Column

EJ Kneifel is a friend of a twin of a twin, author of _VIO-LETS_, co-creator of _P8s, ORANGING, CATCH_. Their ekphrasis: (_Exclaim!, Adroit, mRB, PRISM_); their poetry: (_Canthius, Peach, Malahat, Arc, TIMBER, Vallum_). EJ loves to host, and most recently hosted ALL THE BIRDS WE HEAR IN TREES BUT NEVER SEE. Next, they will host Nivi.

_Note: the print layout of this text is meaningful. To honour that, we've chosen to upload it as a PDF exclusively. [Read or download the PDF.](https://strapi-uploads-c-mag-prod.s3.ca-central-1.amazonaws.com/C159_Kneifel_dd247358f7.pdf)_

Writer

This issue of C Magazine looks through the mirror as a bleeding surface—a metaphor for acts of seeing, thinking, and creating that return your gaze. We recognize that the way we look in a mirror is also the way we tell a story, as a reflection of value systems and the stakes of lucidity and distortion, especially under colonial systems that would twist their subjects’ humanity. Many texts here, between artists and writers, take the form of dialogues, and think through persistent possibilities of visual revelation, language, and mourning. Formal and symbolic fractures are reflected through chimerical imagery, Hong Kong cinemas of resistance, Puerto-Rican space-time, physical and spiritual intertwining, and a real place to land for both joy and grief—the end of a rainbow, or its burning.

Mirror Mirror

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Memory

Language

Taking Lily Wang’s novel _Silver Repetition_ (2024) as a starting point, EJ Kneifel explodes the form of a dialogue, revelling in closeness to and quoting Wang’s source text on grief and memory. 


Composition: The Hardest Part Is Getting to the Beginning: On Lily Wang's _Silver Repetitions_

Innas Tsuroiya is a writer living in Indonesia who works across poetry, criticism, translation, fiction, and divination. Her work can be found in _Poetry Wales, MOLD Magazine, C Magazine, Protean Magazine, ArtReview Asia,_ and _Artforum_, among others.

Man’s perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception; he perceives more than sense (tho’ ever so acute) can discover.

—William Blake, “There Is No Natural Religion,” 1788 [^1]

In Islamic cosmology, creatures made of dust or soil (tactile material: human beings) and creatures made of light (be it “pure light” like angels or “ur-fire” like jinns: spirit[ual] beings) occupy different planes of existence with their respective sets of ethics. These worlds, however, sometimes converge under specific circumstances; an understanding of ontological plurality is therefore inherent in religious teaching. While humans only turn into spirit form post-mortem, it is easier for spirits to assume anthropomorphism due to their superior dimension. The embodiment can be for any purpose, whether for well-meaning assistance or as designated trickster, like the fabled Satan whispering into the human heart a worldly temptation. To the extent this interworld convergence becomes imbalanced or malicious, as in the case of jinn possession, the dynamics must be restored to prevent further consequences (e.g., severe ailment, madness, and so on). Broadly, since the burden of proof rarely lies with the possessed subject whose consciousness is being overtaken, the decision for a dispossession—by exorcism, zar ceremony, ablutionary ritual, or other cathartic means—is seldom up to the possessed subject’s discretion. Bearing witness to possession requires, at least, a special sensibility when the physical is not meant to perceive the metaphysical. In the crossway of religio-cultural life and art history in particular, the work of Sudanese artist Kamala Ibrahim Ishag manoeuvres this stratum: many of her paintings capture the merging of humans and spirits at its exact “time.”

Consider _The Seat - Zar Ceremony_ (2016), in which none of the figures in the oil painting are, per the title, actually seated. Instead, the figures seem to be standing and swaying, each pair of deformed faces overlapping the others (separately, there’s another tinier face on the floor) with misplaced mouths and crooked teeth, distorted limbs indistinguishable from one another’s. A foot turns into the leg of a table set between them, on which a likewise evanescing vase rests just as uneasily. Ishag paints The Seat in assorted shades of brown, the colour of clay that builds a human being, though these figures do not appear fully human. Despite the eerie scene, nothing suggests a touch of violence that may be usual with resolving possession.

Zar itself refers to the type of jinn possessing mostly women, ergo the demographics of the zar ceremony practiced regionally in the Horn of Africa and surrounding countries. Led by a female sheikh (sheikha), over the years it evolved into a form of social gathering and musical dance. Zar is less of a forceful cleansing than the exorcism commonly performed in Muslim-populated countries elsewhere: more of a conciliation of the jinn and an all-around healing rite. Ishag’s zar paintings represent this totality of communion, usually featuring feminine-presenting figures as a stand in for women and/or women-spirits. In _Preparation of Incense - Zar Ceremony_ (2015) she makes the imperceptible trance more evident by including greeneries, a spread of dancing foliage—some sprouting from heads—on a light-blue backdrop, amid the grotesque cohort in pallid garbs. An ecology synthesized from the encapsulation of converging worlds and an artistic imagination unique to her.

Ishag occupies a certain nexus in the Sudanese art constellation. For one, she was among the first women artists who graduated from the College of Fine and Applied Art in Khartoum in 1963, years later returning to her alma mater to teach. Between her training and teaching in Khartoum, Ishag embarked on a formative period of study at the Royal College of Art in London, UK, where she graduated in 1969—fortuitously at the height of conceptual art—and encountered William Blake’s oeuvre, frequently cited as her inspiration. The Blakean pull is perhaps most obvious in the crystalists, the movement she steered with the publication of a manifesto in a newspaper in 1976, co-authored with several former students. It begins: “Man himself is the endeavor and the subject of a crystal that extends endlessly within. This happens simultaneously in isolation from and in connection to other things.” [^2] “The Crystalist Manifesto” (originally published in Arabic) is a treatise on arts that, for the most part, longs to break free from the conventions of that time when major aesthetic inclinations in ’60s Sudan, less than a decade post-independence, were shaped by nation-building visions. The prominent artists were largely men, including Ishag’s peer, the painter Ibrahim El-Salahi, and largely influenced by Islamic art style. Ishag meanwhile emerged with new epistemology—deriving from a wide range of disciplines such as poetics and theoretical physics, in other words a true syncretism of ideals—and conjured on her canvas the subtle weaving of women and (super)natural phenomena.

Prior to the constitution of the crystalist movement, Ishag predated her fixation in the early work _Untitled - Zar_ (1973), which she painted on a square surface angled into a rhombus to approximate a crystal shape (this adjustment applies to subsequent works, e.g., _Preparation of Incense_). Brushed in sensuous earthy palettes, _Untitled_ strikes the observer as if, from a birds-eye view, a disfigured crowd is sealed inside a glass box. There are more obscure nodes than slightly distinguishable faces; Ishag’s meticulous composition evokes something imminent hanging in the air. How will everything unfold? Centred in this scene is a diamond-like gleam—one may reckon it as a crystal that refracts light rays passing through. It is a model for transcending the senses as well as a metaphor for perceiving multilayered realities. Through the chorus of Ishag’s interconnected subjects, one shall accept such an illumination.

[^1]: William Blake, _There Is No Natural Religion [b]_ (1788), I.
[^2]: Hassan Abdallah, Naiyla Al Tayib, Hashim Ibrahim, Kamala Ibrahim Ishag, and Muhammad Hamid Shaddad, “The Crystalist Manifesto,” trans. Nariman Youssef, in _Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents_, ed. Anneka Lenssen, Sarah Rogers, and Nada Shabout (New York City: The Museum of Modern Art, in association with Duke University Press, 2018), 393–408; [https://post.moma.org/modern-art-in-the-arab-world-primary-documents-the-crystalist-manifesto](https://post.moma.org/modern-art-in-the-arab-world-primary-documents-the-crystalist-manifesto)

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Spirituality

Gender

Innas Tsuroiya explores Kamala Ibrahim Ishag’s paintings about the zar ceremony, a social gathering and dance around the Horn of Africa. A founder of the crystalist movement, Ishag broke away from the nation-building aesthetics of post-independence Sudan in the 1970s.

One Thing: Kamala Ibrahim Ishag’s Zar Paintings

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Editorial

Joy Xiang (she/her) is a writer and editor, born in Shanghai and based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Her work and life engages erotics, migration, material flows, and media nostalgia and futurity. She is currently Editor at _C Magazine_. 

By the time this issue reaches you, as editors, we have read and thought alongside so many others, that I forget my own words. I am full of everyone and don’t want to begin. Unconsciously, but not surprisingly, many of the texts we commissioned are dialogues. The mirror is a bleeding surface; looking, thinking, and reflecting goes both ways, and confront us with how we are all polluted with each other. This is something more than empathy. When the forces of state myths, inhumane value systems, and empire feel like an inescapable chokehold, the enactment of our responsibility to each other matters. How do we access lucidity? How do we see distortion for what it is? “Mirror Mirror” intends to be an unpunctuated echo, recognizing that the way we look in a mirror is also the way we tell a story. 

Intimate coincidences run through many pieces in this issue—a writer of one text evoked as a collaborator in another, common symbols called to different purposes, and a persistent throughline of speech, mourning, and the impossibilities of language and nostalgia. The works together reflect on many formal and symbolic relationships, and their fractures, like: 

cinema — state narratives 
visual failure — revelation 
drawing — writing — living 
body politic — infection 
physical world — spirit 

When James Albers speaks to Bhenji Ra about her moving image commission _Biraddali Dancing on the Horizon_ (2024), Ra explains the mythical Biraddali from Tausūg cultures as a non-gendered birdhuman hybrid that sits at the end of a rainbow, but is also called the rainbow. Recalling her journey through the Sulu Sea in the Philippines to film in the region her Pangalay dance mentor is from, Ra makes connections between seeing the horizon, queer and trans liberation, and collaborating with spirit using the medium of physical film, all the while honouring the Biraddali’s refusal to be captured. Later, in Nasrin Himada and Yantong Li’s moving exchange of letters, Himada quotes Brandon Shimoda’s invocation of the late Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer through poetry: “I had a dream last night that a rainbow was burning.” Marked by the grave accent (`) in its title, Himada and Li’s correspondence takes us through the constellations of mourning unseen by colonial regimes that deny peace to numerous deceased kins. 

The struggle to find form “to think and feel through this world that’s on fire” grounds Lara Mimosa Montes and Sofía Gallisá Muriente’s conversation about their respective writing and filmmaking practices, which image a Puerto Rican time and poetics characterized by intuition, contradiction, and linguistic locura (madness). Joshua Segun-Lean and Tiffany Sia take Sia’s recent book _On and Off-Screen Imaginaries_ (2024) as a starting point to discuss a Hong Kong cinema of dissent that is present in a vernacular style, rather than the nostalgic coherence of “golden age” narratives. Two films in particular by the anonymous Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers collective cover key moments in the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests against the extradition bill, where protestors sieged the Polytechnic University and occupied the Legislative Council Complex. Sia identifies the paradox of state narratives that use nostalgic cinema to project revolutionary pasts at the same time as they brutally surveil protestors’ images and bodies in the present. 

Furqan Mohamed writes of Karice Mitchell’s photographs as both a “mirror and a portal”—in conversation, the two consider how Mitchell’s tools of formal intervention, like flatbed scanning, cropping, blurring, filters, and digital effects, seize the visual negotiation of Black femininity, sexuality, and adornment, to disrupt consumptive and censoring gazes. 

Exploring the vampiric as a symbol for contagion, its specifics depending on the socio-political fears of the day (be it disease, sin, sex, or foreigner), Christiana Myers dives into Mitchell Wiebe’s maximalist shapeshifting exhibition “VampSites” (2018–2024), and other recent chimerical imagery by contemporary artists who “us[e] the fantastic to access the real,” when the truth is already so complex and monstrous. 

In One Thing, Innas Tsuroiya focuses on Kamala Ibrahim Ishag’s zar paintings, which often capture the moment of physical and spiritual entwining. Zar is a type of jinn that mostly possesses women. Within the zar ceremony that has evolved into a social gathering and dance around the Horn of Africa, Ishag’s depictions of feminine figures and spirits are entangled, standing or swaying together, in a “totality of communion.” As one of the first women to graduate from the College of Fine and Applied Art in Khartoum in 1963, Ishag went on to co-lead the crystalist movement with several of her former students. Inspired by poetics, theoretical physics, and the gleam of light refracted through a crystal, the movement desired to break away from the nation-building aesthetics of post-independence Sudan in the 1970s.

_Floor Drawing Series_ by Aubin Soonhwan K opens these pages as the newly commissioned Artist Project, a vibrant meditation on writing as a physical act, in the spectrum between script and drawing that moves toward gesture rather than linguistic marks. This becomes “a feeling as opposed to a meaning,” suggests Christian Vistan in their accompanying text. Through multiple material translations, K’s writing and drawing take form, reading the distance between a mark and its meaning. 

EJ Kneifel’s Composition explodes the form of a dialogue, revelling in closeness to and quoting fervently from Lily Wang’s novel _Silver Repetition_ (2024). It feels devotional. In Wang’s novel, Yuè Yuè is dislodged by grief, and the need to repeat to not forget. Yuè Yuè’s name is the word moon, doubled, like when Earth briefly had two moons last September, as Kneifel notes (and there’s the grave accent again). 

The cover image for this issue traverses odd pathos on its own. It is an uncanny still from _Inside the Red Brick Wall_ (2020) by the Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers—a film that follows protestors’ two-week occupation of the Polytechnic University, their urgency, exhaustion, and stand-off with police violence. In its starkness, the image is also a short-hand for what is not seen; a lamplight; also, a moon.

Editor

Relational

Editor Joy Xiang reflects on the issue’s theme: _Mirror Mirror_.

