teenager was how the geographies of this place interfere with a sense of physical intimacy. In Istanbul, no matter what time of day, you were around people, always sharing space, messily. There are patterns of living life together in a city like that, whether it’s through public transit, eating on the street, through witnessing all celebrations and ceremonies in public from weddings to funerals. Before I moved here, that was the form of spatial intimacy that was familiar – the unfiltered collision of lives. But in learning how to be and move through this space, on Lekwungen Territories, I have also needed to listen to and learn in other ways. I am often amazed by how different my body feels now than when I arrived. Fathoming the distance between now and then is such a beautiful reminder of the role of place in our emotional and spiritual spaces.

This brings to mind a moment from the walk where we convened the group by walking back to the gallery each holding on to a rope, like a youth summer camp group might in public. As adults, and strangers, this gesture was practical but also so emotional in intervening in our visibility, pronouncing us as a group to our viewers and to each other, and creating a tether between ourselves. I am sure it looked ridiculous, but it remains a profoundly moving moment of the project for both of us. I wonder then, what other gestures can rupture or generate intimacy in public space? For some, it is maybe just having their body be visible. Maybe it is crying in public, or being angry in public. How can we develop that intimacy into the land, into our neighbourhoods, into our public spaces?

Feeling Measurements _includes collaborations and conspiring by_: Kerri Flannigan, Megan K. Quigley, Alexis Hogan, Laura Gildner, Estraven Lupino-Smith, Doug Jarvis and ARTSCAPE

_With support and consultation from_: Claire Lyke, Kim Smith, Dan M, Dana Levine, Breanna Fabbro, Helen Marzolf, Rebecca Singer, Jess MacCormack, Kelsey Lavoie, Miles Giesbrecht, Kegan McFadden, Peggy Cady and Bill Bartlett.

_With stories from_: My Name Is Scot, Kim Smith, Jamie Ross, Vendela Phutmoh, Libby King, Kara Stanton, Kendra Marks, Greta Hamilton, Dan Mack, Kerri Flannigan, Laura Gildner, Megan Quigley, Estraven Lupino-Smith, Alexis Hogan, Katie Sage, Leslie Robinson, S and Kelsey Lavoie.

[^1]: [https://merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fathom](“merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fathom”)
[^2]: Robin Wall Kimmerer. _Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants_

Artist

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The artist Greta Hamilton initiates a conversation with Kerri Flannigan and Megan K. Quigley regarding the artists’ most recent collaborative project _Feeling Measurements_. This is an ongoing series of community-based activities, namely “pierogi-making, relational mapping, knot-tying, creating cordage from invasive species and making jam.” A series of questions and responses unpack the project’s methodologies for generating intimacy, explored through the metaphor of the “fathom.”

Queering Intimacy Through Acts of Care: A Conversation with Kerri Flannigan and Megan K. Quigley

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Vince Rozario is an independent critic, curator, writer, arts administrator, and community organizer based in Tkaronto/Toronto. They have published writing in _C Magazine_ and _Momus_, and contributed to exhibition texts for Xpace, Whippersnapper Gallery, InterAccess, and Gallery 44\. They were the winner of the 2018 C New Critics Award and the 2021 Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators.

In the warm sunlight of a late summer afternoon, a curious pastel pink tableau – seemingly, a diorama of a suburban living room – occupies a storefront in Toronto’s Chinatown. The stifling heat inside is palpable. _Biding My Time / Biting My Tongue_ delves into mental health, trauma and memory, as experienced through a South Asian diasporic lens, broaching a sensitive discourse on mental health wherein whiteness is often disproportionately centred. 

These themes are fraught within an exhibition complex which aestheticizes and intellectualizes racialized trauma for colonial consumption. Racialized artists are often expected to perform the role of the “native informant.” Critical consensus often relegates work exploring race and identity to the realm of the pseudo-political, or vanity-driven. A racialized depiction of mental anguish is often either trivialized as anecdotal or expected to encompass the entirety of a communal experience. Sanjit Dhillon and cherry kutti deftly navigate the challenges of presenting confessional work as racialized femme artists – or “bearers of race,” as Hannah Black[^1] writes – by way of an extended visual conceit which plays with indexicality and memory.

The installation comprises an assemblage of peculiar furniture and anachronistically assembled bric-a-brac: a model auto rickshaw, a screen-printed stool made by kutti’s grandmother, a lamp embellished with pressed flowers, dying houseplants, novelty votive wall hangings bearing the evil eye and a sandalwood box with a secret stash and bong, among other items. While some of these objects are particular to South Asian households, it is in fact a familiar suburban tableau. As a diorama, it appears authentic, save for minor yet evocative interventions in which the artists challenge the voyeuristic hegemonic gaze engendered by the diorama format. Appearing to be signifiers of otherness to an etic perspective, for the emic viewer, these interventions invoke a nostalgic relationship. Even this nostalgia, however, is problematized by kutti’s gestural interventions, which come in the form of graphic overlays on multiple surfaces. Traced schematic drawings on vellum are placed over old family photographs. A video work loops on the television; on the pink wall behind it, kutti has hand-painted, in a slightly darker shade of pink, a pattern of grimacing faces, recalling delirium. This interplay between static and dynamic components seems to viscerally conjure the thrall of a psychological nadir.

The accompanying text, sourced from Dhillon’s personal journals, oscillates between depressive inertia and cloying anxiety. It recounts the countless hours spent waiting in hope of treatment, support or even basic motivation. She articulates the exhaustion of confronting the systemic realities of being a racialized artist operating in circumstances of precarity. “I’m tired in all the ways that tiredness can manifest itself on both an emotional and mental level. I’m tired from following my mind, jumping through hoops, searching the cracks and crevices for pieces of ‘Myself,’ and consistently coming up short,”[^2] she opines. Impaired mental health and systemic trauma are expressly not mutually exclusive here, which is echoed in the exhibition’s title. While _Biting My Tongue_ evokes a suppression of rage and tacit resignation to systemic contingencies, _Biding My Time_ characterizes this period as one of anticipation, of a positive alterity.

kutti and Dhillon also confront the myth of the model minority. Dhillon criticizes the valorization of high-functioning depressives who fit conveniently into capitalist notions of productivity while the systemic factors affecting mental health in racialized communities are flattened. Exploitative labour and intergenerational trauma inform the work. In the exhibition text, Dhillon contrasts her psychological exhaustion with the physical exhaustion of her mother who endured years of strenuous manual labour supporting her family. She belies the sense of disappointment and frustration that comes with not being able to meet the expectations of a parent who has contributed toil and capital toward the prosperity of their child. In this way, Dhillon traces the bewildering trajectories that render trauma through successive generations, particularly as they relate to capital.

