Column

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

red bulbs in all my lamps   
attempt at warmth

> but achieve a kind of seething 

red within black  
backburner/slow-cooker/low cinder  
like the sun in closed eyes  
paired in paired sockets  
turn circles into spheres  
superimposed and spiralling  
alone at the centre  
of a living universe   
where new experience   
requires new senses

> but in my gridlock of five

a list is all I can handle:  
tarot tells me Courage   
time tells me Manage   
fall tells me Succumb

> but where will I spread these ashes? 

in small heavy days  
wide hours diluted  
sun squinting from low   
and then lower  
until I have  
just one thought left:  
no thing has no end

> but in all my books

not read past the intro  
in split ends stuttered  
on table, chest, and floor

> is the halflife 

in dust drifting  
fading  
this soft-edged self  
remains strangely   
diminished but sustaining  
a lack’s accumulation   
like pennies  
small values  
dead weight in the purse  
wasting away

> but still something 

not nothing  
but nothing left   
a mineral garden  
of finitude’s fiction  
something tells me it’s already over

> but winter tells me Wait

this is the longest season

> but time is not a length   
> but a weight

a pendulum planet   
of rusted iron  
and saltwater thirst   
rocked by tides rolling  
down orbit’s curve, descending   
approaching toward

> but never reaching 

the dry shore  
on all fours I go   
mudlarking in silt   
sifting and scratching  
for source and seed   
for vinegar’s mother   
uranium in a pill  
I drag them out   
root and stem  
from fortunes, disinherit   
or accept the poison cure   
on all fours forage  
for an altered inheritance   
a coin made of mercury   
for currencies buried  
by current’s reversal   
I am bargaining now  
to drop the remainder  
for as cells divide to double   
loss by division  
never reaches zero 

> but

in the instant before blackout   
is the forest fire  
red-gold   
blood-burnt   
glow  
of the last   
sunrise   
set  
or burn   
last cent  
last radiance/radiation  
of a day already spent  
as the ember is  
already  
an end   
extended

Writer

Grief

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Composition: halflife

Theresa Wang is a writer and curator based in Toronto. She is currently Associate  
Curator & Registrar at Oakville Galleries.

My parents were content being childless until the year that both of my mother’s parents passed away. I was the result of my mother’s grief transformed into a yearning to supplant her familial loss. Following my parents’ separation, my mother trailed after me to Toronto, where we sought to partake in a relationship predicated upon each other’s independence rather than one built on the blood-relation piety of mother and daughter. Once, I asked about her relationship with her own mother, who had died before we could meet. My mother admitted to her disaffected indignation that was in turn met by her mother’s upholding of authority. Their bond was so strained that it distressed my mother to think of repeating those same mistakes. She took it upon herself to volunteer at a daycare centre to familiarize herself with children and embody the maternal. I could see her struggling with the regrets around her mistakes as a daughter, as someone who had lost a mother, and how she was trying to reconcile maternal loss by having a daughter. Her anxious devotion to make amends spurred by misgivings about her caregiving capability moved me to tears, to which she responded with quiet acknowledgement, her eyes welling with tears of gratitude.

Consisting of 14 photographs and one video, _Mother_ (2017) by Chun Hua Catherine Dong is an attempt to reconcile feelings around the mother-daughter relationship following the artist’s mother’s abrupt death. Upon encountering Dong’s images, I think of my own mother’s grieving process. Although prompted by death, Dong’s work is more concerned with the unsettled identity of a mourning daughter, when the tie to her mother has been severed. Each photograph in the series portrays a symmetrical image of Dong seated in a rural home, next to one of her mother’s close friends or relatives. Each figure stoically looks toward the camera while mirroring the other’s pose. The doubling carries over to their garments: Dong asked the women to lend her something to wear from their closets, resulting in Dong being adorned in similar fabrics, patterns, and styles as the woman she is seated next to, bringing to mind the phrase “cut of the same cloth.” Each pictured woman not only is a mother in her own right, but also plays the character of another person’s mother—that of Dong. These variations on motherhood are connected by a sole constant: the floral embroidered shoes that each woman wears. Dong offered these floral shoes to the women as a gift, and a reminder of the style of shoes treasured by her own mother.

Dong’s practice is largely interested in social relations in the context of both Chinese identities and family roles. As a performance artist, she places great emphasis upon the individual in dialogue and confrontation with cultural expressions, expectations, and spaces. In _The Misfits_ (2020)—a series of photographs animated with augmented reality—Dong examines the social roles of husband and wife through the symbolic gender-based representations of the feminized phoenix and masculinized dragon. To Dong, the relationship between the dragon and phoenix is closer to a compatible partnership than oppositional forces. The mirroring of kindred individuals in _The Misfits_ is also present in _Mother_, when Dong resurrects her own mother through her pining search for a maternal figure in each of the pictured women. The maternal figure in _Mother_ is knotty, encompassing the denial of loss by Dong’s projection of the maternal onto other women. However, the artist’s performative gestures also profoundly declare to replace the absence, with Dong adopting and embodying the identity of the mother. Dong aptly captures this ambivalence by manufacturing and accentuating the likeness between herself and her “mothers.” During infancy, the parent-child relationship resides in the womb, where intimacy is built from sharing a body. But throughout life—and especially adulthood—the mother and daughter are made distinct, and resemblances are as comforting as they are confining. The mother is a model for comparison, an exemplar through which differences are distinguished with pride and shame, as the child moulds their identity. The anguish of bereavement, then, is two-fold: once for the mother and once for the self.

Within the foreground of the photographs in _Mother_ are assorted furniture pieces and decorative elements. Some of the objects, like the small dining table, are repeated throughout the series. Such repetition breaks the illusion of authentic family portraiture, and instead reveals the photographs as staged, fragmented attempts to reconstruct togetherness. In an interview with Lena Chen, Dong explains that all of her mother’s personal belongings had been burned shortly after her death, in accordance with a hometown tradition. Instead of physical mementos, Dong was left with memories. The sparseness in the homes of these photographs alludes to this dwindling of material possessions that tends to accompany age (and eventually, death), as well as the personal value that accrues in what little remains of the deceased.

Despite depicting the act of gathering at a table, Dong and her “mothers” are never shown facing one another, or engaging in activities together. Any sentiment or affinity between Dong and these women is inferred through their reserved stance and dynamic. Like early photographic portraits of families, Dong controls the proximity between figures and meticulously arranges the scene to suggest domestic intimacy and ancestral lineage. Certain objects such as a floral teapot or a humble home altar hint at the possibility of shared activities, like drinking tea or burning incense for worship. In two photographs, red banners marked with good fortune read “_zǔ dé liúfāng 祖德流芳_,” pointing to the endurance of the noble ancestral virtues that continue to inform future generations, and consequently, the implicit, unwavering presence of kin.

This poetic grace of distant yet deeply felt bonds is most palpable in the video component of _Mother_, where the women from the photographs are seated in a row of wooden chairs in a grass field. Only the middle seat is left unoccupied. Gradually, the seat is filled through the superimposition of Dong herself. As she comes into view, the other women fade out—only their embroidered shoes remain. Soon, Dong also vanishes, only to be replaced by another version of herself in different attire, with her back turned to the camera. Dong’s image is visually and figuratively bound up with her mother’s reflection, finding closeness and consolation through a boundless act of longing and becoming. The film eventually returns in a loop to the initial image of the seated women, epitomizing the acceptance of mortality, the bonds that extend out of one’s life, and the discovery of familial legacy within oneself.

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Theresa Wang takes up Mother, a photo series by Chun Hua Catherine Dong in which she returns to the village where her late mother had lived and undertakes a portrait project with her female friends and relatives in a unique act of seeking.

Mother

Maya Wilson-Sanchez is a curator and writer based in Toronto.

Finding good employment in the art world has never been easy. Short-term contracts that rely on grants, donations, or special temporary projects are often the norm. The framing of arts work as a passion, together with job scarcity and insecurity, creates the best conditions for exploitation. Following long-standing attempts to promote the understanding that arts work is work, developments in the last few years have opened up new and renewed questions around labour issues and how to tackle them.

Many of my peers and I are disappointed to see how art institutions develop Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies that may change their subject matter or programming, but have little to no effect on their work culture nor toward fair compensation, job security, and better working conditions. If DEI policies don’t create workplaces where workers—especially BIPOC or other equity-seeking workers—are valued, fairly compensated, and treated well, then what are they there for? I really can’t think of anti-oppression work as being separate from labour issues, although that is how they are usually presented.

Though these issues have plagued the art world for decades, the pandemic brought them to the surface. Many of us were laid off while others were asked to work in unsafe conditions. A lot of us were angry and scared—and some of us were able to ask for, fight for, or at least imagine something different, something better. In 2020, these sentiments included calls for universal or guaranteed basic income that manifested in a letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau signed by hundreds of art workers and organizations, and an announcement supporting it written by the presidents, CEOs, and executive directors of the Toronto, Edmonton, Montreal, Calgary, and Winnipeg art councils published in _The Globe and Mail_. Advocating for living wages, rather than just minimum wages, has also gained traction, with multiple living wage networks now across Canada that offer certification for employers that pay living wages.

Another approach was forming unions. Recently the _Toronto Star_ reported that for the first time in decades, there is a slight increase in the percentage of unionized workers in Canada,[^1] with union representatives noting that they’re getting more calls.[^2] Many of the people I’ve spoken to about unions mention that it’s a good way to get a seat at the table, especially for non-salaried or front-facing workers (where the most BIPOC employees tend to be concentrated). For others, forming a union was one step closer to dismantling the power structures within the art world. I spoke with individuals from two unions that were formed during the pandemic: Jonny Sopotiuk, the president of the Vancouver-based Arts and Cultural Workers Union (ACWU), and a group of past and present employees of The Power Plant in Toronto who contributed to a successful unionizing effort last year. (In light of the fact that they are still in the midst of negotiating their first collective agreement, _C_ and I have respected their request to keep their identities anonymous.) Among other gains, this work toward improving labour conditions came from a genuine place of _caring_ for this field— caring for its future and in creating fair, equitable, and sustainable conditions so that we can keep doing this work, and doing it better.

##### 1.

**MWS**: Why did you start a union?

Jonny Sopotiuk: We started the ACWU as a community organizing project to address precarity and exploitation in the arts. I had seen too many friends abandon their arts practices after graduating. They couldn’t make a living in Metro Vancouver. High rents and a lack of accessible studio space are endemic here. Even the artists who took on jobs with arts organizations struggled to balance their practice and work. A small group of four of us came together to create change. Over time, our founding team grew to eight and then to 17.

**MWS**: How did you start? And why did you choose to work with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) union in New York City?

**JS**: It started out as a lot of one-on-one conversations over coffee and food. We started holding monthly and then biweekly planning meetings online, in galleries, and in our living rooms. We had incredible conversations about labour, work, quality of life, politics, solidarity, community, and mutual aid. We debated arts practice and the definition of an artist. After a year of meetings, we founded two sibling organizations: the ACWU, which is an independent union, and the Vancouver Arts Labour Union Cooperative (VALU CO-OP). After we founded the ACWU, we connected with an organizer from IATSE Canada; we picked IATSE because of their expertise in the film and theatre sectors, and they supported our development with staff time and access to lawyers. We knew we wanted to develop a portable extended benefits plan for artists. We met with IATSE reps for over a year, originally discussing an affiliation, but in January 2020, IATSE invited us to become full members and chartered our very own local in BC. Our founding members voted unanimously to join, and our charter arrived from New York City in March.

**MWS**: You’re both a union and a democratically run workers cooperative. Can you tell me more about why having a co-op model is important to you?

**JS**: The co-op takes the union a step further. We’re creating a space where our members run the workplace. They get to make the decisions that impact their lives, careers, working conditions, and enjoyment at work. So many arts organizations replicate the top-down hierarchical corporate culture of business. Although they’re value-driven organizations, we see abuse of arts workers in all sizes of organizations. We believe all workers deserve and need a union, and that many small arts organizations are better suited for a cooperative governance model that provides proper compensation.

**MWS**: After you received your union charter in February 2020, what happened?

**JS**: We received a start-up loan, established our constitution and by-laws, opened a bank account, and elected an interim executive. We held monthly meetings and created our first collective agreement for members working through VALU. And then we turned our attention to helping grow the cooperative and connecting with other arts workers in BC.

**MWS**: You’re based in Vancouver, and your union covers all of British Columbia. You’ve already had major successes; in July 2020, the workers of the Contemporary Art Gallery (CAG) in Vancouver voted unanimously to join the union. Do you have plans to expand and cover the rest of Canada?

**JS**: After we launched, we received inquiries from workers at other arts organizations in BC who wanted to know more about our organizing work and the role of a union in small arts organizations. We held meetings and responded to inquiries and over the year we saw workers at five arts organizations unanimously vote to join the ACWU.

Gallery Gachet workers led the way, which resulted in our union getting formal recognition at the Labour Relations Board; workers at the CAG, CARFAC BC, Cineworks, and Love Intersections all joined shortly after. We’ve supported those workers in bargaining their first agreements and have seen considerable improvements in wages, benefits, and working conditions. The lowest paid worker at CAG saw a 42 percent increase in their base pay!

Our focus right now is on supporting our members in BC and building an accountable and responsive union structure. We’re also currently working with artists in Calgary, Toronto, Halifax, Los Angeles, New York City, and elsewhere to expand or support their local organizing projects.

##### 2.

**MWS**: Why did you start a union at The Power Plant (TPP)?

**The Power Plant Workers**: There had been chatter about unionization over the years, so the desire really came from a series of issues that had been accumulating for a long time. The pandemic was the catalyst for us to come together and start organizing, since the non-salaried employees had been furloughed when the gallery closed in March 2020\. Those who remained employed and working from home were constantly asked to take on more tasks and more responsibilities that were often outside the purview of their job, without additional compensation, training, or sufficient resources. We all felt devalued and overworked.

There are many highly skilled and qualified employees among us, with varying degrees of education and unique professional experiences, working for well under liveable wages. It is common knowledge that \[TPP\] wages are among the lowest in Toronto for the same or comparable jobs. Stagnant wages and the rising cost of living are common issues across industries, and as inequity was instantly laid bare by the pandemic, we believed in doing our part to hold the arts and culture sector accountable. We wanted some tools, support, and resources so that we could advocate for our needs and rights as arts workers. We also wanted the formal opportunity for financial transparency from the institution.

The union came from a deep commitment to our work. Workers have a stake in the institutions where they are employed, and they want to see these institutions do better, reflect their mandates, and create conditions for all of their employees to succeed and thrive.

**MWS**: How did you and other non-salaried employees at TPP start the union?

**TPPW**: The \[early part of the\] process made us realize that some issues were pervasive across departments; we wanted to bring all non-managerial staff together, i.e., front-of-house, installation, and office workers. We started by organizing a meeting outside of work hours to discuss whether being part of a union was something the staff would support, and the answer was a resounding yes. Then we began holding regular meetings to research the process, since we had little prior knowledge on the matter. We read over existing bargaining agreements at various institutions across Ontario, which are accessible online, comparing them and picking out clauses and protections we found appealing, such as health care coverage, overtime pay on holidays, vacations and leaves of absence, paid sick days that if not used could be cashed out, and even RRSP contributions being topped up by employers. None of these are particularly outlandish, but they have been made to feel like a luxury for many of us and generated a lot of excitement. Reviewing them allowed us to imagine financial security. We slowly reached out to trusted staff one by one and identified those we thought wouldn’t be supportive. This was nerve-racking, but surprisingly much easier than we imagined. We proceeded to reach out to the unions that represented the strongest collective agreements. In the end we chose the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU) because of their impressive history of organizing within institutions of this scale and larger, and for having the lowest union dues based on gross pay.

Anyone interested in unionizing should know that it poses a risk until the vote goes through and you are certified. Trust is very important, as is keeping the process before the vote confidential. Despite the risks, the promise of better working conditions was worth it. After the hardships of the past few years, we suddenly felt heartened and invigorated. It forged stronger relationships between us. We acknowledge that it takes time and effort to organize, and we certainly benefited from having time off due to the pandemic.

**MWS**: What happened after the vote?

**TPPW**: OPSEU publicly announced our union forming, and that the vote was unanimous—we hope that this initiative might encourage other cultural workers to do the same in their respective workplaces.

We expected challenges, particularly because of the pandemic, but we have continued to be patient when it comes to the next steps. We’ve elected a bargaining team and await the creation of our first collective agreement \[with TPP\]. We have up to a year to bargain; it can be a slow process.

**MWS**: What role do you think unions can play in improving working conditions in the Canadian art world?

**TPPW**: We see unions as a way to demand accountability and establish more equitable structures within institutions. The problems that we are trying to address are not unique to TTP, they are widespread in the art world. We are often told that non-profit organizations are by definition financially precarious; however, the risk and burden posed by a lack of funding shouldn’t fall on the workers who sustain them. Precarity should not be an excuse not to pay employees a liveable wage. We did this not just for our own benefit but for future employees.

Workers should understand the power they hold collectively, and that creating structural change is attainable. For us, unionizing serves a larger purpose. We hope that in the future this initiative can inspire a Canada-wide support network for cultural workers, art administrators, and artists to have formal processes to advocate for our needs and rights.

[^1]: Rosa Saba, “After Years of Decline, the Percentage of Unionized Workers Is Increasing Again — And the Pandemic Is Likely the Reason,” _Toronto Star_, February 12, 2022, <www.thestar.com/business/2022/02/12/after-years-of-decline-the-percentage-of-unionized-workers-is-increasing-again-and-the-pandemic-is-likely-the-reason.html>
[^2]: Rosa Saba, “‘We’ve Never Been Busier’: New Data from Statistics Canada Seems to Show a Sudden Growth in Unionization,” _Toronto Star_, January 16, 2021, <www.thestar.com/business/2021/01/16/unions-say-more-workers-looking-to-organize-during-the-pandemic.html>

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Maya Wilson-Sanchez speaks with individuals from two unions that were formed during the pandemic: Jonny Sopotiuk, the president of the Vancouver-based Arts and Cultural Workers’ Union, and a group of past and present employees of The Power Plant in Toronto who contributed to a successful unionizing effort last year.

 The Push to Unionize Art and Culture Work in Canada

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Editorial

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

“no thing has no end,” the artist Jenine Marsh writes in this issue’s Composition column. As we know, endings produce absences, and absences rouse new processes, new feelings, new layers of ourselves. It’s notoriously hard to talk about, write about, produce culture from this rousing; I tend to think that means it’s as vital as blood. I’m grateful to every contributor in this issue, for moving their hands toward this thing called grief, seeing what happens when contact is initiated.

During our Curious Criticism symposium in autumn 2021, Harry Dodge said something like: poetics are chiefly a means with which not to obscure what’s inherently clear but rather to echo the obscurity inherent to so much of life, the world. In their lush conversation, Nadine Khalil asks the Saudi multimedia performance artist Sarah Brahim: “\[I\]s the language of grief abstract? Does it occupy this space that’s beyond language?” Having met in the wake of the passing of their mothers, the latter responds by asking, “Have you been able to write about your mother’s death?” Yes, Khalil says, but only after the Beirut port explosion in 2020 (an allusion to grief’s self-determined connective activities below our threshold of notice). An excerpt from Khalil’s poem goes: “A man writes / about writing himself out / of disaster. I write / about the failure in documenting / subtraction.” The feature ends with a text Brahim writes in response. Such tender imploring crops up again and again in this issue, with even the most individuated griefs snapping into relation, by some invisible chain of grace.

In other words, grief sees grief—even when it doesn’t follow the (Western cultural) script. “I always found it interesting that \[Lou Sheppard’s\] work was rarely contextualized as addressing grief (even by him), because to me it is so viscerally present in his practice” Michèle Pearson Clarke writes. The two artists draw parallels between grief and the way they think about queerness in their respective work, which is typically not as a subject but as a lens. The “idea of grief being a way of seeing resonates with the ways queerness can ask us to see differently,” Sheppard says. “What does it mean to see through grief? What can grief show us?”

These more elusive, open-ended ruminations around representation are tempered by lucid questioning that Rana Nazzal Hamadeh undertakes in her feature about the tensions in sharing imagery of conflict, having spent time in Palestine during the Unity Uprising. She considers work by Emily Jacir, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, and Rehab Nazzal, as well as the Abu Ghraib photographs and the glut of imagery depicting police violence against Black people, in weighing the importance of disseminating images of violence (for consciousness-raising) against honouring the privacy, loss, and grief of those afflicted. “As artists, how can we make work that invokes the value of life? How can we represent violence without replicating the relations of domination depicted?” And then, rejoining many  
others in considering the ineffable core of this theme: “How can we express everything that cannot be recreated: the invisible, banal, physical, and psychological effects of loss, suffering, and violence?”

It’s no surprise that photography resurfaces throughout, given, as April Thompson writes, photography’s age-old relationship with death. “Barthes believed that to be photographed was to experience ‘a micro-version of death’; for Sontag, photography was the ‘inventory of mortality’; and for Levi Strauss, it was that photographs ‘are always about something that is _gone_, and so are in league with death.’” In concise, potent, and often personal fragments, Thompson examines how Roxanne Charles, Kali Spitzer, and Tania Willard approach photography in ways that work toward a decolonial decoupling of death from the medium. What does it look like to stop treating photographs as rote memory-keepers that exempt us from doing the remembering with our bodies, our senses, our non-linear networks of feeling?

Lindsey Sharman’s “The Scent of Death” focuses on one sense in particular: notoriously the one with the strongest link to memory. Drawing on work by Azza El Siddique, Rolande Souliere, Vicky Sabourin, Brian Goeltzenleuchter, Omer Polak, and others, the writer looks at funerary rites, reverse engineering of redolent flowers lost through colonial land interventions, replication of the forest’s olfactive profile before and after fire, refugee narratives distilled into scents suspended in hand sanitizer, and attempts to capture the smell-scape of the home of one’s demised loved ones. The latter, a work by Sabourin, was offered as take-home experience in an ongoing project the artist is involved in at the Musée d’art de Joliette and this desire to bring others into the fold, to depart from the individual realm of grief and enter into communion, is present in Esmé Hogeveen’s, Muheb Esmat’s, and Theresa Wang’s texts as well.

Hogeveen speaks with Estraven Lupino-Smith and Regan Shrumm about _Collective Grief, Collective Futures_, a workshop series they orchestrated in Victoria; the text opens up questions about the implications of community support mechanisms offered by art spaces. Esmat invites the textile artist Hangama Amiri to reflect on the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban takeover, and the proceeding implications on the meaning of her work—which focuses heavily on feminine worlds both internal and external. Wang’s One Thing is _Mother_, a photo series by Chun Hua Catherine Dong in which she returns to the Chinese village where her late mother had lived; by the time she arrived, her mother’s possessions had been customarily burned. She asked her mother’s female relatives and friends if they could lend her an outfit that resembled another they owned, wear that, and then pose in a portrait with her.

Lois Taylor Biggs, the winner of our inaugural Indigenous Art Writing Award, co-presented with the Indigenous Curatorial Collective, revolves around the work of the late artist Kimowan Metchewais who sought to build a personal photo archive toward his “imagining of a post-\[Edward\] Curtis world, without ‘ethnographic baggage.’” Kosisochukwu Nnebe’s artist project strikes me as similarly concerned with searing the edges off an ongoingness: in her case, Black grief. She swirls into the historic use of cassava as a poison wielded by African-descended and Indigenous people living in the Caribbean, positing “simmering rage” as a natural outcome of inherited grief and “reclaim\[ing\] Black emotional subjectivity” by “constructively defying Black victimization and passivity.”

Biggs ends on a 2021 work by Duane Linklater in which he tries to remove layers of paint from the walls of the ICA Philadelphia in order to exhume images Metchewais had transferred onto them nine years earlier. The simultaneous earnestness and futility of this concept encapsulates something exquisitely heartbreaking, and central, about this theme; it also seems to match (or at least meet) the distortions caused by the compounded grief that marks this time. Metchewais’s images remain interred in the walls, but the craters produced from the effort are something unto themselves. Not better, not worse, just something else; the outcome of a momentary transference.

