Column

Adriana Disman is a performance art maker, thinker and writer.

> Whose body is this?

“This is my performance,” I singsong quaver. Again and again. Returning to this tune throughout the whole performance, like a bridge or echo between other things. _This is my performance_. The line born from a desire to feel as much. Chuckling to myself about its ambivalent performativity: in the saying of it, it is so. And, it is also not. _This is my performance_ … these kinds of things can’t be only mine or yours; they’re just as co-constituted as _me_ is. Toward the end, the audience follows me outside of the Calgary theatre. I’ve somehow talked the staff into letting me use the big digital marquee out front. Its red letters are on, running dog-chasing-its-tail laps: _WHOSE BODY IS THIS? WHOSE BODY IS THIS? WHOSE BODY IS THIS?_ As I stand under it — the big cold chatty giggly staring audience across the street watching me — some bro’s voice cracks out of a way-too-big car driving past: _WHAT ARE YOU GONNA DO?_  
I look at him, deadpan, as the traffic lights change, then yell: _THIS IS MY PERFORMANCE. WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU TAKING UP SPACE?!_ Everyone on the other side laughs. People love it. It becomes a running gag with the pitch perfect punchline. People talk about that moment months later. It was, to me, the most impotent moment of the piece.

> Documentation

I try to always make agreements beforehand with the photographers and videographers who document my work. This is sometimes difficult in that it’s unusual and things in performance art are often last-minute and thrown together and shit falls through the cracks. But, when I can, I propose that in the instance that I were to sell a photo, they’d get a small percentage of the sale on top of their fee—something like 4 percent, a number originally suggested by an experienced performance documentarian. I’m not sure if I think it is fair to offer such a small percentage but I don’t have anything to sell beyond my live body. I’ve never sold a photograph, it’s just some weird art-world idea I got told along the way and a piece of my fear-of-starving claw caught it. But we all know the money isn’t in performance art. It’s in porn.

Some years ago, I discovered that documentation photos of one of my performances had been appropriated by porn sites—along with some shots of Marina Abramović and Pipilotti Rist from when they were younger and naked-er— titled something like _ADRIANA DISMAN BIG BUSH STARLETTE_. I could only have the documentation removed by filing a copyright claim which I wrestled with myself over, not able to agree with any possible position provided. (In the end, the copyright claim didn’t do shit anyway.) I wondered if I should write to the other artists to let them know their work was there, just in case they didn’t.

The first and only time I met Marina Abramović, she asked what I did and when I said I was a performance artist, she took me by the shoulders and told me like a wise auntie: Document Everything. Later, I curated some great artists online in relation to a small-time DIY space. They made an endearing spoof of some Abramović-Ulay works with puppets and got slapped with a cease and desist letter from her French lawyers.

> Real elders 

I looked around Montreal and realized that all my elders in performance art who are women — all of them — are either literally struggling for rent from month to month or married to rich men.

> Mine

The “my” in “my performance” is not _mine_ as in possession or individuation (as in, _what’s mine is not yours_, a reflex capitalism bred in), but a _mine_ that means mutual difference entwined with respect; means my body is made of play; means my nipple hairs can do karaoke; means I am the sensation of almost falling; means that in performance I can tell you the stories that I can’t tell anyone because we are all no(t) one together. Means I can drop it quick and jump cut to the next thing:

I face a huge wall, nose to brick. And turn my head back and forth and back and forth and back and forth forever. Which ends when the skin on my nose goes raw enough to bleed and mark the wall. I thank them for witnessing and they clap.

> 2019

Given the biopolitical organization of the body, liberation (an interdependent and as-yet-unknown state) is hard to imagine. We police ourselves. Power is diffuse and hard to expel because it is us. In our marrow, in the mirror, in our heads. To whom do the insides of this body belong? The physical interior? Do you feel you have a right to your blood, your gut, your bone? A doctor can cut you open but if you do, you’re sick.

> Professional? Tick yes/no

Rojava, located in the northeastern part of Syria, is a de facto autonomous region that was declared as such by Kurdish revolutionaries in 2012\. It runs through semi-direct democracy and focuses on gender equity and decentralized power. There, medical care is knowledge for everyone to take turns learning. In this way, medicine becomes accessible to all either through direct learning or through administration by others who have learned. It does not become cut off from some (i.e. “professionalized”) because it is not based on information that only some can pay for.

Across the globe, historically and presently, vast numbers of colonized peoples are cut off from practicing their healing knowledges, which are violently extracted by colonial powers, packaged and sold as headache pills, plant fertilizer, powder for your morning green smoothie.

Women were (and are) called witches and their birth-related medicines privatized while they burned. Processes that now have us convinced we do not know our bodies.

Abortion access: the ultimate biopolitical crossroads between (racialized, classed and gendered) control and health care. Wombs are the most public of body parts. In the wake of Christian anti-abortion morality laws, my social media is filled with cute illustrated How Tos on abortive herbs that can  
be administered at home. _Maybe we’ve got this_, I think. _Maybe we just have to rebirth these knowledges through the internet_.

Friends of mine lived in a direct-action anarchist home. They were taking care of one of their own who had decided to go cold turkey. They were taking things in shifts, caring for him, walking through this with him. _They’ve got this_, I think. _They don’t need the state and it’s fucking beautiful and inspiring_. But then he suddenly died. He fucking died in their home on their watch in their hands. I can see in their eyes that they will never be over that. Something broke, splintered. And it makes me scared that we will never be free of the organizing power of private medicine.

> The correct use of the term “gaslighting”

The only time I’ve felt genuinely suicidal as an adult was when I sought the help of a doctor. He dedicated himself, during two 15-minute monologues, to convincing me it was all in my head. We’d just met. No tests had been done. He kept repeating that with _some_ patients it takes time for the _penny to drop_, but it _always_ does in the end. My inner fairy gawdmother said to him: _Look bitch, I’m from a place where pennies were cancelled years ago. If you’ve got money to throw around, by all means, toss it over here. But if you’re not dropping me some pennies then shut the fuck up and stop telling me what you feel as if it’s more fact than what I feel_. My mouth said: _Yes, I understand. Thank you for your thoughts_. Scared he wouldn’t treat me anymore and that I’d go into an unwell period and wouldn’t have a GP, I shut up and summarized my findings into a new mantra: Depression is the New Hysteria.

> Internalized

In my earliest performance art works, I offered my body to be touched anywhere, be kissed, put needles through. I sat in silence, blindfolded, for long, long periods. People did different things to me. Now, I can’t help but hear the voices inside asking whether those performances were all just unwitting re-enactments of violence I’ve lived—psychology’s moth to a flame. Even though it never _feels_ true, the voices have kept chorusing the question throughout a decade. Now I’m writing a book on how not to pathologize performance practices and I doubt even that will stop the voices. They’re deep in there.

> Postscript

I send my anarchist friends this text and they tell me his death didn’t break their fight but transformed it. Humbled them. Birthed an irreversible connection to the spiritual in their struggle. Connected their fight to the dead. Now, they strive harder because their work is extremely serious. Now, they know, it is life and death.

Writer

Ownership

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Adriana Disman writes about what it means to be a modern performance artist.

Composition: Skin Has Two Sides

Elisha Lim’s social media activism catapulted them to fame as a queer advocate for the pronoun “they,” an award-winning filmmaker, a graphic novelist, a curator and an anti-racist festival director. Then they free-fell out of the social network spotlight and are currently writing a PhD on identity economics.

In 2012, an artist I admire curated a highly anticipated exhibition of 101 Toronto artists, and 94 of them were white. I was so incensed that I wrote an MFA thesis about it. “Why,” ranted my thesis, “doesn’t Canadian art reflect national demographics? Whose art history is canonical? Who truly owns the gallery space?” Within just five years, my paper was outdated. In 2017 the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) unveiled _Every. Now. Then: Reframing Nationhood_, a retrospective deliberately honouring Toronto artists who are Black, Indigenous and people of colour. The same year the gallery inaugurated the formal position of Indigenous curator, first appointed to Wanda Nanibush. She radically established Anishinaabemowin as a third language on most AGO wall texts, a groundbreaking precedent for a major Canadian cultural institution, and in 2018 the AGO’s JS McLean Centre for Canadian Art was renamed and reinstalled to include and integrate Indigenous art.

How did cultural priorities change so drastically in such a short time? It’s an unprecedented pace even to generations of local activists, and it wasn’t accelerated by belligerent MFA papers. A major enabling factor has been social media’s voracious pace. Online movements drive social change in what feels like dog years, and one activist month on Twitter is equal to one pre-internet activist year. In the United States in 2014, for example, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation released a diversity report confirming that American art galleries are disproportionately programmed by rich white people. What would normally pass as a tedious and obvious statement collided for the first time with an empowered 2014 blogosphere almost instantly. It was the year that Black activists organized viral international protests against the shooting of Michael Brown by Ferguson, Missouri police. Inspired by this call, a “Joint Statement from Museum Bloggers and Colleagues on Ferguson and Related Events” circulated, demanding racial diversity in the top ranks of museums and galleries. It blossomed with the hashtag #museumsrespondtoFerguson and a rapidly expanding collaborative Google Doc of relevant resources. It blossomed parallel to empowered online movements globally, including widely circulated inquiries into the exclusionary practices of the art world in Canada.

As contagious as #Oscarssowhite, online movements rapidly effected what marginalized artists had demanded for decades. In just the past handful of years, we’ve seen more young racialized staff members hired to entry- and mid-level curatorial positions in art institutions in both Canada and the US (though leadership positions are still predominantly white). _Hell yes_, I thought, watching in awe as the swell of marginalized voices mobilized online to grasp a fistful of power. Social media movements shook the idea of who the art-viewing public is. The activists propelling these movements became poised to emerge as the new owners of contemporary museum discourse.

But who owns social media movements? And what happens to social movements when they join the building blocks of corporate business models? This question struck me as a junior curator. My MFA cohort appointed me to be on the class marketing team. We co-curated art exhibitions, and I was in charge of promoting them. I would start by spending $12 on a Facebook ad. Ad Manager would then prompt me to choose a custom target audience from a drop-down menu. Did I want my audience to be from downtown Toronto? Under 40? Interested in art? Yes, I did. Then the options would get more refined. Did I want my audience to be liberals? Liberals and likely to engage with political content? Liberals and likely to engage with political content relating to art and travel, who lived alone, used a Mac OSX operating system, and had friends of the opposite gender whose birthdays were in the same week as our exhibition? Yes, I did. A sidebar would announce the size of this Facebook audience, usually in the hundreds of thousands.

This astonishing precision is social media’s billion- dollar asset. With the help of its subsidiary platforms Instagram and WhatsApp, Facebook is one of the world’s leading providers of razor-sharp custom audiences. Contrary to popular belief, the corporation doesn’t technically own our data: it owns our public-facing attitudes, indexing our belief systems into niche markets. Once our identities enter into these data sets they become merchandise, merely options in a drop-down menu labelling our potential taste in products. In other words, when I declare my political beliefs on social media, I am sorted and shelved into specific consumer tastes, which enables corporate social media platforms to metabolize #wokeness—or any political inclination—into an invaluable brand. We see the effects of this rippling across newly tailored television plots, news angles, political campaigns, apparel ads, university courses and, undoubtedly, museum programs and hiring policies. All of this embodies a shift from identity politics to what I call identity _economics_. I’m so incensed about it that, now, I’m writing a dissertation.

Identity economics galvanizes social movements indiscriminately. The same signal boost that drives the decolonization efforts of the AGO also spurs the right-wing movements of Ontario Proud and Faith Goldy. Facebook, most conspicuously, is blamed for having a hand in the rise of extremism, violence and the implosion of democratic elections worldwide. Facebook changes the world for the worse at the same time as it changes it for the better, breeding xenophobic intolerance at the same pace as it enables social justice takeovers. The same crowdsourcing that rallied behind the first Black American president also catapulted Republican white-lash years later. Within this framework, anti-racism is as much a viral movement as xenophobic nationalism. In both cases, social media platforms algorithmically promote their users and their ideologies in order of their engagement, popularity and user influence. Headlines rage about threats to individual privacy, but for most social media users privacy is neither realistic nor precious. The “personal privacy” panic obscures what is happening to us as a collective: platforms teach us to police and enforce opinions only to polish us into an advertising bull’s eye. Leftist social justice grows in unison with violent extremism because, for their host platforms, they are equal parts of a thriving business model.

This is a far cry from the origins of identity politics. In the ’60s Black civil rights activists called for radical solidarity in the face of white supremacist systems of power, demanding a dramatic material redistribution and systemic transformation. But now, online, expressions of identity politics are ranked by likeability and virality, baiting social capital that drives exclusive brands and individual careers. They foster a profoundly alienating status anxiety at best, and at worst, they feed dehumanizing mobs and real-world violence. These are two sides of the same coin, minting highly lucrative razor-sharp commercial targets. Identity economics, in essence, contradicts the original goals of identity politics.