Recovery becomes contentious when even the holistic modes of addressing trauma available to racialized communities are co-opted by larger social and political systems. The exhibition’s central video work samples footage of Baba Ramdev, a celebrity yogi and business magnate at the helm of a multi-million-dollar business in pseudo-Ayurvedic products and quack remedies which promise relief from every conceivable ailment, from cancer to depression. He is also currently at the centre of multiple fraud and sexual abuse scandals related to his company, Patanjali.[^3] Orientalist thirst for the exotic other, albeit appeased by opportunistic swamis and yogis from the time of Vivekananda in the early 20th century,[^4] pollutes centuries-old esoteric practices with pseudo-science and modern religious identity politics. The tongue-in-cheek video hints at a sense of betrayal at the failure of both traditional coping mechanisms and familial support networks against the countervailing pressures of consumer capitalism and border imperialism. kutti’s stash and bong, nestled within the confines of a carved sandalwood box, take this up, winking at contested cultural taboos and the stigma of self-medication in the absence of effective treatment.

While grappling with the complex intersections of mental health and race, _Biding My Time / Biting My Tongue_ still manages to hold space for those wounded by these realities. The fictitious domesticity of the space, its celebration of liminality and articulation of a hybrid diasporic aesthetic, invites viewers to converse and relate, both to the objects and each other. Across multiple visits, the space continued to facilitate kinship and solidarity. New friendships were forged, communal futures discussed and familiar humorous tropes regaled. In this interactive aspect, _Biding My Time / Biting My Tongue_ is at its most successful, engendering growth, healing and the possibility of reconciliation between oppositional cultural forces impacting mental health for racialized people.

[^1]: Hannah Black, “The Identity Artist and the Identity Critic,” _Artforum_ (Summer 2016).
[^2]: Exhibition text.
[^3]: Ben Crair, “This Multibillion-Dollar Corporation Is Controlled by a Penniless Yoga Superstar” (March 15, 2018); https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-03-15/this-multibillion-dollar-corporation-is-controlled-by-a-penniless-yoga-superstar.
[^4]: Girish Shahane, “Yoga Was Created 5,000 Years Ago, Right?” (January 7, 2015); https://scroll.in/article/699011/yoga-wascreated-5000-years-agoright.

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Exhibitions

This is an exhibition review by Vince Rozario of Sanjit Dhillon and cherry kutti’s project “Biding My Time / Biting My Tongue” at Whippersnapper Gallery, which ran from from August 7 – 27, 2017\. Rozario is the 2018 recipient of the C Magazine C New Critics Award.

Sanjit Dhillon and cherry kutti: Biding My Time / Biting My Tongue

**Aryen Hoekstra** is an artist based in Toronto, where he currently serves as the Director of G Gallery.

Upon entering Éclair’s storefront gallery, the space’s former life as a succession of functioning bars is immediately evident. The right wall of the front room is decorated in small bronze-coloured glass tiles, lending to the exhibition, on a sunny afternoon, the warm shimmer of a newly minted penny. The remaining walls are a combination of cracking and peeling plaster and paint, architectural remnants that give way to speculation about a series of hastily completed renos and even quicker exits. Galleries such as Éclair, which opt to leave the spaces they inhabit intact rather than rolling everything over in white, are an increasingly common and needed break from the conventions of the white-cube’s so- called neutral display strategies. As well as acknowledging that this supposed “neutrality” was always a myth, they also offer artists a site against which to respond, often producing results that wouldn’t otherwise have been generated. Other examples of less conventional exhibition spaces include Long Island City’s Sculpture Center, a former trolley re- pair shop, and Montreal’s Parisian Laundry, a former industrial laundry, both of which have given host to solo exhibitions by Rochelle Goldberg in the past two years. What differentiates Éclair from these larger industrial spaces is its intimacy; bars are built to house bodies, not objects or manufacturing. Perhaps in part, it is because of this that Goldberg’s exhibition _Pétroleuse_ feels especially bodily in this setting.

Éclair’s history also provides a fitting context for Goldberg not only to continue her ongoing investigation of the material, economic and geopolitical properties of oil, but to explicitly consider the violent relationship of human bodies to industrialization’s most contested resource. The Pétroleuses was the name given to a group of female supporters of the Paris Commune who were the subject of a popular rumour that claimed they had been involved in the burning down of private and public buildings in the Commune’s final days. The Paris Commune sought to form a socialist government in Paris following the defeat of Napoleon III, holding power for about two-and-a-half months in 1871 before being defeated by the French national army. After Paris had been recaptured by the Loyalists, word circulated that a group of working-class women, sympathetic to the Commune, had thrown bottles of lit petroleum (early Molotov cocktails) into the cellar windows of buildings across Paris in a final act of defiance against the Versailles government. These rumours were of course untrue, merely an attempt to paint the Communards as unnatural, destructive brutes. Perhaps the plans of the Commune too were first hatched in a bar – a gathering place for bodies set upon a collective revolutionary act. In _Pétroleuse_, the often-abstract realities and ramifications of petropolitics are drawn closer to the body, with oil acting as a lubricating agent for radical transformation.

Retained from the building’s previous use is the division of the space into two connected yet distinct rooms, and Goldberg has effectively created two connected yet distinct installations. In the front, the tiled wall supports one edge of a well-worn rug slumped against it, its design so badly faded from use that it is a challenge to recognize anything of its original Baroque patterning. A subtle narrative can be found ingrained in its tired fibres: a luxury object removed from a bourgeois home and repurposed once its value had expired. A segment of the rug has been cut away and covered, in part, with a plastic sheet. Layered between the plastic sheet and the rug is a grouping of glass bowls pushed towards the wall and filled with water that has spilled out onto the plastic covering. Added to the water is a littering of gold glitter that has begun to break apart, producing an oily residue that stretches across the surface of the liquid. Its appearance verges on the alchemical, mixed together to produce something more than its constituent parts, a volatile concoction. Around the bowls is a collection of mouldy celeriac bulbs pierced with bronze casts of wicks, alluding to a potential destructive act.

The rear space is somewhat smaller but has been doubled in appearance by the addition of a set of mirrored tiles that reflect an existing set left by one of the previous owners. Here, two smaller rugs appear, as equally worn as that in the front, again covered with bulbous celeriac bombs, and an arrangement of LED lights that gesture toward lines of connection like an excavated subterranean root system. Standing above is a vertical armature, shrouded in gauzy silk and topped with the bronze mask of a woman’s face, eyes closed, turned towards the gallery entrance.