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Editor Jac Renée Bruneau reflects on the issue’s theme: _Grief._

Editorial: Grief

Feature

Nadine Khalil is an independent arts writer, editor, researcher, and curator. After a decade-long stint in art publishing, she is currently advising art institutions such as the Ishara Art Foundation and Goethe-Institut on programming and editorial strategy. She is former editor of Dubai-based contemporary art magazine _Canvas_ (2017–2020) and her writing can be found in _art-agenda_, _Artforum_, _The Art Newspaper_, _ArtReview Asia_, _Artsy_, _Broadcast_, _The Brooklyn Rail_, _FT Arts_, _Ocula_, and _Women’s Review of Books_.

I met Sarah Brahim during a studio visit of another Saudi Arabian artist last year, when I was on a visit to Riyadh. I was familiar with the burgeoning art scene there but I had never encountered Sarah before, who had recently moved back from Portland, where she grew up. Her Swedish-German-American mother moved her there from Saudi Arabia, a place she had made her home at the age of 21 and raised a family, as Sarah was born during the Gulf War. At the time, Sarah and I connected over the deaths of our mothers in a charged conversation that seemed to prevent anyone else from entering the room. We marvelled at how the loss of a parent becomes protracted and abstract over time, like constant static in the backdrop of one’s life—sometimes un-noticed but always there. When I think back to our exchange, I remember not the words but the body language, the sense of space, the inexpressibility of mourning, and how Sarah, dressed in black, carried herself with a sombre gentleness.

Over several months, Sarah and I had regular discussions about her movement-driven practice. Trained as a dancer and choreographer, she studied at the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance and received her BFA from London Contemporary Dance School in 2016\. Her corporeal research, looking at the body through biological, physiological, and experiential lenses, began during her studies at Oregon Health and Science University, where she specialized in medical anthropology and public health. After she got her medical degree in 2017, she led a peripatetic life moving from one art residency to the other before returning to live with her Saudi father in 2020.

While much of Sarah’s work examines notions of the unseen body and an inner language of pain and transformation, her most recent performance-video _Soft Machines/Far Away Engines_ (2021) for the Diriyah Biennale moves away from interiority and embodied memory to a collective depiction of breath, connectivity, and shared states of being.

**Nadine Khalil**: I’m thinking about how much of your work gives form to absence, where absence becomes a form of presence, like with _Who we are out of the dark_ (2020), cyanotypes that have this ethereal quality to them, or the sense of negative space.

**Sarah Brahim**: The issue is how do we externalize what is happening inside us so we can understand it better? How far do we exist outside our bodies? The work you mention emerged from losing my mother eight years ago. She died three months after I joined the BFA program at the London Contemporary Dance School. I was so unprepared. I had physical responses I couldn’t control—it took years for the loss to stop randomly hitting me. In retrospect, it was one of the most intense experiences of pain I’ve ever had. It was purely physical and included cramping in a way that I knew was linked to grieving. At the time, I was practicing every day, so I was able to observe and release it. I became fascinated with how pain gets stored in the body, with witnessing when it became a part of me and when it slowly faded. Movement was the only thing that allowed me to progress and get through it, the density of it.

**NK**: I understand what you mean. It is during moments of stillness that the passing of my mother, nine years ago now, resurfaces. At the time, I found that by throwing myself into work I could cope, until recently, when the pandemic slowed everything down, I felt like there was a landslide in my stomach. This feeling of not being anchored was what I came to understand as grief.

**SB**: This reminds me of a quote by Agnès Varda: “If we opened people, we’d find landscapes. If we opened me up, we’d find beaches.”[^1] For me, it felt more like an earthquake. I began to explore the experience of quaking in the body through movement, when your whole stability is shaking.

**NK**: It’s clear how art and movement enabled you to process this pain; how did your medical studies impact you?

**SB**: Medical anthropology was my introduction to thinking about pain in the body. Predominantly, we were studying Western techniques as well as Chinese medicine and Ayurvedic practices. We were engaging with case studies where these different traditions would collide, like in a modern hospital in Tanzania, situated in a rural village. We analyzed how to assess a patient’s problem through the existing body of knowledge rather than just one discipline. The Eastern schools were more concerned with the roots of pain while Western methods were less exploratory and more about how to fix or alleviate the problem by following a formula that works.

**NK**: It’s uncanny how time tricks you with sudden death. There is the speed at which it occurs and yet its long duration. How do you look at the passing of time in your work?

**SB**: I made a work called _Bodyland_ (2021), which came out of Performance Works NorthWest run by performance artist Linda Austin, a nine-month choreographic residency in Portland (2019–2020), where I found myself trying to express the weight of stories that our body holds by focusing on the memories and imprints of my mother and grandmother. I recalled that they had very dominant, beautiful hands—that’s when the hand gestures emerged as part of my research. There’s something about watching an elder express themselves—the accumulation of life embodied in that—and the gravity of emotion, which I wanted to transform into something communicative, creating a language that described the heaviness of pain transmitted. I articulated gestures that felt connected to my mother’s and grandmother’s bodies and the burdens that we shared.

**NK**: Your articulation comprises a system of gestures, which you amplify in singular form in _Who we are out of the dark_.

**SB**: Yes, in that body of work I was interested in ways of photographing and containing the human form. I met a master indigo dyer from Mali, Aboubakar Fofana, who has honed 11 shades of blue. The lightest is what they call the blue of nothingness and it’s between blue and white. In his culture, babies are wrapped with this shade. The darkest is that of night sky, which is the colour they use to wrap a deceased person. The colours in-between are the tones people live with. The material I use is transparent because the work is performative and activated outdoors by the sun and wind, bringing motion to the hands and plugging them back in to the natural world. I’m very interested in using material to disguise the body, so it takes on other shapes. With fabric you can become the rock or the mountain and your body is just the form holding it up.

**NK**: This reminds me of your work _Roofless_ (2019), which similarly merges the body with the environment. You’ve spoken of trying to replicate this feeling of movement in buildings, like those in the midst of construction, wrapped in tarp. Where does this impulse come from?

**SB**: I don’t feel there’s a barrier between my life and my creative practice. Most of my practice is improvisational. When I see spaces that strike my curiosity, I’ll spend time in them, moving, researching, and filming. It is not different from an experience in a landscape—coming to a place and listening to what’s there for you and what you can leave behind. Even today, I prefer to work outside \[more\] than in a studio. Outside is where so much life happens.

I guess I started to see the world through movement. In a way, I was taking from what I learned in the classroom about music and movement and noticing it outside, in architectural composition. In the conservatory, we weren’t training to be ballet dancers—it wasn’t about excelling in a particular discipline like ballet. It was about using the form as a tool to investigate the body. The question was how do we use this form, this musicality, and these restrictions to make ourselves as big or small as possible?

**NK**: What propelled you into the world of dance in the beginning?

**SB**: It’s a humble story. When I was young, my mum noticed that I was introverted and wouldn’t speak to people. She put me in dance classes so I could make friends. She grew up dancing so she knew it was a good place to be. Because I started when I was three, it has made me who I am. I got lucky with the teachers and mentors I had. As soon I was old enough, I was at dance all day after school, and now I can’t see things without that lens. My view of the world is through my understanding of the body speaking. That’s why I began isolating gestures, studying my own hands and expressions. After my BFA, I had to go through a process of unlearning to find my art practice and language. I had trained for so long that my body would fall into these learned movements, like performing on autopilot.

**NK**: You’ve incorporated a lot of improvisation in your latest work, _Soft Machines/Far Away Engines_.

**SB**: For me, there’s nothing you can do that’s repeatable; the beautiful moments that express human spontaneity just happen. But yes, it was structured improvisation—this way, the work cannot fail but has the potential to exceed expectations. I would define the parameters of a certain situation for the performers. Although the work traces a linear process from the breath, mapping how movement travels from the inside, I didn’t want it to be narrative or conclusive. I was interested in the morphology of the breath as an ancient, elementary movement that can become more complex and support instrumentation. I worked with seven creative people (myself included)—only one of whom was trained as a dancer—in duets and groups. I would coax them into tasks that captured certain conditions of the body, which they would enact and then switch roles. I was interested in the idea of breath and movement coming to the surface of the skin. In that moment, the body is the first and last border. Then maybe, in that transition from a single body to a shared space, the movement breaks through, and you don’t feel your body anymore.

**NK**: You also timed the projections on eight screens, which fragments the way the viewer receives the work. This plays into the notion of mediated presence and the body as digital material, which you’ve explored before in _Our Cup is Broken_ (2021), a commission for Shubbak Festival in London, in collaboration with Portland-based video artist Fernanda D’Agostino.

**SB**: The best way to describe it is that we created a house with many digital rooms, which are activated by movement. For example, in the indigo room, when you stand still, you become an outline and disappear. I performed live via webcam and we used Isadora, a hyper-performance tool that can create layers and multiples of the body. Although we programmed it, I could discover what the visual potential of each space was, so there’s an element of uncertainty. I’ve ended up with reflections on my screen that I’ve never seen before because some of my movements are improvisational and the program reacts differently each time.

**NK**: You also drew on your vocabulary of hand gestures there, which makes me wonder, is the language of grief abstract? Does it occupy this space that’s beyond language?

**SB**: I think it’s an experience that’s hard to put in words. When we met, it wasn’t that we were able to articulate it very well, it was that we understood it without speaking. Have you been able to write about your mother’s death?

**NK**: Only recently in a poem for Beirut, after the August 4 port explosion in 2020\. Somehow, my mind linked the sense of being uprooted with the loss of my mother. \[I shared the poem with Sarah. A few excerpts: _A man writes / about writing himself out / of disaster. I write / about the failure in documenting / subtraction \[…\] an afterimage unmakes / the world as she leaves / natural light bleeding / the impossibility of / seeing everything / at once \[…\] You say you always / shed past / iterations, as if / it happened to someone else. / I don’t \[…\] is memory matter / that we carry / my mother wasn’t / alive for charred coral / and concrete dust \[…\] In fictive archives, / maps minus territory / we find a way / outside ourselves.\]_

If you would write something in response to my text, for your mother today, what would it be?

SB: \[After a few days:\] _I land. / I depart. / I land. / I depart. / I depart. / I depart. / I land. / I depart. / I land. / I land / I land. / I fall. / I recover. / I land. / I land. / I am landing. / I am landing. / I am falling. / I am free falling. / I am falling. / I land. / I am recovering. / I recover. / I depart. / I depart. / I land. / I depart. / I depart. / I depart. / I land. / I land. / I land. / I fall. / I recover. / I fall. / I recover. / I land. / I land. / I am landing. / I am landing. / I am falling. / I am free falling. / I am falling. / I fall. / I land. / I am recovering. / I recover. / I land. / I depart._

**NK**: Say more.

**SB**: This came from a dance I made shortly after my mother passed. I was playing with the idea of falling and recovering—what it felt like to land. As time moves forward in the near-decade since her death, I feel a continuation of this cycle of grieving mentally and spiritually, if less physically. As I grow and change, so does my perspective of my life, her life, and our time together and apart. Often it feels like an ebb and flow, and this physical poem is a reflection of these waves.

[^1]: Agnès Varda, _The Beaches of Agnès_, France, 2008, www.criterionchannel.com/the-beaches-of-agnes

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In their lush conversation, Nadine Khalil and artist Sarah Brahim explore what it means to attempt to articulate grief through language and movement. 

Ebb and Flow / Moving Through Mourning

Rana Nazzal Hamadeh is a Palestinian artist and filmmaker living and working between Ramallah and Tkaronto.

Images of people suffering have long been a topic of debate. Images of inflicted violence can distance, objectify, condemn, and dehumanize—or they can produce compassion and move masses to action. As cameras have become omnipresent, critics have increasingly questioned the role and effect of images of suffering, but their undeniable importance to change-making produces important tensions. As artists, how can we make work that invokes the value of life? How can we represent violence without replicating the relations of domination depicted? How can we express everything that cannot be recreated: the invisible, banal, physical, and psychological effects of loss, suffering, and violence? And are there moments when we should simply try to show things as they are? These are some of the questions I asked myself in spring 2021 as a popular uprising erupted in Palestine.

“\[S\]traight photography leads you to the scandal of horror, not to horror itself,” wrote Roland Barthes in 1969.[^1] Three decades after her 1978 _Cuesta del Plomo_ image of a severed body during the Nicaraguan revolution, photographer Susan Meiselas was still reflecting on whether it is even possible to “make pictures that are not spectacle for the comfortable safe lives that look at them from a distance.”[^2] And whereas images of suffering in distant places tell the viewer that “this is the sort of thing that happens in that place,”[^3] images of violence nearby can tell viewers that this is the sort of thing that happens to _those people_. In both cases, the image distances the subject from the viewer in such a way that leaves the latter incapable of identifying with the former.

Consider, for example, the nearly constant stream of videos documenting Black victims of police violence in the United States and Canada. Despite the immense visual evidence, jury conviction rates in the US have not been impacted, and the widespread denial of anti-Black racism prevails.[^4] When images and videos depicting racial violence reach our social media feeds, they become available to be watched again and again in all their graphic detail, running the risk of entangling viewers in a voyeuristic gaze at trauma, suffering, and grief. Although some documentation is taken with care, violence is often captured by technologies that belong to the perpetrators, such as surveillance cameras, or police car dashboard and body cameras, which deepen the likelihood of objectification.[^5]

In the case of the American occupation of Iraq in 2003, aerial images, with their distancing frames were among the only representations of the violence distributed by North American media.[^6] That changed, for a moment, with the publication of the Abu Ghraib torture photographs. The photos of hooded prisoners next to smiling US soldiers with their thumbs up burst into the American public, interrupting, for many, the story of the noble American war and summoning disgust. The pictured soldiers became mirrors for the American public, inspiring indignation not just against the crimes, but also “against seeing ourselves made into the people who would commit these acts.”[^7] The prisoners were hooded not only to heighten their terror, but to obscure their humanity from the guards (and the camera). In the few months that the photographs were circulated, they lodged themselves indelibly in the North American imagination[^8] —but they would not have the impact that the Vietnam napalm photos did 30 years earlier in provoking mass anti-war sentiment.[^9] In the following years the Iraqi death toll would grow to unimaginable numbers while the American public returned to seeing only aerial footage or images from “embedded” journalists living and travelling with US military units. In effect, the Western public was shielded from images and narratives of the extent of the violence enacted against the Iraqi people—not just those who were detained, but the population at large. I was in grade school in Ottawa when the Iraq war began and still remember the haunting images of Iraqi suffering my family and I witnessed on Arab news stations via our satellite TV, which portrayed a vastly different war than what we saw on Canadian news. It’s worth noting that while the Abu Ghraib photographs provoked horror in many of us, they were not captured in order to expose the torture—they were taken triumphantly. The photographs were themselves a form of violence, used by the US captors to humiliate the Iraqi prisoners, underscoring the thin line between images that prompt care and images that assert domination.[^10]

Needless to say, in Palestinian communities, the debate about whether or not to share images of Palestinian suffering came to the forefront when the popular uprising, marked by unprecedented social media engagement, erupted in May 2021\. With smartphones in easy reach, the Unity Uprising and Israel’s violent response were incredibly well documented. People watched live as Israeli police in Jerusalem attacked worshippers in the Aqsa Mosque, then harassed residents of the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood facing imminent ethnic cleansing. They watched on live television as the Israeli army flattened the building housing Al Jazeera and the Associated Press in Gaza, and as a mob of Israelis pulled a Palestinian from his car in a Tel Aviv suburb in an attempted lynching.[^11]

The “Unity Uprising” earned its title because it challenged the fragmentation imposed by Israeli settler colonialism—a fragmentation that is not only geographic but also social and political.[^12] The images being shared on social media, in news media, and in WhatsApp groups helped us reach across the Bantu-stan-like enclaves of colonized Palestine and our diaspora, and form the shared feeling of rising up. I was living in the occupied Palestinian West Bank at the time, and spent May and June between protests, marches, vigils, and funerals for those killed by the Israeli military at the protests. In all of our spare time we were glued to our phones, watching videos of thousands of exiled Palestinians in Jordan and Lebanon storm the border to return (knowing they would be stopped), of medics in Gaza in tears as they filmed bodies pulled from the rubble after an air strike, or of Palestinians in Haifa hide from mobs of Israeli settlers chanting “death to Arabs.” However they might be perceived after the fact, these images were central to our experience of this historical moment.

I spoke to Mohammed El-Kurd, a poet and writer; he and his twin sister Muna were perhaps the most influential Palestinian voices on social media in the past year. Mohammed is one of hundreds of Palestinians in East Jerusalem being forcibly expelled from their homes by the Israeli regime; his images of the daily violence enacted by Israeli police and settlers in his Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood catalyzed, in part, the Unity Uprising. “It’s an excruciating dilemma,” he said, “because it’s not a dignifying situation to put your loved ones in. You hesitate before sharing the images because you want to preserve and protect your family.” At the same time, Mohammed recognized that the images played a huge role in mobilizing global action—specifying that this was owed in large part to who was behind the camera, and how they were able to frame the images. Due to COVID\-19 travel restrictions, there were fewer foreign correspondents in Palestine when the uprising erupted, meaning international media could not rely on their usual reporting of what was happening on the ground, a framing that Mohammed called “careless and extractive.” Instead, they turned to voices like Mohammed’s. “Our role as artists is really to give agency and dignity to the humanity of the oppressed. If we are going to share the images of us being brutalized, we should also be showing the images of us celebrating, fighting back, living our daily lives.” This is essential to articulating ourselves as complex and full human beings, he said, “and not just producing flattened representations that feed into political spectacle.”[^13]

“\[P\]hotographs can and do distress,” wrote Sontag in her 1978 _On Photography_, “\[b\]ut the aestheticizing tendency of photography is such that the medium which conveys distress ends by neutralizing it.”[^14] Although Sontag would complicate her stance in later essays, she identified an essential dilemma: the same thing in images that has the potential to arouse care can also numb it. Images can flatten, and thus, in images of violence, not all suffering can be seen—and in fact perhaps there is more that cannot be seen, or which is visually unremarkable. Reflecting again on _Cuesta del Plomo_, Meiselas recalled the shortcomings of the photographic frame to express that scene. “For a long time I’ve lived with the inadequacy of that frame to tell everything I knew,” she writes, “and I think a lot about what is outside of the frame.”[^15] The frame excludes not only much of the sensory environment, but the emotional, social, and cultural ramifications of the pictured violence, as well as the power structures that made the violence possible.

Representations that capture their subject more accurately do not necessarily avoid these pitfalls. In their essay “Care, Domination, and Representation,” Rochelle M. Green, Bonnie Mann, and Amy E. Story argue that images of violence lose their ethical claim precisely when they succeed in representing their subject.[^16] In other words, images can be too conclusive; they tell the viewer that “this is the whole story,” and the viewer leaves satisfied with a two-dimensional understanding of the person or place depicted. “Capturing how things look fools us into thinking that we’ve captured their truth,” wrote Teju Cole.[^17] For Sontag, photographs by their nature _capture_, which is to say: they objectify their subject and transform them into something to be possessed.[^18] She argues that to produce understanding, one needs narrative. This echoes what Mohammed told me, that images of the violence enacted on Palestinians during the Unity Uprising were more moving because they were explained and framed by people from the impacted communities who understood the deep implications of what was happening. “Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else,” wrote Sontag: “they haunt us.”[^19]

Artists who represent violence and suffering often use strategies or interventions to avoid repeating established narratives or objectifying their subjects, and to prompt their audience to think in new and more complex ways. _Material for a Film_ (2005–ongoing), by Palestinian artist and filmmaker Emily Jacir, for example, commemorates the killing of Wael Zuaiter, who in 1972 was the first target in a two-decades-long series of assassinations of Palestinian artists, intellectuals, and diplomats by Israeli agents across Europe—a campaign known as Operation Wrath of God.[^20] The poet and intellectual was shot with 12 bullets outside his apartment in Rome, with a 13th bullet lodging itself in the spine of his copy of _One Thousand and One Nights_, a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales which he had been translating into Italian since 1962.[^21] Having been collected over centuries, the title’s fables, romances, and legends are presented through the story of Scheherazade, newly married to a king who has vowed to execute a new bride every morning. For 1,001 nights, she tells him a story ending in a cliff-hanger to force him to keep her alive for another day. As part of the expansive work, Jacir fired a gun through the spines of 1,000 books and hung them on the gallery wall. The pierced pages are a silent representation of the force that took Zuaiter’s life, and the ripples his loss left—in the people who loved him and in those dedicated to the Palestinian cause.

Palestinian-Canadian artist Rehab Nazzal’s short silent film _Mourning_ (2012) commemorates the assassination of her brother (my uncle), Khalid Nazzal, in 1986 in Greece as part of the same campaign.[^22] Khalid was shot by Israeli agents outside his hotel in Athens, and a few years later I was born into a world where his loss was a constant presence; my brother and several cousins bear his name, his death is commemorated in June of each year, and through portraits and photographs I have known Khalid’s face for as long as I can remember. How does one bring that loss into the gallery? _Mourning_ depicts the black-and-white footage from our family archive of thousands gathered in Yarmouk refugee camp for Khalid’s funeral and protest march. Yarmouk, outside of Damascus, was home to the largest Palestinian refugee community in Syria, and Khalid was buried there in exile after Israel refused to allow his body into Palestine to be buried. Rehab stripped its audio and set the video in an oval frame on a black background, as if we are watching the procession through a scope. The lack of sound and colour, and the artist’s minimal intervention, force the viewer to focus on the crowd, where you can make out outraged mourners gathered around his family, holding each other. “The targeted assassinations were officially invisible,” Rehab told me. “_Mourning_ was about making the violence visible.”

The impulse to be seen when your experiences are denied is one that many colonized peoples can relate to. The more international visibility Palestinian images and videos received during the May 2021 uprising, the more Palestinian content was flagged as “sensitive” or removed altogether from social media websites.[^23] 7amleh, a Palestinian digital rights organization, documented the removal of nearly 500 pro-Palestine posts on Instagram and Facebook in just two weeks in May 2021, and human rights groups have pointed to possible relationships between social media platforms and the Israeli government’s Cyber Unit as well as the Israeli Ministry of Defense; _The Intercept_’s May 2021 investigation into Facebook’s content-moderation rules also found evidence of the company’s impeding criticism of Israel.[^24] The “sensitive content” filter was not seen by activists as a way of minimizing the circulation of objectifying images of Palestinian bodies in pain, but as a deliberate act of censorship that furthered the erasure of Palestinian life.

The will to document what is happening in moments of mass mobilization and repression is also propelled by the need to collect evidence, even when we do not have faith that today’s political and judicial systems will deliver justice. Beirut-based sound and visual artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan joined the interdisciplinary Forensic Architecture team to investigate the killing of two Palestinian teenagers, Nadeem Nawara and Mohammed Abu Daher, at a protest in the West Bank in 2014.[^25] Abu Hamdan’s audio analysis was used in court to expose the Israeli military’s intentional use of live ammunition at the protest, a practice that is commonplace, but which is denied in official statements. Abu Hamdan later expanded upon the confines of presenting evidence for an investigation in the video _Rubber Coated Steel_ (2016), in which he imagined his own tribunal for the boys by authoring a courtroom transcript presented as written text over passing images in a space that resembles a shooting range.[^26] Like Rehab’s _Mourning_, the lack of sound engages the audience’s imagination. “In a way, even if you don’t see the reality of what happened, you don’t see the event, the moments in which those people are shot,” said Abu Hamdan about the silence, “you see another kind of reality, and that allows the real event to emerge.”[^27]

I find myself thinking about the power of such omission when looking at the images that have emerged from the besieged Palestinian Gaza Strip, which has been subjected to Israeli air strikes since 2008\. In the latest bombing campaign in May, homes and residential buildings, roads and infrastructure, schools and hospitals were targeted alike. The flood of images captured people at their most vulnerable: weeping over the shroud-covered body of a loved one, in the dusty aftermath of a bombing, or collapsed in the rubble of what was once their homes. These moments of grief remain online, forever available for public viewing. So I created _Grieving in Private_ (2021–ongoing), in which I overlay the media images of Palestinian grief with photographs I have taken across colonized Palestine—of cactus branches and forested hills, olive trees, poppy fields, hazy skies, and rich, red soil, allowing the land to protect the grieving subjects from the invasive gaze of the viewer.