Editorial: Mirror Mirror

Feature

James Albers is an emerging artist, writer, and cultural worker situated on the unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. They are interested in the magic of fiction and believe in the truth of a perfect lie. Recently, they’ve been exploring hidden folklores, intimacy, and uninhibited dancing.

Bhenji Ra is a Filipina-Australian artist based on Gadigal land, Eora Nation. Ra’s projects combine choreography and video and are deeply rooted in social justice practices. Her practice combines dance, video, illustration, and community activation. Her work dissects cultural theory and identity, centralizing her own personal histories as a tool to reframe performance. She is the mother of Western Sydney–based collective and ballroom house SLÉ.

Bhenji Ra and I met in Vancouver in mid-July of 2024 while she was in town to present her newly commissioned film and first solo exhibition in Canada, _Biraddali Dancing on the Horizon_ (2024), at Western Front. The film weaves together ancestral spirit and cultural dance through the ghostly lens of 16mm film transferred to 4K. It explores the history of the mythical Biraddali creature through the Pangalay, the traditional “fingernail” dance of the Tausūg people of the Sulu Archipelago in the Philippines. Bhenji reinterprets the story through her own matriarchal lineages, personal histories, and lived experiences as a transfeminine person. The following text weaves together a script of our conversation on the experiences behind the imagining and creation of the film.

[_Bhenji relaxes into her chair, dropping her shoulders. She sits in front of a banner with palm trees and ghostly figures dancing in the foreground, and drinks sparkly water out of a glass._] 

 

> **James Albers: Hi!**

**Bhenji Ra:** Hii booooo.
 
> **JA: Do you want to introduce yourself?**

**BR:** Sure, I’m an artist. I’m not based anywhere right now. I spend a lot of time in Sydney connecting with the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and I’ve cultivated a practice from being rooted in community there. That practice has since grown, mostly to the Philippines. I’m back and forth between Manila and Sydney a lot. I grew up in this really sweet village in New South Wales, about six hours from Sydney. It’s a very small town, around 5,000 people at the time. There was always the smell of salty water, long and deep rivers, mountains, bush, eucalyptus, and a lot of green pastures and farmland.

> **JA: Would you say that you were a creative child?**

**BR:** Super creative! Very inspired by everything I would touch and see. I would always grab my family’s video camera, filming something or setting up a scene with my Barbie dolls or with me and my sister. I was always directing things or performing or endlessly drawing, cartoons and characters, and working with aesthetics.

> **JA: I always like to hear about people’s childhoods. As I’m getting older, I find myself wanting to reintegrate play into my practice as much as possible. Would you agree for yourself?**

**BR:** Definitely. The improvisational aspect of my work is so important to me because it refuses to be captured by a type of academia or technical aspect. My work’s always about feeling, you know?

> **JA: From my understanding, you’re a multimedia artist who plays around with a lot of different material, but there’s definitely narrative threads through it all, like spirituality, gender fluidity, folklore, performativity, embodiment, and play.**

**BR:** It’s true. I always ask myself, what is the necessary form this thing needs to take in order to be fleshed out and manifested into the physical world?

> **JA: Is there a certain reason that you gravitated toward making films and imagery?**

**BR:** I would say that my practice mostly has to do with the body, actually. It’s dominated most of my work and performances. I think it’s only been in the last decade that I’ve been working with film. Well, I feel film is easier to share.

> **JA: There’s also the ephemerality of live performance... Are there some kinds of performances that you would never want to film?**

**BR:** I think so... Some folks that watch my live performances say, “This is not a film, it needs to stay like this,” and I trust that from my community. I would usually create a film based on the performance being a type of storyboard. I can’t really think about a film without performing it in life first. Everything has to be ritualized. I need to feel it in my body before I can know what it feels like on film. I need to be able to embody something so I know how it needs to be retrieved through the lens. That’s my way of working through this idea of the “anthropological lens,” or this colonial lens of capture that a lot of our bodies as cultural dancers have been subjected to throughout history.

> **JA: I was reading an interview that you did in 2018, “Bhenji Ra on embodying future forms”—there’s one part where you specifically talk about your parents. You described your mother as having an “urbanness about her that’s vibrant and longing to be somewhere else,” [^1] and this was accompanied by a slight bitterness in her character. [_Bhenji cries out, “Oof!”_]**

> **And you described your father as a “very soft, quiet, white-Australian man who was happy to be in a country town.” [^2] I loved these quotes because I feel similarly about my parents. I feel that this reality challenges the typical racialized tropes and power dynamics applied to interracial marriages. Considering these descriptions of your parents, how do you see this dynamic being explored within yourself and your practice?**

**BR:** I think we as folx of the diaspora with white dads have this relationship to the patriarchal figure standing in as symbols of colonialization and empire, but at the same time we share an intimacy with the father figure. But, I don’t have any answers to what it means for us to be in that dynamic. At times when I was younger, I felt like I had to be in opposition to what my father represented, and not be in a relationship with it. From a very young age I felt that my father opposed me, in a way that just didn’t make sense to me and what I liked. I guess he thought I was quite jarring to be around, and vice versa.

I do feel we typically use the matrilineal line to find our way back to self and back to our cultural identity. It’s a spiritual connection that we have through the womb, through our mother’s womb, our grandmother’s womb, that connective tissue that’s within our DNA, which just isn’t there in the patrilineal line. 

Wasians are my favourite people. [_We both giggle._] We don’t necessarily need to hear more about Wasians; we’re often overrepresented, over-celebrated. But I feel like if we can tap into that spiritual connectedness between the two bloodlines, it can be a strategic way to think about the fall of the empire, and even to decolonize our minds, selves, and bodies.

> **JA: Can you expand on that?**

**BR:** Well, now, I don’t see my father as a white-Australian man, I see him as an Irish-Scottish settler who has a history of his own, and a land and soil that he comes from. As I get older, the binary between us starts to dissolve and I’m finding more ways to be in relationship to him instead of in opposition. His blood is within my blood and I can’t ignore that. [She says with conviction.] It’s the same with my mom. For so long, she was my only window into my culture, and now I have become the door for her to come back into hers. It’s not necessarily like she’s the one teaching me about being Filipina. It’s more that I’m leading her back to decolonial space that also recognizes her as a settler in Australia. 

> **JA: That’s a much more expansive way of thinking about race than just existing within a clear binary of “us and other.” I really resonate with that. Thank you for sharing. The first thing I encountered about your new work was the title, _Biraddali Dancing on the Horizon_, which I love. Any time a horizon is mentioned in a work about the body, queerness, or gender, I am reminded of the late José Esteban Muñoz and his book _Cruising Utopia_ (2009). The introductory paragraph contains this gorgeous line: “We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.” [^3] The idea that queerness exists as a more desirable imagination of a future, slightly out of reach, resonated with me deeply. Do you know the quote?**

**BR:** Yeah, I do. I feel like that quote has marked my body for such a long time. I’m always thinking about this idea of the horizon, futurity, possibility. How I came to the title comes from when I was with my family on a boat in the Sulu Sea, going back to the mainland. We had just made it through a storm and my cousin said, “Oh my god you’re gonna see the Biraddali! You’re gonna see the Biraddali in the morning!” and I was like, “What is that?” They said, “It’s a rainbow! You're gonna see the rainbow and it’s gonna be on the horizon!” I was like, “Wait, didn’t you say that the Biraddali is a mythical creature?” And they told me that it was one and the same. The Biraddali is this non-gendered feminine figure that is a bird-human hybrid from the Tausūg culture. She’s fallen from heaven and sits at the bottom of the rainbow, but she’s also called the rainbow.

After hearing this, I stared at the horizon for two days in that boat. It made me think about what it meant to be in that place: in the Sulu Sea, guided by the stars and celestial navigation. Looking out toward the horizon was a way of mapping our direction back to home. And as trans folx, we aren’t just sitting on the horizon, we’re actually dancing on it. I see this distinction as a gesture of joy and celebration. 

> **JA: That’s a really beautiful story. Can you share a little more about your research process?**

**BR:** I like to give myself time with family and land, before I go and open up a book, so I wanted my research to be going back to the region where my Pangalay dance mentor was from, whom I called my auntie. Going back to this island was really important; she hasn’t been there for 49 years. It’s a very remote and dangerous place that tourists don’t really go to. 

I wanted to look for archival footage of her mother, which apparently exists but she doesn’t know who has it. When we got there, a bunch of stuff happened that I don’t want to get into, but we had to leave four hours after arriving, and that’s why we spent the next two days on the boat. That was our deepest form of research, because as a people, we are seafarers. We’ve always been seafarers. Our connection to land has been a nomadic connection, and so we spent so much time on the water following the stars and horizon back. It was there where Auntie just opened up about stories growing up on this island, about her mother. We also had these big dreams together, like we were dreaming under the same sky, under the same map... 

I would say the time on the boat was more an embodiment of the research. When I got back to the mainland, I had two days to shoot the rest of the film. It was hard to say that I had a strategy, because I wanted to treat my footage as an archive, as something that I found and was uncovering, reframing. It’s ironic that we never found anything about her mother, since her name had also related back to a bird, one that’s very rare to see in the Philippines. We never saw a Biraddali either.

> **JA: How poetic. Do you think there should be academic writing about this?**

**BR:** I think there should be writing about our folklore and cultural traditions, but from our own people. That would help minimize the violence of the capture. I do want to honour the refusal of the capture of the Biraddali form; maybe she isn’t meant to be found. When you academicize something, it allows anybody to access it, and then, I guess, imitate it, or feel like they can. I think that the academic approach to archiving other cultural practices can be very misguided, skewed, and extractive. 

> **JA: I’d love to see how you’d archive these cultural practices in your own ways.**

**BR:** I’m an artist after all, and that’s an archive in its own way. [_She laughs._]

> **JA: I want to talk about the visual language of the film—it’s filmed completely on 16mm film, which gives it an archival feel. For me, the visuals were very blue and green. There’s a lot of overlaying, duplicate images, which also suggests a ghostly quality. Can you talk about some of these creative choices?**

**BR:** I wanted to work with 16mm because I feel like there’s more space to collaborate with spirit when dealing with physical film as opposed to digital cameras. I was also interested in referring back to this violence of capture; the instrument used to shoot 16mm is huge and heavy to carry around the village. War films from WWII were also filmed on these cameras.

> **JA: Oh true, that’s a haunting thought.**

**BR:** Yeah, and I wanted it to feel like I was given material, not that I was producing it. I told the cameraman to film and I would work with what I was given. There was even a time when I had to get the film through a small airport’s security and they had no idea what this film was. They thought it was a bomb and had to take the film into a dark room and physically touch it instead of putting it through the X-ray, which would damage the film. I was crying and pleading the whole time, but those rolls got ruined and I just decided to work with this instance. What will be will be. After that we just had to slice and dice and create a space for the footage to really be activated. 

> **JA: I really love how you talk about the footage as something given to you, something gifted to you. That’s an interesting angle to look at your own work with.** 

**BR:** I feel like a lot of the times when I’m making a work, I get lost in all the choices of where it can start and where it can go. I guess that was my way of forcing something to just happen, giving it restrictions to let it fly elsewhere. There’s that push-and-pull of it all. 

> **JA: What’s next for you?**

**BR:** I think that I’m entering a time of just making things! I think it’s important for artists my age to just create so that we can sit with our bodies of work. I really want to return to that place of play that we talked about at the beginning. I want to create from that curious place of childlike wonder, instead of only creating for, you know, exhibitions that are based on funding. I want to think more strategically about how my work and life can contribute to the fall of empire and the liberation of queer and trans bodies. 

> **JA: Like a warm horizon imbued with potentiality, or finding the end of the rainbow, right?**

**BR:** Yeah, something like that. [_Bhenji takes one last sip of her sparkly water and leaves her glass empty_.] 


[^1]: Eugenia Lim, “Bhenji Ra on embodying future forms,” _Assemble Papers_, March 29, 2018, https://assemblepapers.com.au/2018/03/29/embodying-future-forms-bhenji-ra
[^2]: Ibid.
[^3]: José Esteban Muñoz, _Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity_, 10th anniversary ed. (New York City: NYU Press, 2009), 1.

Speaker

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Video

James Albers speaks to artist Bhenji Ra about her moving image commission _Biraddali Dancing on the Horizon_ (2024). Ra makes connections between horizons, queer and trans liberation, and collaborating with spirit using the medium of physical film. 

Bhenji Ra Dances at the End of the Rainbow

Nasrin Himada is a Palestinian writer and curator from Montreal. Their practice is heavily influenced by their long-term friendships and by their many ongoing collaborations with artists, filmmakers, and poets. Nasrin’s recent project _For Many Returns_ experiments with writing as an act dictated by love, and typifies their current curatorial interests, which foreground desire as transformation and liberation through many forms. Nasrin currently holds the position of Associate Curator at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University in Kingston (ON).

Yantong Li (b. 1998, Dali, China) is a curator and artist based in Toronto. He is a Master of Visual Studies (curatorial) candidate at the University of Toronto. Li works at the intersection of global infrastructure, Sinophone and trans-Pacific diaspora, regional folklore, and decolonization. His recent works and curatorial projects have been shown internationally, which include the Curatorial Awards at Jimei x Arles International Photography Festival, Xiamen (2022); Durian-Durian: The First Trans–Southeast Asia Triennial, Guangzhou (2023); Trinity Square Video, Toronto (2023); The New Gallery, Calgary (2024); Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto (2024).