What does it mean when museum policy is determined by callout culture? When identity politics are immersed in Facebook’s logic of supply and demand, they risk becoming tokens of publicity and branding— which is exactly what marginalized artists had previously protested. When contemporary art galleries build their reputation according to what—or who—is in fashion, they’re bound to overlook marginalized local artists. Identity economics, meanwhile, only reinforces this capitalist approach to art—hashtag movements have simply proven to be as stylish as a biennial. When Andrew Hunter, one of the co-curators of AGO exhibition _Every. Now. Then_ resigned from his senior curatorial position, he lamented that these bold interventions into Toronto’s historically white canon served as a mere marketing ploy. He published his resignation letter in the Toronto Star, stating that “engaging with diversity has to mean more than just expanding an audience for an established model.”

What will be the fate of the progressive changes made in recent years at the behest of viral social media demands? Will they be replaced by the next trending topic? Will they be sold out by activists themselves in the name of career advancement? How do we steel ourselves against the distortions of identity economics?

Identity economics is a masterful act of alchemy: corporate social media platforms spin solidarity into a cold hard currency that can be amassed and accumulated for more institutional or personal capital. In other words, this neo-liberal cacophony entices us to desire, to influence and to own. Originally, identity politics demanded the opposite. Audre Lorde’s idea of solidarity is unglamorous. “Survival is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled,” she wrote in her bedrock essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” It is “to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish.” As marginalized artists, critics and curators, we have to work to outlast the cold currency of identity economics. As fast as social media pays lip service to justice, it metabolizes ideals into saleable units. But diversity isn’t a brand— it’s an effort to understand how our fates are deeply intertwined.

issue-143-p50-52.pdf

Elisha Lim discusses the effects of social media movements with regards to art, and the modern responses from institutions such as museums to both identity politics and identity economics.

Thread: Identity Politics Economics

Arun Nedra Rodrigo is the founder of the Tamil Studies Symposium at York University, and the quarterly bilingual literary event the Tam Fam Lit Jam. She is a published poet, translator and academic, an arts educator and organizer of community work- shops and cultural events.

> _“The villager’s concern is not only with what substances enter the_ ür _(town/village) and affect its inhabitants but with the effect of these alien substances on the substance of the_ ür _itself. Concern with the effect on the quality of the soil substance of the is understandable given Tamil beliefs that the soil substance is ultimately mixed with the bodily substance of the_ ür’s \_inhabitants.”\_[^1]

Waves crash and pull away on screen while spectral figures play a game of catch with the sea, casting out objects that may or may not return. This shot is supplanted by clips of Google Translate rebounding words and phrases—from a simple noun, “flower,” to evocative phrases like “conceiving of longing as the outcome of a wish”—back and forth between English and Tamil, changing form and meaning as they do. On a table, a series of newspaper clippings refer to, among many things, the arrival of two boatloads of Tamil refugees in Newfoundland in 1986, and arising from the ground, a dune of wet sand bears a life-sized impression of the hull of the lifeboat that brought them. 

“Surface tension” references the invisible bridges that water molecules create between particles of sand that allow it to become soil. The molecules remain invisible yet shape the visible. These invisible bridges, here, can be read as a metaphor for the covenants that shape human relations, including abstract concepts like community, ownership, belonging and nation. Through _Surface Tension (or What Holds an ‘Us’ Together)_ (2019), Joshua Vettivelu underlines a colonizing extractive practice by foregrounding land, to interrogate and shift the ways it is viewed. They draw the viewer into a meditation on the idea of _terra nullius_ (nobody’s land) and the imprint of multiple arrivals on Indigenous lands. 

Along with the 1986 event, _Surface Tension_ spans, in its trajectory, the first point of contact between English settlers and Indigenous peoples on Beothuk territories in 1497; the arrival in Vancouver of the Ocean Lady in 2009 and the MV Sun Sea in 2010, both of which transported Tamil refugees; the gruesome 2018 murder of the Tamil refugee Kirushnakumar Kanagaratnam (who arrived on the MV Sun Sea) and, tethering the project directly to the present, disparaging online commentary on the waste of resources on the exhibition as well as on the Tamil refugees. 

Settler incursions into Indigenous lands were first legitimized by ontotheologically derived European international trade laws which endowed the settlers with the freedom to extract from _terra nullius_, the right to a free market and the right to enter into a “just war” with the Indigenous people who resisted them.[^2] The desire of the settler to extract resources from this so-called nobody’s land, for the benefit of their own nations and empires, became codified into an international network of juridical and cultural practices that reified the settlers’ claims in relation to the ownership of land (material/territorial resource), the enslavement or murder of Indigenous people (labour resource) and the enforcement of religious conversion (spiritual resource). The normalization of such extractive rights and freedoms, which enriched the colonizing nations, would continue well into the legislation of the Indian Act in Canada and would be key in shaping the settler mindset. 

It is precisely this long, self-endorsing[^3] practice of extraction that would instill a kind of impunity in settlers regarding refugees. For example, though rights were extended to the refugees who arrived in 1986, they were denied to the refugees who arrived in 2009 and 2010; the former were framed as desirable immigrants (potential model minorities), and the latter as undesirable immigrants (terrorists and suicide bombers). _Surface Tension_ reveals the capricious nature of extractive power, which endows only those deemed worthy with rights, and follows the trajectory of that power to the moment when Kanagaratnam was deemed unworthy and denied those rights to the point of death. Suspected of having links to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, he was criminalized by the state and rendered vulnerable to isolation, exploitation and predation. His murder and the subsequent difficulties in identifying his tortured body are excruciatingly emblematic of the rights and resources his murderer could access, and which Kanagaratnam was denied. 

Notably, the Harper government’s vitriolic outbursts against the 2009 and 2010 refugees—which were predicated on arguments that they were undocumented immigrants who would be stealing Canadian jobs, despite the large numbers of invisible migrant labourers who grow and cook our food—starkly contrasted to the welcoming and healing ceremonies carried out by Indigenous Elders of the Coast Salish territories, and the public declarations of support from members of the Wet’suwet’en and Anishinaabe nations. As Kailey Bryan, curator of Eastern Edge Gallery, intimates: “Through imagined bodies and visceral consequences … we reflect on who receives the benefits of empathy. How is the ‘us’ that delivers that empathy constituted?”[^4] For those refugees, reaching land from the sea meant reaching safety, but that safety becomes a mirage when the haven reveals its own violence and erasures, and when a refugee is ultimately driven to his death. 

_Surface Tension_ is an intervention in the forces of extraction in its manifold iterations. It renders tangible the bonds between human beings, in order to observe the moments when those bonds fail us. Relational bonds shift, change and express themselves in means outside their own framing. In creating a work that will deteriorate and lose definition over time, Vettivelu explores the possibilities of a non extractive cultural practice that returns the land to its natural state. In a coda indicating the temporality of extracting and own.ing meaning altogether, the materials used in Surface Tension have since been dismantled for use in gardens and in the construction of furniture for farmers and artists in the local community.

[^1]: Valentine Daniels, _Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 
[^2]: Anthony Anghie, _Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 
[^3]: Edward Said, _Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World_, revised ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1997). 
[^4]: _Surface Tension (or What Holds an ‘Us’ Together)_, brochure (Eastern Edge Gallery, St. John’s, NL, April 26-May 24, 2019). 

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issue-143-p70-72.pdf

Arun Nedra Rodrigo examines Joshua Vettivelu’s piece _Surface Tension (or What Holds an ‘Us’ Together)_, a sculptural piece of sand and water which seeks to highlight the constant arrival of explorers and refugees on the soil of _terra nullius_ (nobody’s land).

One Thing: Surface Tension (or What Holds an ‘Us’ Together)

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The Image Centre

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Sobey

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Editorial

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

“I found my drive to diversify permanent collections. They are the beating heart of the art world. If you can change the collection, you can change the public story of art,” curator Helen Molesworth has said. I used this quote in a draft of an investigative piece I worked on for over two years—a draft that is no longer my intellectual property—in which I look at a skeleton in the closet of Canada’s largest collecting institution. I examine what its presence says about the omissions that persist in the gallery’s collecting practices and policies, despite its claims of inclusion. The quote encapsulates the recent upswing of attempts to change the “story of art” that collections tell, of reconsiderations of the space allotted to overrepresented artists in order to make space for those who are still underrepresented. Over the last year and a half, collecting institutions like the Baltimore Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and most recently the Art Gallery of Ontario made headlines when they announced they would sell work by dead white men to purchase work by artists of colour and women.

For the purposes of this issue, it’s important to assert the difference between exhibition representation and collection representation because of the latter’s potential long-term impact on how an artist’s output gets valorized and becomes historicized. Curator Sara Raza shares how she approached acquiring works by artists from the Middle East and North Africa for the Guggenheim. She talks about how the collection-based exhibition she curated evades the tropes of geographically specific curation to ensure that the artworks she inducted will have many lives after her tenure. Is entering a collection really the be-all and end-all, though? What does increased visibility mean within something as fraught and as “fucked,” as Tiana Reid writes, as the market? This is a question that Reid takes up in her assessment of recent auction records broken by Black American artists; while representation of Black Canadian artists may be increasing at non-collecting institutions, they are still underrepresented in collections here. Through interviews with collector Kenneth Montague and members of the Black Artists Union, Reid looks at what it might take to increase representation sustainably, and yet still asks: “But is that all we want? Who are we, anyway?”

Collections were founded on enforced hierarchies. So, can a collection, by definition, be anything but a colonial exercise? How can we decolonize collecting institutions when the collection is founded on the quintessentially settler colonial imperative to possess? Curator Jaimie Isaac describes the protocols and processes she initiated at the Winnipeg Art Gallery to Indigenize its collection—not just right now, but for posterity—towards “museological reform.” Because collections function primarily as repositories of cultural production, immaterial and impermanent practices— especially ones that cannot be documented—can tamper with the collection’s sanctity. Curator Marie Fraser shares how she acquired a Tino Sehgal piece for the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; and, by asking “Could a collection be forever?” she reminds us that “preserving objects forever should no longer be what is at stake; what should, rather, is how to live with them, how to care for them and about them.” This concern is also at the heart of Adrian Stimson’s recollection of his work in politics, on repatriation initiatives throughout the ’90s, before he became an artist. Many Indigenous cultural belongings are living beings so sacred, he says, that not just anyone should handle them; they need to breathe, to be activated in ceremony. Yet he’s seen pieces of stolen material culture residing in museum storage spaces in conditions where they are not cared for. The collection’s apparatus of care—or lack thereof—is one of Sameer Farooq’s primary preoccupations. For his artist project, he reveals museums’ storage spaces—“the waiting rooms of history,” he calls them—in tandem with his own ceramic veils of museums’ storage devices. 

Over the duration of this issue’s production, a woman sued Harvard for publishing and profiting from a photograph that the university still owns of her enslaved ancestors—in this, the 400-year anniversary of the arrival of the first African slaves to North America. The Alabama anti-abortion law fuelled debates over the state’s ownership of women’s bodies. A Quebecois real estate developer announced that he would transfer 60 hectares of land that was central in the Oka Crisis 29 years ago to the Kanien’kehà:ka of Kanehsatà:ke. “Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined,” Toni Morrison (RIP) wrote in Beloved (1987); so, who owns what does matter. Major institutions—public and corporate—acquired the work of several artists featured in this issue over the summer. Until recently, work by BIPOC artists hadn’t been entering collections enough to begin changing the “story of art” that they tell. But still, visibility does not equate to viability, and proclamation doesn’t always translate to practice. What are the structural and systemic underpinnings that could ensure the long-term viability of this visibility?

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Collecting

History

Museums

Editorial Fellow Merray Gerges reflects on the issue’s theme: Ownership. What is the difference between exhibition representation and collection representation? This is the question at the centre of this issue. In this issue, artists and writers discuss the delicate balance between visibility and viability, the long-term impact of exhibitions, as well as the historical value and inextricably colonial exercise of collecting works of art.

Editorial: Ownership

Feature

Tiana Reid is a writer, editor and PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her writing has been published in Art in America, Briarpatch, Canadian Art, FASHION, Flash Art, Garage, Maisonneuve, The Nation, The New Inquiry, The Paris Review, rabble.ca, VICE, Vulture and elsewhere.

“The market” is a term that takes on a brutal life of its own: grotesque, ghostly, ghastly. “The market” names an invisible force for which no one seems to bear responsibility, for which no one seems to be accountable. “The market” seems to suggest a process that happens “out there,” a thing that no one can touch, a kind of accidental power that exists on an otherworldly terrain. (The scare quotes perhaps always seem necessary.)