While Jacir, Rehab, Abu Hamdan, and even I use formal strategies, interventions, and refusals to invite their audiences to prehend the humanity of their subjects, at times of popular mobilization—like the unprecedented Unity Uprising—there is a sense of urgency and a need to show things as they are. “Palestinians remain virtually unknown,” wrote Edward Said in the 1986 photobook _After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives_, with photography by Jean Mohr. Said’s sentiment was not that Palestinians are absent from the media but that “the images used to represent us only diminish our reality further.”[^28] This is what propelled artists like El-Kurd to document as much as he could of the police violence and settler takeover of his neighbourhood. During the uprising, Abu Hamdan handed his Instagram account over to Inas Halabi, a Palestinian artist who reported live from Haifa as Israeli police suppressed the ongoing protests.[^29] There was a collective sense of responsibility to both witness and show what was happening around us, and Palestinians on the ground worked tirelessly to make visible our organizing and our struggles, our celebrations and our grief.

What is the difference, then, between images that distance and dehumanize, and images that provoke the value of life? There cannot be a static answer, because the frame, the narrative, the positionality of the artist, and the political moment all impact the way that an image will be received. It is up to us who work with representations of violence—especially artists—to keep asking ourselves this question.

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Rana Nazzal Hamadeh considers work by Emily Jacir, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, and Rehab Nazzal, as well as the Abu Ghraib photographs and the glut of imagery depicting police violence against Black people, in weighing the importance of disseminating images of violence (for consciousness-raising) against honouring the privacy, loss, and grief of those afflicted.

The Impulse to Share Evidence: Tensions in Representing the Unity Uprising

Michèle Pearson Clarke is a Trinidad-born artist, writer, and  
educator, and the current Photo Laureate for the City of Toronto (2019–2022). Quantum Choir is on view in the exhibition “Muscle Memory” at the Art Gallery of Hamilton from February 12 to May 23, 2022\. @mpclarke

<h5>“When I first encountered his work, I immediately thought that we must be thinking about some of the same things,” Michèle Pearson Clarke remarked of Lou Sheppard. “And I always found it interesting that his work was rarely contextualized as addressing grief (even by him), because to me it is so viscerally present in his practice.”

Here, the two artists engage in a lively repartee about their works that sometimes, but often don’t, position grief as an immediately legible central subject—in either case, seeing grief as a kind of inextricable lens. Sheppard articulates a parallel to queerness, writing “I don’t really think of my work as ‘queer’ but I do see queerly.” They go on to discuss navigating the spectacle of queer pain, dispensing with vulnerability as a kind of “generosity,” and understanding play as a sign of maturation—the other side of exhaustively strategic attempts to represent marginalized experience according to someone else’s criteria. Clarke and Sheppard bring their own experiences, vernaculars, and motivations to muse about coaxing grief from private space, cultivating subtle, sincere, shared arenas.</h5>
  
  
**Lou Sheppard:** Grief feels very familiar, but also vast and amorphous, and thinking about it has made me realize that I’m not that sure what it is. In a Euro-, Ameri-, and colonio-centric world it feels like experiences of grief are tightly scripted—grief is an emotional state that follows a linear trajectory of healing, a response to loss or trauma. But in my experience, grief feels more like a presence, or like a timescale, or even a lens that I see the world from. I have felt that grief has its own temporality, its own dimensional qualities, and that you become entangled in it, or maybe it in you. What is grief to you, Michèle? And what does it mean to bring the dimension of grief into your work?

> **Michèle Pearson Clarke:** I’ve never thought of it that way, but yes to all of that. Particularly the notion of it possibly being a lens or a way of seeing, that really makes sense to me. It’s both a way that I see and understand myself, my reactions, and my choices, and also a way that I try to see and understand other people, especially people that I don’t know. Because I do think that everyone is living with grief, everywhere, all the time. That’s yet another thing that has been “revealed” by the pandemic, even though it was always already there.

> But also, the way I think about grief is divided into _before my mother died and after my mother died_. That cleavage produced the staggering grief that has shaped everything since, including the decision to go back to school and become an artist whose practice explores grief and loss. And I do that to honour her memory, and to try and make sense of my own griefs, and to hopefully hold space for other people’s griefs.

**LS:** Yes. It makes me think: I don’t really think of my work as “queer” but I do see queerly and make through a queer lens. And this idea of grief being a way of seeing resonates with the ways queerness can ask us to see differently. What does it mean to see through grief? What can grief show us? 

Memory, vulnerability, and grief— maybe these feel like three strands of a braid?

> **MPC:** Oh, and I would weave queerness directly into that braid as well. It was Heather Love and José Esteban Muñoz who first showed me the ways in which being queer means accepting that triangular relationship between social exclusion, failure, and grief. Or at least learning to contend with it. Similarly, Anne Anlin Cheng’s conceptualization of “racial melancholia” is a sort of parallel formulation that describes the everyday mourning of racialized subjects in the grinding face of white supremacy. I carry both of these losses with me, and in my work I’m interested in thinking about how I can situate these griefs as sites of possibility for social engagement and political connection. This is partly why queerness can ask us to see differently, as you put it, but don’t you think it’s also asking us to _do_ differently? Even though you don’t see your work as queer, I think the ways that you are addressing the griefs that systems of power enact upon us are queer invitations to do otherwise.

> Would you say that’s a deliberate gesture on your part?

**LS:** Yeah—I like that… “doing differently.” I think this touches on a shift in my work, where I have moved from a space of representation and asking to be seen, or asking people to see, to positioning my work as a time and space that I invite people into. In my work, grief has become a way to hold people in a present tense, to hold attention. Some earlier works, like _A Strong Desire_ (2018), directed attention to the marginalization of trans identity within the medical establishment, by reading the textual margins of the diagnostic criteria used by psychiatrists to diagnose gender dysphoria as a dance score. I wanted the audience to bear witness to the frustrations and griefs of encountering the medical system as a trans person. Later works, like _Murmurations_ (2020), or _Rights of Passage_ (2020), implicated the bodies of the audience members in the production of the work. In _Murmurations_ people followed familiar social-distance markings painted on pavement to perform a collective, but socially distanced, dance. In _Rights of Passage_ the audience followed pathways of buried and lost rivers in the Richmond-Delta region of BC. The movement of their bodies along these pathways reinscribed the movement of water along these historic waterways. I am asking the audience to enter a space of loss and grieving together.

Relatedly—and we’ve talked about this before—for the first few years of my return to my practice, I felt that I had to be so deliberate in my positioning of queerness, of transness, and precise in my strategies of representation. Now, with a more established practice and with a broader social queer literacy, I am able to be more oblique and poetic in my work, and hopefully also more playful. It feels more complex, and it allows me to be present with my own grief, when in the past I may have been more strategic. Grief feels more like a wildness in my work. Which feels exciting and heightens my awareness of how narratives of marginalization are often constructed: that we ask people to fit their stories into a metanarrative of marginalization instead of attending to the nuances of these experiences.

From what we have talked about, it seems like your forthcoming work _Quantum Choir_ (2022) also invites this element of play, through the negotiation of the failure and vulnerability of singing in public. The grief in this work feels so nuanced, because it is entwined with that vulnerability and queerness and Blackness and masculinity, and so it resonates in surprising, uncomfortable, and compelling ways. Does that ring true? And I wonder: are you holding grief and joy in the same hand?

> **MPC:** Maybe, finally, yes? I mean, after 10 years, I’ve certainly gotten there with my own grief, and yes, like you, I’m now allowing myself to include play explicitly in my work. But maybe I’m less interested in joy, and rather more interested in conveying pleasure in my work? I’ve been thinking a lot about the differences between the two, and somehow pleasure holds a more complicated and familiar relationship with grief than joy does to me. There can be a melancholy in pleasure and a pettiness in pleasure—perhaps that wildness that you named—that’s hopefully more present in everything I’m working on these days.

**LS:** Oh, pleasure. Yes. The wildness is also a kind of pleasure, or vice versa.

> **MPC:** For sure. And you’re right, with Quantum Choir, even though I’m using the vulnerability of learning to sing as a way of exploring the failure of contemporary queer female masculinity, I’m really trying to balance our shame and hurt with how fun it was to kinda feel like a boy band, even for the briefest of moments. It was tremendously hard for all of us to sing publicly for the first time—I think even more than most people will realize—in the same way that it can be tremendously hard to be queer and masculine and female bodied. I wanted to share that but I didn’t want to foreground it, if that makes sense? Our pain has too often been a spectacle for public consumption, and I’m always navigating that terrible visual history. I guess bringing play and pleasure into the work is my most current coping mechanism.

> Permission is relevant here too, and I’m curious to hear more about your arrival at a more oblique and poetic approach in your practice. I can relate to feeling like you have to be measured and intentional in your work, that you have to be able to credibly justify every creative choice, and that you don’t have the luxury or privilege of being more instinctual or esoteric. There’s a professional grief there that is difficult to articulate.

**LS:** I have to work so hard against my own internalized phobias to feel both grief and pleasure. Because both of these feelings require centring my body and experiences rather than just seeing my body as a kind of abstracted political construction. Have you read _Jonny Appleseed_ (2018) by Joshua Whitehead? The whole novel is centred in Jonny’s body in such a beautiful way; it was stunning to me.

Permission _is_ relevant here. To me because I think grief and pleasure are not really permitted. If something feels too raw, too unprocessed, it risks being seen as dangerous. And maybe it is dangerous. I don’t know. When trans artists talk to me about some of the difficulties of sharing their work, there is a protective instinct in me. I caught myself telling an artist that they should have personally processed what they were sharing before they shared it, so that they couldn’t be hurt by people’s responses. And I felt so defeated by that— as if we have to do that labour too, as if we can’t be surprised by our own work. Maybe I’m getting off-topic; what I mean to say is: moving into work that is more oblique and poetic has come from actually just wanting to think about and respond to my world, to navigate these slippery terrains, to see instead of asking permission to be seen.

> **MPC:** No, I haven’t read that novel, but I most certainly will. The way you contrasted its centring of a queer body versus seeing it as a kind of “abstracted political construction” is a gut punch by the way. Because one of the things I love most about your work is how present and centred the body is through movement, notation, translation, and score—your body, sometimes your performers’ bodies, and always my body as the viewer.

**LS:** And what about generosity? People often say that my work is “generous,” and I feel like I could apply it to your work too. I think because sharing vulnerability is seen as generous, like sharing our grief or our pain is generous. (I don’t think we so much think of sharing pleasure as generous—hah!) But something about it rubs me the wrong way when people say it, and when I say it about other people’s work, and I wonder how you feel about it? When you talk about navigating the spectacle of queer pain (in all of its intersections), are you being generous with your audience?

> **MPC:** People definitely think of sharing vulnerability as generous, but for some reason, it’s always come naturally to me, so I don’t see it as going above or beyond. There are times where it has made me uncomfortable because of the implication that I’m giving more of something than most people would or most artists would, and that demarcation doesn’t sit right. But as far as my audiences are concerned, what I can say is that I am always thinking about queer collectivity and connection and, at the risk of everyone rolling their eyes as they read this, care. Before I was an artist, I was a social worker, and that has strongly shaped how I think about my professional responsibilities and how I want to communicate my ideas in a photograph or a video. For a long time, it seemed like I had made a radical career shift, but really, I’ve been working with grief and loss and community from day one.

**LS:** I mean, isn’t care kind of the point? Especially now? I wrote this piece called “Family Matter” (2021), based on this idea that ecology and economy both draw from the root word _oikos_ (family). Ecology is the functional logic of the family, and economy is the management of this function. Two ideas so often placed at odds, but both describe how we live in relation to each other. In this way, the action of caring could be seen as a function of the economy, an investment into our ecological networks. (And, I would say, as we see the pandemic wear on and on, collective care has become central to our economics.)

> **MPC:** Completely. The pandemic has also heightened the dynamics of care in relation to public space, and so I’m very excited by your more recent public artworks like _Murmurations: Scores for Social Distancing and Colour Guard, Atlantic Flyway_ (2020). Both works bring the grieving body out from private space where we’re told it should stay. How has that shift been for you, and where do you go from here?

**LS:** I think “caring about” something can feel like a kind of grief. So, for me, grief is a means to attention and presence, an act of care for our relations. And that’s what I’m asking people to do in those two pieces: _Murmurations_ engages bodies in public structures of collective care, and _Colour Guard_ acknowledges the loss of migratory birds through a military colour-guard ceremony. Both works provide rituals and structures for paying attention—a means with which to disrupt some of the dissociation that we all need to survive—and a space where we can attend to loss. 

When you ask where I go from here, I come back to that point you made earlier, about “doing differently.” The last piece I made, _The Exquisite Corpse_ (2021), holds two performers (Seamus Gallagher and Marley O’Brien) in a liminal flickering space between human and post-human—a space that I feel like we are collectively navigating, and a space where queerness could be a guide. In the video, I ask Marley and Seamus to share some of their personal losses and talk about how those losses inform their present. At the end of the video, I ask them to imagine the future. The futures they describe are both incredibly grim and incredibly hopeful. Crisis and suffering met with queer community and collective care. As she walks into the sunset Marley says, “I think there is a lot of love in the future, and that the future… is going to be unbelievably vast…” This felt like the first time that grief became transformative in my work, and I am carrying that idea into the work I am making now.

What about you? You’ve engaged in some very public-facing projects, like _I’m Thinking of Ending Things_ (2017), which details General Motors job losses as an ongoing collective experience of Oshawa residents, and your upcoming Photo Laureate project that will invite families to have free portraits taken in Toronto parks. I love these projects because they’re both so socially oriented and deeply personal at the same time. Reflecting on the parallels you draw between your career as a social worker and career as an artist, I find these works feel like deep and loving acts of service to the community. Is that what you mean when you say professional responsibilities? _Quantum Choir_ feels intimate, like you’re inviting us into your own process, your own experiences, and your own world. Is this a shift too or are _Quantum Choir_ and _I’m Thinking of Ending Things_ two sides of the same coin?

> **MPC:** Probably less of a shift and more of a leaning in. As much as grief has taken from me, it’s also given me so much that I carry, and so I’m slowly working my way through when and how to share that in my work. And because I’m always asking other folks to be deeply vulnerable, with this piece, I really wanted to put myself in that place, on the other side of the camera. But I didn’t want to be there alone. The choir is a collective gesture in both a musical sense and as a way to create queer kinship as we did this hard thing. Because if there’s one thing I return to again and again, grief needs company.

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

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Michèle Pearson Clarke and Lou Sheppard discuss how in their respective practices, they approach grief and queerness not as subjects but as a lens. “What does it mean to see through grief? What can grief show us?”

Relevant Permission A Conversation between Michèle Pearson Clarke and Lou Sheppard

Lindsey Sharman is based on Treaty 6 territory in Edmonton and has been the Curator of the Art Gallery of Alberta since 2018\. She is interested in sensorial art experiences and the aesthetics of olfaction.

In October 2021, the British Museum announced that it has the earliest known image of a ghost. On this Babylonian clay tablet, a figure stands with feet on the ground and hands tied, being led into the afterlife by a female figure. We know this is a ghost because the accompanying cuneiform inscription describes that this man has come back from the dead, and includes instructions on how to exorcise his miserable spirit and untether him from this world. The ritual includes making small effigies, offering beer, and burning juniper incense at sunrise.[^1] Many funerary practices all over the world use smells, oils, and incenses. Our sense of smell is our most immediate sense, and most intimately tied to memory; it has the ability to tug or shove us in unexpected directions, to make us time travel to extremely specific times and places, and to soothe. It’s no wonder, then, that smell and grief have long been intertwined.

Azza El Siddique uses sacred and secular scents that for her conjure memories of home, women, and care. These scents are used in contemporary Islamic funerary practices as well as for personal enjoyment in the home, and she has even traced their use back to ancient Egyptian texts. Egyptians and Nubians believed that fragrant scents were the smells of the gods—and so, to burn incense is to be in their presence. In _Fade into the Sun_ (2021), scents are placed in ceramic water lily vessels—the water lily one of the manifestations of Dedwen, the Egyptian god of incense—and activated by heat lamps. Her installations also typically include unfired ceramics, sometimes embedded with scents, that dissolve by the slow dripping of water over and through them. The ceramics rarely survive being exhibited. As drops of water cause them to fragment and decompose one molecule at a time, the scents swirl around the space. Here, one might smell bukhoor, an incense made by soaking wood chips in fragrant oils and resins. El Siddique uses bukhoor of rose, musk, and sandalwood she purchased from a Middle Eastern market, because it triggered memories of the Sudanese women she grew up with. She also uses sandaliya in her installations, an oil made from sandalwood that can be mixed with other scents and used in bukhoor incense, but on its own is used by family members to wash the body after death and is placed on the joints of the deceased. The slow decomposition of the ceramic vessels in El Siddique’s installations conveys the gradual transition from one state to the next. Although it is often regarded as abrupt, death is a slow process of returning to the earth.

Rolande Souliere, who is Anishinaabe and a member of the Michipicoten First Nation, is similarly engaged in exploring the scent traditions of her family and her ancestors. She shared with me that, after death, cedar is soaked in water, and this infused water is used to wash the deceased’s body. At the wake, family and friends drink cedar tea and use cedar branches to build a ceremonial fire. The resin, oil, and smoke of cedar cleanses the body, purifies it, helps to wash away the physical world and prepare the spirit to travel through the seven doors back to the spirit world. For Souliere, the spirit realm is home. This physical realm is fleeting; we are simply spiritual beings temporarily brought out of the spirit world to live this human experience.

The artist has been working on an installation called _The Four Directions-an olfactory journey_ (forthcoming), which will have both synthesized and natural scents of cedar, sweetgrass, tobacco, and sage in isolated pure scents and in blends intended to evoke the ethos of each of the four directions. With those eight scents, along with 36 intertwining multimedia elements marking the points around and through the four directions, Souliere is attempting to encompass her entire worldview, including physical and spiritual worlds, clans and their respective attributes, and the stages of life, afterlife, death, and birth. According to this holistic worldview, there is no grief because there is no loss; like El Siddique’s ceramics that flow into water, things move to a different stage or transition to something else.

In her most recent project, _What the fragrant lilies are trying to cover up_ (2021), Vicky Sabourin has undergone a shift of a slightly different nature. The artist was once repulsed by and ashamed of the odours of her grandmother and uncle’s shared home, but after their 2019 passings, mere months apart, she has been working to preserve its array of smells. By clearing out the house and going through every one of their belongings, she found a deeper closeness and intimacy with them than would ever have likely been possible in life; she has come to know aspects of them that had never been shared, and has come to a fuller love, acceptance, and understanding. The primary way to engage with _What the fragrant lilies are trying to cover up_ is to sign out a care package from Musée d’art de Joliette that includes objects and scents from Sabourin’s uncle and grandmother. She has not only caringly re-created the scents, but is now sending them out into other people’s homes in an unselfconscious act of communion.

The box contains Neiges by Lise Watier, which her grandmother always wore; a blend created to smell like wine-tipped Colts cigars (a favourite of her uncle’s); small ceramic worms that are perfumed; a woman’s shoe insole from her uncle’s private collection that Sabourin found hidden in his belongings; several lily and lilac blends; and a book written by Sabourin that details her loved ones’ deaths and some of her grieving process. She describes her grandmother dying surrounded by loved ones, and finding her uncle alone and dead on his kitchen floor, when she smelled death for the first time. She describes putting a blend of patchouli and ylang-ylang under her nose to combat the smell of the house, a realtor handing out lilacs for guests to carry under their noses at an open house, the lilies from her grandmother’s wedding, and the lilies from her grandmother’s funeral. The contents of the box are drawn and described through a chocolate box-style index, and a sign-out sheet like those found in old library books keeps a trace of everyone who has borrowed it. Grief is overwhelming and unfocused; by isolating, deconstructing, and then cataloguing the scents of her loved ones, she is able to compartmentalize her grief, order it, and name it. Although scent is also illusive and ineffable, in this case Sabourin uses it as a tool to pin down grief. With a nod to the fact that grief can also often plunge you into a world of loneliness, the boxes take Sabourin’s private individual experience and translate it to a collective one. Similar to the olfactory rituals undertaken by El Siddique’s and Souliere’s families, this too signals the necessity of shared processing.

Since 2019, Brian Goeltzenleuchter has been recreating scents of homes as well—but in his case, homes to which refugees and immigrants will never return. Goeltzenleuchter has long worked with scent and often initiates projects through interviews and questionnaires. For _Scents of Exile_ (2019–ongoing) he has worked with newcomers to the United States who share scent memories that range from mundane to tragic to humorous. After rendering the stories into scents, the artist infuses them into hand sanitizer. When _Scents of Exile_ is exhibited, museum-goers use the sanitizer dispensed from now-common stations you’d encounter in any public building. Qasim’s scent, one of 15 created so far, is that of oud-based incense, and his story is about his confusion over many Westerners’ everyday use of what in Pakistan is a ceremonial scent used in funerary rites. He thinks it’s funny that his American girlfriend’s house often smells like a wake.

When someone uses this hand sanitizer, they are enveloped by Qasim’s memory while their own associations rise up to meet it. Similarly to _What the fragrant lilies are trying to cover up_, experiences and memories are absorbed into skin to build upon and muddy the subjectivity of scent. _Scents of Exile_ replaces the antiseptic, ubiquitous scent of hand sanitizer with highly personalized scent memories, injecting multiple individual experiences into institutional infrastructure. While Sabourin’s scents are meant to be lasting, not only on the skin of those who take them home but as a living archive that will continue to hold her memories, the smells of _Scents of Exile_ are designed to be fleeting. After mere moments, the scent of incense or dirt or rice or gun powder is gone and only your brief close encounter remains. Like El Siddique’s disintegrating ceramic works, these scents are made to fade, mimicking memories in their ephemerality.

Sabourin’s and Goeltzenleuchter’s impulse to capture, translate, and replicate scents in order to sustain memory access points in the face of grief resonates with _Resurrecting the Sublime_ (2019). A collaborative research group—Dr. Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, the olfactory artist Sissel Tolaas, and a team of synthetic biologists at Ginkgo Bioworks led by Dr. Christina Agapakis—has attempted to synthesize the smells of flowers that have been made extinct through colonial activity by extracting DNA from dried and pressed plant samples held in the Harvard University Herbaria collection. Twenty extinct specimens are held in this collection; the researchers were able to collect material from 14, and from them, three were successfully synthesized.

The _Hibiscadelphus wilderianus_ (or _Maui hau kuahiwi_ in Hawaiian), which smelled of juniper, citrus, and thyme, lived on ancient lava fields on the southern slopes of the dormant volcano Haleakalā on Maui. Its forest habitat was decimated by early 20th-century cattle ranching. In 1912 the botanist Gerrit Wilder (after whom the plant was named) plucked the last flower from the one remaining nearly 5 m tree that died soon after. The _Orbexilum stipulatum_, or Falls-of-the-Ohio scurfpea—a woody, peppery, balsamic-scented legume—was last documented in 1881 on Rock Island in the Ohio River, near Louisville, KY, not long before the area was flooded due to the construction of a dam. The third was _Leucadendron grandiflorum_, the Wynberg Conebush, although, through the DNA sequencing of this specimen, the team suspects that the sample held in the Harvard collection as well as those in other botany collections had been improperly labelled. It’s likely that no specimens remain at all. The last presumed accurate documentation of this over 1.5-m-tall flower was in a collection in London, England, in 1805, at which time its habitat just outside Cape Town in South Africa had already been converted into vineyards.The scent that was created smells of jasmine, lemongrass, cannabis, chamomile, turmeric, ginger, and hops, but because the sample may have been mislabelled there’s no way to gauge its accuracy.[^2]

Whatever these three plants truly were, what can be produced by Ginsberg and her team is a hopeful approximation. Even if the smell molecules are known, the team sometimes used molecules that are very close but not identical to what the plant was able to produce, and we don’t know how or even if these plants produced all the smell compounds their DNA indicates they could. Furthermore, it’s impossible to know the quantity or ratios—like having the contents of your grandmother’s cupboard but not the recipe of her famous dish. With all of this considered, it’s poignant and humbling to realize that what _Resurrecting the Sublime_ has created is only a best guess. The substitution highlights the absence, showing that despite scientific expertise and boundless artistic imagining, extinct species cannot be resurrected after all.