While researching the accused female incendiaries of the Paris Commune and the revolutionary government they hoped to form, the word that kept springing to my mind was the Greek polis, which literally translates to city, but which can also mean a body of citizens. The Paris Commune was an attempt at socialist self-governance within the space of a city, but in the context of Goldberg’s exhibition I’m more curious about the body of citizens that gathered to produce it, however briefly. Standing in a space that bears the traces of a life that was once a bar, questions emerge that might not have otherwise been generated. How might bodies gather, connect and work together toward a politics that extends itself through interconnectivity? What shift takes place when a collective movement is ascribed the attributes of a single body rather than a collection of individuals? Goldberg’s exhibition oscillates between the two, as the multiple becomes the singular and vice versa through historical reference and material enactment. In Reza Negarestani’s ficto-theory-thriller novel _Cyclonopedia: Complicity With Anonymous Materials_, oil is described as the lubricant of all historical and political narratives. Goldberg’s _Pétroleuse_ is steeped in both, adding to this that oil might also be productive as an emulsifying agent, capable of dissolving the singular into the collective. Here, such a mixture unearths petro-politics from the hidden, the subterranean and the universal to something more visible and particular: binding and coating bodies to one another until boundaries leak away, and providing the material means to produce a collective action.

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Aryen Hoekstra reviews Richelle Goldberg’s exhibition _Pétroleuse_ at Éclaire, Berlin, Germany. (April 28 – June 17 2018).

Rochelle Goldberg: Pétroleuse

Portuguese artist Filipa César’s first feature film – the experimental documentary _Spell Reel_ (2017) – is a poetic montage that explores the processes of recovery, archiving and display of a collection of abandoned film reels produced by Guinea-Bissau resistance fighters during and after their war of independence against Portugal (1963-1974).

Numerous entities appear in this highly collaborative project, but two figures, neither of whom contributed directly to the film, have particular presence: Amílcar Cabral, the Bissau-Guineans’ anticolonialist leader and the French Marxist film-essayist Chris Marker. Across continents, these figures shared beliefs in revolutionary politics and the importance of both education and film in these struggles. Cabral sent four young Guineans to receive film training at the Cuban Film Institute; Marker provided instruction and film equipment to groups in France during the 1968 factory worker occupations and, later, to Guineans during his half-year stay in Guinea-Bissau. As a history of political struggle and revolutionary cinema, _Spell Reel_ pays tribute to and continues their legacy, and asks us to consider education as avant-garde work.

César shares with other contemporary European artists – including Renzo Martens and Sven Augustijnen – filmic explorations that grapple with their respective nations’ colonialist crimes in Africa. Portugal initiated the European slave trade and African colonization and was the last to withdraw its brutal rule; this dark legacy remains. _Spell Reel_ shines a flickering light through that history, unearthing filmic evidence of resistance and offering hope for present and future struggles.

The Cuban-trained filmmakers documented their country’s struggles from 1963 to 1974\. Neglected after a military coup in 1980, the films were recovered in 2001 but, because of improper storage, only about 40 of the original 100 hours of footage were salvageable. The National Film Institute of Guinea-Bissau, current holders of the archive, collaborated with Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art, to digitize the footage in Berlin. In 2011, César and two of the original four filmmakers – Sana na N’Hada and Flora Gomes – joined the project. To educate both sides of this colonial history, the digitized fragments were then presented as itinerant screenings across villages in Guinea-Bissau and European cities. César documented the project’s different stages digitally and, following Marker’s signature style, montaged her footage with the older black and white fragments. The new footage – of old film cans and their mouldy contents; the 16mm film running through fingers and the simultaneous appearance of its contents on a computer screen; the setting up of outdoor projection screens in towns across Guinea-Bissau; the original filmmakers and their audiences talking about their past and the film’s reception in the present – is playfully collaged with earlier footage of guerrilla meetings in forest camps, military activities and the post-independence establishment of a national currency. The old and new footage, merging past and present, combines in a patchwork.

The composition of the different imagery shifts within the frame, with silent black and white film often presented as an insert on either side of the frame, overlaid onto César’s footage or a black background. Text in small, typewriter-style font, in a tone recalling Marker’s intimate voice-over commentary, appears occasionally beside or beneath the imagery. As in dialectical montage, images and text combine to develop poetic resonances and pointed meanings. In one example, the concept of communal or networked strength emerges when a camera pan across a dense mangrove forest merges with scenes of jumbled electrical cables and hands plugging them into sockets in preparation for an outdoor screening, strings of film reels and rows of young fighters marching and singing. The accompanying text unites the imagery: “a cine-port opened into a time capsule film reels and magnetic tapes allowing cine-kinships to relate beyond the system of national and racial patterns matter de-processing for nearly 40 years in a misty milieu remains of a militant cinema praxis becoming re-inscribed.” César’s polyphonic splicing, too, adheres to such re-inscription.

Faces and bodies etched with patterns of mould and decay suggest relations of materiality and fragility between the decomposing celluloid film – lest we forget its gelatin emulsion is made from the bones of animals – and the bodies it once preserved. Time, bodies, memory can all slip away if not cared for. César’s project – of recovery, preservation and dissemination to an African population that knows little of its heroic past – reflects the importance of looking back in order to make preparations for the future.

The value of collaborative work is represented through every aspect of the film. In the earlier footage, rebels fought together for future independence, and after attaining it, in 1973, they attempted to construct a socialist society. César’s own footage features many individuals engaged in the processes of archiving and digitization, interviewing, discussing and setting up projections. Lastly, the organizations who supported the project span various historical, artistic, social and political interests. This exemplary model of communal work, the film suggests, is the methodology that will effect change. The values of both community and cultural engagement are figured forcefully by the voice of exiled South African singer Mariam Makeba in her performance at the 20th-anniversary celebration of Guinea-Bissau’s independence in 1976 and in the film’s closing soundtrack, when she urges: “We’ve got to rally, rally ’round the P.A.I.G.C. (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde).”

_Spell Reel_ registers the last of the African independence struggles, an important victory that needs to be understood as just one stage in an admittedly very long road toward racial equality. In the film, black activist Angela Davis emphasizes this point to her Berlin audience when she situates present-day issues on that continuum: “Some of our ancestors were forced to migrate through slavery, and so … instead of conceptualizing the refugee movement or migrant crisis as a small movement, it should be seen as the most important movement of our time. This movement is the 21st-century civil rights movement.” As the title of César’s 2013 project suggests: _Luta ca caba inda_ (the struggle is not over yet).