When we say it—the art market—we pretend we know what we are talking about, or at least we assume that we are all talking about the same thing. I am mostly not sure. The market can refer to the economic processes of supply and demand, encompassing sales, fairs, auctions, private collections, public museums, small galleries, established galleries—the list goes on. Perhaps all contemporary neo-liberal markets abandon the human by abandoning the haptic, preferring instead the shiny fetish over the social relation. But the art market is both particularly opaque because private sales data is not publicly available and particularly important because the relationship between auctioneers, dealers and collectors contributes to what gets sanctioned as worth collecting—and therefore what gets remembered in normative art history. One thing I do know for sure: markets are fucked. They often get brought up as a justification for why things—racism, sexism, poverty—stay the same.

“An artist with a market has little need for community,” M. NourbeSe Philip said almost 30 years ago in an essay called “Who’s Listening? Artists, Audiences, and Language,” published in her 1992 book _Frontiers: Essays and Writings on Racism and Culture_. “The reverse, however, is not as assured—the artist with both community and audience but no market will, undoubtedly, starve, unless someone supports her.” Following the Tobago-born and Toronto-based writer Philip, then, community, audience and market index something of a holy trinity for an artist, providing her material sustenance, professional opportunity and emotional care. Even years ago, in 1992, Philip gendered the artist through the pronoun “she,” staggering the masculine subject that (still) tends to define most art markets. In the time since, the options ought to have become more multifarious, and yet, to either get rich or die trying seem to still be the predominant two. 

Yes, an artist’s relationship to the market can mean the difference between eating and not eating, but if you’re already hot, the difference might be a few million dollars. In May of last year, for instance, music mogul Sean Combs bought _Past Times_ (1997) by Alabama-born artist Kerry James Marshall for US$21.1 million, which broke the record for the highest price of work sold by a living Black American artist. This is, mind you, a mere fraction of what is considered the highest price ever paid for a living artist: Jeff Koons’ _Rabbit_ (1986) sold for $91.1 million in May of this year. The auction block is not a metaphor. Along with big names like Kehin de Wiley and Mickalene Thomas, Marshall is among a number of Black artists drawing high sale prices. This heat wave is occurring in conjunction with a watershed of institutional supports. You might cite the popular _Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power_, which travelled to New York City, Los Angeles and London and will be on view in San Francisco in November. Another example might be Mark Bradford representing the United States  
at the 2017 Venice Biennale. When in 2017 Barack Obama commissioned Wiley and Michelle Obama commissioned Amy Sherald to paint their portraits for the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, it was one of those obnoxiously remarkable “firsts.” This year, that same Sherald painting appeared along side works by Carrie Mae Weems, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Titus Kaphar, Juliana Huxtable and others in Spike Lee’s horrendous television series _She’s Gotta Have It_.

The industry is at a tipping point, at least on the surface, at least in the starry smog of representational politics where only a select few receive institutional and financial support. The desire for positive racial representation, so present in the ’80s culture war, has spilled over into the 21st century, and even as the limits of representation have made themselves clear, especially after the Obama presidency, we can’t seem to let go. All of these confluent market forces signal visibility, recognition and ultimately, possibly, inclusion. But is that all we want? Who are _we_, anyway?

In Canada, there is something of a trickle-down in this increased attraction to Black artists. Yet, the Canadian art market clearly lags behind, especially in terms of ascribing monetary value to artists’ work on the global art market. Pamela Edmonds, recently appointed senior curator of the McMaster Museum of Art, mentioned the recent Toronto exhibitions by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Theaster Gates and Thomas at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), and Glenn Ligon at the Power Plant. “The work of ‘international’ Black artists continues to take precedence over those living and working within this country, particularly evidenced by the lack of solo exhibitions by Canadian artists,” she told me over email.

Because the market fetishizes visibility, recognition and inclusion, it also ostensibly erases the class, gender and geographical differences among Black artists. Until Sandra Brewster’s summer  
2019 exhibition _Blur_, Thomas was only the second Black woman artist, after Wangechi Mutu, to have a solo exhibition at the AGO, as noted in Connor Garel’s essay “Why Have There Been No Great  
Black Canadian Women Artists?” Both are not Canadian and both are highly successful internationally recognized artists already. Only well-established, popular artists have a fighting chance at institutional recognition. You have to make it before you make it.

The history of Canada’s discourse of multiculturalism often means that cultural institutions are talking the talk only to appear inclusive and diverse—without investing significant resources to enable Black artists to survive. “It seems that Black Canadian artists are engaged more for supplementary programming—talks, panels, etc.—but not in presenting their work outside of group shows,” Edmonds said. Canada has long relied on its nationalist pomp and circumstance, its reputation of being liberal and diverse for a kind of discursive leg up in situations that merit or require financial contribution. This might partially explain why representation for Black Canadian artists seems to be increasing in certain spaces (public programming, education, outreach, media discussions, non-collecting institutions) but not necessarily in others (permanent collections, grants, funding, senior institutional positions). The language of diversity falls flat on its face.

“The market for and the knowledge about Black Canadian art is just really not there, and it’s funny because everything is just so blackity-black all of a sudden on the art market,” Dr. Kenneth Montague, dentist and founder of the non-profit organization Wedge Curatorial Projects, a platform that promotes emerging Black Canadian artists, told me. “It’s very strange to be waving the flag for something for so long and then finally seeing the market coming around—and I’m talking generally about interest in Black artists.”

What both Edmonds and Montague are getting after is the mere lip service that is paid to Black Canadian artists. Montague is one of the country’s most prominent collectors of Black art and Black Canadian art. He’s been collecting for over 20 years, but save for an experience as a member of the Tate Modern’s Africa acquisitions committee where he met other Black collectors from other parts of the world, he has felt like an island. Of course, there are other Canadian collectors who are interested in Black art, though mainly Black American art, and none of the major collectors besides Montague are  
Black themselves. As a Black collector in a very white art world, he is often described in Canadian media as being in a league of his own, but he would love nothing else than to see more Black collectors. “I’m trying to encourage and nurture collectors coming out of the Black community,” he told me over the phone. “I feel like there are, particularly in the metropolitan areas of Canada like Toronto, enough Black folks that have the income and now the interest in collecting art.”

It feels strange, then, that the holy trinity that Philip described—community, market, audience—seems to exist, and yet, frankly, we are going in circles. It is in this sense that this essay attempts to capture a kind of loss. 

“There’s a lot of work that needs to be done around education, spreading knowledge, museum shows and more scholarship so that people recognize the importance of the work of Black artists in Canada and then the art market will follow,” Montague said. But when? And at what cost? And what exactly are we waiting for? Another record-breaking sale? 

Philip is instructive here. “The market, with its forces, can be a positive factor provided it underpins the forces created by audience and community,” she writes in _Frontiers_. “The market becomes a negative force when it replaces or obliterates audience and community or, even more dangerously, determines ‘our way of seeing things’ and replaces the ‘process of community: the sharing of common meanings, and thence common activities and purposes’ with the process of commodification.” The  
market risks giving way to this negative force, which names a kind of anti-social energy that is tied to the unequivocal fact that art is a commodity.

The art market thrives on newness, so Montague thinks it may only be a matter of time before Black Canadian art catches fire. But will it burn? “As a collector, I’m thrilled that other people are seeing the beauty, the value, the importance of \[Black\] Canadian art but I am ultimately concerned that it’s not just an art-market moment,” he told me. “I’m much more interested in the long view, which for me is getting those artists into institutions, into public and major private collections, into the story, the fabric of contemporary art.”

Not keen to wait for recognition from mainstream and predominantly white institutions, many artists are approaching these issues through establishing and sustaining a collective model. Collectives have been cropping up in recent years in what could be seen as an effort not only to evade the market  
as an imperative, but also to challenge ownership itself, a concept shaped by the intersections of settler colonialism, the Atlantic slave trade and capitalism, which gave us modernity. These processes, often reduced to “-isms,” are the conditions under which we live. These are the market forces. But they are also, importantly, the forces that brought us the very idea of art as we know it: art sanctioned by the institution, by the museum, by grants, by the government.

Some try to get around it, or at least say “fuck it.” In Toronto, the Black Artists Union (BAU) is a collective that focuses on developing, connecting and representing artists of the African diaspora. Members include Oreka James, Curtia Wright, Esmaa Mohamoud, Timothy Yanick Hunter, Destiny Grimm, Aaron Jones and others. Working to dismantle the hegemony of the solo artist, collectives destabilize the distinction between auteur and audience, showing work where their friends can come and hang. If they don’t get the support within the white walls of the white gallery, they go and make the support themselves. It’s labour.

At the end of 2018, BAU’s group exhibition _Burnt Umber_, at the Margin of Eras Gallery in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood (with work by Wright, Grimm, Ekow Stone, Jemini Baptiste, James, Phillip Saunders, Hunter and Sylvia Limbana), directly attempted to address the exclusionary practices and individuating dogmas of the Canadian art scene. One of the featured artists, Wright, told me that she is “constantly questioning where \[her\] work fits within the Canadian art market” but that with BAU, she found support, group critique and a larger audience.

Collectives bubble up through intimate relationships and conjure deep forms of affiliation. As art historian Kellie Jones writes in the introduction to her book _EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art_, “art is not only part of history—even a living history—it is part of and makes community, it is part of and makes family.” These groups, and groups like it, including the now defunct General Idea and the queer Caribbean diasporic collective RAGGA, who did a group show at Mercer Union in Summer 2018, experiment with making art and making art together. They eschew the demand to perform for white enjoyment. They refuse the strictures of a certain type of visibility. They make plans. They do their thing. They find refuge. They imagine another world. In other words, collectives expose the gap between art and labour, bringing “the market” as thick and elastic phraseology back to the ground. Something we can touch. Something historicized and politicized. Something local.

Black American artists—visual artists as well as musicians and performers—know how the incorporation (or assimilation) of Black art into the mainstream market produces a kind of irony: cultural objects being applauded while violent social and economic inequalities persist. Is that something that Black Canadian artists want to replicate or refuse? It is clear that the United States is often an implicit or explicit backdrop to a Canadian artist’s viability and security, indexing cultural and economic authority. Wright put her experience this way: “In Canada we have a tendency to focus our attention on what is happening elsewhere, which stifles creativity in our own backyard and creates pressure on artists, specifically Black artists, to become _the_ best new Black artist on the scene. It pushes a very individualistic ideology instead of creating room for artists to work collectively.”

The market, its home in corporate financing, has its own desires that can co-opt our own, can prevent us from imagining a thousand new ensembles, ways of archiving, showing and making art. And yet even communal practice is not stable. It is a horizon. It is here and yet it might always escape us. If we are lucky, the market will never catch up.

##### ERRATA

In issue 143, p. 17: Tiana Reid wrote that “Until Sandra Brewster’s summer 2019 exhibition _Blur,_ \[Mickalene\] Thomas was only the second Black woman artist, after Wangechi Mutu, to have a solo exhibition at the AGO, as noted in Connor Garel’s essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Black Canadian Women Artists?’” Garel’s article was originally published in Canadian Art (January 10, 2019). In fact, Sandra Brewster was the 7th Black woman artist to have a solo show at the AGO, following Lorna Simpson’s _Call Waiting_ (1998), Karma Clarke-Davis’ _Present Tense #14_ (2000), Wangechi Mutu’s _This You Call Civilization?_ (2010), June Clark’s self-titled show (2018), Mickalene Thomas’ _Femmes Noires_ (2019) and Winsom’s _I Rise_ (2019). We apologize for having perpetuated this false information, which we acknowledge is an implicit act of erasure.

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Race

Representation

Tiana Reid remarks on “The market”, an invisible yet powerful, largely unknowable entity which looms ominously over artistic creativity. Reid discusses the struggle among Black Canadian artists to be represented fairly in a mainstream art market that constantly threatens to undermine identity, self-expression and creative control.

The Market Will Never Catch Up

Marie Fraser is a curator and a Professor of Contemporary Art and Museology at the Université du Québec à Montréal. She was the Chief Curator at the MACM (2010–2013). Over the years, her exhibitions have been presented in Canada and in Europe. In 2015, she curated the BGL exhibition in the Canadian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale. She is part of the research group CIÉCO: Collections et impératif évènementiel/The Convulsive Collections.

In 2012, during my tenure as chief curator at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MACM), I initiated the acquisition of a work by the artist Tino Sehgal that brought about a discussion within the museum itself on the issue of the permanence of the collection.[^1] For the museum, founded on preservation and inalienability, what are the implications of acquiring a _living_ artwork whose radical immateriality resists its own conservation? Sehgal’s work problematizes the idea of permanence, and in that sense, it undermines the modern and Western conception of the museum: to preserve the past in order to build the future. 