Human activity has already changed how our world smells—not only through the loss of plants like _Maui hau kuahiwi_ or the Wynberg Conebush but as a reaction to the loss of oxygen in our atmosphere. Biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) are how plants communicate with one another; to human perception, BVOCs are how plants smell. As CO2 concentrations increase in our atmosphere and temperature rises, plants react by producing more BVOCs.[^3] This will, among other things, continue to change smell-scapes all over the world. Designer Omer Polak’s _Olfactory Forest_ (2019) is an homage to lost and changing forest smell-scapes and their benefits to environmental, physical, and emotional health. Minimal, white, and uniquely moulded rattan poles are suspended throughout the mirrored room, each containing one isolated scent—“tree resin, moss, damp soil, mammal sweat, mushrooms, Linden, broken wood, or young green leaves”—which together recreate the olfactory symphony of walking through the woods.[^4] This installation can be seen as a sci-fi monument that might be needed in a forestless future—or as a memorial. Although smell tends to privilege the past, Polak’s work, and Ginsberg’s to some degree, looks to the future to speculate on how we will continue to grapple with our own destruction. Polak’s as yet unrealized _Olfactory Forest_, II creates a recently burned forest and will smell of charcoal, ash, wet soil, and burned earth, driving home not only what we have to lose but what has been already lost.

Scent by its very nature lends itself to ethereal, backward-looking, and romantic connection; it’s what relates it to grief. Spanning the spectrum from scientific to homemade, these projects each give something different for the many stages of grief. They translate experiences that oscillate between the individual and the universal, and create convening places large enough to hold the artist’s intentions and others’ lived experience. Goeltzenleuchter and Sabourin offer intricate narratives to cling to and perhaps even wallow in. Souliere and El Siddique provide ways to move on, move forward, and submit to a higher power or glimpse at a bigger picture. Ginsberg and Polak offer opportunities to look back. Although scent can never bring back what has been lost in a physical sense, it can allow us to clutch the past when loss is fresh, to move on when we are ready, and access profound recall when the crashing waves of grief subside to mere ripples.

[^1]: Dalya Alberge, “Figures of Babylon: Oldest Drawing of a Ghost Found in British Museum Vault,” _The Guardian_, October 16, 2021, www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/oct/16/figures-of-babylon-oldest-drawing-of-a-ghost-found-in-british-museum-vault
[^2]: Rowan Jacobson, “Fragrant Genes of Extinct Flowers Have Been Brought Back to Life,” _Scientific American_ (February 2019), www.scientificamerican.com/article/fragrant-genes-of-extinct-flowers-have-been-brought-back-to-life/; www.resurrectingthesublime.com/about.
[^3]: J. Peñuelas and M. Staudt, “BVOCs and Global Change,” _Trends in Plant Science_ 10, no. 3 (March 2010), 133–144, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1360138509003197.
[^4]: Patrick McCumiskey “The Olfactory Forest: A Multisensorial Installation,” _warmwhite_, December 2019, https://warm-white.com/the-olfactory-forest/.

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Drawing on work by Azza El Siddique, Rolande Souliere, Vicky Sabourin, Brian Goeltzenleuchter, Omer Polak, and others, Lindsey Sharman focuses on the sense with the strongest link to memory. From its use in funerary rites to the reverse engineering of redolent flowers lost to colonization and refugee narratives interpreted into scents, we consider the salience of olfaction in grief.

The Scent of Death

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

Back in early December 2021, I remember speaking to a friend—outside and at a distance—about the upcoming year. Exhausted by personal and familial health issues and impatient for change, I expressed a desire for “2023 to just start already.” “You mean 2022, right?” my friend asked. We laughed. I had meant to say 2022, but given the devastating news parade of 2021, a year that was arguably overburdened with naive hopefulness, the prospective distinctions between ’22 and ’23 seemed moot. The meaning of the future, while always technically un- fixed, seemed to have shifted during the pandemic. Once a horizon for optimistic projections, lately, at least for many, the future has come to represent challenge and increased risk of loss.

In certain contexts, loss manifests as more literal or acute, such as the death of a loved one or the sudden impossibility of pre-pandemic plans. Other absences feel more amorphous, such as the abrupt or gradual diminishment of pre-COVID habits, pleasures, or so-called freedoms. Despite best efforts to pause, notice, listen, or share, most people lack sufficient tools or distance to appreciate its full scope; the compounded volume of grief today is, if not historically unprecedented, perhaps unparalleled in terms of real-time visibility on a global scale. Cognizant of an abundance of heterogeneous forms of grieving and a paucity of spaces to collectively process and discuss their impact, artist and curator Regan Shrumm became interested in grief’s influence on contemporary art practice. In Summer 2020, as an assistant curator at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (AGGV), they worked with colleague Amy Smith, a community engagement coordinator at Legacy Art Galleries, to create _Collective Grief, Collective Futures_. Jointly supported by the AGGV and Legacy Art Galleries in association with the University of Victoria, the program took the form of three free Zoom workshops for emerging artists in late 2020, each led by a different artist mentor.

In winter 2022, I spoke over Zoom with Shrumm and Estraven Lupino-Smith—a multimedia artist, political ecology researcher, and one of the _Collective Grief, Collective Futures_ mentors—about the program. “Even long before COVID,” Shrumm told me, they had been “eager to talk about mental health in the context of the art world.” Observing various colleagues minimize the pandemic and some of the inequities it exposed motivated Shrumm to develop programming that addressed the intense grief they suspected others were also feeling. Given Lupino-Smith’s attention to grief in their art and academic practices, including recent research into basket weaving as a therapy for WWII soldiers’ PTSD, Shrumm immediately thought of them as an ideal potential workshop mentor.

The three workshops were intended to be self-contained and thematically discrete, though the organizers were pleased that a relatively consistent cohort attended—the majority “students in their early twenties.” In addition to Lupino-Smith, Ghinwa Yassine and Kemi Craig also led sessions; each shared a short presentation about the role of grief in their work and then invited participants to discuss the pandemic’s impact upon their own practices. Lupino-Smith’s session was titled “Grieving Losses” and focused on grief in connection to oppressive structures, while Yassine’s workshop, “Imaging New Ways of Work- ing,” considered “curiosity and fearlessness as important factors in moving past trauma and grief and towards the lifelong journey of healing,” according to a write-up in the AGGV’s magazine.[^1] Reflecting the reality that pandemic-era grieving has not only centred COVID, but also responded to the BLM protests and surrounding events of 2020, Craig’s presentation, “Looking Towards the Future,” addressed African diasporic grief in connection to certain roots of Afrofuturism. The discussion portion of Craig’s workshop also explored broader visions of collective grieving and futurism. Mindful of the weight of grief upon mentors and attendees, Shrumm and Smith anticipated how the workshops might flow better if facilitated by a third party. The AGGV hired K.P Dennis, a Sierra-Leonean, Afro-Caribbean activist and former Youth Poet Laureate of Victoria who works across theatre, language arts, and film, and has had extensive experience facilitating within arts and organizing settings.

As someone who didn’t attend, these vast thematic scopes and wide-ranging potential for participant engagement struck me. I was curious—did Shrumm, Smith, Lupino-Smith, and the other mentors start out with a single, shared definition of grief? And does community arts work require a hyper-specific focus, definition, or framework to be “success- ful”? “I don’t think we ever formally discussed or tried to come up with a single definition of ‘grief,’” Lupino-Smith replied. “Same with ‘healing,’ too,” added Shrumm, continuing: “I think we were in agreement about the wide range of grief that it felt important to think through. From death or death in terms of queer experience and feeling unconnected to your family to smaller things like the end of an acquaintanceship, we realized grief was an expansive and surprisingly present feeling.” Lupino-Smith and Shrumm are both ardent readers of _Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief_ (2017), a collection of grief essays edited by anarchist activist Cindy Milstein. It begins with a quote that Shrumm and Lupino-Smith found resonant: “We are, at present, swimming in a sea of grief. That sea includes death, but it is also so much larger, encircling all sorts of sorrows.”[^2] The notion of grief and grieving having fundamentally unfixed identities felt potent and informed the program’s active engagement with a wide range of loss. Shrumm and Lupino-Smith attest that group discussions allowed participants to consider distinct experiences of grief and mourning without collapsing or conflating wider contextual factors. In part, they credit Dennis for grounding each workshop by sharing a set of community guidelines, frameworks that helped support intention and sensitivity to nuance during the conversations.

Still, I was interested in whether the discussions resembled DIY group therapy or had ever become challengingly digressive or awkward, as conversations with groups of arty strangers sometimes do. “That didn’t really happen,” Lupino-Smith said. “We managed to avoid a grief dump.” Shrumm clarified: “We wanted to give everyone a chance to focus on their own work and think through the theme of the session. So, after the mentor artist spoke, \[the emerging artists\] could give a short presentation of their work or they could just debrief the things going on for them, such as ‘I’m staying at my parents’ house though I never thought I would move back. I have no art supplies. I have no room. I don’t feel like doing anything. I’m in a limbo state.’” I inquired about the value or purpose of having non-professionals guide conversations about participants’ real-life emotions and mental health. “I think the real benefit was accessibility,” Shrumm replied, citing “the fact that the Canadian government hasn’t made it a free part of our health care.” Shrumm also noted stigmas associated with therapy, and counselling psychology’s colonial dimensions and its intersections with abuse faced by queer, disabled, and other historically under-represented communities. Shrumm and Lupino-Smith clarified that neither is necessarily opposed to quote-unquote professional healing, grieving, or mental- health supports, but simply that the AGGV project operated differently. “Before there was counselling, what was there?” mused Shrumm semi-rhetorically, then continued: “There was community and creating things together, be it cooking, weaving, or quilting, and having these conversations while doing those activities, which were often really a way to debrief.”

I wondered what was achieved by circumventing more conventional supports. In the context of _Collective Grief, Collective Futures_, the answer seems connected to the fact that mentors and attendees alike used their art practices as quasi-bounded frameworks for analyzing grief’s impact. Talking about loss and mourning via reflecting upon artworks and art-making helped create a non-hierarchical space for sharing. Shrumm likens the energy of the sessions to a quilting bee, wherein the purportedly primary activity of sewing and “keeping your hands busy” allows participants to divulge personal narratives and partake in mutual vulnerability more comfort- ably than if under a direct spotlight. To this end, though the sessions emphasized better understanding one’s own and peers’ art practices—ostensibly a skills-development opportunity—the bigger-picture aims remained intentionally loose in order to respond to the expressed needs and interests of the participants and to factor in evolving global and personal contexts.

Of the attendees’ motivations, Lupino-Smith remarked: “People were there to wrangle vast and hard-to-wrangle ideas of grief, let alone \[analyze\] the feeling or the process of grieving, and to just connect with other people. I think being able to connect with art as the centre- piece helped the conversations flow.” We discuss how an art practice framing may have helped certain participants feel less self-conscious about participating or less avoidant toward potentially intense emotional content. “I think if people had seen _Collective Grief, Collective Mourning_ as a peer-to-peer group, even if you didn’t call it therapy, for discussing grief during the pandemic, I’m not sure the same folks would have joined or shared,” Lupino-Smith commented. “In some ways, I think it mimicked what group therapy is supposed to, which is put a bunch of people together and let their nervous systems coregulate, but instead we got to talk about our practices, which ideally for most of us is also a place to digest and work through things.” Here, Shrumm added that “the commonality that was shared” in people’s personal experiences and the artwork they were “working on, or had worked on in the past, became a special way of making connections. Victoria is known for being a weird, isolated arts place, and it can be hard to meet people and create intimacy around art projects, especially online.” Learning that a few of the participants continued to meet informally and continue the conversations after the sessions concluded excited the organizers.

Over the course of our conversation, I came to understand that Shrumm and Lupino-Smith’s shared idea, for now at least, of a “future beyond trauma and tragedy”—a quote from the _Collective Grief, Collective Futures_ description—remains _intentionally_ unformed. At first, I’d been skeptical about whether the project’s immense purview, including pandemic-induced and pre-existing personal grief and cultural and historical traumas, could avoid subsuming important detail and nuance. However, I grew to appreciate Shrumm and Lupino- Smith’s assertion that the workshops’ eschewing of firm definitions or taxonomies of grief—and of “the future”—was key to their rich potential, and maybe even ultimately beside the point. A word that didn’t come up during our conversation was “comfort,” but it seems that a strong impetus for this programming was to provide comfort and witnessing to individuals during a time of great isolation. This kind of work _could_, Shrumm concedes, occur outside of an explicitly arts-focused space; however, they had ties to the AGGV and Shrumm is, they acknowledge, an advocate “for using what spaces and resources you have access to.”

Over the course of the pandemic, artist participation in community work and mutual-aid projects has been on the rise. In the current cultural moment, questions about defining social praxis versus activist work can sometimes feel pedantic, yet there’s something fascinating and arguably quite urgent underlying questions about the boundaries of art, social work, activism, and associated professional and anti-hierarchical delineations. The answers to some of these queries may impact the development of more sustainable or anti-oppressive forms of grief work or even have practical implications for future funding and resourcing strategies. For Shrumm and Lupino-Smith, _Collective Grief, Collective Futures_ represented one means of beginning to, as Shrumm put it, “find a little bit more commonality between the many forms of grief that are happening.” As the pandemic wears on and grief inevitably proliferates, one hopes dialogue about grief programming will serve to enhance tools, formats, and capacities to support loss under the aegis, at least when effective, of art.

issue-151-p42-45.pdf

Speaking with Estraven Lupino-Smith and Regan Shrumm about Collective Grief, Collective Futures, a workshop series they orchestrated in Victoria with K.P. Dennis as the facilitator, Esmé Hogeveen opens up questions about the implications of community support mechanisms offered by art spaces.

‘All Sorts of Sorrows’: Processing Pandemic Loss in the (Virtual) Gallery

April Thompson is a writer and curator currently based in Vancouver. Her practice is guided by critical investigations of photography and the moving image, spatial politics and new media.

<h5>“her cot a map  
of the world, her death the north folding in on itself.”

— Dallas Hunt,  
_Creeland_, 2021</h5>
  
  
Dallas Hunt’s poem “Rueful” (2021) recounts the death of his grandmother amid stanzas that reference the state of the world, the news, tenderness, and violence. In describing the moment of her death, Hunt turns to land, the world, the cardinal direction; in so few words he expresses how scale can shift when you lose someone. In _The Year of Magical Thinking_, Joan Didion wrote, “Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”[^1] Distance allows us to see others and be seen by them. Distance connects two points across a straight line. And so, it makes perfect sense to me, this simple declaration that “\[g\]rief has no distance,” because grief can feel at once ever-present and also no- where to be seen. In her lecture “Remarks on Letters,” Mary Ruefle asked, “For what is a letter, but to speak one’s thoughts at a distance? Which is why poems and prayers are letters. The origin of poems, prayers, and letters all have this in common: urgency.”[^2] I would go a step further and say that the human need to create poetry and prayer comes from an existential awareness that one day, the distance between oneself and another will be replaced by space, by loss.

• • •

When my dad died in early 2020, a doctor told me, “Make sure you grieve properly, or it will be harder later.” I didn’t know what it meant to grieve properly. For a while, I thought it meant remembering every- thing very well. I wrote down last moments, sentences, sequences. I wrote it down to never forget and to relieve my mind of repeating it, as I tried obsessively to commit it to memory, or else to finally grasp it. One seemed inevitable, the other impossible. My own experience of grief was characterized by loopholes. My memories surfaced in a way that seemed disjointed but was in fact vibratory. “Vibration” is the only word I can think of to express how memories can shine on each other, since vibration in physics refers to a periodic motion about an equilibrium position. These vibrations felt like a deeply personal photography that upset linear time. After experiencing them, I realized that in order to understand my grief I needed to forget everything I’d learned about photography. I reached for art that could show me a different meaning of the medium—one that was spatial, embodied, and non-linear. One that honoured intuition and feeling.

• • •

Schooling taught me that the theory of photography involves words like “index,” “punctum,” and “fixity.” And although theorists used these words across generations—from Barthes to Sontag and Levi Strauss— this discourse is anchored to the daguerreotype of 19th-century industrial Europe.[^3] Such paternity is carried in the seeds of these words, which resonate with settler-colonial processes of the Industrial Revolution; to index is to classify, the punctum is bound to violence, and fixity can enact immobility. When the daguerreotype was invented in 1839, it was seen as a tool that could improve human memory. We didn’t have to remember—the camera could do it for us. This industrial idealism toward the camera shifted the way we think about memory, and centred the image and the visual, over the bodily and other senses.

• • •

A cyanotype shows nine men dressed in suits, ties, and hats, assembled as a group. Those positioned at the front of the group sit with their hands on their knees as they gaze at the camera. The rich tonal reversal has cast their hands and faces in a deep blue that draws the eye in. It is counterbalanced by the white areas— outlines of four rocks placed at each corner of the photosensitive surface, or the outline of two cedar sprigs. This cyanotype by Tania Willard was part of her 2018 exhibition “Anthro(a)pologizing,” which drew on her research of images of Secwépemc peoples in public collections such as the American Museum of Natural History (New York City, NY) and the Canadian Museum of History (Gatineau, QC). Recognizing that the ownership of these images by institutions was preventing them from circulating in their home communities, Willard made replicas of the images and brought them back to sovereign Secwépemc Territory.

Willard’s cyanotype translates an archival photograph from the Canadian Museum of History depicting the 1916 Indian Rights Association delegation. This group, consisting of Chief James Raitasket, Chief John Chelahitsa, Chief Paul David, Chief Basil David, Chief Elie Larue, Chief John Tetlenitsa, James Alexander Teit, Chief Thomas Adolph, and Chief William Pascal, was petitioning the government of Canada for land rights for their respective territories in BC.[^4] In the image they are documented far from their communities, having travelled to the Victoria Memorial Museum (now the Canadian Museum of Nature) in Ottawa, ON, which housed a reconvened Parliament as a result of the fire that burned down the Parliament Buildings Centre Block earlier in 1916.

Across “Anthro(a)pologizing,” Willard used the materials of land measurement and surveyance, such as survey tape and calipers, alongside depictions of Indigenous peoples to bring attention to the systemic overlay between the control of land and the domination of bodies within settler-colonial violence. The cyanotype process was originally invented in the mid- 19th century as a cheap way to produce technical engineering drawings, and as such its history is bound to property and capital. Willard processed the cyanotype with the sun shining down on sovereign Secwépemc Territory and has placed a constellation of the land within the image, in sun, sediment, and cedar. In this, the land becomes the conditions that shape the image, rather than a structural entity that the blueprint denotes as property, thus inverting the historical use of the blueprint process. In her translation of this portrait on sovereign reserve land, Willard honours the ancestral fight for land claims while also connecting this to the present-day continuation of those struggles.

• • •

Academic language on photography is obsessed with death. Barthes believed that to be photographed was to experience “a micro-version of death”[^5]; for Sontag, photography was the “inventory of mortality”[^6]; and for Levi Strauss it was that photographs “are always about something that is _gone_ and so are in league with death.”[^7] This insistence on linking photography with death is a neurosis of white academia. To view death as equivalent to the photograph is to obsess over the finality of both, which limits an understanding of death to a post-industrial rubric. This rubric is a legacy of what Jonathan Crary defined as the “industrial remapping of the body in the nineteenth century.”[^8] It upholds a concept of death that prioritizes the corporeal and productive over the spiritual, resonant, and immaterial.

This industrial framework for death has become entrenched by the increased commodification of death-related service in post-industrial societies. Katsumi Shimane’s 2018 thanatology research demonstrates how rapidly humans in industrialized societies have evolved in their relationship to funerary customs, where death-related services are increasingly outsourced.[^9] This has been a rapid shift from the pre-modern approach to funerals, where they existed as a form of mutual help that was necessary to survival within the social group.

• • •

Scale is a central component in both grief and photography. In grief, our once-rationalized measure of scale can feel unresolved. It’s common to experience a dissonance between the measure of one’s loss and the scale of the world around them. What seems to be the ending of the world (as devastating as “the north / folding in / on itself”) can feel unnoticed as the world moves on.

In her exhibition “The Strata of Many Truths” (2019), Roxanne Charles interrupts this use of scale within archival images, and makes space for the scale of grief and trauma to be acknowledged in ways that are non-visual. Her exhibition responded to archival images from the Museum of Vancouver collection that documents the St. Mary’s residential school in Mission, BC which operated from 1867 to 1984\. The entryway to the space was redefined as an honour gate, inspired by the honour guard ceremony of Canoe Cultures where paddlers are greeted at the shore by an honour guard who forms an archway with their paddles to uplift the spirits of the people.[^10] At her honour gate, Charles enlarged the figures of two children from separate archival photographs taken at the 800-acre school vineyard, which was worked by Indigenous children. Charles moves them out of the frame of the photograph and into the space with cedar boughs hanging overhead. Visitors had to acknowledge their presence as they entered the exhibition. In her use of scale, Charles is recoding the body back into the image, removing the hierarchical dimensions of the archival visual field.

The scale of loss was honoured across the exhibition in the ways that Charles created space for healing, prayer, rest, and contemplation. This centred community care for the visitor, rather than a passive consumption of images. This was most evident in the materials available to craft prayer ties, a form of ceremony that involves gathering medicines and placing your loving intention into them before giving them as an offering. Visitors could craft these prayer ties and leave them around a pyramid of soil from Semiahmoo Reserve land, where the artist resides today.

• • •

Shortly after my father’s death, I was lying awake and heard a bird outside my window. It triggered a memory I had not remembered for 17 years. I was standing side by side with my dad trying to revive a bird kicked from a nest. He held it in the palm of his hand, trying to feed it with a straw. I remembered being anxious because of the insurmountable gap of communication between us and the bird, not knowing what it needed. That memory triggered a more recent one—my mum standing at my dad’s bedside as he lay dying. We had slowly lost the ability to communicate with him as he drifted from sleep to another place.

As he lay breathing, my mum reached over and took a straw from a nearby glass of water. With cradled kindness, she roamed the end gently over his lips, wetting them to give some comfort. The grace of that moment, the intuition of her love amid the loss of communication, crept into my body with the force of a photographic trace transcending a singular image. But what made this moment truly photographic was the fact that it was a form of witnessing, a kind of recognition. Two unconnected memories came together to create a new photographic moment, beyond fixity or reproduction, imprinted through the vibration of feeling.

• • •  
In Leanne Simpson’s book _As We Have Always Done_ (2017), she writes on recognition within Nishnaabewin, and states, “Part of being in meaningful relationship with another being is recognizing who they are, it is reflecting back to them their essence and worth as a being, it is a mirroring.”[^11]

In Kali Spitzer’s work, decolonizing photography means centring slowness, consent, and reciprocity. Her series _An Exploration of Resilience and Resistance_ (2014–ongoing) features portraits made with wet-plate collodion photography. These black-and-white, large-scale portraits depict members of her own community of Indigenous and mixed-heritage peoples, Black folks, people of colour, and women, non-binary, queer, femme, and trans kin.

There is an urgency to Spitzer’s work—to show Indigenous and mixed-heritage people as they exist now, through their own frames of reference—as well as the urgency to take up space in institutions where they have historically been under-represented. This urgency of intent is counterbalanced by a slow photographic process of care. Spitzer develops one portrait at a time, and centres a process of consent. In the darkroom, she is with the portrait sitter, sharing in the moment of transformation when the image reveals itself, and engaging with them in feedback—discussing the image, what to change, what to keep. This emphasis on representing her subjects as they see themselves is a decolonization of “accuracy” within the medium. It focuses on the accuracy of selfhood and kinship, of how one understands and sees oneself and how one is seen by one’s community. This form of witnessing enacts a mirroring that is active and reciprocal.

There is an intimacy to these portraits that also emanates from Spitzer’s decolonization of distance. Spitzer uses an 8×10 large-format camera for her wet-plate photographs, meaning that the camera must be hyper-focused to one particular area of detail. It’s impossible for the entire image of her sitter to be shown in focus. This means that Spitzer and her sitter actively decide which parts of themselves they allow to be seen, shared— scars, wrinkles, tattoos. There is autonomy and agency in this control of focal depth, in the delicate balance between what is visible and what is not. Spitzer gives equal weight to the unseen and the seen, including the space she holds for the invisible labour of care.