###### Dear Nasrin,

In prose and verses, I began writing to you, grieving from the shoreside of Harling Point and Haro Strait on Vancouver Island, petrified about the impossibility of returning. Behind me sits a graveyard turned heritage site; the graves and I, all facing the waterway that brought my ancestors to this land from the other side of the Pacific. From the swamps of the provincial archives, I learned that in colonial regimes, the reality of displacement and dispossession has not disappeared, even in death: the bones and ashes in the cemetery initially migrated from another cemetery in Ross Bay, which uprooted Indigenous, Black, Mongolian, and Chinese graves to make room for more, mainly white, graves. The remains were dug up, with bones left in plain sight, unattended, with seasonal currents washing ashore, eroding parts of the cemetery, carrying the ashes and bones into the sea. To avoid continual desecration, the remaining Chinese bones were dug up from the Ross Bay Cemetery and transferred to the cemetery at Harling Point after 1909. The vacant site can still be seen today from Ross Bay.

Graves are channels to attend to our ancestors’ work, with vitalities and spiritual bonds that cross generational ties through rituals of mourning. Like angels of history that flap their wings, each grave, when well attended to, becomes a rearview mirror that carries the weight of history while we move forward. Beneath the rubble of coloniality, it seems that the lost graves only gain their spectre through a stroll among swamps of archives. The unending replicas of textual materials, photographs, and distributed film reels have become reminders of the impossible return of the lost graves, bones, ashes, rituals, and bonds that will forever be carried through the oceanic currents and seasonal winds, with nowhere to land… I can’t help but think of whether, in the enduring struggle to return, there can be alternative channels of mourning and strategies of relationality that emerge to contest the colonial regime’s perpetual impulse to choreograph our life cycles?

> Each desecrated grave is a bond broken.
> Each desecrated body is a bond broken.
> The archive is cruel,
> an exhausting stroll,
> moving from one grave to another.

Eduardo Cadava describes photography, or in some ways, the nature of archives, as a mode of bereavement that speaks to us of mortification. He interprets the process of eternal return as a celestial graveyard, reflecting on the ways in which technological reproducibility had turned history into a mass-(re)produced event. The fragments of each circulated photograph are like stars and meteorites shot from the universe’s birth, as replicas of (the moment of) dying. Photographs and archives possess a certain cruelty that makes our sky a celestial cemetery that requires the eternal work of mourning. Every passing image disperses time and space in an infinite collision that sheds light on the impossible return of the passing, perpetuated through the replication of fidelitous documentation of loss:

> The world of the eternal return is a world that incessantly fixes and returns to the event of a vanishing, and what vanishes in this return is not only the finite subject matter before the cosmic camera in which the world begins but the possibility of returning itself. A return without return… [^1]

I recently came across Taysir Batniji’s photobook _Disruptions_ (2024), a collection of over 86 screenshots from 2015 to 2017 of WhatsApp video calls with his mother and family in Gaza. The screenshots are all disrupted signals that turn moments of intimacy into complete abstraction, with each heightened pixelation revealing the materiality of exile and the reality of occupation and genocide that seeps into the everyday. The work, at least for me, is also an invitation to reflect on our attachment to the fidelity of visual representation and the reliance on accurate portrayal of violence to garner solidarity in moments of conflict. The body of work is almost an active refusal of transparency, yet it speaks more about the precarity of occupation that rids kin. Aruna D’Souza, in her most recent book, _Imperfect Solidarities_, warns us about the destructiveness of empathy as passivity. To me, it is an uncanny danger that images of fidelity evoke, which turns us into passive voyeurs of violence until our need to understand and relate to others’ pain is satisfied. [^2] In the media outlets, almost every image of Gaza, of the occupation and unfolding genocide, forms a fidelitous archive of death, a celestial graveyard that builds on the eternal return of displacement and dispossession. Batniji’s works require acts of activation and ask for attentiveness and reaching in for us to understand the context that perpetuates the abstraction of violence.

> We live inside a celestial grave,
> One image atop another.
> Yet, we mourn, reflexively.

What is the texture of relation that we form as light, as stars? When we reinterpret the night sky as constellations of perpetual becoming, we begin to transform a celestial graveyard of reflexive mourning into a site where acts of grieving can activate something more. I think of meteors, the moments when stars burn before they return to from whence they came: the night, the dark, the binding texture of the night sky. It is a moment where the cosmic fire engulfs us in liberation, when the celestial forces can no longer suppress our vitality. It is a moment when destruction and resurrection collide, shining across the eternal sky. How can we not just bear witness to the fire but bear it? When we mourn the burning stars, who and what do we become? How do we witness the phantom traces of the cosmic fire and carry it within us?

I was walking across the King’s College Circle on the University of Toronto campus the other day, where the reverberations of the student encampments can still be seen and felt. I can still see the marks left by the OccupyUofT movement, the spectral afterlives that still mark, mow, and “burn” the lawn in parts where the grass almost refuses to grow. Maybe these are the phantom traces I am discussing, the marks left by our comrades, martyrs, and all those who are in active refusal in order to undo the oppressive and complicit regime of death, brutality, and violence that is built on the continuous logic of extraction and destruction that denies us of peace, even in our afterlife. Perhaps the traces of the passing are also traces of resurrections that launch us into imaginaries of another world in this world. Fred Moten’s words resonate with me deeply; perhaps they also resonate with those of us who still have faith, not in regimes of coloniality, but in each other:

> I believe in the world and want to be in it. I want to be in it all the way to the end of it because I believe in another world in the world, and I want to be in that. And I plan to stay a believer, like Curtis Mayfield. But that’s beyond me, […] and out into the world, the other thing, the other world, the joyful noise of the scattered, scatted eschaton, the undercommon refual of the academy of misery. [^3]

I wonder about the channels through which this fire can be passed on.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, in her book _As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance_, uses constellation as a concept of relation that grounds purposeful opacity as a form of fugitive intervention. These constellated relations, as Simpson calls them, invent a dimension where mobilization and movement weave interrelational webs of co-resistance. [^4] As creatures of light and people of stars, how can we learn from Nishnaabewin? I wonder, what relation can we form across the night sky, across darkness?

Nasrin, being your student has been a privilege, and what you have said stuck with me. You spoke of _writing as a form of relational act_. Perhaps in a way, letter writing, correspondence, and exchange through poetics are our own lingua franca in times of collective grievance, a gesture of reaching in without the burdens of disclosure. It is a form of relation-building that occupies the space in-between, and a form of active listening that binds the fabrics of the night sky that weave us together without the need to make ourselves in each other’s image. When we use opacity as a ground for building relation, I believe we begin to render a language untranslatable to the mind of the colonizer. Like what D’Souza writes, it formulates a generous space for communication through the thickets of mistranslation, and an alliance built not on empathy, but on imperfect understanding of each other’s desires, motivations, values, and struggles. [^5] It is a form of relationality through mobilization, about existing _beside_ each other’s struggle. I return to the bones and ashes of my ancestors that became part of the Pacific currents. Their afterlives in the ocean teach me to mourn differently, to embody the oceanic as the texture that forms diasporic thought, to adapt exilic movement as channels of relationality, mistranslation shared as embodied struggle. Maybe these are gateways for us to depart from the logic of coloniality built on occupation, fixated on the contradiction of permanence and death. I don’t have answers to these questions yet, but perhaps these are spaces where we can begin to genuinely mourn and grieve, together…

As I write to you, I also must be aware of the margins we are given. It is never enough to express the love, struggles, and care we all share with each other, which may be precisely why these exchanges must be in constant motion through and with each other, as a form of ritual… There is always so little time, so little space to convene, yet so much more to be done.

###### With love,
###### Yantong
 
 
###### Dear Yantong,

Writing feels incredibly hard these days. I find myself without words, and yet, I’ve never been as busy with so many writing commissions. Somehow, I push through and arrive at a place that feels close to the ache and pain in my bones. As you know, those of us who come from a lineage of the dispossessed carry grief and longing for our land, no matter where we are or where we go. But since October 7th, I’ve been feeling something else— something for which no word exists yet. I believe there are many words we haven’t found because of what we’ve been made to witness. It’s beyond grief, beyond embodiment. It exists both within and outside of our bones. It reminds me of Ojibwe artist Andrea Carlson, who speaks of how “colonial tactics sever us from ourselves.” [^6] In a way, bearing witness to this violence forces us to distance ourselves from our bodies. My question is: how do we continually find our way back to stay centred, focused, and clear?

Before October 7th, I would have said that grief, for me, is generative. It shapes forms of life that include dreams, relationships, connectivity, solidarity, poetry, visions, and imaginings. To me, there is no life force more powerful than grief, because its depth in the body knows no bounds. Grief creates the conditions for transformation— for hope, for anger, for new languages, and utterances. Most importantly, grief generates an ethic of love. You’ve heard me say this before, in my introduction to the “dreamworlds” [^7] screening at Images: “How we mourn is how we love.” Grief connects us in profound ways to those who have passed and to our lands. Yet, since October 7th, I’m no longer certain of anything. My entire centre has been shaken. My deepest concern, as always, is with language: how will we come to understand the traumas emerging from this horror? What new words will be created for someone who found a fetus under the rubble? What dreams can come when the sound of drones is constant? As I write this, I think of Marcellus Williams, murdered by the US state. Before his death in prison, he witnessed the atrocities by Israel, writing and observing. In one of his poems, he expressed astonishment that the children of Palestine still smile: “and somehow you are able to smile / O resilient Children of Palestine!” [^8] Even amid this other horror—the horror of capital punishment—connections can still be forged: through prison walls, across borders, and through the same mechanisms of violence that seek to separate our bodies from ourselves, our bodies from our kin, and our bodies from our lands. 

In our initial conversation about this exchange, you spoke to me of mourning and loss and their cycles of manifestation through ritual, resistance, and relation. Reading your letter now, I find myself freezing up at every sentence, taking a breath each time to sit with the stories of gravesites of ancestors denied proper burial, evoking to me the image of Palestinian gravesites dug up by Israeli soldiers, the tanks repeatedly rolling over and crushing bones. Even in the afterlife, the violence of erasure and unrest endure. Many of us understand this, but it is the learning of these stories—in detail, location, and context—that provides insight into the land as a carrier of histories and the untold stories that remain. 

When I read your letter, I was reminded of Brandon Shimoda’s poetry reading at UC Berkeley in April. [^9] I wasn’t there, I watched it on my screen. He titled it _Oranges_, and said he’d never titled his readings before, which I thought was so moving. He began with the most beautiful line, an image I won’t ever forget: “I had a dream last night that a rainbow was burning.” He continued: 

> I had a dream last night that the war fit on the tip of a finger. I had a dream last night that a scream did not need a hill to gather speed to reach the people. I had a dream last night that a shrine burned down and was replaced with a shrine, identical but empty. Photographs of the dead grimacing from the walls, and the aura of a tree in the shape of smoke, keeping cool the dead, a perfect instrument. 

For the reading, Shimoda altered the original poem, published in his recent book _Hydra Medusa_, to evoke the image and spirit of Refaat Alareer. As we listened, he spoke of Alareer, describing how he had sat “right there,” at that very desk, reading—reading many books, including _The Autobiography of Malcolm X_ “three times.” We could feel his presence, imagine him, and sense that he is still with us. In this reading, Shimoda evoked many images, conjuring visions that flowed through the poem, now transformed for the present moment, continuing to mark and archive dreams. An instant took my breath away: “Do not situate, before the gaze of one particular stranger, the dead were not ‘gazing.’ They wanted it to be over, their reflection to be stronger, like a lunar sound materializing a hymn of thanksgiving to the missing.”

The transition from “they wanted it to be over” to “their reflection to be stronger” demonstrates the power of language in action, giving us an image of those who have passed as deeply resonant and enduring—an overwhelming force that had already decided “they wanted it to be over.” This shift moves us away from the colonial narrative, where death is often manipulated from the colonizer’s perspective: “Do not situate before the gaze of one particular stranger, the dead were not gazing.” Shimoda’s poetry, through his dreams, breaks open language, shattering the normalization of its use to deaden the story of those already dead. Here, they are instead given presence and life—life beyond death. Their bodies return to them, they return to their spirit, to the land, moon, and sky: “their reflection to be stronger, like a lunar sound materializing…”

When you write about Batniji’s work, saying it requires “acts of activation and ask for attentiveness and acts of reaching in for us to understand the context that perpetuates the abstraction of violence.” I think of this act of writing through and alongside dreams—of writing through and recording what we dream as an act of activation and recovery by reaching inward. As my dear friend Maiko Tanaka expressed after hearing Shimoda’s reading, “It opens up spaces I couldn’t reach on my own, just to feel, and to feel things within the dynamic constellation of what is happening now alongside our ancestors... I hear poetry like this, and what else is there to do but feel?” 

When October 7th happened, I stopped listening to the news in the mornings. For the first few weeks, I only listened to June Jordan. One recording I returned to often was from The Poetry Center in 1993. [^10] I thought of her uncompromising strength, her ability to live and engage with the world relationally. Reading and listening to her reminds me not only of the powerful ways poetry transforms our imaginings—keeping the past and future alive in the present—but also of how it empowers our positionalities as it demonstrates the material force of language. It calls us to _return_, it calls us to return to ourselves, as we return to sound the call for collective responsibility, and with the words of June Jordan, “I believe that you cannot claim a people and not assume responsibility for what that people do or don’t do. You cannot claim to be human and not assume responsibility for the value of all human life.” [^11] 

I’ll leave it here for now, as I am off to another screening of “dreamworlds,” here, in sunny Minneapolis.