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Film

Documentary

Jill Glessing reviews Filipa César’s “Spell Reel,” which screened on April 19th, 2018 at Innis Town Hall in Toronto as part of Images Festival.

Filipa César: Spell Reel

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

_Toujours la coquille de l’autre always the shell of another_ offers a subtle meditation on art history, the mysterious pull of beautiful objects and time itself. Known for her photo- graphs of unexpected, esoteric groupings of found and made images and objects that play with conventions of collage and still life, Celia Perrin Sidarous’ practice has been expanding. Her installation _Notte coralli_ (2016), in the most recent (and likely last) Montreal Biennale, saw her signature collage assemblages proliferate into film and three-dimensional works with armatures and sculptural features that echoed formal components of her photographs. In _Toujours_, the artist’s finely attuned sense of the associative power of layering, framing and art’s ability to collapse and complicate temporalities find an adept apogee.

_Toujours_ is a spare, almost austere exhibition, but one that rewards the viewer’s time. The main floor of the gallery is hung with a series of framed prints: staged studio shots of individual and grouped objects (many featuring the show’s titular coquilles or shells), images of cultural sites in Greece and reproduced pages from a catalogue of the archaeological muse- um at Delphi, published in 1975\. Greece has been a reference point in several of the artist’s recent works, but here, it’s Delphi’s particular history, mythology and cultural significance that take centre stage.

The space is bisected diagonally by a long, low plinth on which rests _Notes to Self_ (2018), a collection of ceramic objects – mostly vessels of various sorts: pinch pots, bud vases, delicate spoons and some more unconventionally shaped, calling to mind rock formations, coral or shards of pottery – glazed in a restrained palette of white, slate blue, sea green and taupe.

What feels like both the conceptual and emotion- al heart of the exhibition is _Slip_ (2018), a silent 16mm film projected in the gallery’s basement, the “bunker.” Though enigmatic and non-narrative, it acts as something of an index for the exhibition. Here, as in a photograph upstairs, are the pillars of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, collaged between waves and spray washing over sand, olive trees rustling in the wind. The glossy still lifes are animated here; the elegant female hand, which appears in some of the photographs with nails painted scarlet, enters the frame and delicately, languidly places an olive branch, moves pearls from a table into a dish and pours cream into pitcher, all with purposeful, balletic grace. Situating the film here, in this subaltern space below the white cube, evokes a sense of accessing, or unearthing, a deeper level of meaning beyond the aesthetically beautiful but somewhat un- yielding images and objects in the space above. It is an effective use of the gallery’s secondary exhibition space; the whirr of the projector the only sound and the flicker on the screen the only light in a space that calls to mind an excavation site for some wonder of classical antiquity.

The significance of Greece here extends beyond the merely representational. The connotations it invokes as the place considered in Western history to be the incunabulum of art, architecture and philosophy, bring a sense of historiography to the show, particularly as it concerns the role of the historian, archivist or collector. In _Abalone_ (2018) and _Lucie_ (2018), two of the framed prints which feature the aforementioned hand (of the artist’s aunt), the collector is anonymous but seen – and is noticeably female. By contrast, the images from the Delphi museum catalogue seem to amplify the lack of a human presence, exemplifying the invisible and no doubt male “objectivity” of the archaeologist or historian. In subtly questioning the poetics and politics of collection, display and documentation of objects through these juxtapositions, the presence of the hand is significant. It not only calls attention to the haptic potential of the ceramics, but also to the agency and embodied knowledge of those who consider, select, handle, place and contextualize these objects. Who decides what is documented for posterity and how it is presented? Perrin Sidarous seems to point toward a more intimate, analogical way of knowing objects and their movement through space and time than the traditions and timelines that art history allow. By being documented, activated and re-documented across different media, the art or archaeological object becomes a locus for the collapsing and complicating of temporalities. Through the spatial and formal layering of _Slip, Notes to Self_ and the photographs, Perrin Sidarous invokes an almost Warburgian exploration of the “heterochronic afterlife” of the art object,[^1] whereby art history is transmitted via hauntings, residues.[^2]

Specifically, it is Perrin Sidarous’ vessels – as either image or object – that have the most interpretive potential. _Omphalos_ (2018), one of the framed prints depicting an item from the catalogue of artifacts, comes to mind. In ancient Greece, the omphalos was a carved stone vessel believed to have represented the centre of the world, the place from which life emerged and the portal through which the gods communicated with their supplicants; in other words, it was the physical shell of the otherworldly. Here, the catalogue reproductions, the artist’s images and ceramic objects can be thought of as analogues of the omphalos, functioning as shells for something just as amorphous, though tailored to our present: the generative potential of art as archive and the power of photography to “disclose the world, show us that it is structured by analogy, and help us assume our place within it.”[^3] In its multivalent echoes, mirrorings and associations, _Toujours la coquille de l’autre always the shell of another_ connects the present-day gallery-goer to Apollonian priests and priestesses, 19th-century archaeologists, museologists of the ’70s and Perrin Sidarous herself, alone in the studio, parsing the “untranscendable similarities that structure Being,”[^4] each perspective or reality the shell of another.

[^1]: Eva Kernbauer. “Anachronistic Concepts, Art Historical containers and Historiographical Practices in Contemporary Art,” _Journal of Art Historiography_ 16 (2017), 1-17.
[^2]: Georges Didi-Huberman _The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Any Warburg’s History of Art_, (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017). 
[^3]: Kaja Silverman. _The Miracle of Analogy, or, The History of Photography_, part 1 (Redwood City, California: Stanford University Press, 2015), 11\. 
[^4]: Ibid.

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Kendra Ainsworth reviews Celia Perrin Sidarous’s solo exhibition _Toujours la coquille de l’autre always the shell of another_ at Parisian Laundry in Montreal (April 13–May 19, 2018).

Celia Perrin Sidarous: Toujours la coquille de l’autre always the shell of another

**Casey Wei** is an artist, musician and writer based in Vancouver, unceded Coast Salish Territories. She founded the music and printed matter label agonyklub in 2016, and performs as hazy and Kamikaze Nurse.

The book begins with an “establishing shot”[^1] from Kathy Acker’s wake: her ashes fly against the wind into everyone’s faces.

This is not the typical, omniscient tale of a star’s rise and fall. Kraus’ account of Acker’s life is constructed through countless interviews, letters, emails, journal entries, and conversations with friends, friends-turned-enemies and ex-lovers, all collaged together in orderly chapters titled after Acker’s published works. Because of the many lies – or, identities – that Acker adopted throughout her career, Kraus’ handling of biographical details does not carry much weight in this retelling: the Kathy that is remembered is not the Karen Alexander that was born. The mythical image of the gym-taut woman with the peroxide blonde buzz dominates as more of an eternal archetype rather than the result of a specific upbringing. So instead, Kraus focuses on how others perceived Acker, by way of citations, writing through everyone else’s messy relationships with her, which leads me to question: _What is it that I really want to know_?