• • •

I recently read that wet-plate collodion photographs from the Victorian era make their sitters look like mourners, when in fact, many of them may have been wearing bright yellow or pink. The wet collodion process (being sensitive to blue and ultraviolet light) makes warm colours seem dark. The trick of the 19th-century camera to cast its subjects in mourning does not escape my attention. It’s a fitting metaphor for the academic obsession with photography and death, how this can occlude every image’s broader context. The works of Willard, Charles, and Spitzer demonstrate possibilities for photography that decentre the visual and reintegrate the relational, spatial, and the felt, as guided by Indigenous worldviews. They are evidence that understanding the medium as a form of relational witnessing is necessary if we are to acknowledge its capacity to engage with the complex and varied human experience of grief, loss, and pain.

[^1]: Joan Didion, _The Year of Magical Thinking_ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 27.
[^2]: Mary Ruefle, _Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures_ (New York: Wave Books, 2012), 204.
[^3]: The broader colonial lineage of photography rests with the Camera Obscura which Jonathan Crary defined as both a technological and discursive object: “\[I\]t was a complex social amalgam in which its existence as a textual figure was never separable from its machinic uses.” Jonathan Crary, _Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century_ (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 31.
[^4]: Tania Willard, “Casting Light to Fill Shadow: A Decolonial Aesthesis in Secwepemcúl’ecw” (master’s thesis, University of British Columbia, Okanagan, 2018), <http://hdl.handle.net/2429/67123>
[^5]: Roland Barthes, _Camera Lucida_, trans. R. Howard (New York: Vintage Classics, 1993), 14.
[^6]: Susan Sontag, _On Photography_ (New York: Picador, 1973), 70.
[^7]: David Levi Strauss, _Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics_ (New York: Aperture, 2003), 103.
[^8]: Crary, 19.
[^9]: Katsumi Shimane, “Social Bonds with the Dead: How Funerals Transformed in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries,” _Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society_ B 373, no. 1754 (September  
2018), <https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0274>
[^10]: Roxanne Charles, e-mail message to author, February 2022.
[^11]: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, _As We Have Always Done_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 180.

issue-151-p45-50.pdf

In concise, potent, and often personal fragments, April Thompson examines how Roxanne Charles, Kali Spitzer, and Tania Willard approach photography in ways that work toward a decolonial decoupling of death from the medium. What does it mean to stop treating photographs as rote memory-keepers that exempt us from doing the remembering with our bodies, our senses, our non-linear networks of feeling? 

Grief Has No Distance

Muheb Esmat is a writer and curator based in Brooklyn, NY. His research broadly explores visual and digital culture from Afghanistan. Previously, he has written on art and architecture in Kabul, car decals as representative of social realities, and live streams as a space for building community in exile.

> **Muheb Esmat:** It feels strangely appropriate to begin this conversation by asking if you have heard the song “Gham Daram Gham” by Taher Shubab? It came to mind immediately after I began thinking about “grief,” which is echoed in the song by the Persian word _gham_ (مغ).

**Hangama Amiri:** When this song was popular in 2008/2009, I lived in Halifax with my family. It was also when my father was reunited with our family. He was able to join us in Canada after spending almost eight years in refugee camps in Europe, so the song really takes me back to those memories. But besides the good memories, it also resonates deeply with feelings of displacement that were painful.

> **ME:** It’s incredible how such personal memories could be attached to a song, even years later.

> Even though the music video would attribute Shubab’s grief to his separation from the woman he loves, clearly his lamentation deeply resonates with other losses too. How has the recent turmoil— end of American occupation, fall of the republic, return of the Taliban, humanitarian crisis currently unfolding in Afghanistan—affected you and your work?

**HA:** I have lived away from Afghanistan for a long time, so this sense of distance and separation has been a part of my life. But observing the events of the past several months from afar does not make the grief any easier. Witnessing the changes in the country affects those of us living abroad (whether by force or by choice), emotionally and mentally. I still feel like I have lost something—a safe space or a place I had hoped to visit in person or reconnect with again.

Judging from the videos and images reported by journalists, we can see how ordinary people fear being caught by the Taliban. That fear and the fear of survival is hugely taxing, mentally and physically. People have been rightfully scared of returning to the previous Taliban era of the ’90s.

Amid this dark moment in history, one of the only lights has come from the women in Afghanistan who continue to protest for their rights despite the immense consequences. The return of the Taliban has meant a sudden loss in social and political realms; even their rights to education and employment have almost disappeared overnight. While it is easy to speak and judge from the outside, what these women are doing on the streets of Kabul is extremely courageous, and we must listen to and amplify their voices. For example, women in Kabul used their own lipstick to write on walls with slogans such as “Removing women is removing human beings,” and “My love is going to school.” These actions and words are so powerful and brave that they will have long-lasting effects on Afghans in the country and abroad.

With these emotions of rage, loss, and constant fear on my mind, it is inevitable that they have shaped and will shape how I think and practice in the studio.

> **ME:** Can you talk a little about how this distance and separation from home (place, culture, language) feeds your practice?

**HA:** Lately, I have taken a turn toward narrative in my studio work. I have been thinking a lot about the domestic spaces that Afghans create and are subsequently shaped by. Using textiles as the medium, I search to define, explore, and question these spaces. My work tends to be very figurative because I am drawn to the power of representation—things that are ordinary to our everyday life, such as a passport, a vase, or celebrity postcards. I am thinking here about two works that I recently exhibited at the NADA FAIR 2021, _Still-Life with Papers_ (2021) and _Eight Seated Women_ (2021), both of which drew from my experience of connecting with my relatives in Kabul before the American withdrawal.

Living in the diaspora, I often feel that I live in multiple places at the same time, especially when watching the news about Afghanistan and thinking of my family. Therefore, I have always been interested in how visual translation shapes this in-between space for me. Using the visual vocabulary of popular culture in Afghanistan is a way for me to connect to myself. Including Bollywood postcards in my work beside the figures adds a fantastical space for the figures’ emotions, loves, and inspirations. They create an unknown, imagined space for my characters to escape to. Such elements help me structure not only the material but also the spiritual worlds in my work.

I am always learning about how my personal relations to Afghanistan shape what’s happening in my studio.

> **ME:** What I find fascinating and also admire in your work is your thinking around and illustration of smaller spaces and moments, whether it be the social space that a beauty salon creates or this cordial and introspective moment framed in _Eight Seated Women._ But all of these spaces and moments have witnessed a dramatic change, even the most intimate and private, in the past couple of months. As you remember, in the early days under the Taliban last summer, defaced images of women in public spaces—like the beauty salons in Kabul—were circulating widely. Has this sudden turn added a new meaning to the works you have created for the past couple of years?

**HA:** Those beauty salons and the glamorous posters of women were all torn down or spray-painted, at times by the owners themselves, acting in fear for their own safety. This erasure definitely has long-term effects on society.

In my series _Bazaar: A Recollection of Home_ (2020), which was mounted at T293 gallery in Rome, I focused on the cultural, political, and economic spaces that women carved in Afghan society and used to empower each other, including a number of scenes in beauty salons. I see these projects as archival, as if I documented visual evidence in contemporary history itself, which has changed tremendously for Afghan women now.

The intimate exchanges between my family in Afghanistan and me over the past two years have also brought new perspectives to my work. My series _Spectators of a New Dawn_ (2021) depicts a range of stories and personal accounts that were shared with me by friends and family still living in Afghanistan; I had begun to document conversations with cousins, aunts, and close friends about the possible return of the Taliban regime amid the ongoing US-Taliban peace deal process. They were and are predominantly concerned about maintaining their rights and the progress Afghan women have made in education, employment, and overall in society. I brought my figures to have dialogue both in public settings, such as _Portrait of a Lady in a Cafe or Woman with Red Lipstick_, and in private, as in _Poet or Night Visit_. Using the lens within domestic spaces was also something new to me; I used to consider them to be untouchable, unimportant, or insignificant to talk about, probably because those were the common perceptions that I grew up with.

> **ME:** What is it that draws you to the domestic space?

**HA:** It’s surprising how much public spaces shape our personal ones. As far as I remember, growing up as a young girl in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and later in Tajikistan, I was always surrounded by women, including my cousins and distant relatives. While my father was seeking asylum in Europe, my mother was left to take care of four young children on her own. But she found incredible support in these informal spaces and communities that women had created for each other, wherever we went. And I grew up being shaped by and aware of these spaces’ vital role.

I also think a lot about how Afghan women’s sexuality has always been hidden and confined to the domestic space, and how its expression in public is shameful. What language have I been taught to express my desires and wants through? And what structures and forces are they bound to? Here, I am especially referring to the overwhelming passion for Bollywood movies and Bollywood ideas of love, intimacy, and pleasure, which my mother and my aunts used to admire. On the one hand, these things are strictly private, while on the other hand, we consumed so much media that visualizes them; I find this dual reality fascinating. My aunts would fantasize about being in a relationship like Shah Rukh Khan or Kajol from the film _Kuch Kuch Hota Hai_ (1998). It shaped their understanding of love. My current body of work explores women owning their bedrooms as a space for celebration, healing, laughing, or simply coming together. These domestic spaces present us with glimpses into how the social and cultural boundaries that restrict and shape women’s sexuality are effectively subverted. I see them as a form of self-empowerment practiced on a smaller scale.

> **ME:** In light of all this you have shared, I am curious to know how textiles came to be the primary medium in your practice?

**HA:** My relationship with textile is also closely related to the experience of being around women. Cloth or fabric is very important to me. Growing up in an Afghan household, the first thing my mother taught me was how to sew a running stitch for patching ripped shirts or jeans, or how to stitch a button on a shirt. I remember my sister and my close cousin would find two sticks from outside and wrap them in old cloths to make stick dolls for us to play with at a tea house. It was a very creative process, sewing tiny dresses for our dolls. It was nothing fancy, but those were some of my happiest memories. My mother loved to tailor her dresses, so I grew up observing her.

When I first started, I mostly made paintings. That was partly due to my art education, which was very Eurocentric. I never felt comfortable in painting; deep down, it was missing originality. I felt very removed from it. I somehow felt more connected to the raw canvas itself than filling it with ready-made paint tubes. It took me some time to realize, but that’s how I finally found myself working with textiles as a medium—and also as a subject, in ways.

I work with different types of textiles sourced from New York, Afghanistan, ikat-print fabrics from Uzbekistan or Tajikistan, and punjabi/sarees from India and Pakistan. Being surrounded by a diverse collection of such fabrics also resonates with the world I grew up in as a refugee. Having a variety of them in my pieces is a way for me to unite with my own identity as an Afghan in the diaspora.

> **ME:** I know we all have different relationships to grief, in regard to both expressing and coping with it; have you found any solace in making work?

**HA:** Indeed, I have. My studio has been the only space for me to cope with this continuous grief these days. Keeping my mind and hands active helps me a lot to transform some of the feelings in my work. I’ve also been patient and understanding with my own work and with myself; the creative process has been a very meditative journey for me in the past months.

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Muheb Esmat invites the textile artist Hangama Amiri to reflect on the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban takeover, and the proceeding implications on the meaning of her work—which focuses heavily on feminine worlds both internal and external.

Gham, Private Spheres, and Informal Support Systems: A Conversation with Hangama Amiri

Lois Taylor Biggs is an emerging writer, curator, and art historian of Oklahoma Cherokee, White Earth Ojibwe, and white  
settler descent. She resides on Council of Three Fires homelands  
in Chicago, IL. Lois is currently the Terra Foundation Curatorial Research Fellow at Northwestern University’s  
Block Museum of Art, where she is part of a curatorial team  
developing an exhibition focused on the Indigenous art history of Chicago. She holds a BA in Comparative Literary  
Studies and Art History from Northwestern University, where  
she served as a student leader within the Northwestern University Native American and Indigenous Alliance, and a  
Fulbright-funded MA in Social History of Art from the University  
of Leeds, where she wrote a dissertation on Anishinaabe  
art history as expressed within Robert Houle’s 2010 installation  
Paris/Ojibwa. Her research interests include archival studies,  
Indigenous curatorial practice, and Indigenous art-historical  
methodology. She has published writings on the visual and literary culture of the Alcatraz Occupation in the Columbia University Journal of Politics and Society and presented archival artwork as part of the 2021 Leeds Creative Labs cohort.

The late Cree artist Kimowan Metchewais understood stories through the body. Former Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) curator Liz Park relayed his worldview in a 2014 blog post on the museum website, writing that Metchewais believed some stories are highly visible but “ephemeral and forgettable”—that, like hair, “they grow and are stuck on you, but eventually they’ll fall out and be swept away.”[^1] Others, however, get “etched into your ribcage” and can never be excised. “They stay with you permanently even if they cannot be seen.”[^2]

This haunting formulation reflects Metchewais’s own creative practice. Throughout his career, Metchewais told stories that could not be swept away. He maintained a vast archive of Polaroid images, which he used as material for wall-sized collages, multimedia installations, and other smaller works. These images, which featured places, community members, and the artist himself, enabled him to reflect upon his Cree identity, his relationship to his homelands, and his battle with cancer. Many of Metchewais’s Polaroids archived elements of his body and the bodies of his subjects: hair, hands, bare torsos. He dipped these Polaroids in water dyed tawny brown by tobacco, a sacred substance. In his 2020 _Aperture_ article “Kimowan Metchewais’s Search for Visual Sovereignty,” art historian Christopher Green describes this process as a ceremonial act, citing the artist’s description of well-known collage series _Cold Lake_ (2004–06) as “a kind of prayer.”[^3] Through such ceremonial, material acts, Metchewais blurred the boundaries of the body and the archive for the purpose of healing.

Given the archive’s historic entanglement with colonial violence, what does it mean—and what else might it look like—for Indigenous artists to draw connections between bodies and archives?

The artist described his Polaroid works as “post-Curtis portraits,” referencing the 20th-century photographer whose ethnographic portraits of Native people fed the “vanishing race” trope.[^4] Although many contemporary Indigenous artworks critically restage archival representations such as Curtis’s, Metchewais’s use of a personal archive provides an alternate strategy. Rather than an intervention within an existing archive, the artist saw his practice as an imagining of a post-Curtis world, without “ethnographic baggage.”[^5] Green argues that Metchewais’s approach released him from the “need for intervention, interrogation, and reinscription that typically weighs down some work by contemporary Native photographers who explore the archive as a site of privileged access, subjugation, and colonial violence.”[^6]

As Green’s claim suggests, Metchewais’s personal archival approach opens space for self-determined healing. Photographs taken during the artist’s battle with brain cancer, for instance, document his loss of hair and surgery-induced loss of movement on the left side of his body.[^7] In a set of images titled _Hand Signs_ (undated), he paired photographs of his still-mobile right hand making gestures with the written words “flight,” “touch,” and “open.”[^8] These movements, Green observes, recall neither American Sign Language nor Plains Sign Talk, a form of Indigenous sign language widely appropriated by Boy Scouts and summer-camp programs.[^9] As Metchewais made sense of his changed body, he formed a new language beyond those of appropriation and subjugation.

Indigenous artworks which, like _Hand Signs_, constitute alternative archives, also reveal the stakes of archival misrepresentation. In his 1998 book _Fugitive Poses_, White Earth Ojibwe theorist Gerald Vizenor reflects on representations of Indigenous people within and beyond dominant colonial structures including archives. _Fugitive Poses_ articulates a theory of representation in which the “indian” is a mere simulation of the actual “native,” whose presence manifests in traces beyond the grasp of colonialism.[^10] In the chapter “Penenative Rumors,” Vizenor draws on Derrida to theorize the archive as a structure intent on the “preservation, death, and deconstruction” of the native, making a key equivalence between archival documentation and the disappearance of Indigenous people within the settler-colonial project.[^11] For Vizenor, the archive undermines Indigenous sovereignty. “The Constitution of the United States has not always protected natives from the violations of their right of privacy by federal agents, archaeologists, and social scientists,” he writes. “Various agencies of the federal government, in fact, continue to encourage and subsidize an ‘archive fever’ of research that countermines the native right to be ‘secure in their persons.’”[^12]

In part because of their role in structuring colonial violence, the archive and archival form have become subjects of interest for contemporary artists. In his 2004 article “An Archival Impulse,” critic Hal Foster locates a “will ‘to connect what cannot be connected’” at the heart of contemporary archival practice, linking this drive with Freudian paranoia in the face of historical trauma.[^13] Freud understood paranoia as a projection of ideas which threaten the ego onto the external world, a defence mechanism which enables people to make sense of traumatic experience.[^14] Foster writes that for Freud, “the paranoiac projects meaning onto a world ominously drained of the same.”[^15] Does the archival turn in art, therefore, operate as projection in a world drained of meaning? Or as Foster asks, “why \[would artists seek to\] connect so feverishly if things did not appear so frightfully disconnected in the first place?”[^16]

Importantly, within this frame, Foster characterizes archives as spaces for constructive efforts with broad cultural significance. “\[The\] move to turn ‘excavation sites’ into ‘construction sites,’” he writes, “suggests a shift away from a melancholic culture that views the historical as little more than the traumatic.”[^17] For Indigenous people, the historical and the traumatic are one within the archive, a structure which has undermined our sovereignty by anticipating our disappearance. Our constructive efforts are thus entangled, sometimes inextricably, with our projects of excavation.

While Foster discusses paranoia in terms of contemporary art practice and as a response to cultural trauma, Vizenor shows us that a paranoid logic undergirds oppressive colonial structures, such as archives themselves. The “_indian_ is an archive,” he writes, “which contains the simulations, discoveries, treaties, documents of ancestry, traditions in translation, museum remains, and the aesthetics of victimry.”[^18] From Vizenor’s perspective, colonial archives of Indigenous people—such as Curtis’s photographs—are feverish attempts to remove us from land and displace us from history. They simulate and distort our images and, through this misrepresentation, make our simulated bodies into archival repositories.

As Metchewais notes, some stories are etched into our ribcage.

What do we do with the pain of this etching when the engraving is not our own? Do we construct a new body? Do we rip ourselves open to root out history? When we become an archive against our will, do we take on its paranoia?

In her 2002 book _Touching Feeling_, the theorist Eve Sedgwick attempts to answer a similar set of questions about trauma through a practice she calls “repair.” She positions repair as an alternative to paranoia, a state in which subjects constantly expect the worst. “Because learning of the possibility of a bad surprise would itself constitute a bad surprise,” she writes, “paranoia requires that bad news be always already known.”[^19] The paranoid subject seeks to expose bad news before they can be caught off guard and vulnerable to the pain of further trauma. When they shift from paranoid anticipation to self-determined creation, they move into the reparative position. From this position, Sedg- wick writes, “it is possible to use one’s own resources to assemble or ‘repair’” the fragmented pieces of a paranoid worldview “into something like a whole.”[^20] By offering its creator “nourishment and comfort,” she suggests, repair aids in healing.

One suggestive Foster footnote speaks to archival paranoia in a manner which recalls Sedgwick’s “bad surprises.” He states, “\[P\]erhaps, like the Library of Alexandria, any archive is founded on disaster (or its threat), pledged against a ruin that it cannot forestall.”[^21] Archives, like Sedgwick’s paranoid subjects, anticipate developments that could destroy them—including, as Vizenor suggests, the archive of Indigenous subjugation. This archive seeks to forestall the “ruin” of the colonial project; it pledges itself against the Indigenous presence that threatens to undermine and dismantle it. This dynamic makes reparative archival practice difficult for Indigenous artists. We often find ourselves working against a paranoid medium through paranoid strategies—the “intervention, interrogation, and reinscription” that Green describes in _Aperture_.[^22] Our intimate familiarity with the violence of archives primes us not only to anticipate further trauma, but also to wield these strategies against ourselves. We challenge, but remain trapped within, a structure that wounds.

Repair is an appealing exit from the trap of intervention. It offers a healing balm that moves beyond the grain of paranoid structures such as the colonial archive, a chance to create a comforting whole out of historical fragments. It is not, however, without risks. Sedgwick’s juxtapositions—paranoia and repair, good and bad, pain and comfort—suggest to some a world of neat, easily solvable dualities. Understood in this way, repair threatens to act out reconciliation: a pre-emptive tying-up of loose ends that enables continued rending.

Indigenous healing and artistic practice cannot, and should not, be oversimplified. We are constantly making sense of our bodies in relation to the body of the colonial archive, finding the wounds and stemming the blood. These efforts are painful; they are also often transformative.

Perhaps there is a word, or many words, for such a visceral practice. We see its traces in Metchewais’s 2002 installation _Without Ground_ and Duane Linklater’s 2014 response _It means it is raining_, both of which envision the material body in—and of—the archive as a site for healing.

To create _Without Ground_, Metchewais transferred self-portraits onto the walls of the ICA.[^23] In this work, the white walls of the gallery space become a deft visual synecdoche for colonial structures. Metchewais’s self-portraits, coloured and faded to create an illusion of depth, searched the museum walls for clues to a crime: “the theft of Indigenous land evoked by the installation’s title.”[^24] While its forensic framing carries paranoid echoes, the work’s tactility recalls construction and repair. “Treating the walls of the museum as the ‘ribcage of a living animal,’” Green writes, Metchewais “felt that his photographs were like ‘tattoos etched onto the bones of the beast.’”[^25] The artist anticipated their burial within the institution’s architectural memory, covered by future layers of accumulated paint. Metchewais intermingled his body with the museum’s to make him- self a permanent Indigenous presence at the ICA, mediating between the paranoid archival impulse to connect and the reparative archival impulse to construct. He etched a story into the bones of an archival body and, in doing so, rewrote the story of absence on his own bones.

Twelve years later, and three years after Metchewais’s 2011 death, the ICA invited Linklater to respond to _Without Ground_ as part of the institution’s 50th-anniversary programming.[^26] In the project titled _It means it is raining_, Linklater removed layers of paint from the ICA walls in an effort to recover Metchewais’s self-portraits.[^27] This excavation is a succinct critique of Indigenous erasure within contemporary art spaces as well as a moving uncovering of the personal “traces left behind” by Metchewais, an artistic gesture with a provocative archival dimension.[^28] Although Linklater did not succeed in revealing Metchewais’s figures, his efforts are visible on the gallery walls as a series of grey and yellow craters. Linklater’s project, which encompasses elements of excavation, construction, and repair, speaks to an archival healing that moves beyond these practices. Like Metchewais’s Polaroid archive, Linklater broke open the body of the colonial archive to build a connection between Indigenous lives.

The works of Metchewais and Linklater transform our understanding of what an archive is, how it wounds and breathes and heals. The ICA employee who relayed Metchewais’s understanding of stories as hair and bones wrote that “Metchewais’s words make me look at the walls \[of the museum\] differently—as vessels containing stories that fundamentally structure how we, as curators, artists, administrators, and visitors, are shaped within this living, organic system.”[^29] For Metchewais and Linklater, the archive is a living body. Through artistic practice, they etched permanent stories into its walls—into its ribcage.

[^1]: “Denouement,” Institute of Contemporary Art, accessed May 16, 2021, https://icaphila.org/posts/denouement/.
[^2]: Ibid.
[^3]: Christopher Green, “Kimowan Metchewais’s Search for Visual Sovereignty,” _Aperture_, September 24, 2020, https://aperture.org/editorial/kimowan-metchewaiss-search-for-visual-sover-eignty/.
[^4]: Ibid.
[^5]: Ibid.
[^6]: Ibid.
[^7]: Ibid.
[^8]: Ibid.
[^9]: Ibid.
[^10]: Gerald Vizenor, _Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence_ (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 25.
[^11]: Vizenor, 50.
[^12]: Vizenor, 59.
[^13]: Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” _October_ 110 (2004), 21, www.jstor.org/stable/3397555.
[^14]: “Paranoia,” Freud Museum London, accessed February 6, 2022, www.freud.org.uk/exhibitions/
[^15]: Foster, 21.
[^16]: Foster, 22.
[^17]: Foster, 22.
[^18]: Vizenor, 50 (emphasis in original).
[^19]: Eve Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” in _Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity_ (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 130.
[^20]: Sedgwick, 128.
[^21]: Foster, 5.
[^22]: Green.
[^23]: Ibid.
[^24]: Ibid.
[^25]: Ibid.
[^26]: “Duane Linklater: It means it is raining / Kimowan McLain: Without Ground (2002),” Institute of Contemporary Art, accessed May 16, 2021, https://icaphila.org/exhibitions/duane-linklater-it-means-it-is-raining-kimowan-mclain-without-ground-2002/.
[^27]: “Duane Linklater, It means it is raining, June 25–August 17, 2014, ICA, Philadelphia, USA,” accessed May 16, 2021, https://catrionajeffries.com/artists/duane-linklater/exhibitions/it-means-it-is-raining-june-25-august-17-2014.
[^28]: “It means it is raining,” Institute of Contemporary Art, accessed May 16, 2021, https://icaphila.org/exhibitions/it-means-it-is-raining/.
[^29]: “Denouement.”