###### With love,
###### Nasrin

[^1]: Eduardo Cadava, _Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History_ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 42.
[^2]: Aruna D’Souza, _Imperfect Solidarities_ (New York City: Columbia University Press, 2024), 23.
[^3]: Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, _The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study_ (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013), 118.
[^4]: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, _As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 211–231.
[^5]: D’Souza, _Imperfect Solidarities_, 36–37.
[^6]: Andrea Carlson, artist talk (Penny Stamps Speaker Series, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, October 20, 2022).
[^7]: “dreamworlds” is a program of short films I curated for Images Festival in Toronto, April 2024; it later screened at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, September 2024.
[^8]: Marcellus Williams’s “The Perplexing Smiles of the Children of Palestine” was circulated much online; also see: [https://tempestmag.org/2024/10/the-perplexing-smiles-of-the-children-of-palestine](https://tempestmag.org/2024/10/the-perplexing-smiles-of-the-children-of-palestine)
[^9]: Brandon Shimoda,“Oranges,” poetry reading (Lunch Poems, University of California, Berkeley, April 4, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZvi78rFyWg&t=560s
[^10]: June Jordan, poetry reading (The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University, April 15, 1993), [https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/poetrycenter/bundles/238553] (https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/poetrycenter/bundles/238553)
[^11]: June Jordan, “On Israel and Lebanon: A Response to Adrienne Rich from One Black Woman,” _The New York War Crimes_, September 11, 2024, [https://newyorkwarcrimes.com/june-jordan-on-israel-and-lebanon-a-response-to-adrienne-rich] (https://newyorkwarcrimes.com/june-jordan-on-israel-and-lebanon-a-response-to-adrienne-rich)