My reaction to Kraus’ writing is not one of reverence towards any kind of pen\[wo\]manship; it is mysterious to me how her texts compel me to soldier on, to finish, to reread, to pay closer attention, since her prose has a way of keeping me at a distance that obliquely grounds (or perhaps _chains_) me very much in my own reality, rather than inviting me into the glamorously bohemian story world of the New York and Los Angeles scenes from the ’70s onward. In line with the New Narrative tradition, Kraus’ writing is very meta, very real, and sometimes very unrewarding to read: a tactic which strangely invites further engagement. Kraus identifies that Acker had a similar intent from early in her career, having wanted to “\_crack up the old identity-god\_,”[^2] being “\_sick of beautiful words word-phrases etc\_.”[^3] In that fresh, post-modern spirit of appropriation, Acker managed to ride the wave of what her mentor and friend David Antin said more than once to his class, that if what they wanted to write already existed, they should “go to the library and steal it.”[^4] But whereas Acker’s writing moves seamlessly between her life and the life of the texts she appropriated – “\_This writing is all just fake (copied from other writing) so you should go away and just not read any of it\_”[^5] – Kraus is always careful to cite. The awkwardness of her voice in relation to those whom she admires, loves, desires to have and desires to be, has always been so slavish, coming from a very human place of lack. What stays with me about _After Kathy Acker_ is that it does not read like Kraus stole anything from anyone to re- veal anything about Acker that her community did not already know. This care is true of Kraus’ other works as well: “every letter is a love letter,”[^6] a line that sticks with me, striking and humble.

In _Aliens and Anorexia_ (2000), John Handardt – film and video curator of the Whitney Museum at the time – explains to Kraus, after viewing her self-acknowledged failed film, why she’d never be an artist. He found her work “intelligent and courageous” but lacking in “beauty, criticality, and narrative resolution.”[^7] It is her persistent intelligence and courage, however clumsy, that keep me engaged, keep me wondering about my own desire, lack, persistence. What stylistically triggers an instinctive dislike at first quickly turns on itself to ask _how much of my own value systems are still chained to the damned patriarchy_? There is more to writing than _identity-gods_ and _beautiful words word-phrases_ and Kraus navigates this deconstruction with a masterful command of unadorned, unaffected – and much of the time, artless – writing on a sentence-by-sentence level. I interpret her work as historical documents that are completely accurate, factual presentations collaged from a variety of corroborated sources. And while her own ego is free to roam, with unlimited access to all the documents, photos, recordings and celebrities – the book ends with some sage words from Martha Rosler to Kraus: “I could have been you, you could’ve been me”[^8] – her writing always comes from a respectful distance, without detectable ornamentation. She acknowledges her subjectivity every step of the way: each time there is a transition, a stutter in narrative, Kraus defers her identity as an author to that of an archivist and of a participant – an act of humility, of love, of gravity and of grace.

However personally messy and fraught Kraus’ and Acker’s overlapping social circles might have been, the absence of any personal anecdotes between the two leads me back to the question of: _What is it that I really want to know_? The last phase of Acker’s life, during her cancer, is the part of the book that reads most like a biography, where Kraus exercises some identity-god writing. Acker’s perfect logic of sex-as-writing-as-art-as-life-as-art-as-writing-as-sex was no way to fight a terminal sickness and the sicker she became, the less she was able to write. To witness a goddess fall back into humanity is a narrative we are familiar with in our celebrity culture. They’re just flesh and blood, deteriorating like any of us. That death, in Acker’s case, could have been potentially prevented through treatment is all the more gutting. But she refused. She refused to acknowledge her humanity – the very fuel for art. How can any artist deny that? What stays with me from this fable – as the last chapter is aptly titled– is not the impact of Kraus’ writing, but the work of constructing a myth. _What is it that I really want to know?_ That I could have been Kathy Acker, that I could be Chris Kraus.

[^1]: Chris Kraus, _After Kathy Acker_ (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2017), 14.
[^2]: Ibid, 84.
[^3]: Ibid, 112.
[^4]: Ibid, 48\. To fully appreciate Acker’s _Great Expectations_ (1982), wouldn’t one think to read Dickens first?
[^5]: Ibid, 49.
[^6]: Chris Kraus, _I Love Dick_ (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006), 121.
[^7]: Chris Kraus, _Aliens & Anorexia_ (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2000), 162.
[^8]: _After Kathy Acker_, 279.

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Casey Wei reviews American writer and filmmaker Chris Kraus’s _After Kathy Acker_, a biography published with Semiotext(e), 2017.

Chris Kraus: After Kathy Acker

**Natasha Young** (b. 1989 in Portland, Maine) is a roving writer whose criticism also appears in _Artforum_, _Real Life Mag_, _Garage Magazine_, _The New Inquiry_, and other publications. Her first novel, _Static Flux_, is forthcoming in September 2018 via Metatron Press.

To begin with, a coincidence. I went to a show at Café OTO in London because Mattea Perrotta recommended I go there when we met over coffee in LA. (Perrotta is an LA-based artist in that she was raised there and her studio is in LA; but she is, in essence, a woman of the world, with deep family ties in Italy and France, travelling frequently and gracefully everywhere from Central and South America to North Africa.) At Café OTO, I met a friend well-versed in etymology and showed her Perrotta’s work on my phone. She at once explained to me the origins of the word “grotesque”: from the ancient Roman artwork found in a _grotta_ (cave), often sublimations of the female form in arabesque environs. Perrotta’s sensual, fleshy obelisks, rendered in thick layers of oil paint, take this ancient and sultry convention into modern abstraction. Indeed, she paints grotesques immersed in the Rothko universe; profoundly saturated blocks of colour ensconce the levitating bodies with gravitas.