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Indigenous

Archives, Bones, and Polaroids

Letter

##### Dear C,

Maps that confront me daily are deeply disappointing. Disappointing to the point of tears. To make them work, you and I are obliged to surrender not just our locations, but _every bit_ of ambient data that is available when we activate phones, browsers, watches… Further to that point, Sophia Arnold quotes Vladan Joler’s _New Extractivism_ in “Mapping the Black Box”:

> “Traditional colonial practices of control over critical assets, trade routes, natural resources and exploitation of human labor are still deeply embedded in the contemporary supply chains, logistics, and assembly lines of digital content, products and infrastructure.”

I have unmapped rage for the way maps continue to create unregulated and exploitative worlds.

So, I am writing to say _thank you_ for countering that reality, and for supplanting it with other possibilities. A standout for me is Maureen Gruben’s _We all have to go someday. Do the best you can. Love one another_ (2019)—a map on stretched deer hide that uses knotted thread and punched holes to materialize the angiogram of the artist’s father, and as an echo of caribou migrations on the land. Recently, I have left numerous diagnostic maps of my body in oncology labs. Gruben’s vision makes me wonder: do these maps carry traces of others on the land?

In “Directions to BUSH Gallery,” the counter-map that Leah Decter and Tania Willard propose for teaching ethical “guest-host relations and \[for\] visiting as \[a\] non-colonial/decolonial activation” is an invitation to practice travel and residency with intention. The map that Decter and Willard cite is a 1910 land-rights document from the Chiefs of the Secwepémc, Syilx, and Nlaka’pamux Nations. The Chiefs’ text speaks directly to persistent colonial deception:

> “The Queen’s law which we believe guaranteed us our rights, the British Columbia government has trampled underfoot. This is how our guests have treated us—the brothers we received hospitably in our house.”

In Valeria Luiselli’s _Lost Children Archive_, which I am currently reading, a family is traveling to the Mexico-United States border from New York without GPS technology. They frequently get lost. In the section “Map,” the narrator-author inserts a description of how she needs to explain the concept of “refugee” to a five-year-old. She wonders if she should tell the girl about how time and insecurity are demanded of those seeking asylum. Luiselli describes how systemic inhospitality is mapped everywhere.

Thank you for printing maps that, instead, knot hospitality to the land.

##### Lois Klassen

• • •

##### Dear C Magazine,

While reading Coco Zhou’s “Octavia E. Butler on Mars,” and Lera Kotsyuba’s “Star Stories and Indigenous Resistance Against Light Pollution,” I thought back to when I first learned about redshift and blueshift. In astronomy, redshift and blueshift refer to changes in light frequency that allow astronomers to deduce whether objects in space are moving toward or away from Earth. That entire galaxies (including our own) are in constant motion, was a revelation to me on two fronts.

Firstly: our galaxy’s stillness, which I had implicitly taken for granted, was an illusion. The second revelation was that an analogy I often use in my writing and community mapping work to describe the various Black diasporic communities I grew up around was more accurate than I had thought. I often refer to African diasporas as constellations or superclusters—a collection of communities and peoples always on the move, and colliding in sometimes traumatic or mutually edifying processes that transform their environments and each other. The ongoing reverberations of these movements (not unlike those of vast astronomical bodies) directly result from the violence of many displacements and dispossessions. Though enduring, these reverberations are often difficult to fully perceive due to the demarcation of space and the temporal division between past and present under colonial cartographies. This difficulty allows us to forget that we are still being pulled toward and away from each other by the gravitational force of these reverberations, sometimes to our detriment.

It is somewhat ironic, but also exciting, that maps are being taken up as a tool of anti-colonial resistance by Black and Indigenous activists, writers, scholars, and artists. Their cartographic practices effectively and affectively chart the reverberations of ongoing displacement and dispossession, while resisting the kind of oppressive fixity that has been imposed on their communities. In ad- dressing white supremacist and colonial notions of time and space, these maps trace counter-logics that fundamentally undermine any illusion of spatiotemporal stillness. In other words, countermapping charts and therefore allows us to more fully perceive the cosmic shifts on Earth that guide our existence.

##### Adwoa Afful

• • •

##### Dear C Magazine,

Thank you for including Kat Benedict’s article on Queering the Map (QTM) in C150.

Through my lived experience as a newly-out queer woman living in Canada, I was, in the words of Sara Ahmed, “oriented” toward QTM. Opening the QTM website for the first time, one immediately encounters a world map inundated with clusters of opaque black pins which, when zoomed out, obscure the map beneath them. As Benedict notes, “LaRochelle focuses on the act of disorientation, contrasted against many cartographic and phenomenological studies whose priority is orientation.” Does the disorientation we feel while navigating QTM mimic the disorienting feeling of being queer in the world? Definitely. So, I find myself asking: what is to be said of feeling momentarily lost while simultaneously finding community online? This, I would argue, is how QTM undoes the legacy of colonial maps.

In _Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity_, José Esteban Muñoz states that queerness resembles being lost. Through my own recent life events, I have become aware of what is strange and what is familiar to me, as well as where I might feel lost. Navi- gating QTM’s website also causes users to become temporarily lost; regions become obscured by black pins, or the site lags when loading, creating blank voids of pixelated earth. However, the project as a whole invites its users, followers, and contributors to take part in the queer community it honours. It encourages users to orient themselves, if only for a moment, toward a global online community they perhaps never knew existed.

##### Catriona Reid

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Letters reflecting on Issue 150 “Maps.”

Letters

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Publisher

Designer

Editor

Artist Project

Nya Lewis’s hybrid interdisciplinary practice is a culmination of centuries of resistance, questions, and actions rooted in the theorization of Black cultural production. She is an MFA candidate, the year-round programmer at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival, a Research Assistant at the Centre for the Study of Black Canadian Diaspora, and an independent curator currently serving as Guest Curator at UBC Museum of Anthropology and grunt gallery.

The world has already begun to spin the grief of the last two years into a heroic tale of resilience. As a society we return to the compounded reckoning with anti-Blackness as a site of reflection and departure from what we considered a show of our worst. We’ve come to tout the spirit of our resistance, our communal drive for justice, our relentless search for the light at the end of the tunnel. When we recall the last two years, we will speak of the tireless endurance of Black communities, the indelible aspects of this uniquely difficult time, the sacrifices made, and the magnitude of the loss endured. I add, both in defence and critique of Black resilience, a reference to the hopeless, despairing, passionate grief that found a powerful and healing presence in rage. In _an inheritance_, Nigerian-Canadian, Ottawa-based artist Kosisochukwu Nnebe reclaims Afro-diasporic histories of rebellion by confronting the potential of rage to destroy and construct.

As a Black queer woman, I admit that the term grief carries an air of unfamiliarity and privilege. My Trinidadian grandmother had a saying for times of inexplicable sorrow: “Put grief in your pocket”—as if to note its uselessness and its tethered nature. I am oblivious to any true meaning of grief, but far too aware of its connotations. Grief and its complexities felt unavailable to me, missing from the cultural narratives that grounded my intersectionality. I understood there was no linear Kübler-Ross five- or six-stage process, no successful completion of grieving prescribed for Black folks like me. I consider Dionne Brand’s articulation of the pandemic of anti-Blackness—the ever-revolving state of grief—and its inextricable link to racism, sexism, homophobia, marginalization, violence, and oppression.[^1] Caught in a cycle of irresolution (mourn, rage, survive), I inherited a persistent grief, inveterate and disenfranchised. It feels foreign and then again too familiar to name. It is, for me, trite, par for the course, and in no uncertain terms a contradiction—unwanted and vital, mine and borrowed. In my attempts to define and understand my consuming grief, I examine the ways in which we realize and absorb devastation. If anti-Blackness is unrelenting, does rage for Black communities become synonymous with a deferred, ceaseless grief? I lean on the grief that is made alive in bell hooks’s demarcation of Black rage and Black deprivation as a vehicle for transformative revolutionary action,[^2] and in Lucille Clifton’s characterization of the luxury of forgetfulness for “Black and going on women.”[^3] I believe this distinctive persistent grief has shaped the potential for critical consciousness and commitment to justice.

Nnebe’s photo series positions rage as a necessary aspect of resistance for communities in constant mediation of racism. Her practice makes use of phenomenology as a methodology with which to work through themes of racialization, diasporic experience, and epistemic violence and restitution. Nnebe’s work speculates opacity (that which is undecipherable, hidden) and transparency (that which is legible, hypervisible) as mechanisms to obfuscate, transform, and reveal new ways of seeing and understanding.[^4] _an inheritance_ turns to cassava—a crop native to South America that became an important food source for people of African descent in the Caribbean and on the continent through the Columbian exchange. A naturally poisonous root vegetable, cassava became, for some enslaved Africans and Indigenous people, a weapon with which to poison enslavers and colonialists. For those who made use of it in this way, it was the ultimate rejection of a world order premised on their dehumanization, their way of asserting their agency and subjectivity both covertly and revolutionarily. Nnebe mocks the societally ingrained, repetitive process of grieving, inviting Black audiences to confront the persistence of grief in “relation to the complexities of Blackness and the historical _by any means necessary_ rhetoric.”[^5] Black rage is made visible, constructively defying Black victimization and passivity.

_an inheritance_ depicts a step-by-step process for producing the cassava poison. Employing visual performance, image making, and narrative text, the vignette subtly reveals a dynamic interplay of retaliation and monotonous regularity. _Cut, peel, grate, wring, putrefy, harvest, dry, powder, and load. The subject packs the cassava under their thumbnail_. Historically, the poison from cassava was transferred from the thumbnail to the drink or meal of the person being poisoned. The insinuated performance ending functions as a phantom mark of exacerbation, and a defiant articulation of rage, memorializing the significance of the silent threat. In a world where Black and African people are incentivized to suppress rage, Nnebe captures an instance of “simmering rage”[^6] as a catalyst to reclaim Black emotional subjectivity. She manipulates grief as a legible and edifying practice of retribution. _an inheritance_ asks us: in what ways must our rage be deliberately hidden, veiled, and choked down? In what ways can embracing this rage destroy those things which no longer (and never did) serve us and point us toward alternative courses of action, ones that create new possibilities for living?[^7]

Living in the dissolving aftermath of 2020 is a new grief all its own. In my pocket I’m carrying the emotional manipulation, hurt, and rage from the veils of resolution and progress. I’m carrying Anique Jordan’s words, _we have done enough_,[^8] Ravyn Wngz’s calls to disarm, dismantle, demilitarize, destabilize,[^9] and Clifton’s “Black and going on women.” I am learning that for me grief is everyday dejection and anti-Black racism. Grief is not just a model for resistance but an obligatory condition.

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Kosisochukwu Nnebe’s photographs depict the historic use of cassava as a poison wielded by African-descended and Indigenous people living in the Caribbean. In the accompanying text, guest curator Nya Lewis explores how Nnebe’s images reclaim “Black emotional subjectivity” by “constructively defying Black victimization and passivity.”

an inheritance by Kosisochukwu Nnebe: Text

Kosisochukwu Nnebe is a Nigerian-Canadian visual artist whose work has been exhibited at AXENEO7, the Montreal Museum of Fine  
Arts, Place des Arts, the Art Gallery of Guelph, the Nia Centre for the Arts, Studio Sixty Six, Z Art Space, Station 16, and the Mohr Gallery. She has given presentations at universities across Quebec.

Artist

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an inheritance

Review

Žana Kozomora is an emerging curator, artist, and writer. She is completing a Master of Visual Studies in Curatorial Studies degree at the University of Toronto.

Throughout the ’50s, a hydroelectric dam and artificial lake were constructed in Cornwall, ON, as a part of the St. Lawrence Seaway project. “Radiant Temperature of Openings” documents this transformation of the land. Despite referencing archival material, the exhibition’s historiography is not didactic. Instead, the anxious suture between data and memory is privileged over any linear chronology. There is no monument to the icon of supposed progress here—the hydroelectric dam. Rather, in the dam’s shadow, the artists present an inquiry into the logic that supports such infrastructure projects.

Upon entering the gallery space, three quaint oil paintings depict perspectives from a shoreline gazing out to bodies of water. According to the exhibition’s printed list of works, the undated oil paintings are titled _Long Sault Rapids_ and painted by John Brownell, J.E. Crother, Jane Firn, and Dorothy Phelps, and represent the former rapids that vanished after the dam’s construction. The paintings rest on a fabricated wooden structure painted in white, as if to emulate their desired orientation on the walls of the gallery space it imitates, but from which they are displaced. Hovering on the structure’s platform above these works is an installation titled _Demolition of former Customs Buildings, Cornwall Island, Ontario_ (2015). In this installation, a surveillance camera is fixed on a heap of photographs depicting abandoned office and storage spaces. The movement of my fingers sorting through the photographs is displayed by a small analogue monitor wedged underneath the same structure. The looped image of my rummaging elicits in me a self-conscious impulse to reorder the photographs as I found them, as if the camera determined the objects as a fixed orientation—on walls, inside archives—that becomes loosened throughout the exhibition.

The abandoned buildings featured in the photographs are images of former Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) buildings located on Cornwall Island. Demolished in 2015, the defunct buildings signified a visible site of conflict between police and the Mohawks of Akwesasne, whose rights of passage across the St. Lawrence Seaway under the 1794 Jay Treaty have been ignored by colonial policy since the drawing of the Canada-US border. Although the CBSA buildings may no longer be physically present on Cornwall Island, the colonial border has deepened through the weaponized patrol of movement. Another analogue monitor positioned nearby on the floor screens _Untitled (Under the St. Lawrence River)_, an undated video depicting remnants of the flooded land. Forgoing the detailed labelling of coordinates and dates that frame data in an institutional archive, these images blur distinctions between data legitimized as fact and data labelled as memory, to highlight how colonial law constructs the former category to expropriate land, and dismisses the latter to undermine Indigenous sovereignty.

Surveillance continues to permeate the gallery space in the form of measurement. Architectural drawings of various built structures (including rooms in a home and a schoolhouse) sourced from the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) archives present a kind of map for the wood cribs that were ignited as part of the 1958 St. Lawrence Burns project, which was coordinated to dispose of properties prior to the flooding of the land that formed the St. Lawrence Seaway. A replica wood crib is also included in the exhibition as an undated installation. Titled _Wood Crib_, the installation recalls the possibility of fire as a destructive force—a force that could extend to the surrounding archives of colonialism, as a reminder of how data itself can be destroyed and compiled, again and again. Behind the crib are excerpted pages of empirical observations from the NRC 1959 _Saint Lawrence Burns General Report_. The observations trace the path of fire, heat, and smoke emanating from a burning structure on the brink of collapse.

As if between a state of assembly and ruin, the walls of the back gallery are lined with wooden house framing. _Saint Lawrence Burns_ (2021), a video compiled from the NRC’s 1958 archival footage of the fires, is projected onto a built wall in the centre of the room. The film documents crowds of men gathering to observe the licks of red flame and thick smoke that escape through the windows and doors of houses that become skeletal against the cold white of a winter landscape. The burning structures suggest the titular “radiant temperature of openings”—a measurement for the intensity of heat emitted from those openings in a burning building that pose a risk of fire in adjacent structures. The exhibition resists fixing the viewer in a time capsule, and instead melds the logic of data collection with material memory to highlight the violence required by ongoing projects of colonial infrastructure. The coordinated investment between the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario, military defense bodies, and related government agencies forced a reshaping of land. Empirical data that documents this reshaping was likely disseminated to insurance and demolition companies. Under the motivations of science, profit, safety, and risk assessment, the pursuit of colonial progress overwrites the right of the Mohawks of Akwesasne to move across their territories. As an expansive installation, “Radiant Temperature of Openings” prompts a consideration of the insidious colonial logics at play in these operations of government policy.

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“Radiant Temperature of Openings” included work by Faraz Anoushahpour,  
Parastoo Anoushahpour, and Ryan Ferko, and ran from 28 August to 20 November 2021 at Hamilton Artists Inc.

“Radiant Temperature of Openings” — Faraz Anoushahpour, Parastoo Anoushahpour, Ryan Ferko

Sam Weselowski is a poet and critic from Vancouver, Canada. He resides in the UK.

Entering the gallery-cum-consulate at Canada House is not unlike passing through airport security, the guard informs me. First, I’m required to book tickets online or by QR code, which involves several sweaty minutes on Eventbrite while standing in the vestibule. I’m next instructed to place my belongings in a plastic tub that will pass through a baggage scanner, then walk through the archway metal detector. The guard gives me a good-natured “Thank you” and opens the reinforced glass doors that lead to the satellite extension of “Artery,” a new exhibition by Montreal-born, London-based artist Allison Katz.

Canada House represents something like the frontier garrison for “Artery,” which is more centrally anchored at Camden Art Centre. The four walls just beyond the security detail feature a selection of posters Katz has designed for just about every show she’s ever participated in. These images display not only her attraction toward the optics of advertising, but how those ways of seeing have framed and ultimately shaped her artistic practice. At the same time, the posters function as an autobiographical record, visually documenting the different contexts and geographies in which Katz’s oeuvre has appeared. Navigating the Canadian consulate’s screening protocols feels essential to viewing this archive of posters and to “Artery” more broadly, as though experiencing a miniaturized version of national border security at a gallery were some kind of participatory gesture on Katz’s part. The poster, that exemplar of informational conveyance, has been ensconced within multiple layers of digital and government administration. Put differently, the Canada House portion of “Artery” distils the wider exhibition’s key thematics, whereby Katz investigates the ways in which aesthetic practices link—if not absorb—autobiography, commodity culture, and the infrastructures of urban and geopolitical space.

About 8 km north of Canada House, Camden Art Centre sees “Artery” in its second iteration, as the exhibition originally took place at Nottingham Contemporary in 2021\. That many of the same artworks appear here as they did there is only one aspect of their continuity. Indeed, what magnetizes these installations is Katz’s sharp eye for urban environments. The Nottingham Contemporary show spilled over into the nearby City of Caves, a network of tunnels variously used as public-house cellars and World War II-era air-raid shelters. At Camden Art Centre, “Artery” stretches out toward Canada House while burrowing into the gallery space, as in the trompe l’oeil painting _Elevator III (Camden Art Centre)_ (2021) that has been positioned on the wall behind the lift, as though back to back with it, to both mirror and distort the building’s inner passages. Elsewhere, Katz’s infrastructural images, such as the scaffolds and waterways in _Nottingham Canal, 11th March 2020_ (2021), serve as foils for her borderline surrealist ones, such as _The Cockfather_ (2021). The competing senses of the exhibition’s title are stark: with images of bridges, roads, and elevators, “Artery” names the ambient environments that underpin daily life, whereas paintings centred on gooey animals and serrated teeth suggest an association that’s emphatically biological if not outright alien.

Katz also jams these connotations together. The most striking example of this is a series of paintings mounted on free-standing slabs, arranged in a flying-V formation. Each is framed by gaping mouths, whose ripples of enamel and gums toggle between visual perspective and point of consumption while also evoking a sense of erotic proximity or potential violence. Aimed at the licorice-braided rooster of _Stage Cock_ (2021) or the translucent feline of _Alley Cat_ (2020), Katz’s mouths synthesize distinct kinds of sensory experience—taste and sight—just as much as they allude to the wordplay that underwrites her work—cats for Katz. The reverse sides of these slabs showcase a painted series of cabbages. Vegetables are a strangely effective synecdoche for the associative shocks in “Artery”; Katz highlights how their fractal structure uncannily reproduces in leafy form both the capillaries of contemporary cityscapes and human bodies alike.

In _Ssik_ (2020), the mouth is an aperture through which our gaze passes (like the metal detector at Canada House), arriving at two faces poised between exchanging a kiss or whisper. Squinting at their pale cheeks, the faintest inscription can be seen: “Katz” materializes from the left-hand face, while I can just make out “ck” emerging from the oral commissure on the right. Here, “Katz” is not so much an authorial signature as a brand name, that engine of cultural capital, and has been planted within intimacy’s close quarters. With _M.A.S.K._ (2021) you see a similar immersion in consumer culture, where Katz recreates Steven Meisel’s ad for Miu Miu that she starred in last year. In Meisel’s photograph, Katz sits on what resembles a weathered yoga mat, surrounded by fruit, shuttlecocks, and a spiky massage ball, while the lines of her fingers counterpose the folds of her luxury handbag. Katz’s mouth is only a few millimeters open, her facial expression frozen and inscrutable, mask-like. Aside from the pink fissures and veiny blues that dominate the pictorial field, Katz’s version includes more subtle changes too. The room appears somehow more spacious than Meisel’s set, yet the articulation of the walls gives the impression that she’s cornered. In some ways she is: the boundary between self-portrait and consumer spectacle has been broken, and in its wake Katz presents herself as an object of consumption. Contrariwise, the mouth produces a kind of perspectival overload, metonymizing the camera, Meisel’s gaze, our gaze, and even Katz’s gaze, this last being directed back at all the others. The painting reconstructs commercial advertising only to suspend its logic.

Katz ultimately elicits some baseline questions about aesthetic pleasure: how do we distinguish or safeguard our enjoyment of earthly possessions from the sensory conditions of capital? How do we experience desire as not just another extraction? In addressing this dilemma, Katz’s construction of consumer spectacle as an autobiographical form doesn’t simply soak the latter with the former, but rather places them in dialectical unease. At the same time, Katz underscores that the antagonism between aesthetic pleasure and commodity culture needs to be understood as part of a broader mosaic of urban infrastructure and border security. “Artery” ends where it begins, with the viewer set adrift inside a circulatory system of cabbage veins, city streets, body scanners, and toothy caverns.

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“Artery” ran from 14 January to 25 March 2022 at Camden Art Centre, London and Canada House, London.

“Artery” — Allison Katz

Olivia Michiko Gagnon is Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at UBC, where she is currently working on her first book manuscript about closeness in minoritarian art and performance.

I am the only person in the Belkin Art Gallery on this particularly rainy weekday afternoon––a fact that I will become grateful for, because Laiwan’s work gives the most when you take your time. Specifically, the works on display are insistent in their demand that we refocus our attention onto the formal architectures that produce knowledge and transmit meaning. With equal attention given to print and lens-based media, her structural interventions both reveal and disrupt the way form sometimes recedes from view––concealing the force of its ideological frame, its forceful shaping of perception according to colonial, imperial, or otherwise hegemonic logics. But through aesthetic practices of overlay, translation, redaction, and juxtaposition, Laiwan slows down our encounter, renders seemingly known documents, images, or forms strange once more, brings occluded narratives or possibilities into sight, or else asks us to weave new poetic meaning from a set of reassembled traces. In short, we are invited––demanded, even––to _look_ otherwise, with a renewed perception that searches beneath and between what might appear to be simply at hand, dangerously unthought. And _that_ takes time. What becomes evident to me as I walk through the gallery is just how careful, extensive, and expansive this exploration of Laiwan’s has been: “Traces, Erasures, Resists” spans work from over 20 years and an array of media including: 35 mm slides, 16 mm film, analogue video, printmaking, writing, poetry, drawing, collage, photography, and sound. The exhibition also makes clear how Laiwan’s artistic practice has always been in conversation with and grounded in her community and activist work, as well as her commitments to Vancouver’s artist-run centres.