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Dialogue

Nasrin Himada and Yantong Li’s moving letter exchange takes us through the constellations of mourning unseen by colonial regimes that deny peace to numerous deceased kins.

```````````````````To Return

Sofía Gallisá Muriente is a Puerto Rican visual artist and cultural organizer. Her work employs text, image, and archive as medium and subject, exploring their poetic and political implications.

Lara Mimosa Montes is a writer, editor, and teaching artist whose practice and experiences span the fields of alternative publishing and experimental writing. She was born in the Bronx.

> **Lara Mimosa Montes:** Your films explore the space between narrative and image, poetry and memory. For example, in _Celaje_ (2020), which I caught at The Whitney last spring, [^1] Puerto Rico appears as a collage of interwoven fragments that pairs the real alongside the written. The textures of the sea, the palm trees, and other fauna in combination with poetic language, voice-over, and the score with the coqui depicts a Puerto Rico that feels more dreamlike than documentary. When I write, I try to induce a similar state where a reader can inhabit the images in a poem by becoming attuned to the poem’s rhythms. How does writing fit into your process as someone who works with moving images outside of traditional narrative frameworks?

**Sofía Gallisá Muriente:** I’ve had cameras since I was a little girl, so images have been important for me throughout my life mainly as a way of documenting life and remembering. As I started deepening my artistic practice, I started thinking more about what the camera can’t capture, what is outside the frame, and all the images we’ve lost to time and climate, and how to make the invisible visible, conjure or account for it somehow in the combination between image, sound, and text. I also grew concerned with the automatic, mindless ways in which we consume images and how to slow that process down: interrupt, complicate, and disturb it in some way, so that whoever is watching has to make sense differently.

I film in very intuitive ways, so sometimes I need to interpret what I’ve done afterward, in the editing process. Words can be helpful to articulate those intentions, even in coded ways. Often the text or narration in my work is a collage of thoughts, references, things I overheard or that friends shared with me; and my work is to document and connect those ideas. I’m interested in layering meanings and ways of looking to explore the complexity and multiplicity of Puerto Rico. It’s a way of pushing back against the colonial gaze that insists on imaging us as just a big beautiful beach.

> **LMM:** Those techniques done in post-production generate a new atmosphere for meaning to circulate between word and image. This weekend,
I read “Interview With an Empire” (2003) [^2] —thank you for sharing it with me—and I keep returning to this idea that M. NourbeSe Philip introduces, that she handles language as if it were a “foreign anguish.”

> At the centre of Philip’s poem “Discourse on the Logic of Language” is a mirroring that happens between the words “language” and
“l/anguish.” [^3] This doubleness, a sense of being both of and outside English, tradition, the culture of the colonizer, the mainland… feels so Caribbean to me. The foreign anguish is this blank, a space of contradiction, silence, mourning; it’s a source of madness, or locura, for me. I have a hard time describing this to others because the anguish is both historical and preverbal. Do you experience a version of this—foreign anguish? Doubleness? The histories of colonialism scrambling your senses?

**SGM:** Of course! First of all I have to thank Nasrin Himada, a dear friend and curator, for sharing “Interview With an Empire” with me recently in Toronto, in
the context of Open Secret, a beautiful dialogue she generated between a group of artists mostly based in Canada and largely from immigrant backgrounds. [^4] It was interesting to read the text with them because we were all subjected to English as a colonial, imperial language, and we were sharing our ideas and works in part as a way of negotiating hybridity and experimenting with forms of visual language that can act as a counterweight. Relying on English in a context like that is very different to me, because it’s simply a mechanism of communication based on a common set of codes, but we are all standing outside the logic of that language.

I was excited that Philip is from Trinidad and Tobago and invokes the Caribbean experience in her writing. Visiting Port of Spain some years ago to do a residency with the brilliant folks from Alice Yard absolutely altered my experience of the English language. Creole English sounded and felt so different from the American English that surrounds and drowns me (culturally, professionally…). I understood it as a separate Caribbean thing, almost unrelated to the language of my colonizer.

That being said, the anguish of doubleness is definitely present for me as well. As much as I try to refuse the pressure to make myself understood in Imperial English, it’s an inevitable part of standing in the in-between, living and working in Puerto Rico while supporting myself economically and maintaining an artistic career thanks to opportunities in the United States. Negotiating that positioning in relation to communication is a constant struggle, but I am decidedly rooted in the Caribbean and in Puerto Rico; the US is not my mainland.

> **LMM:** I wonder if you could speak more to this decision, to be rooted where you are, in the Caribbean, in Puerto Rico.

**SGM:** Puerto Rico is the place where I was born and raised, where my deepest affections and allegiances are, where I feel there’s the most work to be done, where my work has the most at stake, and where it’s most personal. I had to leave New York after nine years in order to find my artistic voice because all the work I wanted to do was home. I was holding on to a clip of a newsreel for years after finding it in the National Archives in Maryland, of when the mayor of San Juan brought snow to Puerto Rico in the ’50s. It was like an apparition, because this is a mythical story but I had never seen images of the event, and it immediately complicated what I imagined it to be. I came back to PR as a fellow of Beta-Local, [^5] wanting to make something with that clip that was unlike any work I had done before. I wanted to experiment with multichannel video art and push myself to commit to art-making, and once I was here and energized by my community and the sense of infinite possibility, I was able to finally produce _Lluvia con nieve_ (2014).

As a diasporic Puerto Rican, your experience of navigating doubleness and of being rooted in a Caribbean or Puerto Rican way of thinking and writing must be very different. You said something wonderful about how Caribbean people have an innate relationship to speculation and a different relationship with time; do you sustain that within your writing practice? How do you do it while living physically disconnected from Puerto Rico or your Puerto Rican community in New York, without trafficking in nostalgia, like you mentioned you resisted?

> **LMM:** Ah, but nostalgia is so seductive! My mother recently told me that she had intended for me to be born in Puerto Rico. I couldn’t believe it— it wasn’t until we were in this community garden in Loisaida, this historically Puerto Rican neighbourhood in New York, that she thought to express to me this fantasy of self-determination. I ended up being born in New York, but I never imagined this aspect of my identity to have been the result of a very personal and ideological compromise she had made. I imagine in the ’80s, the more fluid terms some of us habitually call upon now to think about identity, relation, diaspora, and belonging may not have been so available to her. So my mother may still hold on to a speculative hope that even if I was not born in Puerto Rico, I _might_ yet be a Puerto Rican.

> Receiving this story shed light onto this speculative relation to self that haunts my writing. In my poems I repeatedly return to questions like “Who is speaking?” and “What am I? _When_ am I?” I don’t call upon nostalgia to work through these because any nostalgic feelings I may have about the island are what my mother would have tried to stoke in me. The nostalgia is not exactly my own; it is hers. She and I will likely spend the rest of our lives disentangling this. Talk about non-sovereignty!

> For now, I can recognize the moods my writing often pays tribute to are those of disorientation. Sometimes it comes out as a kind of linguistic locura, and I feel the resonance with the work of other Puerto Rican writers, especially when I read and hear the poetry. The poems of Lydia Cortés, Edwin Torres, and Urayoán Noel come to mind. The connection is reactivated whenever I hear our voices and see our work—this extends even to Bad Bunny. That the monolingual, colonial publishing and distribution networks of American literary culture don’t know how to recognize, translate, or theorize any of this is the compromise I accept to publish in the States. I also pessimistically accept the “neither here nor there” designation of the commonwealth status. Doing so allows me to identify with the sea, that which is inbetween, or at least that’s what I tell myself. How do you relate to the speculative or the non-human?

**SGM:** After the passing of Hurricane Maria in 2017, I was really drawn to thinking deeply about how climate conditions memory in the tropics, and how invisible forces like salt in the air and humidity impose impermanence all around us. For my series _Assimilate & Destroy_ (2017–2020), I started to work with film and biodeterioration, training myself to trust the process more and surrender to the elements by using expired film, burying film in wet soil and brine, or hand-developing film with native medicinal plants. As a result, the developing process made itself visible through the different artefacts that it provoked, but these effects were also new images and messages that I conjured through an act of transmission or mediation with my context. This process of thinking and making has evolved in a lot of different directions through my work these past few years, driven mainly by a desire to learn to observe nature and read my surroundings differently. Also, I need to be able to make work about colonialism, imperialism, memory, grief, and other heavy topics using fresh language and logics of time to reframe them and move away from tired discourses. We are so entrenched politically, and so many words have been instrumentalized and emptied of meaning, that I’m looking for communication strategies to think and feel through this world that’s on fire.

In Spanish, the word for “lagoon” (laguna) refers to both the coastal ecosystems as well as lacunae—absences or gaps in archives that signal to oblivion. I’ve been using this homonym as a departure point for a lot of the work I’ve been doing as part of an umbrella project I call _Lacuna Observatory (Observatorio de lagunas)_. I’ve spent a lot of time in lagoons throughout Puerto Rico, as well as working in formal and informal archives. In the process, one of the most beautiful things I’ve learned came from a conversation with a biologist in Laguna Grande in Fajardo. He was explaining to me the transformations in the lagoon driven by climate change that they’ve been monitoring, and suddenly he said “but there might be things happening that we can’t see or measure that might save it” and it blew my mind. We ended up talking about chaos theory and how to always count on what we don’t know that we don’t know. This take on the uncertain and unknown as potentially life-saving really made me trust the speculative in a new way, and be a little less pessimistic about the future.

How do you relate to the future?

> **LMM:** That’s incredible. I enjoy the different layers of materiality you work into the narrative process. The weather, the salt, and the sea make contact with the film and create this new texture, particularly in _Celaje_. I love to dwell in these zones of possibility—especially when they’re the result of a process that involves analogue technologies, natural elements, the reality of devastation. In this kind of situation, the only constant is change and you have to accept there’s only so much in your control as an artist. Maybe I relate to the fatalism in this.

> I believe this speculative way of working with matter, time, and the immaterial is also a way of making contact with the future. The synthesis of the metaphysical and the biochemical is a form of alchemy, and this is what I want to tap into when I sit down to write. Change, transformation, and destruction are not only essential but sacred parts of the creative process, so I try to make a habit of inviting chance, accident, and ruin into my practice as these feel like forms of speculative thinking. This is an intuitive thing, yet I am also self-conscious about it. As a teaching artist, I feel compelled to theorize the intuitive, but I find it to be a challenge: how does one describe to others through the language of practice what also feels innate?

**SGM:** Another part I love from the text by Philip is when she says, “The struggle is to reduce the gap between the experience and the expression of that experience.” [^6] That resonates _deeply_ with my work. It’s a struggle. Yet here we are. The struggle goes on. Everyday.

[^1]: See: “no existe unmundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria,” [https://whitney.org/exhibitions/no-existe](https://whitney.org/exhibitions/no-existe)
[^2]: M. NourbeSe Philip, “Interview with an Empire,” in _Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally_, ed. Romana Huk (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 195–206; see also: [https://www.are.na/block/1979981](https://www.are.na/block/1979981)
[^3]: M. NourbeSe Philip, “Discourse on the Logic of Language,” in _She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks_ (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2015), 29–34; see also: [https://www.womensrepublic.net/english-is-a-foreign-anguish-m-nourbese-philip](https://www.womensrepublic.net/english-is-a-foreign-anguish-m-nourbese-philip)
[^4]: Curated by Nasrin Himada, Open Secret is a series of screenings, conversations, and workshops that take place at Agnes Etherington Art Centre (Kingston, ON): [https://agnes.queensu.ca/participate/talks-tours-events/open-secret-sofia-gallisa-muriente](https://agnes.queensu.ca/participate/talks-tours-events/open-secret-sofia-gallisa-muriente)
[^5]: Beta-Local is an artist-run organization in PR dedicated to fostering knowledge exchange and artistic practices.
[^6]: Philip, “Interview with an Empire,” 197.

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Time

Lara Mimosa Montes and Sofía Gallisá Muriente discuss their respective writing and filmmaking practices, which image a Puerto Rican time and poetics characterized by intuition, contradiction, and linguistic locura (madness).

In the Lacuna

Karice Mitchell is a photo-based artist whose practice seeks to situate the vintage erotic publication _Players_ as a crucial marker of Black cultural production. Concerned with how the Black female body has been historically and colonially exploited, Mitchell is invested in finding restorative ways to engage with and respond to archival erotic material. She received her BFA at York University in 2019 and her MFA at the University of Waterloo in 2021. She resides on the unceded and traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations where she is a Black Scholar Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia.

Furqan Mohamed is a writer and educator from Tkaronto interested in all things culture, kinship, and abolition. Her work has been featured in publications such as _Canthius, This Magazine, Maisonneuve,_ and _The Local_. She is presently a graduate student at the University of Toronto.

I do not need an invitation to invoke June Jordan, but Karice Mitchell’s works as part of “Please be gentle,” a 2023 group exhibition curated by Laura Carusi at the plumb in Toronto, served as the perfect kind. Playing with visibility and obstruction, the images, lustrous and even insolent, beckon to us. I wasn’t aware of _Players_, the softcore magazine nicknamed “the Black _Playboy_,” which ran from 1973 to 2005, until seeing Mitchell’s work, much of which is rooted in this archive. But I was familiar with the wink and nod coming from Mitchell in “Please be gentle,” and throughout her work; the “iykyk” that stems from representations of Black women appearing as their authentic selves. They are Black, alive, and looking back at us. [^1] The work is both a mirror and a portal, and part of that lies in Mitchell’s invitation of the “glitch” during different stages of working with found images, providing opportunities for meaning and re-meaning to enter these photos. Using a combination of scanning, cropping, and digital effects, as both the artist and sometimes subject in the work, Mitchell refuses restrictive and shallow interpretations of Black femininity and sexuality and invites us to consider and rejoice in self-expression, reclamation, and acts of adornment and self-care.

Mitchell, now an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, discovered the flatbed scanner toward the end of her undergraduate studies and, while developing her own Black feminist politic, was taken by the fact that a seemingly mundane office object could be the bed of so much possibility. We chatted over Zoom, with Mitchell in Vancouver and me in Toronto, and discussed her process, sourcing her archive, the work and power dynamics of looking and consuming, especially when there are competing translations of an image, and seeing ourselves in public.

**Karice Mitchell:** I used to make trips to the BMV at Dundas Square [in Toronto]. I’d go to the back, where it’s all 18+ stuff, and go through vintage magazines, thinking a lot about collage and how I could integrate that into my work. I stumbled across this one particular magazine, _Players_, and started cutting them up. I wasn’t aware of the historical significance of this publication in particular, until the tail-end of my master’s. I had been conscious of the rhetoric around the dangerous hypersexualization of the Black female body, and something within this publication was challenging me to think more broadly about representation, about what a Black feminine sexuality could look like. I was intrigued. Flipping through the pages, the images felt familiar and familial. There was amazing beauty, and this kind of agency that felt alive in this publication.

> **Furqan Mohamed:** During my visit to the plumb, _Untitled (Woman in Gold)_ (2022) evoked that familial quality for me. She looks like my aunties, comfortable in her living room. It appeared to me as though she had a child in her lap, with your signature digital manipulation perhaps inviting me to see what I wanted.

**KM:** _[Gently corrects with a small, knowing smile.]_ It’s a doll! That’s an image that surprises people. They’re like, “That’s an image from an erotic magazine?” She was a centrefold model in one of the issues. She has her natural hair in this bun. The pearls, the gold. And there’s something about the interior design in some of these images, the gaudy, tacky furniture in the back that’s comforting. I was [also] thinking a lot about how blurring could be this device to disrupt a particular gaze.

> **FM:** Do you arrive at an image first and think, “I want to play around with this,” or is it the tool of the scanner that drives you, and you want to see what you can do with it?

**KM:** I think it’s a combination of both. Whatever I’m considering at the time will probably yield a particular methodology. With the work specifically at the plumb, I was motivated by ideas of adornment and beauty. So looking through images, I was trying to isolate these moments: cropping as a device to make something small, or to—theoretically or conceptually—make it really, really big. With _Intimacy Is_ (2023) [my installation at BAF Gallery, Vancouver], glitch and process were more at the forefront of my mind. “I like this tool, how can I, materially, play around with it?” So it’s a dance of both. What does this body of work require? What am I thinking about?

> **FM:** _Intimacy Is_, to me, exemplifies this, and all the considerations you’re making when exhibiting these images. In terms of methodology, I’m really intrigued by using blurring as a kind of refusal, as a tool of disruption. How did you move from more defined outlines or close-ups of a body to more illegible images?