Paradoxically composed of organic curves that invite embrace and geometric shapes that confound recognition, her surreal figures – somehow intuitively identifiable as female bodies – are satisfyingly tactile and resplendently subvert convention. At her works’ most naked, tender and vulnerable, these bodies are a Rorschach test: initially, I perceived _Secondary Witness_ (all works 2018) as spread legs; later, looking closer, I see that the rolling flesh-hills are breasts, nipples subtly etched into the paint, protruding from a nubile cylindrical creature whose secret eyeball has been gazing back at me all along. You may not hazard a guess about where the head is and where the body is until you see one of her large canvases up close and in person. In _Comfortable Silence_, an eyeball and mouth protrude from the thick layers of monochromatic fleshlike paint. These textural, gestural notions of facial features invite you into intimacy with the deceptively simple, amorphous figures. Suddenly, these angular protrusions become the appendages of a woman at rest, rich blue-black perhaps her bed, the black square in the corner a window looking out into the night. I imagine these as proud, joyful women in their power, full-bodied and free, unconstrained by our subliminal superimposition of how a woman’s body should look. These are voluptuous souls, aura made flesh.

Where, in Perrotta’s works, the body is distilled into primary shapes, her contemporary and fellow LA-based artist Jonathan Ryan imbues primary shapes with rich colour and tactile textures. Also inspired by travel abroad and melding minds with artists before his time, Ryan renders the deep historical landscapes of Oaxaca, Mexico in rich, tactile abstractions informed by Mexican _arte popular_ and the likes of Josef Albers: _To Monte Alban_ (2017) is a reverential nod to Albers’ _To Monte Alban_ (1942) (the latter work I have recently seen, in another fortuitous coincidence, at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin). The works are fraternal, not identical, twins: each evokes the surreal structures and ancient temples found at Oaxaca’s historic centre, but Ryan’s rendition is softened around the edges, his oil paints enriched with sand for the structures alone, to imbue them with hyperreal tactility.

Elsewhere, Ryan recreates the region’s already- surreal landscape in striking surrealism. Like the negatives from a photographic memory, the ziggurats in _Purple Mountain, Lavender Steps_ and _Neon Mountain_ (all 2018) juxtapose supernatural colour with earth tones enriched with literal earth. _Lavender Steps_, in particular, impresses a dreamscape facsimile of preternatural labyrinthine constructions in an anodized hue. In _Split_ (2018) and _Cone Field_ (2017), geometric objects are implausibly arranged in desert scenes, reminiscent of some of O’Keeffe’s later works. At play in most all of Ryan’s works are deceptively simple linework and colour contrasts that function as trompe-l’oeil.

What struck me immediately about these paintings was their unexpected emotional charge. To experience them up-close is – as with Perrotta’s paintings – to be as captivated, inexplicably, as you would be flying over any grandiose organic landscape. Every one of Ryan’s works gives you the God’s-eye view and immerses you in sheer mortal awe, at once. The earthy consistency of the earth-tone oil paint and unpretentious yet tasteful use of gaudy colour vacuum all your attention into a strangely intimate atmosphere.

Each artist manifests their womblike imaginative worlds that, together or on their own, make even the cavernous whitewashed environment of the gallery feel warm and inviting. Fittingly, a rug recreation of one of Perrotta’s paintings lay on the floor of the gallery, as if a reflecting-pool mirror image of the paint- ing on the wall behind it. At the show’s vernissage, a friend of the artist brought a dog, who promptly lay down on the rug and rolled around; friends joined, reclining on the rug with a glass of wine, as the artist encouraged guests not to treat the beautiful piece, handwoven in Morocco, as “too precious.” I wanted, too, to lay down in one of Ryan’s paintings, swathed in humid air amongst the ziggurats, which appear to be soft and warm like beach sand.

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Natasha Young reviews Mattea Perotta and Jonathan Ryan’s two-person exhibition at _The Landing_, Los Angeles (May 19–June 30, 2018).

Mattea Perrotta and Jonathan Ryan

**Noor Bhangu** is an emerging curator and scholar of South Asian descent, currently based between Winnipeg, Treaty 1 and Tkaronto/Toronto.

The final sculpture in Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa’s colourful garden of feces was of a baby, whose position as the sole producer of shit was somehow annulled by his posture of indifference – as if the public process of ejecting such bodily fluids had not yet entered his register of shame and was, therefore, not worthy of consideration. In _Shit-Baby and The Crumpled Giraffe_, the titular shit-baby sat unbothered at the end of the exhibition’s circuit, which included a sexless stork in a pair of no-name hightops, a towering giraffe with her head inches from the ceiling, fecal droppings that had just missed their intended chamber pots and an airborne shit-serpent, hovering like a warning at the entrance.

The exhibition, curated by Jenifer Papararo, had travelled from Kunsthalle Lissabon (who had originally commissioned the work) to accompany Plug In ICA’s exhibition of Przemek Pyszczek, entitled _Białystok_. Childhood memory and nostalgia, Papararo articulated, were uniquely taken up by both artists to deliver commentary on the current political climate and aerate the violent conflicts that had unfolded between each artist’s past and present.

For Ramírez-Figueroa, both childhood memory and nostalgia are linked to the history of the Guatemalan Civil War (1960-1996), which resulted in the exile of his family to Canada via Mexico. He was only a child when, upon witnessing the escalating violence enacted by the US-supported Guatemalan government, his family was forced to escape. The artist has come to inhabit the war as a paradigmatic landscape in which to enrol his own body as a means of thinking through the effects of colonial violence, censorship, displacement and loss of culture. Previous installation-based works, such as _Corazón del espantapájaros (Heart of the Scarecrow)_ (2016), point to this habitation quite explicitly: a play by the Guatemalan playwright, Hugo Carrillo, was repurposed by Ramírez-Figueroa to reference a 1975 student-led production that faced one of the harshest censorships during the civil war for its critique of authority. Having seen _Corazón del espantapájaros_ at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art – where it was included in the group exhibition, _A Universal History of Infamy_ (2017) – I found that _Shit-Baby and The Crumpled Giraffe_ was devoid of both a categorical connection to the Guatemalan Civil War and the artist’s penchant for maximalist theatre.

Much has been written about the Guatemalan Civil War and the ways in which it exists as both an event and a lens in the world of Ramírez-Figueroa. Walking through _Shit-Baby and The Crumpled Giraffe_, it was neither war nor the diasporic imaginary that drew me in but the artist’s sincere indulgence in the subconscious, the dreamy and the seemingly faraway. Here, shit-baby is a reference to Freud’s case study, “Little Hans,” in which a young boy is traumatized by his desire for his mother (the crumpled giraffe) and his fear of his father (the horse). But shit-baby is not Little Hans – at least not yet. He is at the anal stage, which according to the psychosexual developmental ladder devised by Freud, is a rung where pleasure is derived from the act and power of desecration. The anal stage eventually leads to the phallic stage. Interestingly, the figure of the horse was absent in the exhibition and with it disappeared all threats of punishment that might have regulated the child’s restless bowel movement. In anticipation of the phallic stage, the giraffe was given prominence and depicted with a pink sliver of a tongue to thicken the underlying feeling of desire, gone unnoticed by shit-baby and, in fact, further suppressed by the presence of the sexless stork, whose only role seemed to involve collecting shit in an already full and soiled bundle. As noted by Lindsay Taylor in her review for _Art Review_, the artist read Freudian case studies as works of fiction rather than foundations of psychoanalysis.[^1] The more Ramírez-Figueroa takes up fiction, the more we are able to appreciate fantasy as an active agent in his work, which beneath the spectacle is very much bound to the real.