The 1992 installation _distance of distinct vision/point éloigné de vision claire_ lines the walls of the gallery’s first room with serialized photographs accompanied by poetic text fragments in both English and French. Also printed in book form, this work draws its name from what the wall text describes as the “optic principle of depth and the distance it takes a subject to come into focus.” Unlike colonial and imperial modes of narration and representation that seek to fix the other’s meaning through capture, or else through the kind of distancing that enables fantasies of objectivity, Laiwan uses distance––established through the tight crop of an image, indirect language, or translation––as a resistant ethics through which the viewer’s access is mediated, even as multiple possibilities are kept alive through the unexpected interplay of text and image. One black-and-white photograph features a field of spiky trees, mostly their sharp foliage in clusters, reaching upward toward sky. Beneath, the words “‘I have put aside my agenda for you’ she said / «J’ai mis de côté mon programme pour toi» dit-elle” have me searching for a hidden she in the image’s margins, perhaps just out of sight, even as a toi circles around the trees’ grove. Meanings, here, are both open and withheld and made anew. Meanwhile, on the far wall, the 35 mm slide projection _African Notes Parts 1 and 2_ (1983/2020) clicks through images taken of an independent Zimbabwe in 1982, the year Laiwan returned for the first time since her family had migrated to Canada. A poetic spoken text accompanies some of these images, inviting viewer-listeners into a soporific and always-partial witnessing of sites overlaid with histories of indigeneity, colonialism, and resistance.

This sense of mediated witnessing and strategic intervention into grammars of signification comes to the fore in the next room, where redacted pages from a Chinese-to-English dictionary are pinned to the wall. _AGILE_ (2021) is the latest iteration of the series _dotting like flatheads: this is the english I learn_ (1996–). The pages of _AGILE_ sway gently––almost ghostlike––as my moving body makes the air move around them.

In this, they seem almost to defy the sticky heaviness of the whiteout that Laiwan has used to carefully carve out poetic fragments––moments of translation that reveal the malleability of sense-making and the resistant possibilities of playing in and with language. Meanwhile, on the far wall, early experiments with obfuscating overlays render the textured pastel works _Writing on Writing #1_ and _#2_ (1980–81). Hypnotic and disorienting in their heavy layers of scribbled colour, both works refer to and constantly evade meaning, as they turn symbol into shape, and signification into a set of seductive––if sometimes frustrating––densities. These densities are echoed in Working text diary (1986), which displays four copies of _Great Mysteries of Vanished Civilizations_ upon which small gestural markings (here in acrylic paint) have blotted out entire pages. Intervening in the materiality of the colonial book, these aesthetic traces simultaneously alter this text’s violent inscriptions and call attention to the erasures inherent within its anthropological narrative of disappearance.

This (in some ways) retrospective holds so much more than I could ever detail here, but I am left in awe of Laiwan’s complex unfolding of concealment’s sometimes opposing political valences, the way she asks us to perceive absence and presence together as twinned shadows of one another, and how she probes the explosive, anti-colonial, and minoritarian force of formal intervention. One way of parsing her precise offer, then, might be as a politics of writing and image making that attends to gaps and leaves them open, refuses fixity through a recombinant poetics, and slows us to a pace and shape and feel of reading and looking that allows something else––not yet known––to come into view. This might be the embodied swell of anti-imperial resistance, or how to jam an oppressive representational regime, or the complex feel of living in translation, or the pleasurable rush of a self partially withheld or brought to the fore in a new expansive shape so as to momentarily shatter this same self’s constraints.

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“Traces, Erasures, Resists” ran from 7 January to 10 April 2022 at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver. Guest curated by Amy Kazymerchyk.

“Traces, Erasures, Resists” — Laiwan

Sophia Larigakis is writer and editor from Vancouver living in Brooklyn, NY.

“Somewhere in the distance something hurts.”

This refrain runs through Jenny Hval’s poem “Amphibious, Androgynous,” one of the many texts that make up the expansive catalogue _Sex Ecologies_, which accompanies the titular exhibition at Kunsthall Trondheim in Norway. _Somewhere in the distance something hurts_. This grammar is a distancing of its own through language; it is barely in the third person, as there is no person here, no subject, barely a discernible object—instead a distillation of pure feeling. Paradoxically, this remoteness (grammatical, stated) alludes to an unlikely connectivity. In Hval’s terms, distance is not a barrier to shared experience but rather an improbable site of identification. Here feeling dismantles the twin presumptions of skin as enclosure and time/space as diluting force. This is the electric shock of recognition: that second-hand pain is sharper than anticipated, when the distant wail of a siren is suddenly obliteratingly close. The surprise of proximity, of our entanglement and thus implication and vulnerability within an impossibly vast ecosystem, is at the core of _Sex Ecologies_.

This volume is an exhibition catalogue in name only. In addition to artworks by, among others, Okwui Okpokwasili and Jes Fan, its contents span nearly every type of text imaginable: poetry, literary diegesis, archival texts, essays, and annotations. Its topics encompass, among many others, queerness, disability, racialization, agriculture, sex, decay, fleshy fruit, polyamory, indigeneity, and toxicity. There is none of the jargon-heavy, solipsistic, and unreadable academic and art-historical pandering quintessential to the genre. Contrary to the purported form of an exhibition “accompaniment,” the best art books can stand alone; they do not simply categorize the work within a dominant canon or historical narrative, but rather question the construction and validity of such accounts altogether. _Sex Ecologies_ achieves this and more.

Just as _Sex Ecologies_ is expansive in form, it expands definitions of aliveness and the erotic to draw out new relationships to the world. Sentience and subjectivity— key to what is defined as alive, for whom a life is allowed to “matter”—are acknowledged in forms and species often denied, at the altar of capital, feeling or intent. The erotic here pushes beyond the bounds of heteroromantic tropes to constitute a desirous relationship with that which is “outside” of us. It is even, as revealed in several texts, a mode by which pleasure can be taken back from under colonialism and its attendant traumas. Astrida Neimanis’s “Toxic Love” unfurls as both a close reading of and love letter to a place: the Windermere Basin in Ontario. This land, first held by Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and other Indigenous peoples, then decimated by industrial colonialism, is now the subject of an imperfect restoration effort (that is, an attempt to suck the poison from a wound that has long scabbed over). Neimanis is in thrall— _toxic love_ — with this place, and her prose reflects this through an erotic poetics. In the basin, “tall grasses are stirring, alive against \[her\] legs.” The wildlife here is “panting,” the gravel’s edge “butch,” the creek stained with “the chartreuse ejaculation of early autumn pollen.” Certainly our language is limited when vitality can be signalled only through anthropomorphic terms, yet by radically extending this lexicon it is still possible, the book suggests, to confound and blur the violent classifications contrived by capitalism for the purposes of subjugation. Subjectivity is a privilege, and by recognizing it in other beings—through forms of aliveness, eroticism—we can move forward in solidarity. Only then are we forced to reckon with our mutual responsibility to, and inextricability from, our tangled ecosystem.

In “Safous and Other Fruits of the Future,” Anna Tje builds upon her existing “poetic mythology” of so-called _exotic_ fruits, thinking through the ways in which these plants can serve as both examples of and metonyms for the exploitative global circulation of those deemed commodities under capitalism. This focus, she writes, “makes me face the tragedies of importation, immigration, and deportation of Black bodies rooting from the social and geopolitical structures of slavery and colonialism: economies of exhaustion that continue to abuse.” Embodying in her poetry the safou and its existential and cross-continental journeys, Tje takes on multiple subjectivities. The author is watching the fruit-bearing tree both from the semantic distance of the third person—“the rain hammers her every day for two months”—and as part of a collective, a chorus— “this is the time when our leaves are the freshest / when our flowers bloom before our fruits.” This multiplicity breaks down the sacrosanct boundaries of identity and body, at once undermining the notions of selfhood as hermetically sealed, the integrity of the skin, and other foundational border myths.

“Only when a boundary materializes can it become a site for transgression,” writes Elvia Wilk in her essay “This Compost.” Throughout this volume, the naturalized borders and categorizations that constitute the blood-soaked heart of racial capitalism are repeatedly revealed to be dangerous constructions. As editor Stefanie Hessler denotes in her introduction, nature is “a category used to lower the status of those who haven’t ‘extracted themselves sufficiently’ from the realm of necessity and dependence on nature.” The exploitative practices of industrial agriculture and resource extraction are justified, authors including Neimanis and Léuli Eshrāghi underline, through the same hierarchical paradigm used to delineate certain beings as “less human” and thus deserving of colonization, enslavement, and imprisonment. Resistance, as ever, comes only through solidarity. Yet if “human” is a dominant category weaponized to delineate who or what is worthy of embodiment, freedom, and a life lived, then this solidarity must extend not only to members of our species, but to every being in this world that is exploited under our current economic conditions.

The intimacy of the world—of our ties, elective or otherwise—is, in our current imaginary, scary and overwhelming. These links make us vulnerable to loss, to feeling, to the shock of recognition. Yet, as _Sex Ecologies_ reminds us, we are so much more precarious without them. Returning to Wilk, “any moral, and in this case anthropomorphic, distinctions between toxic and safe, pure and artificial, chemically neutral and chemically enhanced, may be reclaimed and/or rendered irrelevant through the sheer intoxicating nature of togetherness.” To remain alienated, atomized, pitted against one another, to hold on, white-knuckled, to the false borders dislocating us from everything and everyone else, is to ensure mutual destruction. However frightening it is to acknowledge our proximity to and thus reliance on one another, on nature, it is our only way out. Pain and vulnerability ricochet like stray bullets; there is no safety in remoteness. _Somewhere in the distance something hurts_. Somewhere close, too, something hurts.

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_Sex Ecologies_ was published by MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2022.

Sex Ecologies Ed. by Stefanie Hessler

Tess Edmonson is a writer and editor based in Toronto. She is the recipient of a 2019 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

At Ignacio Gatica’s “Stones Above Diamonds,” a thin aluminum display shelf borders the gallery walls; on it rests a straight line of custom-printed smart cards bearing images of barricaded storefronts. The display is bifurcated by a pole-mounted monitor installed in the centre of the space. On the left side of the monitor, the smart cards are printed with photos of Chilean banks— their facades sheathed in plywood or metal hoardings— taken during the civil protests of late 2019\. The cards to the right of the monitor are printed with photos of New York flagship retail stores equally fortified during the George Floyd protests of 2020\. Gatica makes use of symmetry in his exhibition design: viewers attuned to pattern recognition might conclude that some things are different, and other things are the same. In Chile, graffiti across the entrance of a Scotiabank says _ACAB_. In New York, a G-Star RAW is spray-painted with _George Floyd RIP_. Common to both image archives is the implication of a phantom public of rioters and looters, anticipated and yet out of frame.

As a whole, the photos offer a taxonomy of emergency architectures, especially plywood, inflecting the exhibition with a kind of rigid, repetitive maximalism. There’s concision here, and spareness: despite their abundance (there are over 100), the cards are small, as are their visual planes. Each image is also punctuated with a gold integrated-circuit chip, and the verso bears a magnetic stripe. Viewers are invited to pickup the cards and carry them to the monitor at the centre of the gallery, whose side is outfitted with a magnetic-stripe reader. Each card, when swiped, is programmed to make a given line of text appear in a white script against the black background of the monitor. The Scotiabank card prompts the appearance of _so then what_. The G-Star RAW card cues _you have to be happy_. These phrases are transcriptions of text spray-painted or otherwise marked on public surfaces in the vicinity of where each photograph was taken.

So one walks around the exhibition, choosing cards at random, and swiping them in the reader. A Balenciaga store clad in plywood yields _under the pavement the oasis_. Window barriers spanning the front of a The RealReal (and printed with the offensive corporate platitude _It’s Time To Take Real Care Of One Another_) bring up _they will never have the comfort of our silence_ on the monitor. In succession, the street writings are alternately aphoristic (_memory is fragile only when it suits, decorating the cage does not free you_), succinct (_thief bank_), mysterious (_wound, burning in your hands_), and lyrical (_if nothing lasts forever you will be my nothing_). Displaced from the streetscapes in which they originally appeared and transposed onto the digital surface of the screen, the phrases take on the appearance of a chaotic, machine-generated poem.

I was especially pleased to swipe a card fixed with the image of a boarded-up Madison Avenue Pradastore in the reader, which delivered _all resentment is alid_. There’s a kind of inversion at work: I’m thinking about Prada, I’m swiping a card—a mechanical gesture that’s already opening some well-established dopamine pathways—but in lieu of luxury commercial products I receive only a maxim. (Nonetheless, I am grateful for this reminder. I believe it to be true. I ran the card through the reader several times. All resentment IS valid.) The integrated-circuit card is a technology central to debt economies—a conduit by which its users become indebted to the same banks Gatica shows fortifying themselves against the public (_thief bank_). In making this technology the material of his exhibition alongside a visual archive of barricaded capital, Gatica compels an evaluation of what belongs to whom and why.

Leaving the exhibition, I think of the images of graffitied aphorisms I keep on my phone: those I’ve captured in the wild in Toronto—other West End residents might be familiar with _email god_ —and others I’ve come across on social media and saved— _no cops no jails no linear fucking time_. I identify with Gatica’s impulse to document these spontaneous and illicit truths, as well as to index their relationship to larger mechanisms of power and capital. The exhibition comes at a time when narratives about the popular uprisings of the early pandemic era are being evaluated and canonized. Shortly after Gatica’s exhibition closed, the Kenosha County Circuit Court endorsed Kyle Rittenhouse’s authority to carry out public executions in service of property, in particular an idea of property that perpetuates anti-Black disenfranchisement and the material legacies of American enslavement. In Chile a different course: in December leftist student leader Gabriel Boric was elected to the presidency, making him the youngest person to ever hold that office. (At Cooper Cole, swiping a card printed with an image of graffiti painted over metal cladding yields the proverb _being young and not being a revolutionary is a biological contradiction_.) Gatica reminds viewers of the ways in which unrest and violence are routinely mistaken for each other: that violence lives in the hoarding of wealth and power in the hands of the few, and not in the inscription upon civic surfaces by the many. We are reminded, too, who stands to benefit from this confusion.

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“Stones Above Diamonds” ran from 24 September to 6 November 2021 at Cooper Cole, Toronto.

“Stones Above Diamonds” — Ignacio Gatica

Saelan Twerdy is a writer, editor, and cultural worker based in  
Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. He is the Managing Editor of RACAR, the  
official journal of the Universities Art Association of Canada, and currently works as a Student Librarian at Concordia University Webster Library.

Last fall, Centre CLARK presented separate solo exhibitions by artists Joshua Schwebel and Sanaz Sohrabi. Employing the strategies of institutional critique and research-based installation, respectively, the two shows complemented each other in their polemical approach. Schwebel’s “The Tenant” was a hyperlocal investigation of the fraught politics of gentrification and artwashing while Sohrabi’s “Hiding in Plain Sight: Archives of Oil” offered a more free-associative curation of archival imagery relating to the geopolitics of oil in Iran and the Middle East.

Schwebel’s “The Tenant” was presented as a single entity consisting of a dossier of evidence regarding the effects of real-estate speculation on artists in Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood. Specifically, the exhibition focused on the holdings and activities of Allied Properties Real Estate Investment Trust, a Toronto-based firm that owns the buildings at 5445 and 5455 Avenue de Gaspé, which contain Centre CLARK, along with other artist-run centres and studios. A series of seven en- graved aluminum plaques bearing informative texts—meticulously fabricated to match the specifications of the building’s Allied-branded corridors—lined the walls of the exhibition, narrating the recent history of gentrification in the Mile End, for which the de Gaspé buildings serve as a microcosm.

Once a hub for the Montreal garment industry, the building attracted artists’ studios and galleries, including CLARK, which moved into the property in 2002\. Textile manufacturers and wholesalers have largely either shut down or migrated to cheaper warehouse spaces along Chabanel, northeast of Mile End, in what is now known as the Garment District. When Allied purchased the building in 2011, artists based in the building organized to form the Pied Carré collective. Their fight to preserve studio space and artistic community led to a 30-year reduced-rent agreement with Allied for studios and cultural spaces. Initially celebrated as a successful collaboration between artists, the city, and realestate developers—and marked by Allied’s establishment of its Make Room for the Arts program and launch of an in-house art magazine, _Block_, with the tagline “Creativity has its place”— Allied’s costly renovations nevertheless resulted in exponential, unexpected increases in rental taxes, forcing up overall rents and leading to the departure of artists, many of whom decamped to the same Chabanel area to which garment workers had already moved.

The first phase of Schwebel’s exhibition was a procession of displaced artists who travelled from their current studios on Chabanel back to de Gaspé—an event that occurred before the exhibition opened to the public. They came bearing found equipment and junk—signage, tools, sewing machines, clothing racks— from abandoned or evicted textile shops, which was installed at CLARK, along with other items found and produced by Schwebel. The artist’s research is meticulous, but his signature ruthlessness comes out in deliciously subtle gestures of revenge and exposure. One table displayed a custom Monopoly game branded with Allied properties on the board and the company CEO on its currency, a “celebratory” gift given to tenants (including Centre CLARK) upon Allied’s purchase of the building. If Schwebel had made it himself, it would be a fairly trite critical gesture. The fact that it was produced by Allied, and apparently offered without irony, is far more damning. Displaying precisely this sort of object is the essence of Schwebel’s practice; as in previous exhibitions where he donated his fees to paying gallery interns or impersonated a more well-known artist in order to reveal bias in curatorial selection, Schwebel delights in airing dirty laundry, exposing the “normal” operations of organizations to uncomfortable scrutiny.

Another item on view was obtained by more invasive measures: a copy of Jane Jacobs’s _The Death and Life of Great American Cities_ (1961) sits atop a stack of coffee table books that replicates those found in Allied’s Toronto offices, which Schwebel visited, seeking information about their Make Room for the Arts program. While there, he stole the dust jacket of Jacobs’s text, lending the tableau a mild transgressive thrill. On another table, he assembled a small library of past _Block_ issues, whose roster of respected contributing artists, writers, and curators disguises the publication’s function as a publicity venture meant to polish Allied’s reputation as a benevolent, creative enterprise. One of the artists featured in the magazine’s commissioned centrefold was Celia Perrin Sidarous. Along with two other artists, Perrin Sidarous gave audio testimony about her experience with Allied in a custom listening post. As Perrin Sidarous relates, she felt she simply wasn’t in a position to turn down Allied’s fee. Schwebel’s inclusion of her testimony highlights the ethical contortions that cultural workers are forced into by the imperatives of a fundamentally predatory economy.

Like “The Tenant,” Sohrabi’s “Hiding in Plain Sight: Archives of Oil” also engaged the cultural investments of powerful financial interests. But whereas Schwebel’s exhibition was embedded in the context of Montreal, Sohrabi’s focused on her birth country of Iran. She curated materials from the archives of British Petroleum (BP), formerly the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC), to emphasize how cultural production funded by oil extraction played a role in constructing the imaginary of Middle Eastern nationhood and national liberation. The exhibition comprises two “timelines” of imagery: _Spectres of the Subterranean (part 1): Rhymes and Songs for the Oil Minister_, which focuses on the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and _Archives of Oil: Future Relics_ (both 2021–ongoing), which focuses on the BP archives. Presented without didactic context, these fragments convey the complex struggle of colonized nations attempting to liberate themselves from the yoke of imperialism by nationalizing their oil resources.

Sohrabi’s exhibition was dominated by an enormous print of the cover art for _Rhymes and Songs for OPEC_, a 1980 Venezuelan double LP (sponsored by Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A.) that celebrates South- to-South solidarity among member countries of OPEC in Asia, Africa, and South America. The cover art matches highlighted nations on a world map to the cheerful jewel tones of the robes and Nehru jackets of singers striding across a green lawn. The walls of the gallery clamoured with a salon-style profusion of other archival images and ephemera, from magazine covers to stamps, and official and non-official APOC and BP documentation. Underlying the glamorous images of Iran’s swimming pools and cinemas is the persistently imperial logic of a political order based on fossil fuels.

The commissioned images of leisure in “Archives of Oil” obscure the labour (and the transnational labourers, including migrants from Iraq and India) that made such abundance possible, while also disguising that the majority of this wealth flowed not into Iran but back to BP’s headquarters in London. Sohrabi’s assemblages illuminate the “structures of feeling” (to use Raymond Williams’s term) that inflected cultural life in the post-war period in Iran, prior to the revolution of 1978–79 and the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war in 1980: decolonial aspirations ultimately limited by neocolonial power relations.

Sohrabi and Schwebel both used investigative, documentary methods to dig into conflicted political situations, and both emphasized the degree to which culture is a staging ground pitched overtop of a more fundamental struggle over resources. In this regard, each enriched the view of the other, demonstrating how the dynamics of imperialist capitalism operate across various times and places.

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“The Tenant” and “Hiding in Plain Sight: Archives of Oil” ran from 28 October to 27 November 2021 at Centre CLARK, Montreal.

“The Tenant” — Joshua Schwebel and “Hiding in Plain Sight: Archives of Oil” — Sanaz Sohrabi

Reed H. Reed is an artist who lives between Vancouver on Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh traditional territories and Dawson City on Trondek Hwech’in traditional territory.

The Yukon Prize was formed specifically to address the territory’s artists’ relative lack of visibility in national art discourses. Competitions make me think about currency, not just because of the prize money, but also because of the circulation of work that is enabled through this format. Currency in the context of the Yukon invokes one of the most enduring narratives about the territory: resource extraction. Minerals such as copper, nickel, zinc, silver, and gold are mined, exported, and processed into refined forms, their “value accru\[ing\] … at a distance,” as Candice Hopkins once wrote. So, I entered the Yukon Prize exhibition with value on my mind—how it gets assigned, who does the assigning, and the space there is to challenge it all.

The complexity of commerce is addressed in Krystle Silverfox’s _All that Glitters is Not Gold…_ (2019–2021), which creates an incisive link between her previous residence in Vancouver and her home territory of Selkirk First Nation. A wooden frame, built out of construction discards from Simon Fraser University (the artist’s alma mater) is used to stretch half of a Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) blanket, which unravels into a spill of copper coins on the gallery floor. The latter reference the highly sought-after copper deposits in Northern Tutchone Territories, which are currently being mined by Goldcorp, a major funder of SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts. Trade histories are invoked by the inclusion of the HBC blanket; Fort Selkirk was once itself a Hudson’s Bay trading post and, before then, an important site for exchange between the Tlingit and Northern Tutchone. Given these past and continued relationships of trade within Canada, Silverfox’s work meditates on where value is extracted, who benefits the most from it, and what historical circumstances led to this tangle of interests.

Although we might feel distant from mining in urban centres like Vancouver, in the Yukon it is present and visible nearly everywhere—sometimes literally next door. Veronica Verkley lived for 12 years in a small off-grid cabin near active gold mines in Dawson City. _Suspended Animation_ (2021), a life-size sculptural representation of a horse, is largely constructed from detritus from the mining industry—conveyor belts, rubber hoses, plastic tubing, and copper wires, intricately woven together by hand. In the arts centre, the horse appears limp and lifeless, but an installed pulley system implies that it could stand upright with a little elbow grease. At least 10 bodies are needed to activate it, an inversion of the frontier attitude that places the other-than-human in service to our human desires, and a nod to our collective responsibility to care for vulnerable landscapes. I can’t help but connect the sculpture to the circumstances in which it was built: Verkley’s cabin further and further encroached upon by an adjacent placer mine, piles of earth and rock shifting each day, burying habitats that the artist had meticulously tracked—from the emergence of the first mosquito in the spring, to the migration cycles of grosbeaks, to the passing through of neighbouring black bears. These practices of observation, care, and attentiveness to creaturely lives are intimately connected to Verkley’s work.

Many of the materials that Sho Sho “Belelige” Esquiro uses for her couture work are also sourced from the Yukon. Esquiro creates wearable work that references the artistic traditions of her Kaska Dena, Cree, and Scottish ancestors. _Ascension_ (2017) features intricate beadwork designs, laser-cut rabbit fur, and a pair of lynx paws. Some of the materials are harvested in traditional ways—for example, the lynx was trapped by her uncle, a Kaska Ross River Elder—while others are gathered from her travels. Esquiro shared that _Ascension_ was created at the bedside of her sick grandparents, which points to her careful honouring of what came before while evolving in new directions.

Amy Ball’s work _powers_ (2018/2021) calls into question the currency of mass-produced goods. A structurally precise white tiled bench has embedded in the back a compartment storing canned food, candles, ibuprofen, and other disaster-ready effects. We’re invited to sit on the bench, but it feels like a way stop, too hard and cold to settle into. The piece is a reflection on doomsday prepper culture, the industrially produced goods stockpiled in the back an absurd solution to an uncertain future, their use value steadily expiring. The piece was created pre-pandemic but eerily forecasts its grocery hoarding.