_This Situation_ (2007) is a “constructed situation,” as Sehgal calls most of his works, and it brings together six intellectuals to engage in a philosophical discussion. It is composed of a hundred or more quotations from philosophy, sociology, economics and history, merged into a choreography of gestures, some of which can be identified with art historical icons or themes. The action plays out in a continuous loop. The six bodies move into the space and interact among themselves and the audience in the same space. They are absorbed in their interaction, and from time to time they address the audience directly, asking: “… and you, what do you think?”, “…et vous qu’en pensez-vous?” The piece is presented as an exhibition in itself, not as a performance or an event. The duration corresponds to the museum’s opening hours. It takes place in a typical white cube space, the most “neutral” possible. Following Sehgal’s instructions, nothing in the museum announces the exhibition: no text, no label, no mediation, no publicity. The idea is to enter the room without knowing what awaits us, what is ahead of us. _This Situation_ is entirely spoken. It is a living artwork. In terms of collection, because of its essential oral form, the work can only continue to exist over time through its own presentation. The act of collecting thus participates in the radical immateriality of the work by expanding it into the historical question of permanence.

Since the ’60s, contemporary art has defied the art museum’s dedication to the collection and preservation of artworks according to a well-established aesthetic and historical narrative. Curators, accordingly, have been preoccupied with developing new ways to exhibit artworks that trouble the notion of the object and that challenge the museum’s rules and practices. Only a few, however, have tried to enact this critical approach inside the collection itself. In her 2014 book _Radical Museology,_ Claire Bishop articulates this lack of curatorial interest to work with the historical collection, in favour of temporary exhibitions: “for many curators, the historical weight of a permanent collection is an albatross that inhibits the novelty so essential to drawing in new audiences, since the incessant turnover of temporary exhibitions is deemed more exciting … than finding yet another way to show the canon.”[^2] But during the last decades, as she observes, the difficult socio-economic context in European countries has forced some museums to return to their own collections out of necessity and, in that process, “museums with historical collections have become the most fruitful testing ground for a non-presentist, multi-temporal contemporaneity.”[^3] Her analysis focuses on three museums, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven and the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (MUSM) in Ljubljana, that have explored new ways to exhibit—and consequently to reinterpret—their own historical collections within this model of temporality. In this context, Bishop recognizes the importance of the collection: “without a permanent collection, it is hard for a museum to stake any meaningful claim to an engagement with the past—but also … with the future,”[^4] but she does not address its ongoing constitution. 

Bishop’s argument considers the permanent collection as an entity that already exists, as a resource that can be reinterpreted through its display in the form of temporary thematic exhibitions. Her analysis does not address the problem of the continuity of its development. What is it based on? How do we reconcile, for example, the principle of permanence with a critical multi-temporality approach? To look at the collection from the inside is what interests me, to question and to reconsider its specific temporality: the concept of permanence in itself. The curatorial reinvestment in the collection is important to me as it also raises questions that impact its dominant historical role. How does the collection establish a continuity between the past, the present and the future? Almost nothing exists in the critical fields of art history or museum or curatorial studies about how to approach continuity other than those methods based on the notion of the stability of the collection and sustainability of the works of art that compose it. Its permanence is always taken for granted. More so, the modern concept of the museum itself is based on this association between the permanence of the collection and the sustainability of the artworks within it. This concept is now becoming the challenge to overcome.

Acquiring a “constructed situation” by Sehgal activates a tension within this association. It’s like collecting the uncollectable, creating a compelling paradox: its presence within the collection ensures its continuity through time, but because of the particular nature of the work, its open-ended oral form, the museum has no control over it and we cannot fathom the shape of that continuity. The elusive quality of the work problematizes the permanence of the collection, while questioning the status and the value of the collected object. Could a collection be forever? 

##### To Acquire

When I started discussing the acquisition of the “constructed situation” for the collection of the MACM, only a few other museums had explored the unusual process involved in it. There were several major issues at stake. Can the museum take the risk of acquiring an artwork that it may not be able to conserve or even exhibit in the future? How can it deal with the essentially oral nature of the work within its collection of objects? The other curators whom I knew to have acquired a Seghal had started the procedure only after having exhibited the work itself. My intuition was to do the opposite because the work is, for me, inseparable from all the conditions imposed by the artist, at all levels. The exclusively oral nature of the work begins upstream of its actual exhibition by including into its participatory dimension the process of its own acquisition. All the elements of the transaction are verbal: there is no documentation, no written contract as such, no tangible trace, no certificate of authenticity. The transaction transforms everyone involved into an “actor” in the concretion of the work, as it requires a particular and unique protocol. We gathered around a table, several administrators from the museum and the board, the director, part of the curatorial team and an independent lawyer who acted as witness to the procedure. The representative of the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York explained the purpose of the meeting and outlined the five conditions of the acquisition[^5]: 

> The first condition states that the presentation of the work, the first time, must be prepared and authorized by the artist or his representative. 

> The second condition is that its presentation must take place during the opening hours of the museum and for a period not less than six weeks. 

> The third condition is that all the participants—or the “players”—be paid. 

> The fourth requires that no visual documentation is allowed to be made by the museum, which also commits to ensure against the circulation, as far as possible, of any form of reproduction of the work (this condition also extends to the museum archives, which must contain no material documentation relative to the work). 

> The fifth condition stipulates that if the museum should wish to alienate the work, it must do so by an exclusively oral transaction authorized by the artist or his representative. 

At the end of this enumeration, we all agreed, we shook hands and the transaction was sealed.

I found this experience—the sensation that the work encompasses its own modalities of collecting—profound. For Sehgal, belonging to a collection has a specific meaning. From the perspective of the museum, to welcome this artistic posture is a bold gesture that makes it possible to imagine working with other models of collection. Before its exhibition, the work remains totally abstract, unknown. It is only when the piece is presented that the museum has access to its content. The knowledge of the piece is not something frozen into a materiality that pre-exists its manifestation. This is why it appeared to me so important to exhibit _This Situation_ immediately after its acquisition. All the instructions of the work—the quotations, the gestures and the movement of the bodies in the space—are transmitted orally by the artist or by his representative directly to the participants. There is no scenario. The knowledge passes from one person to another with no rest, in the same way as the eventual relationship between the players and the visitor at the exhibition, like a cascade of orality. A few months after the acquisition, _This Situation_ was presented from March 19 to April 28, 2013, at the museum with another work of Sehgal’s, _The Kiss_ (2002). In order to recruit a sufficient number of intellectuals to activate the piece over the duration of the exhibition, about 30, we launched a call to the four university communities of Montreal. The representative of the artist, Assad Raza, came to the museum to select the players and to initiate them to the process of the piece. During the exhibition, the players exchanged in both French and English indistinctly, in the flow of the local cultural context. 

##### To Care 

If preserving objects over time, from the past to the future, is essential to the museum, the works of Sehgal necessitate a different mode of existence. Once within the collection, his work does not exist as an object, “detached from its original functions,” to use an expression of Walter Benjamin in his short text “The Collector,”[^6] but rather as a living process of transmission, by word of mouth, from generation to generation. Elusive as object, only its remembrance can guarantee its continuity. Unlike performance, which is ephemeral by definition, the “constructed situation” _can live over time_ but not as an ownable object or as documentation, but as an open-ended process of oral transmission. The form of the work persists as entirely immaterial. The challenge is not how to keep this knowledge forever but, rather, how to keep it _alive_: how to learn it, how to memorize it, how to circulate it. 

This particular nature of the work and its elusive immateriality participate for me in a larger reflection on the central function of the museum: its collection. The Western model of the museum, inherited from modernity, is based on classification and preservation and, consequently, on the value and sustainability of the object. Curators are now questioning their own traditional role as guardians of this historical meaning and value of art. I see a potential shift in the function of the curator that could change our conception and our use of collected objects and artworks radically. The undertaking of “curating a collection”[^7] no longer involves only the considerations of how to collect, to select, to study and interpret, and finally to display artworks, but more fundamentally compels considerations of how to care for them.[^8] Preserving objects forever should no longer be what is at stake; what should, rather, is how to live with them, how to care _for_ them and _about_ them. Landing in a museum collection is viewed traditionally as the ultimate stage in the life of an artwork or an artifact, its final destination. Can we rethink this paradigm? What if instead of thinking about the collection as a fixed and immutable entity and as the ultimate destination of its content, it were conceived in terms of adaptability? 

##### ERRATA

In issue 143, p. 27: “Collecting Forever? On Acquiring a Tino Sehgal” by Marie Fraser was published in print without footnotes. C takes full responsibility for this error and apologizes to the writer, as well as those cited in the text. The correct version is published in our digital editions and here online.

[^1]: Many people at the museum were involved with me in the process of this acquisition and the subsequent exhibition of the work: Josée Bélisle, then curator of the collection, Anne-Marie Zeppetelli, the registrar of the collection, and Lesley Johnstone, the curator in charge of the exhibition; François LeTourneux, curator of exhibitions, was one of the players when This Situation was presented. Following the exhibition an interview by Amélie Giguère with the team was published in the magazine Muséologies. See Amélie Giguère, “Acquérir This Situation de Tino Sehgal. Entretiens avec Josée Bélisle, Marie Fraser, Lesley Johnstone et Anne-Marie Zeppetelli,” Muséologies 7, no. 1 (2014), 225–237.
[^2]: Claire Bishop, Radical Museology or: What’s “Contemporary” in Museums of Contemporary Art? (London: Koenig Books, 2014), 24\. 
[^3]: Bishop, 23.
[^4]: Bishop, 24.
[^5]: I am reciting here the five conditions as I remember them from the day of the transaction. 
[^6]: Walter Benjamin 1931, “The Collector,” in The Arcades Project (London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993), 204.
[^7]: To continue this reflection on the transformation of the role of the curator in relation to the museum collection, see the fifth issue of Stedelijk Studies, “Curating the Collection: Strategies of Presentation in the Twenty-First-Century Museum,” edited by Rachel Esner and Fieke Konijn, available online at <https://stedelijkstudies.com/issue-5-curating-the-collection/>. In this special issue, I analyzed the journey of a painting by Picasso from the collection of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven to its exhibition in Ramallah, Palestine in 2011\. See Johanne Lamoureux, Mélanie Boucher and Marie Fraser “Looking at the One and Only: The Return of the Single-Work Show.” The project Picasso in Palestine by the Palestinian artist Khaled Hourani and the investigation I conducted into archives to retrace the whole “life” of the painting brought to my attention new issues regarding the historical significance of the works in collections. See Marie Fraser, “Un Picasso en Palestine ou le mythe moderne comme re-enactment d’une crise politique,” Plastik 7 (May 3, 2019); <https://plastik.univ-paris1.fr/un-picasso-en-palestine-ou-le-mythe-moderne-comme-re-enactment-dune-crise-politique/>. 
[^8]: I am referring here to the curatorial and theoretical work of Beatrice von Bismarck. See Beatrice von Bismarck and Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer, eds., Cultures of the Curatorial 3: Hospitality: Hosting Relations in Exhibitions (Kulturen des Kuratorischen, Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, 2016). Beatrice von Bismarck discusses the notions of care and hospitality in the context of curating temporary exhibitions of contemporary art. I believe that these two notions could equally be extended to a consideration of curatorial practices within historical collections. 

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Performance

Curatorial practice

Marie Fraser reflects on the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal’s acquisition of a performance piece by Tino Sehgal, and the subsequent discussions of permanence in museum collections. How does a museum collect a “constructed situation”, and how might it conserve or exhibit such a work in the future?

Collecting Forever? On Acquiring a Tino Sehgal

Jaimie Isaac is the Curator of Indigenous and Contemporary Art at the Inventory Site/ation 71 Winnipeg Art Gallery. She is an interdisciplinary artist and co-founder of The Ephemerals Collective. Isaac is a member of Sagkeeng First Nation, of Anishnaabe and British heritage.

How does what is owned define the owner? In the _Manual of Curatorship_, Peter Cannon-Brookes stresses that the “process of collecting cannot be considered separately from the cultural characteristics of the society undertaking it.” Institutions still beholden to outdated mandates and protocols will have collections that are reflective of that. Many curators working within these institutions are attempting decolonial methodologies, in a recent and expanding move toward museological reform, to include the work of underrepresented, misrepresented or never-represented artists. When institutions haven’t had major contributions to their collections of contemporary Indigenous art, it’s simply because they haven’t had someone with the specialized knowledge or the initiative to advocate for it.