**KM:** I was having difficulties in my practice, and I think that body of work was a way to negotiate some of the concerns that were being voiced intra-communally. I was thinking a lot about who was in the gallery space. Who is looking at these women? We know that [art] institutions are historically colonial, white spaces. I had this level of anxiety about these images sitting in Vancouver, where there aren’t as many Black people to receive them. What are the ethics of a found image? When you’re making these women anonymous, are you maybe reinforcing something, or is that working against some of your ideas around agency? Can you even negotiate agency within the field of image-making?

> **FM:** Your questions were in some way answered last year, when you faced a level of censorship during the 2023 Capture Photography Festival. You’re also acutely aware of the limitations of photography in representing Black life, like with Kodak, for example, and the origins of film and its relationship to Black skin.

**KM:** The site that I was originally meant to show at [for Capture] is owned by BC Hydro, and they didn’t want to do it. While that was happening, I was thinking about my motivations and being drawn to _Players_, to this archive of images.

I took images of myself using a lens filter attached to my [film] camera, replicating some of the mediation and process- driven work that I do with my digital work. I thought, using my own body as a means to deflect gaze, or implicating my body in a similar process, what potential does that have? That filter, for me, provided the opportunity for intervention. I was being censored while putting my own body into my work. So I thought, “Well, you know what, I’m not going to give you anything then. I’m going to abstract these images so you get nothing.” I think that was a way to take up some agency within image-making and have some sort of control, maybe, over the way that people are receiving the imagery; whether you are able to make out anything, that’s all you’re going to get. I was reading _Glitch Feminism_ by Legacy Russell at the time and was heavily influenced by this work, and wanted to establish visual “failure” as an aesthetic praxis and methodology. [^2]

> **FM:** _take care_ (2021–2022), another public installation, is one of your only works to feature any text, which you thought necessary given its prominent placement on the side of the Hamilton Artists Inc. building. The image, featuring red nails against dark skin with a kind of red under-garment to match, feels intimate.

**KM:** I can’t just put these images in public without underscoring my intention of what I’m trying to do. I thought, well, what if I use text to be that tool to call in people. It is an intimate image. Having darker skin in a public space was really important to me.

> **FM:** I always come back to the nails. And that emphasis on care just had me thinking, you know, whenever I’m not feeling like myself, I just need to get my nails done. I’m not depressed… I just need my hair done.

**KM:** Beauty… it’s not without cultural or political significance. As a Black woman, it’s crucial for my sense of being, and I do think about what certain visual cues signal, when I’m in certain spaces. I’m the only Black woman in my department. I dress in all black and my go-to is these loud, click-clacky nails. Visually, I do take up a particular space. It does something for me. And it does something to people.

Around the beginning of the pandemic, there were conversations around isolation. We were separated from each other, and it was important to me to have this call to Black people, Black women and femmes. To ask how communal care translates to care for the self, intimacy for the self. Audre Lorde says self-preservation is a political tool, an act of political warfare. [^3] We’re in these systems that literally don’t want to see us alive, that don’t value our lives. We need to reclaim these narratives, to be very intentional in our sensibilities around care.

> **FM:** Beauty is not this frivolous thing. I think because we’re used to capitalism narrowing our scope and our view of what’s possible, people often reduce beauty and beauty practices to an individual practice, but they’re linked to this collective history. It’s not a luxury, as Saidiya Hartman says, “it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical act of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of _too much_.” [^4]

**KM:** That will to adorn… Adornment is a way to exercise subjectivity, to reclaim agency. [^5] It’s deep and it goes beyond superficiality. We feel it, and when we encounter some of these images, we recognize it. I think a lot of other Black women can look at these images and recognize the significance—what it means to adorn oneself, but also to see the range of skin tone, texture, and hair.

They felt like my grandmother, my mother, my aunties. These women [in _Players_] would wear really long acrylic nails, that would curve, and pearl jewelry, gold, bamboo earrings. And that always stuck out to me, this authentic way of Black women adorning themselves.

My grandparents were born and raised in Jamaica, and they moved to the UK. When a lot of our people are displaced, or move, gold is the thing they pass down. My grandmother kept her gold jewellery. Black babies are born into these rituals of adornment, of affirmation. When you’re born, you get a necklace with your name on it. I was thinking a lot about these rituals when looking at and responding to these images.

> **FM:** When I was at the plumb, I was taking photos of the work and realized I could fully, literally see myself reflected in the frame. And I thought about the more figurative ways I saw myself, in the close-ups of these women. As someone who veils, who wears a hijab, I’m also playing with access, I think. You don’t see me all of the time. I looked at some of the women in the images and thought, “Oh my god… twin!” Which may be a little funny to some, a hijabi identifying with the art whose source material is a softcore magazine. But the frame that holds that close-up is an extension of the work. And like a hijab, it’s a limit, a boundary. It says, “You can’t go any further than this,” which invites some questions, naturally. “Where is the rest of her? Am I entitled to that? Why?”

> Tina Campt, who also approaches images with a level of intimacy in her writing, tells us in _Listening to Images_ (2017) that we can’t ignore the context in which images are produced, and to think about what’s happening outside the frame. [^6] Your diptychs, like _Untitled Diptych (Woman in Pink Bikini)_ (2022), especially with the brightly-coloured frame, suggest these questions for me.

**KM:** I love that invoking of the hijab. These are the considerations I’m making with the frame, or the way the images exist in space. Plexiglass is shiny; it has a kind of seductive quality. I want the images to take on a visual seduction, and plexiglass has this commercial quality too. The frame is coloured, and along with the glass, it serves as a means of redirecting and disrupting gaze. I’m always thinking about access, and access to these images, because they’re no longer in production. There is a scarcity, but I’m not sharing the entire image. That’s a way to mitigate consumption, and to maybe try to dictate the way that these images are being consumed. You can have this image, but only so much. That’s what we’re willing to give within this institution or in this gallery space. The diptych form, for me, did come from thinking about what you said, and about “the emptiness” between two images. What is the potential there? What could be read between them? With my exhibition last April, [“matter of becoming”] at Franz Kaka in Toronto, I set out to consider diptychs more, thinking about what pairing images could do, particularly bodies and landscapes.

An image of a body paired with [an image of] a body of water may not immediately make you think they should be placed together, but by doing this, I am calling to and referencing a particular history. A lot of the spreads in _Players_ happen in these public, natural spaces. On a beach or in a forest landscape, with the natural world positioned as a background for forging a kind of subjectivity. I was drawn to these images, thinking about landscape and the role it plays in my life, being here on the West Coast and close to a body of water and again, what potential that has to do with my own subjectivity.

> **FM:** Black people and water…

**KM:** Black people and water! It’s a site that is so fraught, right? It’s filled with this horror, and at the same time, because UBC is right on the coast, there’s a beach that I’d go to after being in my studio. I would go for a swim and just float in the water. When I first started, I had this anxiety, and then it would sort of fizzle out, eventually, and there would be this peaceful moment. Being within this vast sea of water was kind of hypnotizing. Being in Vancouver, there aren’t a lot of us Black folks here, but there is something keeping us here. It’s made me curious, and a lot of people have mentioned the landscape, access to the coastline, to water.

When I was in Los Angeles recently, I saw this one exhibition at the California African American Museum (CAAM) that used archives to trace Black people’s history partaking in leisure at the beach. There are these historical all-Black beach clubs, and archival images of Black people just having a good time on the beach. These communities were essentially policed out and pushed out. Access to leisure, access to taking up this kind of space, on coastlines, by bodies of water, is a political thing. And tracing those histories are really important, so going to Los Angeles and seeing that exhibition confirmed that for me. There will always be this call to the water—it’s fraught but it’s also healing.

> **FM:** My family is from Somalia, and back home, water is a part of everyday life. You see yourself in it all the time, but here, water or access to water is a treat or vacation. It’s often pricey, very policed, or there are tickets, permits, rules, and regulations. So we’re separated from it, and there is this foreignness or exoticness attached to it.

> Some of the work you exhibited at Franz Kaka features frames that are pitch black, and other works are close-ups of women’s bodies between or beside bodies of water. We know that land is often reflected back to us as feminized. Black women, Black feminine bodies are also often portrayed as “exotic.”

**KM:** Coming off my work for Capture, after facing censorship, I was sitting with these messages, that Black women needed to be policed out of public space, that Black women showing up for the sake of themselves does not belong in public space. Even though we did end up with an alternative venue for the work, it still left me with this worry that people would continue to respond to the work in that way. But there’s no other way for me to exist. Looking at these images, Black women were existing in this almost utopic, beautiful way in public spaces and their subjectivity isn’t hindered by the fact that they’re in public.

> **FM:** The one work with the woman in a pair of pleasers, paired with the concrete building and tree, is my favourite from “matter of becoming.” You can make her out, wearing those shoes, of course, but it’s clear it’s also just as much about the cityscape she’s in.

**KM:** I was thinking about the “glitch” and legibility, about the Black form emerging and retreating, and emerging again within public space while considering my own role within the institution. We often negotiate, as Black people, how much you emerge, through things like code-switching in the way you speak and dress, in order to survive. Featuring a body that is emerging, through this glitch, to me, is a visual example of this negotiation.

Glitch and legibility, in my mind, work together. There are so many images and caricatures of Black people that have no depth, no substance. What’s really important about the “glitch” is that it’s an opportunity to have a multiplicity of self as it relates to marginalized bodies, [^7] and is so crucial in countering historical contexts that try to flatten marginalized bodies.

With the handheld scanner, you don’t know what the result is going to be. You’re working a little with the unknown, doing this kind of experimental thing, and you have to fail. You sometimes get error codes that pop up, and I was leaning into that, playing within those moments of error. You roll the scanner over something, and then have to go back and forth, but that suggests something, too. It’s that “failure” that allows for images to be read within other framings, other possibilities.

[^1]: June Jordan, “Who Look at Me,” in _Who Look at Me_ (New York City: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1969); see also: https://www.junejordan.net/from-who-look-at-me.html
[^2]: Legacy Russell, _Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto_ (London: Verso Books, 2020), 17–37.
[^3]: Audre Lorde, _A Burst of Light and Other Essays_ (Ithaca: Firebrand Books, 1988).
[^4]: Saidiya Hartman quoted in Christina Sharpe, “Beauty Is a Method,” _e-flux_ 105, December 2019, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/105/303916/beautyis-a-method
[^5]: Library of Congress and sponsoring body American Folklife Center, “The Will to Adorn: Reflections on African American Identity and the Aesthetics of Dress,” recorded on January 30, 2013, video, 1:01:20, https://www.loc.gov/item/2021689026
[^6]: Tina M. Campt, _Listening to Images_ (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).
[^7]: Russell, _Glitch Feminism_, 17–37.

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Photography

Race

Sexuality

Furqan Mohamed writes of Karice Mitchell’s photographs as both a “mirror and a portal”—in conversation, the two consider how Mitchell’s tools of formal intervention, like flatbed scanning, cropping, blurring, filters, and digital effects, seize the visual negotiation of Black femininity, sexuality, and adornment, to disrupt consumptive and censoring gazes.

Black, Alive, and Looking Back at You: In Conversation With Karice Mitchell

Christiana Myers is a curator, writer, educator, and cultural policy analyst based in Menahqesk/Saint John, NB. Her practice often explores physical, environmental, or institutional systems, and her PhD research in Art History through the University of Glasgow examines representations of contagion in contemporary artistic and curatorial practice.

Vampire lore typically utilizes one of two approaches to mirrors: since vampires have no souls, they can have no reflections, or they are reflected in their monstrous rather than human form. A common rationalization for this canonical device is that mirrors reflect truth rather than perception.

In his shapeshifting exhibition “VampSites” (2018–2024), Halifax-based artist Mitchell Wiebe noted the power of using fantasy and whimsy to gesture at the chaos and surrealism of real-world dynamics. “VampSites” was a parasitic funhouse that toured from the Confederation Centre Art Gallery, where it was curated by Pan Wendt, to the MacKenzie Art Gallery, The Reach Gallery Museum Abbotsford, and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. Complete with dark lairs, hypnotizing paintings with fantastical characters in psychedelic landscapes, and documentation from the artist’s studio and practice, it set out to do as vampires have been known to do—seduce through illusion and offer transformative passage to an uncanny future. A three-by-four-inch painting, present in varying ways in each iteration of the maximalist installation, perhaps best encapsulates Wiebe’s method: “Vampirical paintings hang from the wall to display future forms of reverse magic realism.”

Categorical characterizations and symbolism like “vampirical,” which are frequently seen in fantasy, horror, and science-fiction genres, have continuously evolved in societal contexts to serve different narratives. Often these monstrous metaphors were first invited into the domains of linguistics, visual culture, and science as a method of uniting reason with imagination to better understand, or create meaning within, the surrounding environment. Given that humans tend to reflect meaning through the lens of their own experiences, it is reasonable that intense emotions such as joy or fear would be characterized as transformed images of human likeness. These figurative depictions then multiply and distort like refractions in a hall of mirrors—itself a metaphor for evasive truth.

A foundational example of anthropomorphic symbolism in Western art history is the framework of the body politic—the metaphorical alignment of a state with an anatomical body, including when its systems are under threat of infection by elements like political unrest. The body politic metaphor has been expanded and leveraged by prevailing cultural, religious, and scientific paradigms, such as theories surrounding the origin and purpose of disease, to many ends and in many fantastical ways. In _Illness as Metaphor_ (1978) and _AIDS and Its Metaphors_ (1989), Susan Sontag outlines the many associations between physical vulnerability and social disorder, how eras of pathogenic paranoia have played into polarized politics, and how treatment has been conflated with the restoration of balance to society as a metaphorical body. Depending on cultural context, for example, vampires have emerged as shadowy icons of contagion: the feared foreigner, sin, sex, capitalism, and modernity, to name a few.

There is much to explore regarding the transmission of biological and social symptoms through symbolic representation in an era still being defined by a widespread health crisis. Contemporary rhetoric and the art that mirrors it attest to an increase of imaginative imagery consistent with Sontag’s observations. However, even if the threat of disease to the social body is both metaphorical and viscerally literal, which may compromise the membrane between truth and perception to the point of rupture, the role of illness in the body politic remains an effective example of the trajectory from fear to figurative representation to fantasy. In other words: the _rabies to raving-human-animal-hybrid to werewolf_ pipeline.

The 2022 Venice Biennale, largely curated prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic but experienced by audiences with its reflection present in the frame, explored the concept of transformation in a climate of fear and centred the representation of metamorphosis among bodies, technology, and the environment. Curated by Cecilia Alemani, “The Milk of Dreams” was titled after a book by surrealist artist Leonora Carrington that describes a magical world where otherworldly characters undergo a variety of transformations. The biennale prominently featured portals to other dimensions, such as Alberta Whittle’s installation _deep dive (pause) uncoiling memory_ presented by Scotland + Venice that included a tapestry symbolizing an open portal to mortal transformation, healing from historical trauma, and resistance against anti-Blackness. Also frequently featured were works that hybridized the human form with animal, mechanical, or ecological characteristics, and that emphasized the metamorphical qualities between historical legend, future myth, and surrealism. Inuit artist Shuvinai Ashoona’s coloured-pencil drawings comprised humanoid animals, consistent with Indigenous narratives, interacting with elements of contemporary Inuit life, acknowledging the fine threshold between realities, ways of knowing, and planes of existence; while the Danish pavilion’s dystopian installation _We Walked the Earth_ by Uffe Isolotto featured hyperrealistic transhuman centauric figures.

Similarly, expanded varieties of chimerical characters, mythological stories, and portals to other worlds have populated Wiebe’s artistic practice for decades and featured prominently in “VampSites” as well as in his recent and coinciding artist-curated group show, “Third Elbow” (2024), at Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery. “Third Elbow” also featured artists Kayza DeGraff-Ford, Craig Stuart Love, Cliff Eyland, Johanna Steffen, Pam Corell, and Adam Myatt. While “VampSites” felt deeply immersive and encapsulating, “Third Elbow” seemed to take a step back, and audiences were invited to exist in two worlds at once. Paintings spilled out of their frames, a mirror frame stood as both a door and a looking-glass, and the furrowed surface of a floating plastic membrane distorted the works behind it, aside from when holes allowed the “true” image to show through.

Wiebe’s “reverse magic realism” is defined by using the fantastic to access the real. [^1] This suspension of belief stretches over documentation and direct commentary to expand art’s capacity to critically engage through the imagination inherent in its creation and contextualization. Contemporary artists may be drawn to use fantastical imagery because they recognize that other realms can be accessed by inviting legacies of meaning to reveal themselves—where these characters and narratives offer a semiotic shorthand to communicate complex ideas. It may be the acute awareness that what is produced at a given juncture will be revised and reinterpreted at ever-increasing rates—that no matter what, the viewer’s reflection on the work will be warped, so there is no reason to constrict representation. Or it may be the constant navigation of moral complexities in horrifically (sur)real and interconnected scenarios that causes efforts to tell it like it is to be, at best, flattened by literalization, and, at worst, to cause further harm. Regardless of individual motivations, if the truth that art has for so long ventured to reflect is invisible, distorted, or monstrous, then there is little to gain by attempting to measure its strangeness against fiction.