Thinking via Freud, Ramírez-Figueroa creates a _mise-en-scene_ that materializes shit-baby’s unconscious – or his own at the time of diasporic movement. The drama, delinked from the artist’s usual maximalist approach, is soft in that it is half-dreamt and half-remembered. And given the ephemeral nature of the setting – save for the fecal matter, which is impeccably rendered and presents itself as real – it is not surprising to see that paint just barely saturates each subject. What appears, then, are characters not solid enough to represent their Freudian origins but who, in their gentle resemblance to children’s toys, attempt to spare their maker the weight of the next phase: shame and trauma. In contrast, the shit-droppings assume a destructive role which, under the guise of smallness, threaten to activate the discomfort of recognition. In bringing together these opposing agents, Ramírez-Figueroa points to an unconscious mind, battling between a desire to conceal and a willingness to acknowledge trauma.

Ramírez-Figueroa has often shied away from materializing blood on the body. Frédérique Bergholtz and Susan Gibb summarize Matthew McLean when writing, “even when the performance involves physical harm (be it the pinning of feathers into his arm, or sewing buttons into his skin) no visible blood is shed.”[^2] Whatever is at the heart of this reticence towards including blood – be it an act of disrupting the dominant imagery of war or a self-preservation method of disengaging with the colour of trauma – it simply does not transfer to the substance of shit. If we can momentarily look past its serpent-like iterations, then shit is the one form in the installation that most closely resembles its organic one. Through this, it is given agency to move between the fantastical and real-life dimensions of the project. Shit cuts through the bullshit narratives constructed to theorize, and thus understand, the movement from war to post-war, childhood to adulthood, and personal to collective. In the end, _Shit-Baby and The Crumpled Giraffe_ may be fully concentrated neither on the Guatemalan Civil War nor on Freud’s Little Hans, but nonetheless espouses something urgent. It offers, rather than prescribes, ambiguity as a coping mechanism for engaging with histories that can never be righted and traumas that will always persist.

[^1]: Linda Taylor, “Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa,” _Art Review_ (April 30, 2018).
[^2]: Frédérique Bergholtz and Susan Gibb, _A Requiem for Mirrors and Tigers: A Cycle of Performances_ (Vancouver, Grunt Gallery, 2018).

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Sculpture

Psychology

Noor Bhangu reviews Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa’s exhibition “Shit-Baby and The Crumpled Giraffe”, shown at the Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Winnipeg, March 31 – June 10, 2018.

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa: Shit-Baby and The Crumpled Giraffe

**Ricky Varghese** is a Toronto-based art writer and psychotherapist. His recent work has appeared in _Canadian Art_, _esse arts_ \+ _opinions and Porn Studies_, and he is currently training to become a psychoanalyst at the Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis.

Late capitalism has worked meticulously to alienate the modern subject; the hyper-mediation and circulation of images, cultural knowledge and information has been one manner by which this alienation has occurred. All of this is done under the guise of accessibility, connectivity and the formation of networks. It is precisely in its responsiveness to this context that makes the slowness of Angela Grauerholz’s large-scale photographs feel radical. Her quiet, provocative new untitled series, which showed at the 2018 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, captures the vacant, emptied-out, closed-for-renovations spaces of the Musée Carnavalet in Paris. It’s no coincidence that her subject matter consists of the empty nooks and crannies, long, shadowy passageways and silent corridors of the vacant museum. It would seem that she wants us to linger alongside these images as one might within the actual space of the museum itself. The viewer is asked to slow their pace and reconsider the cult of the image. What does it mean to archive slowness in this vertigo-inducing era where we are confronted by images from so many different and disparate quarters on a quotidian basis? By slowing down reception, Grauerholz is not asking us to tarry with the nostalgia of a bygone era; rather, what is under examination here is the very nature of speed itself and its relationship to both loss and memory.

Loss, or more precisely, what remains in the aftermath of loss, is a preoccupation of Grauerholz’s extensive practice. In her _Privation_ series (2001), she took to photographing the charred, crumbling remains of her books after a fire ravaged the library at her home in Montreal – a library “representing some twenty-five years of collecting.” In her own words, the remains came to “embody privation made visible.” It feels apt, then, that Grauerholz’s present subject matter are the melancholic spaces of a now-closed and evacuated museum. Where _Privation_ might have represented scarcity, want and need, mired under the heading of a deep and profoundly personal loss, here the artist gives attention to a sense of loss that is more generalizable.

If the museum is a site that archives human history, a repository for our memory of ourselves – as was the case with the Musée Carnavalet, which was meant to showcase the history of the city of Paris then what do we make of the museum that turns into a tomb, emanating a sort of coldness, devoid of signs of life? Under Grauerholz’s photographic gaze, it is as though the very site, meant to serve as a mere placeholder for memory and commemoration, itself aches to be commemorated. The museum seems to mourn itself, reckoning with the frightening possibility of being forgotten. As philosopher Rebecca Comay has suggested, “the museum \[here\] becomes a mausoleum”; it becomes a counterintuitive space, going against the grain of unchecked, “easy” consumption and, as such, asks us to reflect upon mourning and memorialization. How does mourning or memory operate in the absence of the very images and objects that we use to mourn or remember the past? Grauerholz’s images are iconoclastic in that they resist and decry fast transmission and ask us to reconsider the conditions under which an archive may or may not exist, as both a reservoir and a marker of the repertoire of human history. The gaze is, then, directed squarely back at the viewer’s own subjectivity and at the gestures and affects that inform that subject’s capacity for museological consumption. The viewing subject is asked to confront their own alienation, one that is seen to coexist with and is perhaps pre-eminently suggested by the structural emptiness of the museum. Grauerholz’s museological spaces are no longer sites that obsessively archive the history of human accumulation; rather, they become spatial placeholders signifying and acting as stark reminders of – the emptiness at the very heart of humanity’s melancholia about speedy accumulation.