I started at the Winnipeg Art Gallery (WAG) with a curatorial residency supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. When I was hired as the curator of Indigenous and contemporary art after my residency, in 2017, I was one of the first Indigenous curators hired in a full-time and permanent position. Standing on the shoulders of activators before me who pushed to make such positions available in Canadian institutions, I’ve been an activator in shifting the imbalanced narratives in collecting and exhibiting practices. When I applied for the two-year residency, I set goals to work toward during my time. I began with an analysis report of the collections, specifically looking at First Nations, Métis and Indigenous artworks. 

The WAG has the world’s largest collection of Inuit art, but in my analysis, I found that work by First Nations or Métis artists made up only 1 percent of the WAG’s collection of more than 24,000 works in total. My analysis then examined who is represented in the collection. How can we increase representation within a given budget? How can the WAG better reflect its region when, as of 2019, Indigenous people make up 11 percent of Winnipeg’s population of over 800,000? Winnipeg is home to one of Canada’s largest urban Indigenous populations, so it was important for the WAG to prioritize exhibiting and acquiring art by First Nations and Métis artists. The forthcoming Inuit Art Centre, which will house over 8,000 works by Inuit artists, indicates the WAG’s dedication to collecting and exhibiting Inuit art. But the gallery is also accountable to considering and responding to Treaty 1 Territory to holistically reflect the population around it, including representations of womxn, artists of colour, minorities and non-binary and queer artists—all underrepresented in collections and exhibitions. 

Based on my analysis, I recommended goals to review museum policies and practices, and for the institution to further acquisitions beyond the extensive Inuit art collection. The first goal was to complete the collection of all the members of the Professional Native Indian Artists Inc. (PNIAI), otherwise known as “the Indian Group of Seven.” I was curious to see if we had all seven members of the significant group, consisting of Daphne Odjig, Alex Janvier, Jackson Beardy, Norval Morrisseau, Eddy Cobiness, Carl Ray and Joseph Sanchez. The group was established in Manitoba, and the WAG held a groundbreaking exhibition of their work called _Treaty Numbers 23, 287, 1171_ in 1972\. It turned out that the collection was incomplete, so one of my first recommendations was to connect with collectors who have those works in their collections to see if they would be open to making donations. We’ve collected work from the Indian Group of Seven from throughout the decades, and are working toward completing the collection. It’s important to keep chipping away at those areas of relevance—not only to the WAG’s collection but also to the region, to think about the collection’s mandate through the lens of critical and cultural regionalism, and the history of artists producing in Manitoba. When artists have asserted territorial relevance and made significant bodies of work dedicated to this region, it’s important that we can support those artists with acquisitions. 

My second recommendation was to collect work from the WAG’s signature exhibitions. Acquiring works from institution-authored exhibitions is key to inducting the exhibition into the institution’s memory and cultural time- line. With the _INSURGENCE/RESURGENCE_ exhibition, for example, which I co-curated with Julie Nagam in 2017, and which centred around cultural resurgences and political and social insurgences, we commissioned new work from 12 artists out of the exhibition’s 29 artists. The WAG acquired works by Ursula Johnson, Dee Barsy, Linus Woods and Joi T. Arcand commissioned for that exhibition. Through the commissioned artwork and subsequent acquisitions, we established vestiges of that exhibition through storied objects and a lineage of artistic scholarship. The WAG just acquired a donation from Kent Monkman, from his Urban Rez series, which is based on Winnipeg’s iconography and urban landscape, and will be featuring it in his _Shame and Prejudice_ exhibition in fall 2019\. The exhibition _Boarder X_ presented contemporary work by artists from Indigenous nations across Canada who surf, skate and snowboard, and new acquisitions will mark the exhibition history and national tour in our collection. In an exhibition called _We Are On Treaty Land_, which focused on Indigenous contemporary artists working in Treaty 1 Territory, we exhibited work by members of the Indian Group of Seven. Daphne Odjig’s _Thunderbird Woman_ (1973), which is in the collection, was rendered as a massive mural by Peter Thomas and Mike Valcourt, to activate the collection and introduce Indigenous art histories into contemporary narratives in public spaces. 

As a curator at the WAG proposing acquisitions, I consider the factors of both past exhibitions and possible future exhibitions. The process of acquiring an artwork involves a curator making a justification for its purchase to the director and curatorial department. Once approved, the curator presents their proposed piece to a works of art committee, consisting of institutional staff and members of the arts community, like artists, collectors and scholars, and justifies its relevance to the collection and its relation to an important exhibition or a period in the artist’s career. They explain its significance and its ties to the collection specifically, to art history in general, and to the artist’s work based on where they are in their career. 

Logistically, budgets are always a challenge, and more broadly, it’s been complicated to think about the ethics and methodologies of collecting. A key to practicing decolonial methodologies is to understand the attitudes that have historically informed the lack of institutional engagement with contemporary art by Indigenous artists. Acquisition strategy, therefore, has to be informed by knowledge of the collection as it stands, while bearing in mind the goal to fill the gaps within it going forward. 

The momentum for reform has been building for over three decades, though there have been ebbs and flows of that negotiation for space for Indigenous art. Some of the shifts toward museological reform in Canada began in 1991, when the Canada Council for the Arts released a game-changing report by curator Lee-Ann Martin, titled _The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion: Contemporary Native Art and Public Art Museums in Canada_. Then in 1992, Canada’s 125th anniversary of confederation, the Canadian Museums Association and the Assembly of First Nations jointly issued the _Task Force Report on Museums and First Peoples_, which Martin authored. Both demanded an urgent call to action for Indigenous inclusion. They challenged art institutions to hire Indigenous curators and staff and to enact fair representation by exhibiting and acquiring Indigenous art. Twenty-five years after these reports, the calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples echoed their demands, urging the re-examination of museum policies and practices concerning Indigenous artists and curators, and seeking community input in the cultural sector. 

The dance of inclusion and exclusion of Indigenous art and curation in mainstream galleries is often critiqued as being driven by the availability of targeted funding initiatives rather than by an investment in contemporary Indigenous engagement. Leading up to and throughout 2017, during the Canada 150 celebrations/anti-celebrations, conversations around the TRC questioned the extent to which institutions would _sincerely_ engage in its calls to action in the context of nationalism. Government and leadership inform how funding systems support institutions, which directly affects the way that they collect, exhibit and program. This dynamic contributes to larger national narratives, in turn informing interpretations of current holdings and justifications for future acquisitions. 

The WAG has been addressing the TRC’s calls to action in different capacities. In 2016 the WAG held a consultation with artists, curators and administrators based in Manitoba to explore possibilities of Indigenizing the gallery. The gathering aimed to explore opportunities for the WAG to create spaces and experiences “aligned with Indigenous worldviews and perspectives, and to be a leading innovator in the presentation of Indigenous art.”[^1] Key goals and potential actions suggested by the participants were to “support the professional careers of Indigenous artists,” and to increase “commissions and greater acquisitions of Indigenous contemporary art for the WAG collection.”[^2] 

Indigenous artists have received significant national attention recently, which justifies expanding collections to support them. We’ve also seen an increase in institutional positions for Indigenous scholars and curators. But how can structures of change be supported systemically and sustainably? It’s not enough for institutions to make performative reconciliatory gestures. True museological reform must be based on a sincere desire for change-making that can be sustained past temporal governmental focuses on reconciliation, with a commitment to dismantle normalized institutional exclusion. Passing policy on a governance level is crucial to enable permanent staff positions and support the careers of independent curators. When curators that make changes leave these institutions, what is the sustainability and institutional memory of their work? Can the recommendations on the collection still be maintained and furthered? Can these positions be maintained? Can the shifts that have begun continue? My hope is that yes, these things can happen, if the work and dedication continue at the leadership levels. 

There is a historical legacy of Indigenous representation in galleries and museums that reduces the complexities of Indigenous cultures to oversimplified clichés and colonized narratives and myths, instead of supporting sustained in-depth interpretations from the communities we are collecting and whose cultural production we are looking at. Colonial mindsets formulated reductionist narratives of Indigenous cultures, and museums and art history still perpetuate them. Like many, I have questions: can we truly decolonize or Indigenize institutions if the leadership still subscribes to a colonial mindset toward the systems and structures that these spaces are originally built on? Museological reform is an ongoing process. 

In spite of the lack of institutional permanence, curators committed to anti-racist methods have worked within institutions to break conventions and decentre colonialist knowledge and protocols, confront the art historical canon, exercise human rights and challenge exclusion. Decolonial methodology allows for the transmission of knowledge and under- standing, so before we can address the ongoing absences in the collection, we have to address and acknowledge the colonial mindset of exclusion in the first place. Decolonial methodology centres on self-reflection. We are aware that collections still consist of overrepresented groups that have taken up too much space. And while there’s a sincere individual and collective desire for inclusive policies within museums, it’s still difficult to change what has been normalized. The whole movement of the machine needs to be disrupted and dismantled to enable change. It’s easy to theorize about it, but we need more than a few people at the table to actualize it.

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Indigenous

Jaimie Isaac describes her efforts to Indigenize the collection at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Isaac hopes that the ongoing process of museological reform will lead to further representation of under-, mis-, and never-represented artists, and asserts that only by acknowledging the systemic mindset of colonial exclusion can we enact change.

Reformed?

In 2016 I was invited as the third and final curator of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative for the Middle East and North Africa. The project aimed to diversify the Guggenheim Museum’s holdings, with the previous two chapters involving curators and artists from South and Southeast Asia, and Latin America. Prior to the project, the Guggenheim’s American collection was lacking in global art, in particular from these three regions, so the project aimed to build a critical art historical aggregate about the global south that spoke to the museum’s principles of collecting. It resulted in over 125 new acquisitions from those regions underrepresented in the Guggenheim’s collection.

Before I began to acquire works for the museum, I examined the works that already resided in its collection. I aimed to acquire more than one piece by an individual artist to encourage more of their works to enter the collection after my tenure, and to build history and legacy. This project was not designed to showcase the “top of the pops,” and because it was a collection-building exercise, my decision-making process was invested in sustainability and in reflecting on art history’s relationship to the art of our time.

Based on the collection-building objective, I composed the exhibition _But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise_. It focused on the conceptual application of geometries to create a non-didactic ideas-driven narrative, rather than one informed by geographical myths. As a curator and art historian invested in art practices that identify with the places and spaces connected to the greater Middle East, I wanted to evade stereotypical curatorial approaches to geographically-specific exhibitions. I used geometry to unpack two distinct areas of spatial studies: mental space, which relates to mathematics and logic, and real, actual geographical space. This paved the way for a thematic and curatorial exploration of the colonial structures that were established during the formation of the modern world, and addressed their impact on the Middle East and North Africa regions.

Through the deconstruction of several nonlinear histories and practices, I presented a diverse cohort of artists who deflected reductive analyses. Instead, their works and ideas probed the semiotics of visual and cultural exchange by directly confronting the paired ideas of place and space to delineate the value of previously hidden currencies, and embodied several urgent and overlapping issues within their work. I was interested in suggesting alternative readings of some of the complex global histories that underpin contemporary art from the greater Middle East by exploring the capacity of geometry to embrace and illuminate many other fields of enquiry. I was also interested in teasing out transcultural ideas that connected the museum and its architect Frank Lloyd Wright with his engagements in Iraq during the 1950s as part of Baghdad’s modernization plan under the Hashemite King. The monarchy was overthrown in 1958 by a military coup d’état, and the kingdom, along with Lloyd Wright’s designs, soon collapsed, but some of those designs were later incorporated into the Guggenheim’s building on Fifth Avenue.

An important theoretical source for this exhibition was Jacques Derrida’s 1962 essay “Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction,” in which Derrida drew from the central thesis of mathematician and phenomenologist Husserl’s core argument for the “return to origins,” which he believed was closely associated with geometry. Curatorially, geometry functioned as a form of logical “truth,” which transferred to the exhibition context where 18 artworks by 17 artists, on view in New York, provided myriad avenues into what constitutes the real. By tracing these multiple avenues, the exhibition aimed to reactivate narratives surrounding origins. It aimed to dispel misleading programs of truth, namely those that existed within the 21st century orientalist imagination. Key areas of focus included ideologies of architecture and how they have been used as a tool in the making and reshaping of the modern Middle East, and the migration of people and ideas.

A salient artwork that married these themes was a series by Abbas Akhavan entitled _Study for a Monument_ (2013–). Within this work, Akhavan renders a species of plants native to the Tigris and Euphrates river system of ancient Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) in bronze. Arranged on bed sheets, these charred-looking objects exploit the symbolism of power and status. Bypassing the human form to focus instead on oral anatomy, the artist has replaced the anticipated regality of bronze with something altogether uncanny. This suggests several overlapping readings of the work: it may be registered as an index of the effects of environmental disaster, as a makeshift roadside memorial, or even as a display of illicit finds. But whichever specific interpretation we favour, what is most important and lasting in the work is its enmeshing in a broader political struggle.