Joseph Tisiga’s _Untitled Series_ (2020) is also concerned with shifting values in uncertain times, having been created in the early pandemic. Playing with an economy of form, Tisiga sculpted scale cigarette butts from clay, hand-painting each one with watercolours. These were then arranged on astroturf panels in short phrases, some cryptic—“I COULD NOT WITHOUT MAGIC, LIFT MYSELF FROM THE DUST”—and others more direct: “LAND BACK.” In his Yukon Prize artist talk, Tisiga shared that these phrasings came from a collection of spontaneous notes on his phone, the work altogether capturing the uneven temporal atmosphere of crisis, and the will to communicate despite scarcity.

In Ken Anderson (Khàtinas.àxh)’s _What we had what we have what we take what we are given where we are where we are going who we were who we are who we will be what we have lost and what we have found thanks no thanks; gunalthcheesh da ki en caw_ (2021), a Roomba-style vacuum erratically shuttles around a birch bowl—carved in a traditional Tlingit style— filled with seed beads. The title alone reads like a poetic challenge to notions of fair exchange. The presence of the busy cleaning device carrying supplies for creation points to the ongoing maintenance of art practice, where daily repetitive gestures might help to connect us back to what we value most.

All of the artists are reframing value on their own terms, whether it be through use of recycled and refuse materials, through engagement with art forms undervalued by colonial structures, or by bringing unacknowledged histories to the surface. The initial questions about value that I brought to the exhibition were deepened by the nuances of northerly lived experience that these artists bring to their practices.

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The Yukon Prize Exhibition included work by Ken Anderson (Khàtinas.àxh), Amy Ball, Krystle Silverfox, Sho Sho “Belelige” Esquiro, Joseph Tisiga, and Veronica Verkley, and ran from 18 September to 20 November 2021 at Yukon Arts Centre, Whitehorse.

The Yukon Prize Exhibition 

The Yukon Prize Exhibition — Ken Anderson (Khàtinas.àxh), Amy Ball, Krystle Silverfox, Sho Sho “Belelige” Esquiro, Joseph Tisiga, Veronica Verkley

Jacob Korczynski is an independent curator.

Instead of making a solo debut with the gallery that represents her, HaeAhn Woo Kwon recast her one- person show as a collective encounter and effort. This entailed Kwon inviting four artist peers to collaborate by making their own additions and responses to the exhibition—one per week. All the contributions took familiar fixtures from the two sites identified in the exhibition title as material. Despite marked differences in the artists’ five approaches, they all act against metaphor: specific objects retain their form and function, allowing for the contradictions and clashes that Kwon’s proposition entails.

Throughout the exhibition, hard and shiny surfaces abounded for potential inscription by the unstable medium of dry-erase markers: a working sink, two stacked Rubbermaid bins, a shower base, two squat toilets, a free-standing mirror. Unlike some of the other artworks that entered, exited, and returned to Franz Kaka over the course of the five-week duration, the readily wiped remained at the ready, open to the artists’ writings that proliferated upon them. Two drawings on paper by Kwon formed by the thick and certain lines of chisel-tip permanent markers were also anchors, appearing in the same location adjacent to the gallery door in all versions of “Bathroom Classroom.” Although _Squatty Face_ (2021) and _The Piss Sea_ (2021) appeared on one of the few porous materials in the exhibition, even these were overlaid with lustrous plexiglass frames—slick against splashback.

Acting as the opening iteration of “Bathroom Classroom,” the contribution by Isabelle Pauwels was anchored by her signature medium of video. Taking the opaque verso of the free-standing mirror as its projection screen, _Die Madam Keek Raar and Women Like Me on T.V._ (2021) is a query into the uncertainty of identity—its temporality pulled along by way of language that shifts between hard-edged fonts and handwriting. The latter extended itself into the gallery space through the most idiosyncratic surfaces in the exhibition: two crumpled sheets of dry-erase adhesive. The first, _Cathy from the Bank_ (2021), leaves its account illegible, given that it is wrapped around one of the gallery’s overhead fluorescents. The sheen from these lights upon the second sheet, titled _Masters of Finance_ (2021), belies how unwieldy both surfaces are, with irreversible wrinkles from their backing glue once again obscuring some, but not all, of Pauwels’s writing. Here, she humorously recounts an interview with a US border guard who confused her MFA with the graduate degree of the work’s title. The visceral sight of the loosened surface made me wonder how it could be torn free from the pedagogical authority of the whiteboard—the imagined action puckering the finish through force, chemicals pushed deep below nail beds.

During my first visit to “Bathroom Classroom,” all the contemplation without contact among the tactile objects left touch unfulfilled. This was relieved briefly the second week by way of an invitation to don Blue- tooth headphones that continually broadcasted Amy Lam reading her text _Pink Outfit_ (2021). Combining her practices in performance and writing, it appears as one component of an assemblage produced in collaboration with Kwon titled _Two Big Children and a Child_ (2021) that also encompasses a circle of grey industrial carpet, an uncovered nursing pillow, and a typed transcript of the text. In contrast to the evasive narratives of Pauwels, with _Pink Outfit_, Lam lucidly unpacks her text in segments: a Parisian landlord’s strategies of gentrification, overconsumption of bismuth subsalicylate, an act of lying by authorities in a conflict-resolution meeting, the psychology of a mono-chrome outfit, the last time she herself lied, another apology on the news accompanied by light denial, the scientific measure of desire. Her accumulation of discrete experiences and encounters next to one another took my thoughts into its spaces in-between. Toward the end of _Pink Outfit_, she reports: “A piece of metal bent to become a tube. The surface is also the interior, there is no core, only surface and liquid rushing through. Persistent surface, unending, unperturbed surface.” The wireless headset permitted mobility as I walked around and ran my hands across the mass-produced materials. Her words resisted assembling into a cohesive image, as I registered and then severed her description from what I felt and saw before me.

While many of the objects present through the different iterations of “Bathroom Classroom” were scattered throughout the space, the contributions of Kirby Chen Mages largely collected on the floor around the perimeter of the gallery. Like Lam, Mages announces her additions via text, most prominently on a free-standing white bifold cabinet door, which introduces another plane for writing. Alluding to a woman whose door (much like the one in the space) becomes unhinged, _Lazy Susan_ (2021) is a text inscribed backward in dry-erase marker on both sides of the facing panels. The cognitive consequences of flipping the individual letters in the mind to comprehend the writing are complex, greatly slowing comprehension by breaking the sentences into words, the words into letters. Further discomposition permeates the panel on the right, the text opening up in the middle, space growing between the words, the certainty of the Latin alphabet transmogrified as the letters appear to trickle down toward the floor, either intentionally by Mages or obfuscated by the warm hands of visitors.

IBanJiHa’s austere contribution eschewed written language altogether—gone were the texts added by each of the previous artists that guided my earlier encounters. Gone, too, were the cryptic glyphs in black dry-erase marker that collected inside the working ceramic sink during the three previous weeks. The assemblage of the bathroom fixture stacked upon dishwashing bins that appeared in the earlier iterations by Pauwels and Lam continued to actively circulate liquid in a slightly different configuration, retitled _Speaking Fluently_ (2021). As it had in the previous weeks, an upturned plastic bottle functioned as a reservoir, and a microphone was installed below instead of a faucet. Nearly a month in and I still didn’t know if it was amplified or not. In the absence of words, the room tone rang louder.

Kwon herself concluded the cycle, recomposing her own assemblages alongside the contributions from each of the previous artists. And yet, reading it as a summation would be not only restrictive, but wrong. The mutable arrangement of these objects and actions in the closing week, as in those previous, had not accumulated in order to persuade. There is no total: only opportunities for tangible change. In-between the impenetrable surfaces of industrial objects things could be another way—and they are.

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“Bathroom Classroom” included work by HaeAhn Woo Kwon with Isabelle Pauwels, Amy Lam, Kirby Chen Mages, and IBanJiHa (SoYoon Kim) and ran from 15 October to 13 November 2021 at Franz Kaka, Toronto.

“Bathroom Classroom” 

“Bathroom Classroom” — HaeAhn Woo Kwon with Isabelle Pauwels, Amy Lam, Kirby Chen Mages, IBanJiHa (SoYoon Kim)

Bahar Mohazabnia is an Iranian art historian and cultural worker based on unceded Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish territory. She is currently an MA candidate in the department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia.

Sona Safaei-Sooreh’s “Revolving: a family tale” (2021) tells the story of Iran’s unique semi-colonial history through caricatures and narrative. The term “semi-colonial” is used by Safaei-Sooreh to refer to how Iran faced a period of policy influence and regime change, instead of direct colonization, by the West. Presented as a single installation composed of newspaper comic strips, video, and light boxes displaying cartoon figures, Safaei-Sooreh narrates Iran’s contentious relationship with the West, catalyzed by the nationalization of Iran’s oil industry in the ’50s. A monitor mounted onto the wall displays scenes from Disney’s _Cinderella_ alongside contrasting footage of a British Petroleum (BP) executive speaking on Iran. The split-screen video satirizes BP’s relationship to Iran’s oil industry, with Britain represented as Cinderella’s extractive, evil stepmother.

Safaei-Sooreh’s comic characters take direct inspiration from BP in-house cartoonist, Ronald Searle. Safaei-Sooreh depicts Searle’s imagined grandchildren. In a handout provided to visitors, Safaei-Sooreh includes a fictional Searle family tree, to bridge the past with the present, and fiction with reality. Members of this family are also displayed in stencilled drawings on the exhibition’s walls, where they smile for a family portrait prominently featuring the BP logo. Notably, the exhibition intentionally omits any representation of Iranian families. Instead, Western power is emphasized, as represented by the British familial unit. Safaei-Sooreh’s omission of the Iranian family emphasizes the profound impact of Western imperialism on the structure of Iranian families, including those lost to war, and those forced to leave Iran. This very present absence invokes the fracturing of Iranian families, which is itself a microcosm for how Iran as a whole survived the so-called War on Terror in seclusion, after being labelled as a terrorist nation in the “axis of evil.”

How can the exhibition’s negation of images of Iranian families nuance our understanding of Western imperialism’s effect on Iranian cultures? It is especially critical to address this question, considering the misinformation in mainstream media about contemporary Iranian culture, framed by orientalist imaginaries. Through this act of refusal, Safaei-Sooreh highlights how Iranians bear the burden of this Western intervention, while British families (like the smiling Searles) can remain blissfully ignorant. She refuses to offer an image of Iranian families, perhaps afraid that such a representation risks a reductionism that may serve the orientalist gaze. 

On the gallery’s back wall, a large comic strip drawn in Searle’s trademark propaganda style portrays a group of gentlemen gathered at a cafe to discuss the news of Iran nationalizing its oil in 1951\. In the comic, a frowning man with curly eyebrows is pictured responding to news of the nationalization, angrily declaring that the “British Government is going to fight against it.” Another man provides more context: “Obviously, this is favoring Persia with a better deal compared to the 1933 concession under which Persia received only 20% of the company’s worldwide profits.” Here, fictional characters stand in as figures of Western geopolitical influence over Iran. At the same time, the 20th century was marked not only by turmoil and uncertainty for Iranians, but also by resistance and resilience. Yet, in a manner similar to the Searle family portrait, Safaei-Sooreh’s comic intentionally avoids representing the resistance of individual Iranian subjects. Here, Safaei-Sooreh mobilizes refusal as a kind of anti-representational tool that accords a degree of opacity to the life of Iranians. In this attempt to negate the orientalist gaze, the act of looking is reverted onto the West. If the comic strip is a medium of mass information distribution, the omission of resistance narratives raises another set of questions: whose stories are shared? Who controls historical narrative? By solely focusing on a critique of Western resource extraction, 20th-century news media, and economic exploitation, the exhibition unsettles British imperialism as it places it under a microscope.

Safaei-Sooreh’s use of the comic-strip form to portray political events introduces a tension between history and popular media. This tension is furthered through her refusal to provide insight into Iranian culture, as she instead presents the audience with history laid bare: facts, historical information, and comically drawn figures of British men and women bring together this narrative of Iran’s history. This striking juxtaposition draws attention to the newspaper as a mode of information dissemination. The exhibition underlines the authority of Western news sources, which often present information to the public through their subjective colonial lens. While these political trajectories situate us in our present moment, we long for an alternative. We grieve for what was lost and what could have been, and yet remain grateful for what remains of our own family tale, outside of the Western gaze. At once fractured and resistant, the family unit becomes a metaphor for Iran.

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“Revolving: a family tale” ran from 16 September to 27 November 2021 at Centre A, Vancouver.

“Revolving: a family tale” — Sona Safaei-Sooreh

Leo Cocar is an independent writer, curator, and student from “Vancouver,” the unceded traditional territory of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish Nations. He is currently pursuing an MA in Curatorial Studies at Bard College. In his spare time, he enjoys cooking, bouldering, spending time at the mall, and watching UFC.

Upon entering “Vermin Gloom,” one is immediately apprehended by an ambient soundscape, binding together the visitor, the architecture, and the works on display. Composed by musician Balas De Agua, the score is a composite of drum, flute, and key samples, evoking the simultaneously warm and spectral sound of an old transistor radio playing in a forgotten cave. The untitled soundtrack is the ideal point from which to begin the show by artist duo ASMA (composed of Matias Armendaris and Hanya Beliá). Around the 20-minute mark, instrumentals are bolstered by the sounds of dripping water and possibly crickets or skittering insects, a poetic evocation of the loose narrative in “Vermin Gloom” of an abandoned home being reclaimed by non-human life.

As the exhibition statement notes, “Vermin Gloom” “set\[s\] an imaginary stage within a young human’s room in the midst of its abandonment.” In this sense, the show invokes the space’s former life as the site of the Czech Consulate: homey, warm, and replete with wainscoting and fireplaces, drawing attention to the fact that it was once occupied. At the same time, “Vermin Gloom” presents an architectural intervention, as it replaces a sense of hearth with one of eerie, bug-infested desertion. In the sparsely populated side gallery, the only things are a wood carving (_Harbinger_, 2021), a pillow with ochre- coloured stains made by mould or sweat (_Haunted pillow_, 2021), and a large patchwork textile covered in black fabric, sporting an image of flowers rendered in spindly line work (_Wardrobe bouquet_, 2021). Whether the textile was intended by the room’s fictional former occupant as a source of warmth, decor, or a piece of architecture to block the door behind it is unknown.

In the main gallery, a similar scantily occupied atmosphere is repeated. Another patchwork textile piece, titled _Felt a spider_ (2021), is strung up in front of the fireplace, this time decorated with an insect-arachnid hybrid creeping up the same flowers present in _Wardrobe bouquet_. Plugged in to the wall, _Hooked by the stream_ (2021) appears (at first glance) to be an iPhone forgotten by its owner. Upon closer inspection, one realizes that the device has been co-opted by a biosynthetic resin image of a fly on a fishing hook, dangling above water. Occupying the screen, the presence of the fly neutralizes the phone’s use as a ubiquitous communication tool. On a perpendicular wall, a modified sneaker is fixed to the wall, its twin lying on the ground nearby. Both have received a similar treatment to the phone, with their soles replaced by nature motifs executed in the same icy-blue resin. The shoe lying on the ground, titled _Trail mix (lost keys)_ (2021), sports one of the many insects present in the show, with a dragonfly darting over what resembles a flowing stream populated by a discarded soda can and the titular lost keys. Its flora-centric counterpart, titled _Trail mix (weed)_ (2021), has had its traction pattern replaced by a plant that resembles the product of cross-breeding dandelion and lettuce. _Trail mix (weed)_, _Trail mix (lost keys)_, and _Hooked by the stream_ all adapt the forms of some of the most coveted objects of the digital age— sneakers and phones—and warp them until their use value becomes totally annulled, to make way for extra-human life. Even in their unmodified state, sneakers and phones are a rich index to think through the global networks that make these objects possible—from shipping routes to delocalized labour to rare-earth mineral extraction. Each of these networks has an impact on our ecological systems, a violence that is often obscured. By implanting everyday objects with extra-human life, ASMA reminds us of the indivisibility of the commodity and the biosphere.

In both galleries, three etched, composite wood sculptures adorn the walls, acting as a kind of double for the exhibition space. With these three works, similar elements that exist in the real space of the gallery are instead rendered in the picture-like sculpture’s composition. In _My Wooden Heart_ (2021), a scorpion menacingly crawls over the power cords underneath a bed. In _Harbinger_, a laptop sits on the floor tiles of a bathroom, whose sole occupant is a bird-sized moth. For the third piece, _Fly Kicks_ (2021), a trio of flies crawl over a sneaker’s laces. The insectoid occupants of the space, both real and figurative, recall the exhibition text’s opening statement: “Something becomes a vermin only in relation to any human activity or environment.” In this sense, “Vermin Gloom” blurs the constructed boundaries between human and extra-human relations, habitat and home, as well as natural and artificial.

Ultimately, ASMA brings the space of a fictional domicile to bear on debates concerning human and extra-human relations. What contemporary economically driven green policies do is attempt to reinforce the nature-humanity divide, when this split is really an impossibility, borne of human abstraction and categorization. In contrast, the sneakers, phones, and textiles of “Vermin Gloom” are co-opted by extra-human life, as the idea of the home itself is questioned. It is not that the fictional young occupant’s home has been totally abandoned, but rather that it was left for occupation by our insectoid and mould-spore friends who never even left in the first place. Whether or not vermin are understood as our neighbours or pests is only a matter of conceptualization.

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“Vermin Gloom” ran from 25 September to 23 October 2021 at Projet Pangée, Montreal.

“Vermin Gloom” — ASMA

Alexa Bunnell is an emerging artist, writer, and fermenter based in Mohkinstsís.

Bile gathered at the bottom of my esophagus; I could taste it. “Câlice,” I muttered into the concrete of a Montreal alleyway. As I bent my chest to my legs, I folded my torso strategically to compress my stomach, easing the retching that would soon make focusing on anything aside from my heaving core impossible. My legs were splayed like a giraffe bending to drink water in the hopes of reducing the acidic splash, something one should consider when throwing up on concrete.

A series of resin vomit puddles by Guillaume Adjutor Provost titled _Cioran Slapstick \[vomit\]_ (2020) are splattered around the gallery space, reflecting the stark and industrial fluorescent light of TRUCK Contemporary Art. Each puddle contains a collection of different expired dried goods and coins. Bending over to take a closer look at their contents, I’m reminded of that familiar, strategic position I took time and time again to quell my nauseated stomach. Swimming within the resin are small anchovies, corn, beans, and pocket change. The _Cioran Slapstick_ vomit retch series evokes a visceral horror as I move within the space with a thought: “Someone was sick here.”

Throughout the Main Space of TRUCK, Guillaume Adjutor Provost conceives of a hypercapitalist society as an ailing body, whose deepening inequalities leave behind puddles of vomit, a leaden tongue, and a rib cage constructed of sliced X-rays. While “Tourbe Chunky” continually references this failing body-economy, the body is never fully revealed to us. Like a horror that lurks just beyond the camera lens in a film, or in the closet, we only see the detritus and the fluids that this body-society leaves behind. Within the cork sculpture titled _Blurring Big Tongue_ (2019) a glossectomy results in a heavy tongue hanging under industrial light, disconnected from the mouth that used to houseit. Reaching for the concrete floor, swathes of cork are punched with lead, contrasted with curved X-ray strips that gracefully evoke the image of a rib cage. Grinning teeth and arched spines are exposed by the X-rays, vulnerable and ready for evaluation. Steel cables pierce through the X-rays, linking this rib cage to the cork tongue, like steel pins that hold together broken joints and torn ligaments. I lean in close to examine the lead stamps while consulting the exhibition maps, in a gesture that mirrors a doctor examining a strange mole, or perhaps an autopsy. As a spectator-doctor to the ailing body-economy, my attempt at a diagnosis is just to name what has always been there: dysfunctional growth at the expense of others.

Death, illness, and the body are continually referenced within the printed fibre works that line the walls of the gallery. In _Melancholic Skeleton Looking at the Horizon \[Philosophy\]_ (2020), a skeleton rests with a rifle in its hands, pondering a sunset. Sewn in front of its ribcage is a handkerchief printed with an illustration seemingly out of a children’s book: a scene of frogs enjoying a leisurely picnic under a mushroom. Perched atop a motorcycle, a skeleton grins with a pair of aviator glasses in _Happy Skeleton Riding a Motorcycle \[Philosophy\]_ (2020). The gas tank on the motorcycle is  
shaped like a coffin. Within _Red Foxgloves with Thorns \[Neoliberalism\] v.2_ (2021) foxgloves are hued in a deep red colour and pierced by thorns. Also known as dead man’s bells, the entire plant is toxic, even when dried.

Entering the darkness of TRUCK’s Parkade space, _Everything Visible is Empty \[Siki Soku Ze Ku\]_ (1975) by Toshio Matsumoto pulsates with flashing lights, imagery, and colours. The short film begins with the characters of the Heart Sutra, which are repeated five times throughout the film, accompanied by growing, vivid colours. Close-ups of eyes, ears, mouths, and hands emerge from the dark plane, flashing between each character. Gradually, the flashing intensifies and the images climax into a shattering of dazzling light. It’s physically hard to watch; my eyes and brain struggle to comprehend how wide to hold my pupil, to what extent my iris should contract. I can feel a headache coming on. I try blurring my vision, focusing on nothing. My ciliary muscles relax. The flashing lights and smattering colours don’t overwhelm anymore, instead passing by like a dream, or a thought. Contrasting the anxiety elicited by the ailing body-economy presented in TRUCK’s Main Space, _Everything Visible is Empty \[Siki Soku Ze Ku\]_ is stroboscopic, enchanting, and seductive. With eyes gently glazed over, I exit the screening room, rupturing the lax position I took up to endure the flashing lights. Perhaps the inclusion of this film is a gesture to the Latin etymology of curation: “to take care of.” Matsumoto’s film can tend to an anxious viewer as they leave the exhibition or prepare them as they enter.

The conception of the ailing body-economy within “Tourbe Chunky” presents an urgent comparison between the body and the economy. Late capitalism has stripped bare public healthcare systems, while extractive systems bring environmental devastation and habitat loss, which in turn forces closer contact between industrial human regions with pathogen-harbouring wildlife. Accelerating late capitalism has dire consequences on a global scale for the health of many, as evidenced by the ongoing COVID\-19 pandemic. Capitalism, in its ceaseless hunt for growth and expansion, leaves behind skeletons that are at once abandoned, unnurtured, and grinning. “Tourbe Chunky” distils the dissonance and the emptiness brought by capitalist crises.

issue-151-p81-83.pdf

“Tourbe Chunky” ran from 29 October to 11 December 2021 at TRUCK Contemporary, Calgary.

Header

C Mag

Issue 151

Grief

Credits

Letters

Letters

Editorial

Editorial: Grief

Explore Issue by Images

Features

Ebb and Flow / Moving Through Mourning

The Impulse to Share Evidence: Tensions in Representing the Unity Uprising

Relevant Permission A Conversation between Michèle Pearson Clarke and Lou Sheppard

The Scent of Death

‘All Sorts of Sorrows’: Processing Pandemic Loss in the (Virtual) Gallery

Grief Has No Distance

Gham, Private Spheres, and Informal Support Systems: A Conversation with Hangama Amiri

Archives, Bones, and Polaroids

Artist Projects

an inheritance by Kosisochukwu Nnebe: Text

an inheritance

Columns

Composition: halflife

Mother

The Push to Unionize Art and Culture Work in Canada

Reviews

“Radiant Temperature of Openings” — Faraz Anoushahpour, Parastoo Anoushahpour, Ryan Ferko

“Artery” — Allison Katz

“Traces, Erasures, Resists” — Laiwan

Sex Ecologies Ed. by Stefanie Hessler

“Stones Above Diamonds” — Ignacio Gatica

“The Tenant” — Joshua Schwebel and “Hiding in Plain Sight: Archives of Oil” — Sanaz Sohrabi

The Yukon Prize Exhibition

“Bathroom Classroom”

“Revolving: a family tale” — Sona Safaei-Sooreh

“Vermin Gloom” — ASMA

“Tourbe Chunky” — Guillaume Adjutor Provost in Conversation with Toshio Matsumoto