What is striking in approaching Grauerholz’s images with a slower-than-usual gait is that embedded in the images themselves is a brilliant act of reversal. While we might recognize these large-scale archival pigment prints to be photographs, at first glance and even, to a certain extent, up close, they appear to be paintings. The effect is compelling precisely for the way it plays with our eyes, forcing us to look closer at the details of each image. While in the photorealist tradition, paintings are rendered to look like photographs, Grauerholz’s photographs appear to take the form and texture of paintings. It is a suggestive exercise in translation between and across mediums and recalls Walter Benjamin’s statement that “\[i\]t is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.” One might recognize a kernel of truth in Benjamin’s thought that finds resonance with this entire series: in re-casting the space of the museum, it would seem that Grauerholz reveals it to be the mausoleum that, perhaps, it has always been and always will be.

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Ricky Varghese reviews Angela Grauerholz’s solo exhibition at Olga Kolper Gallery in Toronto (April 28–June 2, 2018).

Angela Grauerholz

“\_Listener\_ begins: with a wanderer Listening. An Oglala woman, equipped with Listening devices, which are passed down from woman to woman. Alone, her devices work in ways she can’t quite understand, they seem to listen farther than technologically possible, beyond time and place. She has suspicion that she is receiving scrambled transmissions from a good place, but a Far Place. She feels they Listen back.”  
– Kite[^1]

A police siren pierced the small dark room: a livestream from the local Ottawa police scanner frequency. Unseen, the artist spoke: “I heard my biometrics.” Two boots trudging a wet sidewalk appeared on a CRT monitor in the corner. The snowy grayscale image treaded the border of legibility. The artist’s voice transmitted a chopped up and delayed narrative over a two-way radio channel. Kite, in character as the Listener, entered the room shrouded in a hooded grey cloak sewn out of industrial felt, doubling as concealment and acoustic absorber. The labour required to keep reciting the text as the delay effect jammed her speech signals felt immense. Yet under this increasing pressure Kite builds a feverish energy – her speech speeding up – a signature move that pulls her audience even deeper into her character’s world.

Kite identifies as diasporic Oglala Lakota and _Listener_ is the first work she has produced since join- ing the Indigenous Futures Cluster at Concordia University. At SAW, Kite placed the various reading materials used to compose Listener just outside of the performance space, an act of citational politics.

In one of these sources, _Standing in the Light_ (1994), the late Porcupine Singers leader Severt Young Bear describes the concept of “four circles” as it applies to both Lakota participatory configurations at _wacipi_ (powwows) and identity more broadly: “There are always some people who are respected and honoured, who are out in the centre, whether as dancers, singers, announcers, or committee members.”[^2] Before she even entered the room, Kite’s installation shaped _Listener_’s audience into in an approximation of Young Bear’s circles, with two distinct circles around her floating circular projections. The smaller one showed a spinning aerial view of Ottawa, vertiginous if watched too closely and on the larger, a white line maintained a mesmeric flow against a blue background, evoking vital signs on an ECG as well as Lakota line, triangle and star designs (echoed in metallic embroidery on the back of her cloak). Kite manipulated her hair-braid instrument which produced visible and audible effects.

A police siren in the settler state can simultaneously represent either terror or order, depending who hears the sound. Kite’s audio composition incorporated the signals of the settler-occupation regime as they poured from the police scanner; in intervening over and around its output, she deftly decentred it. Heard in this context, then, the siren perfectly underscores the positional fact of listening. In a historical study of how certain associations between race and sound came to seem “natural” and “right” with- in the context of the United States, sound studies scholar Jennifer Lynn Stoever offers the figure of the “listening ear.”[^3] This is her shorthand for how sound is racialized by the listening practices of dominant white settler culture which produce and maintain norms and hierarchical values – whose sounds are valued and in what way – through the white surveillance and discipline of aural phenomena such as spoken language or dialect, vocal pitch and volume, or screaming. The police scanner’s output streamed during Listener is live evidence of the state’s “listening ear,” as it surveils for anything deemed out of place and provides disciplinary response accordingly. For 18 minutes, _Listener_ remediated beyond the specific power dynamic of surveiller and surveilled.

_Listener_ builds out from Kite’s deep knowledge of both the Western classical musical tradition and more recent history of sound art in the gallery (she was trained as a classical violinist and in music composition). Conceptual sonic art practice, though regularly occupying unconventional spaces and methods, still often spatially reproduces straightforward producer-receiver listening conventions. The spiral path mapped out by Listener’s graphic score rejects the traditional configuration which renders the position of individual receiver static by architecture (such as in the concert hall) or interpellated as a subject of settler ideology (via the police siren).

“A rethinking of the ontology of music rises up from within the history and tradition of its most accessible and legible symbols: the musical instrument,”[^4] writes Seth Kim-Cohen. Listener’s opening line – “I heard my biometrics” – immediately alludes to a definition of instruments as tools of measurement with deep and gnarly colonial roots. Kite’s custom instrument, her hair-braid, is comprised of an accelerometer woven into synthetic hair that measures her movement according to a three-dimensional coordinate system. This data is rerouted through machine learning software connected to her multiple audio and visual channels – in this case, bell synths, a crashing bass drum and projections. Listener complicates expected subject states in performance frame- works – who is listened to (the artist, the producer) and who listens (the audience, the receiver). This is achieved through the circular process by which Kite’s instrument allows her to respond to the visualization and sonification of data-mapping her own body via the hair-braid, a futuristic GPS technology she has termed L-sys (Lakota-system).

Relational practices too frequently flatten the intricate ethics of what it means to be in relation to each other or technology. In the Lakota epistemologies Kite is working through, there are a multitude of ways for understanding and describing relations. Listener’s series of circles – especially the circularity of the process by which the artist’s body and hair-braid technology co-determine the composition – map a contemporary Lakota relational listening process that insists on an arrangement more intertwined than passive reception and recognition. _Listener_ proposes a challenge to the settler-colonial present and its attendant liberal performance projects of redemption. It takes place in a dystopia but is reaching for the speculative “good place, but a Far Place”[^5] and using L-sys, Kite is working to bring this future into being.

[^1]: Conversation with the artist via email 13 June, 2018.
[^2]: Young Bear, Severt, and R. D. Theisz. _Standing in the Light: A Lakota Way of Seeing_ (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 175.
[^3]: Jennifer Lynn Stoever. _Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening in the U.S._ (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 279.
[^4]: Seth Kim Cohen. _In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non Cochlear Sonic Art_ (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 250.
[^5]: Conversation with the artist via email 13 June, 2018.

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Zoë De Luca reviews Montreal-based artist Kite’s performance _Listener_ at SAW Video Media Art Centre in Ottawa (March 8, 2018).

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