To grapple with the complex histories of the greater Middle East and its constructed cartographic narrative, it was essential to dispel Orientalist and exotic myths associated with the region, which Edward Said described in his canonical text _Orientalism_ (1978) as a program of Western exploitation. The exhibition’s design was based on a fragmented jigsaw puzzle. It was a metaphor for the dual regions of West Asia and North Africa, both of which encountered (with the exception of Iran and Turkey) some form of physical Western occupation during the 18th and 19th centuries after the decline of the Ottoman empire, paving the way for Britain and Europe to carve out their territory and exploit their newly-discovered colonies’ resources.

Attempting to probe the physical and conceptual cannibalism of the region, French-born artist Kader Attia’s practice served as a necessary anchor that aimed to resolve the spatial conundrums of the region’s colonial past through the dissection of architecture. Attia’s study of the vernacular architecture of his family’s native Algeria, which was colonized by the French in the 19th century, is presented within _Untitled (Ghardaïa)_ (2009), a sculpture of the 11th-century ancient city of Ghardaia, from the Mzab region, constructed from couscous. The epic piece explores the colonial legacy of French architects in Algeria, particularly citing Le Corbusier’s and Fernand Pouillon’s roles in the 20th century as frequent “borrowers” of Algeria’s indigenous architectural tropes. Prints of their portraits overlook the installation. By reducing an entire city or heritage to couscous, Attia wittily invites the architects to dine, while mocking their lack of proper acknowledgment of the source of their work.

Another key component of this exhibition was to highlight the critical role of contraband, to consider the term as a possibility for unearthing origins in cartography and heritage. An example was Tunisian-born artist Nadia Kaabi-Linke’s _Flying Carpets_ (2011), a suspended installation made from gridded stainless-steel frames hung by elastic threads. The piece poetically explored the increasing cases of illegal migration from Africa to Europe following the Arab Spring, whereby young men are “smuggled” across the Mediterranean and seduced by the promise of economic prosperity, eventually arriving in places such as the port of Venice, where this work was conceived. Traveling in confined containers and boats, their journeys are contrary to the exotic flying carpet rides that were made popular in 18th- and 19th-century Orientalist literature. To research the piece, Kaabi-Linke spent eight days observing immigrant street hawkers in Venice who sell counterfeit goods on rugs that can be easily bundled up should the authorities arrive. She measured the carpets, and the Ponte del Sepolcro bridge where these traders congregated, and took imprints of their rugs on the bridge. The light and airy feel of this sculptural installation is contrasted by its cage-like resemblance, which casts intricate geometric shadows on the gallery’s walls, alluding to the idea of geometric consciousness and reverting back to the exhibition’s central theme.

_But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise_ occupied a philosophical realm where spatiality and human consciousness interlaced. I designed it to raise a wider dialogue about local and global histories and re-histories, and to move towards shifting centres and peripheries, which are essential objectives in my curatorial practice. Mapping these multiple entry points into a collection-based exhibition allows the art works acquired through it to be re-contextualized in future exhibitions, as part of the institution’s permanent legacy, and as part of a larger matrix.

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Politics

Sara Raza discusses her personal experience acquiring works and composing the exhibition _But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise_ for the Guggenheim. Raza describes the process of creating a space that confronted stereotypical curatorial practices, a practice she hopes will help change the way artworks are obtained for future exhibitions.

But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise:  Acquiring Contemporary Art of the Middle East and North Africa

Adrian Stimson is a member of the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation in southern Alberta. Stimson has a BFA with distinction from the Alberta College of Art and Design and an MFA from the University of Saskatchewan. He considers himself an interdisciplinary artist and exhibits nationally and internationally. Stimson was awarded the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2018 and the REVEAL Indigenous Arts Award from the Hnatyshyn Foundation in 2017\. He was also awarded the Blackfoot Visual Arts Award in 2009, the Alberta Centennial Medal in 2005 and the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal in 2003.

Being born First Nations means that you’re born into politics—that’s the reality we face in this country. My father became chief of Siksika Nation after he was our tribal administrator for 30 years, so I grew up in a political household. For me, understanding the process of fighting for our rights and for our ways of life to be honoured and respected through diplomacy and politics all goes back to Blackfoot traditional values of humility. For as long as I can remember, we have been fighting for our rights. In 1990 I ran for council here at the Siksika Nation, and during the 10 years that I held that position, I worked on a number of different portfolios of the nation’s affairs, like education, finance and culture. In that time, our culture department was aligned with the First Nations Confederacy of Cultural Education Centres (FNCCEC), which was considered the sister organization of the Assembly of First Nations (AFN). 

The FNCCEC represented close to 80 cultural centres across Canada, and it provided the AFN with the research they needed to forward legislative change to the federal government. I became president of that organization, and in that time our two main initiatives were to push for legislation to protect Indigenous languages and for repatriation of stolen cultural objects. The FNCCEC consulted with cultural centres across Canada and internationally, many of whom had regalia, artifacts and material culture in various collections around Canada and around the world that we were hoping to see returned. 

To this day, Canada still doesn’t have effective repatriation legislation, even though Private Member’s Bill C-391, the Indigenous Human Remains and Cultural Property Repatriation Act, an act that suggests a “national strategy for the repatriation of Indigenous human remains and cultural property,” has gone through three readings in the House of Commons. While there has been a lot of research and motion toward repatriation, a very small proportion of institutions are actually even willing to broach this topic, so the onus is on us to approach those that own our material culture. Getting back just one sacred bundle— which is a wrapped collection of sacred, living objects that hold considerable spiritual power—involves a lot of advocacy and activism. 

Siksika’s attempts to repatriate our sacred objects started with the Kainai Nation, the Blood Tribe in Southern Alberta. In 1994, Ryan Heavy Hand sent 4,000 letters to 4,000 museums around the world to inquire about the Blackfoot material culture in their collections. Only 200 museums responded to acknowledge their holdings of our sacred objects. We know that a lot of our material culture is in collections all over the world, but we don’t know what or where it is, what shape things are in or whether they’re being taken care of. It’s a big investigative game to try to figure it out. But once we know, we have to enter into that political process with the institution to see if they’re willing to take accountability for their ownership, and if they are, what is the process of getting our belongings back? 

In Southern Alberta, the Glenbow Museum in Calgary is one of those accepting institutions and over the years they’ve worked very closely with the Blackfoot. The Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton also signed agreements with the nations to return sacred artifacts deemed needed back in our communities. Another museum that has been receptive to repatriation is the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York City, with which the Blackfoot Nations did a lot of work. I visited their facilities with a delegation to look at a number of bundles we were working to bring back. We have to go there ourselves to prepare the bundles to be returned, though I’m not personally in one of the societies that can handle bundles and only went there to evaluate the collections. I couldn’t believe the amount of material culture that was housed in that building— vaults and vaults of totem poles, canoes and pottery from all over the Americas. 

For a lot of First Nations, this has been going on since settlers first started taking our objects. It’s not uncommon to hear stories about how they used to come to reserves and purchase or just take objects— especially at a time when the nation was in a bad state in the ’50s and ’60s. First Nations people were pressured into selling their cultural belongings, but there are also a lot of deviant ways in which settlers acquired these objects. As a recent example, I’ve been working with artist AA Bronson on his _Public Apology to the Siksika Nation_ regarding his familial history. His great-grandfather, Reverend JW Tims, who was one of the first Anglican priests here on the nation, was gifted many Blackfoot artifacts, material culture and headdresses. Then the Marquis of Lorne “borrowed” them from Tims and took off to Europe and never gave them back. The Marquis basically stole them and then sold them for 100 bucks to the British Museum, which is notorious for being unreceptive to repatriation. I recently saw them when I visited the British Museum’s storage facilities in Shoreditch, London. The storage facilities where much of this material culture is housed are old and, frankly, just horrid. They’ve had moth infestations, and many items are stored in plastic bags and degrading cardboard boxes. The facilities are tinderboxes; one match and I’m sure the whole facility would go down. So much of our stolen material culture is in peril and it’s ironic that we have to have approved facilities for their return when the facilities at institutions such as the British Museum are below standard. 

In many Indigenous cultures, a lot of these objects have a life of their own. They’re sacred objects that need to breathe; they need to be taken care of, renewed and activated by being used in ceremony. Because they are considered living items they get transformed by the collections they’re in: they become static when they’re not doing what they normally would do. But even when they’re in stasis, it doesn’t mean that they’re not still alive or that they don’t still hold the power that they once held. 

I recently installed my video _Shaman Exterminator: On the trail of the Woodcraft Indians with the Buffalo Boy Scouts of America_ (2016) in an exhibition curated by Joey Orr, at the University of Kansas’ Spencer Museum of Art. I chose to juxtapose the video with historical Blackfoot objects that I selected from their museum’s collection of Blackfoot material culture. When my work gets curated in museum collections or purchased by institutions, like the British Museum, it’s an opportunity for me to be subversive by inserting myself in the museum. The trickster figure comes to mind—the coyote, the clown—mirroring back but also being contrarian, playing with the system itself and showing how it should be. Hopefully by doing that, I can generate a larger discussion about the agency of the artist and the agency of our work. It’s a strategic choice for me to insert my work in collections—it’s a way to think about acquisitions in relation to how material culture can be displayed with input from First Nations or Indigenous groups, to best represent our material culture in these collections. But because of the museum’s policies I still had to display the historical pieces that I selected behind glass, even though they have to be activated. You can look at them in a vitrine but those leggings, for example, should be moving, in a powwow—that’s where they have their power and their agency. 

A lot of us believe strongly that these living objects are our kin. In dealing with their spiritual power you have to have a lot of respect for them. Each sacred bundle has a specific purpose, and not just anybody can handle a bundle or take care of it—you certainly don’t just open a bundle for the sake of opening it. They can only be in the hands of certain people who have been members of societies for many years; they’re the ones who know the protocol around opening them and renewing and activating their contents in ceremony. If you’re that person at a given time, the community looks to you as the one who’s responsible for using them for the good of the community. If you use their spiritual power in a selfish or malicious way, I could compare the effects to karma: something will come back to bite you. 

Certainly, I can say that in my lifetime I’ve seen and heard of things happen that I can’t explain. There’s a lot of purposeful secrecy behind bundles, and rightly so, to protect them, but there are stories that were told to me, that are told in public, that I can share here. When the Thunder Bundle came back from the Smithsonian, the carriers said that it was vibrating on the flight home to the Blood Reserve. I know of a museum in Oregon that called the Kainai Nation to come and remove a bundle out of their collection because the staff heard animals in the room all the time. My father told me a story about an instance when he participated in opening a bundle during the First Thunder ceremony, and he saw all the animals come out of it and dance around the room. 

A lot of the Elders I know feel very strongly that we have to be ready to take on this work. You don’t want to put yourself or your family at risk—these things have a way of their own if you disrespect the cultural protocols required to handle them. A lot of First Nations are saying to the institutions that have our cultural belongings: yes, show our culture, but do it in a way that involves us, and move toward honest discussions of history and provenance. These collections are still repositories of our history; they’re like our little safeguards. Yes, they might’ve been collected inappropriately, but they’re still there, and a lot of our Elders here on the nation have said that until we’re ready to receive them back, it’s okay for them to be there, as long as they are treated and taken care of properly. 

While we do have to be prepared to receive them back ourselves, one of the standard museum policies for repatriation requires us to build our own centres to house the collections when they’re returned, but the fact is that there’s barely a handful of First Nations that could afford to build the adequate, climate-controlled facilities. For current conversations on repatriation to have any real teeth, there have to be laws put in place and funding secured to support them. The federal government has to pass legislation specifically mandating accountability for institutions that have our belongings in their collections so that when any Indigenous group voices that they want them back, the institutions are obligated to engage with them in discussions about how they’ll return it. 

Being First Nations means you are born into politics. For us to decolonize these institutions, discussions on repatriation need to be based on our communities’ needs, not the whim of whatever current political ideology is in power. The success we’ve had in repatriating bundles has rejuvenated our cultures; getting our cultural belongings back is crucial to the renewal of our societies. Repatriation has been in the political realm for decades, but taking these things on is a long-term process. Change doesn’t happen quickly—we have to be constantly diligent to make it happen. With everything facing us these days, sometimes it doesn’t seem like things are going to get better, and it’s easy to want to just throw up your hands. But we can’t. Because there’s so much at stake. Our lives, our cultural being, our spiritual being—they’re all at stake. You have to act when the time comes—you have to know when to be a diplomat and when to be a warrior. 