[^1]: “Painting, Performance, and the Fantastic Collide in Mitchell Wiebe’s Art,” NSCAD University, July 12, 2024, [https://nscad.ca/painting-performance-and-the-fantastic-collide-in-mitchellwiebes-art](https://nscad.ca/painting-performance-and-the-fantastic-collide-in-mitchellwiebes-art)

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Supernatural

Illness

Christiana Myers explores the vampiric as a symbol for contagion in her consideration of Mitchell Wiebe’s maximalist shapeshifting exhibition “VampSites” (2018–2024), alongside other recent chimerical imagery. 

A Vampire Walks Into a Funhouse

Joshua Segun-Lean’s writing has appeared in _Republic Journal, The Brooklyn Rail_, and elsewhere.

Tiffany Sia is an artist, filmmaker, and writer who was born in Hong Kong and currently lives and works in New York. Her films have screened at TIFF Toronto International Film Festival, MoMA Doc Fortnight, New York Film Festival, Flaherty Film Seminar and elsewhere. Her essays have appeared in _Film Quarterly, October_ and _LUX Moving Image_. Sia’s first collection of essays _On and Off-Screen Imaginaries_ was published by Primary Information in 2024.

The following is an edited conversation with the filmmaker and writer Tiffany Sia, whose short film _The Sojourn_ (2024) had its Canadian première at this year's Toronto International Film Festival, as a part of the “Wavelengths” program. Our conversation considers Hong Kong cinema’s relationship to resistance, history, and place in and through the experience of exile—themes Sia explores in her most recent book, _On and Off-Screen Imaginaries_ (2024).

> **Joshua Segun-Lean:** In “Phantasms of Dissent,” the second essay in your recent book _On and Off-Screen Imaginaries_, you discuss two films by the Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers— a filmmaking collective that has stayed anonymous since 2019, in resistance to the Chinese government’s censorship. These two films, _Inside the Red Brick Wall_ (2020) and _Taking Back the Legislature_ (2020), document the 2019 Hong Kong protests. In your analysis, you emphasize the affective and somatic dimensions of the protests, highlighting the moment when the sense of collective power generated by occupying The Hong Kong Polytechnic University—as seen in _Inside the Red Brick Wall_—becomes one of collective vulnerability, as protesters suspect that they’re being trapped. I’ve been thinking about this scene in relation to political theorist Hagar Kotef’s writing on the relationship between mobility and political spaces—specifically how “the moving individual body often serves as a metaphor, a symbol, and a substitute for the body politic.” [^1]

**Tiffany Sia:** “Phantasms of Dissent” points less to the body as a collective symbol, representative of a nation or ethnic identity, and more to how bodies become animated by the spirit of politics and History (with a big H), through their spatial relations to state power. It is what these bodies do and where they are. It is in halls of governance and legislative spaces where sovereignty expresses its power through ritual, pageantry, and performance, and how the protest attempts to derive its power by taking back such architecture, interrupting public order and radically deforming state rituals. In describing this, I am referencing the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who, in _The Invention of Tradition_ (1983), writes about how so much of revolution, in its inversion of political pageantry, is itself part of the political ritual of state power.

In _Taking Back the Legislature_—as protesters occupied Hong Kong’s Legislative Council Complex—these spatial relations are extended virtually, captured on camera and circulated to a live audience. Similarly, in _Inside the Red Brick Wall_, images of dissent become powerful sites of public memory. Yet, as you mentioned, a fundamental paradox takes place—one that is perhaps inherent to postcolonial history and its deadlocked futures. Even in taking back these legislative halls and other spaces of state power, after arriving at a necessary and hard-fought turning point, the group is left to question, “What now in a place like this?” They realize they are trapped. These same halls—and the fortress of the university campus—hold colonial legacies and become the very architecture that ensnares them into the asphyxiating embrace of a police kettle. While such acts enter a repertoire of revolution, the protesters’ siege is used against them.

Remaining masked and anonymous, the Hong Kong protesters appear as a phantasmic, collective protagonist. When captured on video, their “porousness” (to use Marshall McLuhan’s term for thinking about the mediated body in the digital age) only heightens their vulnerability, as evidenced in the risk of revealed faces, and the broader concern over the films’ circulation under the gaze of the surveillance state. These images live on to haunt their subjects. What lives on in state narratives co-opts and perverts their legacy.

The theme of revolution at the heart of state rituals reveals the construction of national memory. As policies and lawfare globally target dissent and repress social movements, national anthems like those of the US and China are paradoxically premised on revolutionary change and civic engagement from the battlefield to the streets. Such restless pasts are not easily put to rest. If revolution is cyclical, perhaps it mainly returns in an attempt to resolve itself over and over again. Put differently, revolution’s indeterminacy, its history of failure, lull, retreat, creates the conditions for its recurrence.

> **JS:** Further on in your book, your interest in how revolutionary pasts become foundational to state narratives is worked through cinema’s own relationship to pastness—to the encumbrances and escapes nostalgia makes possible—as well as cinema’s often complex relationship with the state. But you also show how, specifically in the context of contemporary Hong Kong cinema, both the past and the state as seemingly stable phenomena are brought closer to, and complicated by, “minor” histories. These histories, marked by synthesis, diffusion, and impermanence, reveal “aftermaths and recollections that cannot be put to rest.” [^2] To what extent are these residues a function of, on the one hand, the desire to mourn Hong Kong (as you explore in your 2019 publication _Salty Wet_) and, on the other, the inability to locate the exact moment in which Hong Kong, either as abstraction or concrete reality, became an object of loss? You also take up the latter function in your _Too Salty Too Wet_ (2020) publication.

**TS:** Part of this desire to escape from a past-bound, or even object-bound, position is a desire to cease mourning a place as lost, to stop being undone by it all, and to no longer be caught in the dead ends of looking back. Instead, for _On and Off- Screen Imaginaries_, I became interested in what historical events and cinema share: contingency. This contingency forces a reckoning with multiplicity and contradiction, with the unstoppable and complicated flow of events. While this interest may be born from a sense of personal loss, it gestures to broad political realities, and how politics and history are never discretely compartmentalized in how we live them. These shapes of loss appear in one’s personal life or one’s family history, though I do not really go into any of that in my work—save for a few recent exceptions. I will not even touch the personal publicly (at least not until I’m older).

These emotional currents surrounding my work guide their sensibilities and their ethics, but I also don’t think the personal needs to be explicit to properly elucidate its relationship to politics. I think we need to go further than merely accepting the aphorism that the personal is political. We need to demonstrate the different forms this relationship takes. So many of my aesthetic decisions arrive at the modulation of what is shown and what isn’t, but despite this obscuring and exposing, it’s amazing how much certain motifs and feelings are absolutely undeniable, and are felt no matter how hard I might try to stop myself from communicating them. They find their way. They are always informing the stakes of the political, atomizing and shaping our lives in difficult ways. As an artist interested in visual rendition as a kind of historiography, I am interested in tracing what affect accompanies events and histories—this is the most elusive yet perhaps most critical project of rendering historical time in aesthetic form.

Cinema as a context and a form became an interesting way for me to think about the cathection of desire, of politics, and of the personal, as an at-once shared feeling, projected image, and political unconscious. It is on-screen that nostalgia is at its most convenient. Consider, for instance, Hong Kong through its golden age of cinema, which (depending on the generation you ask) spans the distinct eras of the ’80s to ’90s, or the ’60s to ’70s. These periods are the most coherent and cohesive in film—tragically and tantalizingly calcified. Looking back upon them will not change our present, nor will it help us understand that time. In reality, history’s shapes are harder to pin down, and its events elude any single telling. It is as film theorist Bill Nichols— via Fredric Jameson—elaborates regarding the use of re-enactment in documentary and non-fiction filmmaking:

> Questions of magnitude are always questions that run not so much against the grain as beyond it. […] They signal, through hysteria on the one hand and bureaucratic numbness on the other, the radical difference between discursive system (language) and experience, or its aggregation, history. “History is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise. […] History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis.” A magnitude of excess remains. It is a specter haunting what can be said or written. [^3]

There is a tendency to turn to aesthetic forms to rediscover the spirit of a period, as we often do when we look back at Hong Kong cinema’s golden age(s)—or to draw on a more widely known example, French cinema of 1968. We seek, in these, a historiography that fulfils our desire for narrative cohesion. A cohesion that idealizes the past and obscures its continuity in the present. But, as Nichols says, there is a magnitude of excess that remains. It will always resist the tropes ready-made through nostalgia. This is at the very core of my practice and was certainly at the heart of _On and Off-Screen Imaginaries_.

> **JS:** I’m reminded of a few passages early in the book in which you describe the immediate aftermath of the passing of Hong Kong’s National Security Law in 2020. Intended to curtail forms of expression deemed “threatening” by the state, the law creates an increasingly unnerving climate of suspicion and panic among cultural workers, many of whom are your peers. You go on to describe how in order to determine levels of personal exposure to surveillance and criminalization, artists and filmmakers keep tabs on each other, judging their relative safety by the relative safety of others. There is a sense here of how exceptional circumstances sometimes demand new modes of assessing and sharing risk, and of communicating with each other when everyday speech becomes fraught. Strange, portentous gaps appear between what is said and what is understood. Language is displaced by, to return to Nichols, a magnitude of excess. I wonder if this displacement, and perhaps a distrust in what can be conveyed in language and in acts of translation, informed your decision to leave much of the Mandarin in your recent film, _The Sojourn_, without subtitles?

**TS:** Two nights ago, I went to the cinema. Johnnie To was there in person to introduce _Exiled_ (2006), the first film in his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. He spoke in Cantonese and was accompanied by a translator. Upon stepping up to the podium to introduce his films, To said something along the lines of: “These films are a testament to my immense affection and respect for cinema.” I went to the cinema alone, the way I like it. And though it was full, it felt incredibly intimate to share the open secret of a common dialect within an English-language space. In a joke, he alluded to the possibility that there were state informants likely present among the audience that evening. That observation—in its sardonic nuance, at once warning and mocking—went over the heads of most of the New York audience once translated into English.

Something came over me when I heard him speak on-stage in Cantonese—I wept. Accompanying him in the room was this sense of a place that I knew, of a Hong Kong that is either painfully distant to me or does not exist anymore. That notion suddenly felt palpable in the cinema. And it was through language, and his physical presence as one of the most important auteurs of cinema (and especially of Hong Kong cinema), that in that moment, I became overwhelmed.

Despite its title, To’s _Exiled_ is not a political film. But perhaps true to that generation of Hong Kong filmmakers, To speaks volumes through euphemism and allusion. He is also more direct than the peers of his generation (especially when speaking in person). And the decision to open a retrospective of his through a film titled _Exiled_ says more than he could or was able to explain in words on-stage or even on-screen.

I had a similar experience when I watched Chan Tze-woon’s _Blue Island_ (2022) in the same theatre. Tze-woon and I are friends, and when I saw him outside the cinema, I burst into tears and walked away because I couldn’t face him. I don’t cry often! But perhaps in the absence of return, Hong Kong has remained vivid, or perhaps was only ever vivid, in cinema. I feel most connected to it in the cinema.

I grew up in a multi-dialect home, a fact that perhaps marks the “no place”- ness of my family. Besides Cantonese and Mandarin, which I understand, my parents speak Shanghainese and Hokkien but never taught them to me. These were the dialects my parents used to shield their adult secrets. Unlike Mandarin and Cantonese, Shanghainese and Hokkien are colloquial and have no standard written forms. They are alive mostly in sound. Even when these dialects are written with Chinese characters, their distinct patterns can only be approximated, leaving out an excess of meaning that instead persists in the domains of flirting, hustling, clever quips, sarcastic one-liners, whining, or other forms of casual conversation. It is difficult to translate all their tone, humour, and nuance. Dialect, and its ongoing improvisations and customs, resists formal rendition.

_The Sojourn_, in its idiosyncratic subtitling, pushes toward this unknowing and ambiguity. I wanted the viewer to rely on the sound of someone’s voice, to watch for hand movements and small shifts in facial expressions. The English intertitles burned upon the image offer only a translation that emphasizes its own partiality.

> **JS:** Do you think cinema’s capacity to preserve these forms of familial and cultural memory—that are, for many displaced peoples, bound up with vanished or disjointed pasts—is related to its capacity to hold, or conjure, imagined futures? In other words, does cinema have, for you, a utopic quality?

**TS:** It’s so interesting you brought up utopia—this came up in a separate conversation just a week ago. I think the promise of utopia is dangerous, and often about concealment, diversion, and obfuscation. For the diaspora, the draw of the return to the homeland is a constant fantasy: a vessel for belonging, unification, and restoration that is fraught, and whose tacit implications obscure the violence of willing that vision into reality. It’s no coincidence that the fantasy of the homeland is often materialized as an ethnonational political project. This impossibility of return can only realize itself through violent means. Cinema’s utopic quality should also be approached with caution, for different reasons. Sure, it is a place for a kind of collectivity that sutures loss and memory, but these moving images are temporary. They are projected. They remain as light. We can orient ourselves to them, but we do not enter them. This—the tantalizing nearness of film’s utopian promise, its elusive political horizon—is the tragic irony of cinema. Yet, in contrast to nostalgia or utopia, it is the ineffable and the elusive already present in vernacular forms, in dialect, and in everyday life that I am interested in getting closer to.

[^1]: Hagar Kotef, _Movement and the Ordering of Freedom_ (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).
[^2]: Tiffany Sia, _On and Off-Screen Imaginaries_ (New York: Primary Information, 2024), 110.
[^3]: Bill Nichols, _Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary_ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 231.

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Politics

Film

Joshua Segun-Lean and Tiffany Sia discuss a Hong Kong cinema of dissent against the paradox of state narratives that use nostalgic cinema to project revolutionary pasts at the same time as they brutally surveil protestors’ images and bodies in the present. 

Cinema, Nostalgia, and the Excess That Remains: A Conversation With Tiffany Sia

Letter

Samantha Lance is a curator and writer originally from Sault Ste. Marie, ON, and currently based in Toronto. She holds a BFA with Distinction in Criticism and Curatorial Practice from OCAD University and will be graduating from the Master of Visual Studies in Curatorial Studies program at the University of Toronto in June 2024. Her graduating exhibition, “The Love that Remains,” is currently on view at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto from May 1 to July 27, 2024. Samantha has worked as a freelance writer and Curatorial Intern for The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery and a Curatorial Assistant and Registrar for the Art Gallery of Algoma, and she has volunteered as a Gallery Guide for the Art Gallery of Ontario. [samanthalance.format.com ](http://samanthalance.format.com)

##### Dear _C Magazine_,

When I read Alper Turan’s review of Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez’s exhibition “Survey,” I thought of the poet Jack Spicer. Like Reyes Rodriguez, Spicer was interested in transtemporal connections and communication between individuals and, more specifically, writers. For Spicer, poetry was like a radio transmission picking up signals from both the past and future, and he developed this idea further through his collection of poems titled _After Lorca_. In this 1957 book, Spicer playfully corresponds with the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, who had been long dead by the time the book was published. Interspersed among the translated poems are letters and musings that Spicer addresses to Lorca, as if he were still alive, primarily about his theories on language, poetry, and how those relate to a broader sense of community. Spicer deeply believed in poetry’s ability to create community. Rather than being a solitary activity, poetry, for Spicer, brought people together, both living and dead, creating an intergenerational tapestry of writing.

Like Spicer, Reyes Rodriguez is an artist who mines the past in order to better understand the present. He uses photography as a way to not only find commonalities between different time periods, but to also produce entirely new narratives, however fleeting they may be. The way that Turan describes the anonymity of Reyes Rodriguez’s methods of seeking connections between disparate archival photographs of queer individuals particularly resonated with me. I have always considered good art to be the product of a methodology that prioritizes poetics, concealment, and the accidental, rather than one that attempts to uncover a “truth” of some kind.

Spicer concealed himself within Lorca’s writing by slightly altering the words in Lorca’s poems. Often, these minute changes would shift the meaning of the poem entirely, echoing Douglas Crimp’s assertion that “underneath each picture is another picture.” Spicer and Reyes Rodriguez make the quest to find an origin nearly impossible. This thought is comforting to me.