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Adrian Stimson discusses the profound irony of collecting and storing Indigenous works of art in museums. The act of collecting art and material culture does not ensure that pieces are being cared for, and this is especially true with regards to living, breathing works of Indigenous art.

Getting Our Belongings Back

Letter

Parker Kay is an artist and writer living in Toronto. He is also sometimes known as Pumice Raft. 

##### Dear c magazine,

I am writing on behalf of the Chinatown Anti-Displacement Zen Garden located in the outdoor courtyard of Chinatown Centre, in Toronto, organized by the community arts centre Tea Base and its friends. The garden is located in a semi-circular concrete container that used to be a fountain (removed by mall management due to a conflict over its feng shui). We planted and named the garden after the struggles that people in Chinatowns all over North America face, in terms of real estate developer recklessness, unaffordability, non-consensual destruction of ways of life, all of the general crushing pressures on low-income racialized people.

Someone commented on an Instagram post about the garden: “How can a garden stop gentrification?” At first, I thought the answer is obviously in the people who care for the plants—the gardeners, not the garden. Just like how stories are in the people who have to live with monuments, not the monuments themselves. But, maybe the answer is also in the garden: in the plants and in the soil and in the water.

Toni Morrison died today, and I read this quote from her essay “The Site of Memory”: “You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasion- ally the river floods these places. ‘Floods’ is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remember- ing. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.”

##### Amy Lam

##### Dear C,

In your recent issue, you decided that it was important to look at the notion of “Monument” with a sideways glance, to subvert the idea that history follows an authoritative linear path. In search of strategies to build a better future and challenge notions of historical narratives, your issue defies the all-too-common impulse to shine a light straight towards a subject and stop at description. Instead the artist’s practices, projects and initiatives featured embody traces of dappled light scattering from oblique angles.  
This makes me think about the relationship between the monument and the ruin. When does a monument become a ruin? Do the ruinous effects of time make a monument worth celebrating?

In the case of Life of a Craphead’s (LOAC) King Edward VII Equestrian Statue Floating Down the Don River, the proposal of corrective action on colonial history is embedded within this translation from monument to ruin through the relocation of the statue from Toronto’s Queen’s Park to the toxic waters of the Don River. The viewing audience was—and continues to be, by way of a 9-minute video—encouraged to believe that LOAC inconspicuously moved this 15-foot bronze equestrian statue and dumped it into the Don—and I wouldn’t put it past them. However, it’s actually a prop replica of the statue; with the help of a kind of movie magic, the viewer completes the sculpture and can indulge in the parafictional world LOAC have created.

The “observer effect” suggests that by merely observing a phenomenon we end up changing the very phenomenon being observed. In other words, if we shine a light on a subject to try and see it in its entirety, we can’t help but squint at the light reflecting back into our eyes. I think that the Bentway, a 1.75 km area underneath the Gardiner Expressway, struggles with this very issue. To formalize a space for arts and culture in what used to be a non-space is to institutionalize the liminal, and risks pulling the sideways glance into a straight-on view. The Bentway’s New Monuments for New Cities (2019) project asks important questions on the evolution of the monument, while also likely contributing to gentrification in the area—a cultural ruin unto itself. This paradox is perhaps most effectively combated through an injection of playful fiction into the banality of urban ruin. Like King Edward, events such as Daniel Rotsztain’s Pillar Picnic (2019) and Tony Romano’s Ruins (2016) series suggest parameters for an alternate cityscape that embraces the possibilities of the sideways glance.

##### Parker Kay

##### Hi! 

I am glad there is an interview with Life of a Craphead. When I read it, I tried to read each sentence slowly so I could understand and digest the interview because lately I have been mostly watching a lot of TV (reality) and not reading a lot and the timing is very different with reading and TV-watching. Reading allows for and requires more time and space to digest and un- derstand the words. In my early school life, I enjoyed comprehension tests because I was good at reading a story and then able to remember and pick out the relevant details. I am still good with details and emotional nuances. I never thought I had memory issues; I thought it was a sign of low mood, disinterest, disconnection or unhappiness that I couldn’t remember what I did on the weekend. But it turns out that it is possibly a short-term memory problem, one which I have chosen to treat with IV vitamin treatment like Brain Boost. While you are reading this letter, I am probably sitting in a hand-built wooden nook on Yonge Street getting a vitamin push. I think I stopped reading because I was scared of the extra space that reading allows—starting by reading a sentence, comprehending the words and ideas but winding up in rumination about my unsolvable problems.

I saw the performance King Edward VII Equestrian Statue Floating Down the Don. It was so alive! Live art with nature, water, trees, people—including some in kayaks pulling the huge statue replica, in what looked like to me an anti-colonial statement. It is so messed up that we have all these colonial statues. Statues by their sheer presence can oppress people; monuments of oppression. At this performance there were Proud Boys walking around and one tried to talk to me to ask me what I thought of the art. This was in my neighbourhood which was so great because when I felt sufficiently and legitimately scared by the neo-Nazis, I could walk home in under 10 minutes.

Life of a Craphead’s art is the great legitimate threat, though! It is using comedy and art for the best and highest purpose of JUSTICE. We must rebalance power; we must give voice to those without a voice! 

##### Lisa Smolkin

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This issue’s column focuses on three letters reflecting on issue 142 “Monument”.

Letters

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Editorial Fellow

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

Editor

Designer

Publisher

Artist Project

“To speak of a veil is to speak of a barrier preventing the viewer from seeing what lies beyond it,” a scholar and translator of Sufi teachings wrote. The veil, in Sufi philosophy, he explains, is “any barrier that bars the intending seeker from what is intended and sought,” which is the divine. To reach it, one must pass through 70,000 veils of light and darkness, a process known as kashf—or “unveiling.” “Unveiling” is used as a verb in the Qur’an 14 times; I lost count of how many times Sameer Farooq used it in our discussions of this artist project. 

Within the collection, the veil can be: a banker’s box, a folder, a shroud, a plastic drape, a bag, a roll of masking tape, a sorting tool, a label, a sheet of bubble wrap, a note to remind oneself to sort and label. Farooq’s practice examines the collection’s mechanisms by mimicking them. He mimics its criteria for acquisition, how it stores the things it acquires, how it classifies and compartmentalizes them, how it conserves them, how it conceals them, how it reveals them—for example, by building fictional, speculative museums to which the audience is invited to contribute the effects of their daily lives, or by bringing forward what is only ever in the collection’s back rooms. To the artist, who was trained as a cultural anthropologist, what collections choose to reveal to us and what they choose to conceal from us is not incidental. 

In 70,000 Veils, Farooq lays bare a sliver of his decades-long excavation of the apparatus of collections—documented in tens of thousands of photographs inside museums, that he’s taken and sorted using his own categorization system. To make the veils on the facing page, Farooq draped millimeter-thin paper clay over weighted objects that are used to cushion the items held in the collection’s storage room. Sixty seconds after the clay’s draping, the object is removed, and the remaining dried ceramic veil delineates the contours of the object it momentarily veiled. The object’s absence, and the impression it leaves behind in its negative space, invites us to think about what gave form to the clay, what it veiled in the minute it took to mimic the object’s form. If the collection is founded on the quintessentially settler colonial imperative to possess, revealing some of the seemingly innocuous but ultimately messy mechanisms it employs to construct narratives amounts to what Farooq calls a gesture of “anti-colonial abstraction.” When he confers value on what is ostensibly of no value, the veil itself becomes just as noteworthy as what it veils. 

—Merray Gerges

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Exhibitions

Merray Gerges shares Sameer Farooq’s work _70,000 Veils_ and discusses the artist’s use of veils to highlight what cultural institutions choose to conceal and reveal to their audience.

70,000 Veils, by Sameer Farooq: Text

Artist

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Sameer Farooq’s artist’s project _70,000 Veils_ examines what cultural institutions choose to conceal and reveal of their collections to their audiences.

70,000 Veils

Review

Daniella Sanader is a writer and reader that lives in Toronto. desanader.com

Halfway through Beatrice Gibson’s _Deux Soeurs Qui Ne Sont Pas Soeurs_ (2019)—one of two films by the London, UK-based filmmaker installed at Mercer Union this spring—a woman reads a letter to her yet- to-be-born daughter: “You will be a girl, but not like me. You will be Black, but not like me…. You will create something else, and that reassures me.” This woman, Diocouda Diaoune, was one of two members of Gibson’s extended network of friends and artists to become pregnant as they worked together on Gibson’s film and its earlier sister work, _I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead_ (2018). Diaoune’s and artist Basma Alsharif’s words to their unborn children became woven into the fabric of _Deux Soeurs_, and both speak to the uncanny forms of doubling and distancing that swirl around experiences of pregnancy. In Alsharif’s words, “this thing that would be made of me but completely alien.”

Gibson has indicated that both _Deux Soeurs_ and _I Hope I’m Loud_ were prompted by the birth of her second child (her daughter Laizer) and the political imperatives of raising new lives in what seems like an increasingly precarious world. Installed together, both films chart these urgencies, situated by Gibson within a network of equally (re)productive gestures: poetry, filmmaking, citation and queer and feminist kinship. They come with an extensive bibliography, including: the poetry of Eileen Myles, CAConrad and Alice Notley, all of whom appear in the films reading their works; Gertrude Stein’s short screenplay _Deux soeurs qui ne sont pas soeurs_ (1929), upon which Gibson’s eponymous film was based; and the final dance scene of Claire Denis’ _Beau Travail_ (1999), recreated with frenetic joy by Gibson and her son Obie to close out _I Hope I’m Loud_. In one of the latter’s central scenes, Gibson, Myles, Conrad and Mason Leaver-Yap sit in Myles’ New York living room, sombrely listening to Trump’s inaugural address. Other political catastrophes anxiously flicker throughout _I Hope I’m Loud_: footage of riots, refugees, the Grenfell Tower fire.

Spoken in a low, melodious voice over footage that meanders in and out of focus, Gibson addresses Laizer directly, explaining her citational ethic: “I wanted to put all these voices in one frame for you, so that one day, if needed, you could use them to unwrite whoever it is you’re told you’re supposed to be.” Some reviews of Gibson’s work make mention of Sara Ahmed’s framework for considering citation as a reproductive technology, one with considerable implications for feminist scholarship. Citation is certainly employed throughout _Plural Dreams of Social Life_ to similar ends: offering proximity, affinity, legacy in the reproducibility of writing. It’s the tenderness of carrying someone’s words within your body, the page of your text, the frame of your film. I remain wholly seduced by, and invested in, these powers of citational intimacy. However, in thinking through these works, I start to feel Diaoune’s and Alsharif’s assertions more deeply: like a child that is both of her mother’s body and also wholly alien, each act of citation carries its own negotiations with distance. Each cited line simultaneously forges connection between authors across space and time and becomes something new, distinct from its origins, wholly trans- formed by the distance it travelled.

This see-saw of doubling and distance is woven throughout the voices that Gibson features. In _I Hope I’m Loud_, Myles speaks of Stein’s radical act of self-doubling in _The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas_ (1933), writing about herself from the perspective of Toklas, in an effort to insert her own work into the flows of history. In a searing moment later in the film, Conrad looks directly at the camera and reads from a poem about their murdered partner, articulating how we can be exquisitely, painfully, simultaneously close and separate from those we have lost to violence: “each time I drink water dropped from clouds, water they burned from your body, I cut my hand to catch you.” Gibson’s cinematography sustains these dynamics: the frames of Conrad and Myles reading are close-cropped—tender yet claustrophobic—and the camera moves frenetically across Myles’ living room, an intimate space captured with little chance for my eyes to rest.

Though this citational/reproductive framework is used by Gibson to situate herself, her family and her community against the threats of our apocalyptic present, its distances occasionally feel like the work’s foil as much as its subject. Later in _I Hope I’m Loud_, there’s a dreamy, intimate scene of Gibson’s partner and their children in the bath—warm water, white skin and swirling constellations of coloured lights. This moment is intercut with footage of Black refugees clad in orange safety vests as they carry themselves across dark, impossible currents. In this case, I can feel the distance thick in the air, one that seems not generative and tender but rather difficult, irreconcilable, kilometres long. Is the frame of this work—like quotation marks enclosing a cited line of text—enough to support this attempt at doubling? Is there enough space to consider the distance that these bodies have travelled to get here?

I’m left thinking about Gibson’s directive to Laizer—that the voices of _I Hope I’m Loud_ could be used to “unwrite whoever it is you’re told you’re supposed to be.” Perhaps the beauty in citation is that every line will always be too large, too unruly for its new home, its intended use. At its most evocative and moving, _Plural Dreams of Social Life_ gives its voices room to exceed their frames, to accumulate other possibilities, futures and histories—like a child’s life beyond a parent. Yet, when articulating her own proximity to global crises, Gibson’s citational ethic occasionally seems less capable of carrying these nuances, these distances within its structure.

Halfway through _I Hope I’m Loud_, Myles reads the conclusion of their poem “My Box,” their face close within the frame. Suddenly, Gibson’s citational framework ripples with the largeness of their words: “Here this is mine. Don’t misunderstand me.”

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Daniella Sanader reviews Beatrice Gibson’s exhibition, _Plural Dreams of Social Life_ at Mercer Union, Toronto. (April 13 – June 1, 2019).

Beatrice Gibson: Plural Dreams of Social Life

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

The bilingual publication _Twenty Years of Despacio 2008–2028_ marks the beginning, the end and a speculative decade ahead in the life of an art space in Central America. Despacio was started by Costa Rican artist Federico Herrero to give artists in the region an opportunity to think and act autonomously. Despacio is also the Spanish word for “slow” and for “slowness,” and although nothing at this venue was ever fast or too concerned with artistic careerism, this gallery helped shape an entire generation of practitioners—myself included. 

The idea to start an art space came to Herrero in 2008, a few years after he had won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2001, at the young age of 22\. Herrero’s work was chosen for inclusion by Swiss curator Harald Szeemann, a man who worked hard throughout his career to show artworks produced outside North America and Europe. At a time when few others in the art world did, Szeemann paid attention to work from Central America. His approach and mentorship registered with Herrero who—like fellow Costa Rican Virginia Pérez-Ratton, the brilliant late artist, writer, curator and collector, had done before him—chose to use his privilege and share his appreciation for cultural production by investing free time, energy and resources into a small independent venue where emerging practitioners could work with curators and fellow artists for the first time. (Pérez-Ratton had founded TEOR/éTica, one of few ongoing places in the country exclusively devoted to the dissemination of contemporary art, critical theory and ideas.) 

While many of the individuals who put together this publication have familial or geographical ties in Central or Latin America, back in 2008, many had a hard time tracking down and articulating what was going on in the local scene. Despacio was a platform where cultural experiments and alternative practices could flourish and were celebrated. It was never meant to become an institution or artist-run centre in a traditional sense and this might be the reason it’s closing its doors today. In fact, in many ways this publication is one of the most internationally professionalizing endeavours the gallery has ever undertaken. 

The first of the book’s three parts comprises writings about the space and the region, including essays—most notably by the book’s editor, Jens Hoffmann, and the gallery’s chief curator, Sandino Scheidegger—and interviews with independent curator Pablo León de La Barra, conducted by Erno Hilarion and Cristina Ramírez, the manager of Despacio and the book’s Spanish language editor, respectively. These texts articulate the ties between their authors and the gallery and situate its efforts in great detail, providing the unfamiliar reader a conceptual and geopolitical framework within which to understand Despacio’s past and suggesting ways to imagine future possibilities of dissemination, experimentation and professionalization in the region. The second “section” is interspersed between the essays and compiles visual documentation of the projects the space helped produce, including artworks by Adriana Arroyo, Sol Calero, Julian Gallese, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, Sergio Rojas Chaves, Dino Urpí and Mimian Hsu, to name just a few. The documentation of these projects is somewhat unframed, making the book a kind of family album whose photos are best understood by its members. The only didactic information provided about the work is a list of exhibitions held at Despacio, tucked at the end of the section. Unknowing readers might not linger with each work, but overall, the book demands that the reader support transcultural exchange rather than limit a potential for cultural growth—by seeking, for example, full-fledged definitions or a clear identity mapping of the artwork from the region. 

The space performed like a sun or an orbit, a ruling member around which we revolved. In this way, the publication, designed to mimic the format of a daily planner, also asks the reader to be a witness from the future—not only of the gallery and what has been produced there but also of the community and what it did and can offer. The third section of the book interposes blank sheets of ruled paper with a series of photographs by the artist Pablo Cambronero. These images show San José, a modest, clumsy city inhabited by workers closing shops, pigeons, storefront reflections, soccer fans, carnival masks, pedestrians and bejewelled body parts. The empty space between them is presumably dedicated to the venue’s imaginary future (until we reach the year 2028 mentioned in the title) while acknowledging the emptiness left by its closure. The more romantic reader can fill in the void while a more cynical person can close the book and leave those pages empty. 

The English texts in the publication were translated into Spanish by the country’s favourite poet, Luis Chaves, and the Spanish texts into English by art editor and writer Lindsey Westbrook. The graphic design collective Åbäke (who co-founded the London-based publishing house responsible for the publication) and Alyssia Lou are responsible for the book’s futuristic layout, which features thermo-chromatic red decals, similar to those on a Formula 1 car. Like a race car, cultural production requires machinic assemblage, where one thing relies on the next. This is echoed in the web of interdependence that shaped the publication and the gallery’s continuous efforts. 

In “Ask the Artists,” Fernanda Brenner examines the parallels between Despacio and other spaces in Latin America, like Beta-Local (Puerto Rico), FLORA and Lugar a Dudas (Colombia) and Casa do Povo (Brazil), all of which are part of the region’s future. It is because of venues like TEOR/éTica and Despacio that more and more artists in San José are seeking to self-initiate and come up with new models for artistic discourse. None of them would have had the chance to get far had it not first been for Herrero and Pérez-Rat-ton, two visionaries who spread the goal of creating a critical community of artists in Central America without expecting any returns—and thus single-handedly opened the Costa Rican art scene to an international audience. 

Despacio was open, plural and full of inventiveness. Its absence will be felt and its past should be celebrated. The book ends speculatively, as a notebook which readers may or may not use to face the challenges ahead: the need to secure living wages for artists in the region, to develop curators and to open commercial spaces that in turn will help to promote and sustain this growing community of practitioners.

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Fabiola Carranza reviews the book _Twenty Years of Despacio 2008-2028_ (2019) edited by Jens Hoffman, published by Dent-De-Leone.

Twenty Years of Despacio 2008–2028

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

The cohesion of three particular films—Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s _Walled Unwalled_ (2018), Onyeka Igwe’s _Specialised Technique_ (2018) and Gabi Dao’s _The Protagonists_ (2018)—anchored the _Inquiring Minds_ program in distinct considerations of sound and experimental inquiries. The more I thought about the program’s aims to highlight the complexities, tragedies and triumphs of recorded lived experiences, it became apparent that zealous objectivity has historically produced more than a few models of false authenticity.

In _Walled Unwalled_, Abu Hamdan performs across three sound effects studios at Funkhaus, the former headquarters for the German Democratic Republic’s state radio. Today, this purpose-built facility is a highly sophisticated recording complex hosting a plethora of recording artists. In his description of the work, Abu Hamdan writes that worldwide, 49 border walls have been constructed in under two decades. The title alludes to the ironic, molecular by-product of border states that he explains in the film:

> “As these walls were being constructed, millions and millions of invisible cosmic particles called muons descended into the atmosphere. Scientists realized that these deep penetrating particles could be harvested, and a technology could be developed to use their peculiar physical capacities to pass through surfaces previously impervious to X-rays…. Today, we’re all wall, and no wall at all.”

Recording studios are designed to isolate and control sound, but Abu Hamdan’s movement between them, followed by the camera, treats the spaces fluidly, his performance pouring through them. His script incorporates narratives drawn from legal cases that focused on evidence based on what witnesses heard. He is accompanied by a drummer, stationed in one of the studios, hitting a repetitive lick throughout the performance like a subtle human metronome. The testimonies describe explosions and the sounds they make, as heard by earwitnesses who struggle to imitate the sounds that produced a decimated room. The choreographed display within this culturally coded site emphasizes how far removed audiences at a film festival are from the events that prompt these testimonies.

_Specialised Technique_ shows archival footage of Nigerian women dancing, recorded in the mechanical, slow, unadorned, cinematographic style developed by British colonialist William Sellers for the Colonial Film Unit in Nigeria in 1939\. These documents are interrupted by white-on-black intertitles or text super- imposed onto still images. They are simple, taut questions: _Is it ok? Is it why I look down?_ The film’s deep score further emphasizes the heaviness of the women’s movement, soaked with the weight of accumulated colonial gazes. Igwe’s trilogy, of which this film is part, strives to unpack colonial moving image by reassembling it before us.

The textual interruptions seem to be drawn from the voices of her subjects, but a voice in intertitles is barely a voice at all—a mere projection. So, this is a film about movement, not a commentary, not a study. Since voice cannot be recuperated here, how about gesture that can transcend calculated witnessing? In a new frame, projected onto the artist’s midsection is some of this colonial footage. Igwe wears a high-waisted leather skirt, and her body recites the vernacular of the African dance depicted in the footage that illuminates the surface of her clothing. This moment in the film—intensely alluring, complicated, produced by an embodied investigative impulse—also provokes the question: when do we ever think of bodies on top of bodies in ways that are not sexual or violent, but as reclamation? In “Mechanical Eye, Electronic Ear, and the Lure of Authenticity,” Trinh T. Minh-ha describes how the scientific universalism of moving image technology has always been a one-way power dynamic: “In the progression toward Truth … one can only gain, never lose. First, conform to scientific demands, then show scientists are also human beings. The order is irreversible.” Minh-ha’s critique of that gaze was in 1983, before mass surveillance and big data, fields of inquiry—given as _natural, uninterrupted_ documentation—that have been instrumentalized to oppress the subject anew.

Yielding to “scientific demands” guarantees that the authentic subject cannot be removed from the neutral technical gaze, so the gaze must be averted, interrupted. Dao’s 8-minute film _The Protagonists_ compresses a catalogue of imagery from her parents’ home and garden in British Columbia. Fronds of aloe are sliced, their shape echoing the hand that dissects them with a kitchen knife. A mechanized, 3-D-printed hand pathetically flinches as it tries to grasp that knife, the plant’s gel applied across its inorganic fingers, its fingertips later adorned by long gem-laden nails. Scenes from _Apocalypse Now_ and _Platoon_ hover over shots of the garden, like clouds, juxtaposing the jungle with the suburban vegetable patch. Vibrantly coloured smoke bombs are discharged around a small greenhouse. Rapid cuts browse this catalogue energetically.

Dao’s cryptic voice-over breathes prose into the film’s popping and clicking repetitive soundtrack. _A hand in the domestic cinema is a will over bodily manipulation_. The hand is a busy instrument, cutting, pressing, throwing, but not in service of. _The only innocent record in history is the dirt that you churn with your petal fingers_. The only innocent record in history is what we touch and you can’t see. _I return to the domestic cinema at the end of the day_. Her script speaks and references indirectly, swerving at every opportunity away from making lived experience legible. In other words, it is encrypted against the banner of authenticity. In the description of her solo exhibition _A knife to wither your petal fingers_ at Blinkers, in Winnipeg in 2018, the film was said to propose “a subtext that allegorizes the movement within moving images to diasporic experience.” Dao’s film is without the typical trauma and nostalgia that informs the colonial imagination. Instead, through this unapparent assemblage, it mystifies. _The Protagonists_ pays homage to the Vietnamese diaspora by employing an iconography that speaks to the diaspora, before all other audiences.

When sound is processed by human description and becomes legal evidence, when the colonized reinterpret the archives of the colonizer and when authenticity is the secret visual language of the diaspora, dusty empiricism is kicked to the margins of inquiry. A house of intellect is repossessed.

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Steffanie Ling reviews the _Inquiring Minds_ program at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (January 23 – February 3, 2019).

Header

C Mag

Issue 143

Ownership

Credits

Letters

Letters

Editorial

Editorial: Ownership

Explore Issue by Images

Features

The Market Will Never Catch Up

Collecting Forever? On Acquiring a Tino Sehgal

Reformed?

But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise: Acquiring Contemporary Art of the Middle East and North Africa

Getting Our Belongings Back

Artist Projects

70,000 Veils, by Sameer Farooq: Text

70,000 Veils

Columns

Composition: Skin Has Two Sides

Thread: Identity Politics Economics

One Thing: Surface Tension (or What Holds an ‘Us’ Together)

Reviews

Beatrice Gibson: Plural Dreams of Social Life

Twenty Years of Despacio 2008–2028

Inquiring Minds: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Gabi Dao, Eitan Efrat, Sirah Foighel Brutmann, Henry Hills, Onyeka Igwe, Martina Melilli

Karla McManus: Inside/Outside: Images of the LAND in Artexte’s Collection

Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill: Money

Alexia Laferté-Coutu and Jessica Williams: Between Two Eternities

Together Apart, Queer Indigeneities

Isuma: Isuma, 58th International Venice Biennale

Varvara & Mar: Chameleon

Manar Moursi: The Loudspeaker and the Tower