##### Sincerely, 
##### Paula McLean 
 

##### Dear _C Magazine_,

After reading Nyssa Komorowski’s featured article “The Seashells That Saved the World” on Truth and Reconciliation Day this year, I thought back to the clams I saw while I was swimming in Lake Superior on Havilland Shores Beach, in Goulais River, Ontario. I researched that these waters and their seashells are part of the traditional territory of the Ojibwe Batchewana First Nation community. Indigenous peoples once used hard clams like these to create beads for wampum belts. Komorowski writes that wampum are sacred objects for Haudenosaunee and other peoples indigenous to Turtle Island to channel their ancestors, seek guidance from the spirit world, and connect to their natural roots. From this, I think about my own lack of an almanac, specifically when it comes to knowing the names of the local plants, trees, and ecosystems that thrive in this little corner of Turtle Island. 

I seek to understand the herbalist, spiritual, and linguistic practices of the Anishinaabeg generations before my European ancestors immigrated to Canada, and eventually settled in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. This land was first named Bawating, meaning “the place of the rapids,” and has been a special gathering place for First Nations peoples of the Great Lakes for thousands of years. I think about the first agreement made between the Europeans and Indigenous peoples, signified by two parallel boats travelling on a river together in the 1613 Two Row Wampum Belt. As Komorowski writes, wampum are imbued with memories, and they also symbolize a commitment to maintaining peace, familial relationships, and the protection of the natural world. When Indigenous peoples collaborated to make wampum belts from the land and for the land, I wonder what dreams, messages, or questions they transmitted through the beads to their descendants today. 

Now, the next time I encounter these clams on the shores of Lake Superior, I will remember that each bead carved from its shell and woven into a pattern are reminders of the teachings, truths, and relationships that Indigenous peoples carry from generation to generation. Instead of adding this clam to my collection of souvenirs, I place the seashell back into the water and wait for more vessels to find their way to the shoreline. 

##### Sincerely, 
##### Samantha Lance

Letters

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

Associate Editor

Publisher

Designer

Artist Project

Christian Vistan is an artist from the peninsular province Bataan, Philippines, living on unceded xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territories, colonially known as Vancouver. In their artworks, they translate experiences of distance and diaspora into hybrid forms that fold together memory, place, poetry, and abstraction. They make paintings and texts, organize exhibitions and publications, and often collaborate with other artists, writers, curators, and their relatives.

I 
I 
I 
 

> —Joan Didion, “Why I Write,” 1976 

 
 
 

> bright read extent of our 

reach beyond grasping 
 
 
is what abstraction is supposed to give, what imaginary numbers give 

> in how we work through 
> little play 
> complexities 
> by obstruction, 
 

so we get to 

> go through someplace else 
 

> —Fred Moten, “the red sheaves,” 2023 


 
In her text “Why I Write,” Joan Didion writes, “Of course I stole the title for this talk, from George Orwell. One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words.” [^1] She liked the “I” sound in _why; I; write; eye; eye; eye_. Didion lists the three I’s down a column. It looks like a formalist drawing or a concrete poem of that isolated sound in canon. Each “I” a new line and the beginning of a new sentence in first person. They look like three cursors waiting—from even before the moment “I” materializes on the page, before the moment of writing. Aubin appropriates this phrase from Didion, using it as the starting point for a poem that opens his _Floor Drawing Series_ (2024). 

Aubin adapts and responds to Didion’s question, and drawing, as a kind of architecture for his own inquiry into _writing_. For Aubin, writing is personal, embodied, and abstract: writing is a means to communicate and express oneself and one’s desires and wishes to another; writing is a physical act; writing is a means to make marks on a surface. 

In poetic response to Didion, Aubin italicizes the “I” in his poem, transforming it into a: /. Ironically, de-emphasizing the slanted subject of the sentence. Conflating the linguistic act with the physical one and writing’s material consequence on a surface, Aubin alters Didion’s stolen title and makes an addition: “Why / write / draw.” “I” dissolves and no longer asserts itself in “the reader’s most private space.” [^2] Here, “I” or / is an enigmatic mark, a porous distinction between the interrogative and the act(s). The phrase becomes a self-reflexive question addressed to the person writing and expressing. “I” is writing, reading, drawing, asking itself into existence on the page.

 
*** 
 

Writing is a hand on a surface. Once, the hand held a pen and made marks and lines on paper. Here, it is extending a finger. The finger is touching an iPhone screen. It drags its touch across an abstract virtual distance. It is drawing.

Alongside, another hand is typing. 

 
*** 
 

Aubin writes and draws to reflect on his dad’s digital gestures drawn on an iPhone screen, on the Notes app, and his physical struggles to write and communicate late in his life. It is a kind of writing that is recognizable as partial script, marks and lines that make up part of a language, but are indecipherable as words. Words are written, but are unutterable. They remain on the tip of the tongue, failing to successfully communicate themselves and reach their intended reader.

Instead, the reader reaches beyond their grasp [^3] and attunes to another register of the gesture: the written marks’ aesthetic and expressive qualities, as opposed to linguistic ones, closer to drawing as opposed to writing, a feeling as opposed to a meaning. In the gap between the marks and their expression, and his reading and understanding, Aubin reads the distance in between. 

 
*** 
 

Accompanying Aubin’s poem are a series of drawings that move away from language and toward gesture. Aubin’s haptic line-work colours much of these pages. Lines loop and curl around the shimmering edge of a cloud; scratches and scribbles pile and tangle into each other in the gridded depths underneath a bathtub. They coalesce distinct scenes, images, and memories that appear simultaneously mundane and spectacular. 

They are a collection of Aubin’s own diaristic digital drawings and notes from his glassy phone translated into physical artworks. He renders his digital drawings and notes into a series of physical outlines cut in vinyl to make stencils. Momentarily, vinyl usurps his gestures while the negative spaces are weeded out. Later, on paper, paint fills in these newly created gaps. In the transfer of these gestures from one surface to another and the inversions and reversals this material translation necessitates, a distance happens between the initial touch from the act of drawing with his finger on the screen and the final physical drawing. These drawings are halves of a material correspondence. Each drawing, a lone translation. 

Looking at Aubin’s digitally hand-drawn line-work, his touch is mediated across many different surfaces and processes, but still, his touch comes to the fore in my reading of these works. There is a sense of closeness and intimacy that I get as I engage and view them tactilely. There is also an inherent distance and abstraction that is part of reading and deciphering another’s gestures. I trace them with my finger on my computer screen. 

 
*** 
 

Aubin’s writing and drawings are stencilled on panels of hanji jangpan, a kind of traditionally crafted floor panel found in Korean homes, made by laminating sheets of mulberry paper with oil and lacquer until the layers are strong enough to stand on. Aubin marks up and paints the flooring material, transposing his gestures and their negatives onto domestic grounds. Compared to a sheet of glass, a screen, paper, or plywood (other surfaces and materials that resonate throughout Aubin’s practice), the floor is a fundamental surface. A surface that facilitates the essential activities of our lives and habitation. On the other hand, mulberry paper is traditionally used in printmaking, Eastern painting, and calligraphy. Hanji jangpan, in its material processing, fuses these contexts. Inscribed on this layered surface, the diaristic, the artistic, and the domestic meet in Aubin’s writing and drawings. 

Where there were once daily gestures from Aubin’s iPhone screen, this touch now exists as hollowed-out gestures that reveal their surface. 

 
*** 
 

_Floor Drawing Series_ accumulates moments from Aubin’s life and practice. Like Didion, he _writes_ “entirely to find out what [he’s] thinking, what [he’s] looking at, what [he sees] and what it means. What [he wants] and what [he fears] [...] What is going on in these pictures in [his] mind?” [^4] They contain gestures, memories, and postures that were first lived, and then drawn and written. Perhaps, the act of putting words and marks on a page itself creates distance, reorienting one’s relationship with one’s own experience, and making room to find ways to express and understand what was unutterable and undecipherable, but lived and felt. 


[^1]: Joan Didion, “Why I Write,” originally published in _The New York Times_, December 5, 1976, https://www.are.na/block/14515853 
[^2]: This phrase is borrowed from Didion’s “Why I Write.”
[^3]: This phrase is adapted from a line in Fred Moten’s poem “the red sheaves” (2023), originally written in response to the abstract minimalist paintings of Jennie C. Jones, and appearing in his book _perennial fashion presence falling_ (2023). Fred Moten, “the red sheaves,” in _CONSTANT STRUCTURE_ (Chicago: The Arts Club of Chicago, 2023), 2–4, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5526ca35e4b02b6cae98841c/t/5e8644ec1b100 8571750e24e/158585 7789526/FINAL+Constant+Structure+Moten.pdf 
[^4]: Didion, “Why I Write.”

_Note: this text, and in particular its epigraphs, have an intentional print layout that cannot be replicated here. [The original is available as a pdf](https://strapi-uploads-c-mag-prod.s3.ca-central-1.amazonaws.com/C159_Vistan_K_fe437c54d9.pdf)_


Curator

Aubin Soonhwan K is an artist working across painting, making, hosting, and researching around ideas of material curiosity, automatic labour, and formal affinity. Born in Seoul, Korea, he grew up in the suburbs of Alberta and currently divides his time living near the West Coast and the Great Lakes. He has co-founded a gallery space, dreams comma delta (2022, Vancouver), and ran a speakeasy project, Epiphyte Epilogue (2021, Vancouver).


Artist

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Drawing

Guest curated by Christian Vistan, Aubin Soonhwan K’s drawings engage writing as a physical act, in the spectrum between script and drawing that moves toward gesture rather than linguistic marks.

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Floor Drawing Series by Aubin Soonhwan K: Text

Review

Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross is a writer and editor based on the traditional, unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, and səlilwətaɬ nations. Her fiction, poetry, essays, and art criticism have appeared in _BOMB, The Ex-Puritan, Fence, Mousse,_ and elsewhere, and she is currently the Art Editor at _The Capilano Review_. Her debut fiction collection, _The Longest Way to Eat a Melon_, is forthcoming from Sarabande Books in 2025.


There’s an electric charge in the room. A metallic energy, intensity. Silver-coated wands, vanity mirrors, and blunt-tipped baguettes—objects that might, in some other time and place, appear whimsical or fairytale-like— are balanced and strung along metal wires that run in rows over my head like power lines. On the floor, _Partial View_ and _Obstructed View_ (both 2023) take the form of twinned busts of a broken and suggestively pregnant Marilyn Monroe. The busts are cast crudely in fragmented slabs of bronze and rest atop aluminum-cast tin cans, the icon’s skin and eyes violently imprinted with the diamond-barbed exteriors of crystal punch bowls.

I wonder if it’s these figures or the total absence of shadows that most unnerves me. The whole room is bathed in an even, fluorescent light, lending the space and its mirrored and silver-encrusted objects a wondrous but disturbing stillness. One has the impression one has stumbled upon a hidden theatrical set—some parallel, hypothetical environment in which both actor and prop have the overwhelming capacity to change the course of the play. “Sun Moon Stars” draws its narrative symbolism from the artist’s ongoing fascination with Mary of Egypt, a lesser-known Mary and patron saint of penitents, whose remorse for a lifetime of sexual deviation results in her fabled disappearance into the desert with only three loaves of bread. The installation’s sculptural motifs, figures, and forms imaginatively extend from this parable, recasting Mary of Egypt as a kind of model transgressor and heroic minor character whose speculative subtext, for Goldberg, proves as artistically generative as it is productively withholding. For despite the illusion of a lesson to be had here, just beyond it, there’s only a feeling.

Of energy and exile. Of bodies and decay. Of sex and predation. Of desert and corpse. These things, while not all monstrous, become so in their stillness, grouping, and sterile arrangements. There is a deep material language at work in the exhibition’s charged compositions of weighted and weightless leaden objects and casts: the deliberate sharpening of a certain aesthetic vocabulary and effect. Goldberg’s language is one of implied violence, of morbidity, of grief. It is a language of aftershocks, of alienation and estrangement. It is a language of apocalypse—microscopic or totalizing, singular or synchronous, here or approaching—and of the creeping recognition and even banality that has accumulated around these new shared conditions. To experience this sculptural language and its intricate networks of power and powerlessness at work is therefore to quite literally spend time inside its dark logic. I do so in a kind of spell, uncomfortable with my own complicity.

It is said that Mary of Egypt subsisted ferally in the desert for a year and subsequently perished, her corpse later found perfectly preserved in the sand. I still don’t know what to make of this ending—her miraculous embalmment; her suspended, but no less real, death. In the gallery, I witness Mary’s refragmentation, mutilation, and (attempt at) reconstitution, and struggle with the secondary violence of these symbolic deployments. If the function of this art is to shock and disorient us into another kind of awakeness and corporality, what are we to do with the toxic by-products of this transformation?
 
In a 2016 conversation with Elena Tavecchia published in _Mousse_, Goldberg describes her interest in nature as “a confusing of what is alive or not.” “I am a living corpse,” Goldberg says, highlighting the sterile essence of this contradiction. I think of her 2016 exhibition _The Plastic Thirsty_ and its oversized steel fish skeletons breaking apart into exaggerated modernist armatures, or of the uncanny, oil slick–like pelican sculptures sitting atop a carpet of sprouting chia seeds in _No Where, Now Here_ (2016). There has always been something falsely illustrative about Goldberg’s use of metaphor that I instinctively distrust, and yet it is this straightforwardness that also most disarms me. Out of place against the ambiguity so present in her sculptural language, I have only to wonder whether this didactic function has something to do with the totalizing pursuit of ugliness—as tactlessness, as moral project, as value, as aesthetic. Throughout Goldberg’s oeuvre, life and death collide with an attitude of apparent indifference, and yet it is not the artist’s indifference, but the visceral wonderment that the viewer experiences in response to it, that raises the most alarming and morally ambiguous stakes. It is possible, I suppose, that the artist is just telling us an ugly parable about ourselves.

I am drawn to the work of Goldberg not because I like what I see, but because I recognize in it the very real conditions of our abjection and perversion. If art is a mirror, then these objects are not just objects, and these symbols are not just symbols, but rather, manipulated evidence of a society’s innermost values, fears, and sensibilities. In summoning Mary of Egypt’s transgressive corporality within the exhibition space, Goldberg exposes the affective charge of implied, rather than enacted, violence—what is actually a very frightening but real form of magic. 


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“Sun Moon Stars” ran from 7 June to 8 September 2024 at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver.


“Sun Moon Stars” — Rochelle Goldberg

Yasmina Price a New York–based writer and film curator completing a PhD at Yale University. Her work centers Black Cinema, anti-colonial visual culture, and the experimental practices of women artists.


Even where the earth has been rewritten with the colonizing texts of extraction and ownership, its first poems are still visible. Although reading them requires the work of unearthing, this is not the palimpsest legible to a geologist. In a scene from Cauleen Smith’s new film _The Deep West Assembly_ (2024), a Black woman sits on a shoreline of greyish sand, her legs stretched out, tossing shells or perhaps pebbles at the waves. Loosely dressed as a North American pilgrim, she lists geology’s siblings and cousins—anthropology, archeology, gynecology, ethnography, cinematography, botany, economics, criminology. A chronicle of disciplines, a record of impositions of order. Grounded in the telluric, her new solo exhibition of the same name, curated by Rhea Anastas and Mia Locks, further elasticizes the artist’s mercurial practice, built on touchstones of Afro-diasporic knowledge systems, radical film movements, the inherited communal teachings of Black women, and fabulatory imaginaries. 

The archipelagos of the exhibition include several multi-scalar screening and installation spaces, a banner gallery, a wax room, as well as a verdant cocoon for reading and listening. Here, two walls bear a visual bibliography of book covers, indexing the devotion to study that animates Smith’s practice. The other walls are covered with her wallpaper of jaggedly joyful drawings of the candelabrum tree, titled _The Panadus Matrix_ (2024). Principally found in Liberia, this sculptural plant is currently threatened because of its natural placement on kimberlite rocks, which signal the presence of diamonds, making the plant collateral damage to mercenary mining. Jamaican writer and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter informs Smith’s aesthetic challenges to Western humanism, indicting its allied redesignation of nature as the plundered object of capital. As a space, the cushy couches in the study room have the feeling of a summons to collectively participate in the instruction laid out in the title of one of Wynter’s essays, “We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk About a Little Culture: Reflections on West Indian Writing and Criticism” (1968). An urgent call for relational cultural work is interwoven with the show’s ecological concerns. Smith is careful to not lay claim to inventing new ways to expose colonial violations of the Earth. Instead, she approaches slowly, with curiosity and an understanding that these are occasions to join already rooted efforts, not reinvent them. An essential dimension of the exhibition was a series of public programs and collaborations with Black women culture workers already based in Norway, such as the notable contributions of Ayesha Jordan, reflected in the leafy room of book covers and records. 

As the artist explained at the Oslo opening, the “Deep West” of the title was drawn from the writings of a guiding compass, the late undaunted, bluesy poet of Black Los Angeles, Wanda Coleman. Under this banner, the exhibition articulates a California constructed through the same logics as the South, unearthing the reality of settler-colonial empire barely concealed under the nominal veneer “United States of America.” The delinking of the purportedly liberal, emancipatory regions of the Californian west (and for that matter, the Northeast) from southern areas branded as the unique sites of enslavement and horrors relegated to the past conveniently functions to limit contemporary understandings of their fundamental interdependence. The westward expansion that created California converged the ideological architecture of manifest destiny and the ongoing genocides of Indigenous peoples with the conjugations of labour, finance, and warmongering—all of these, of course, imbricated with plantation economies in the southern states. This rhetorical reassembly bridges the West Coast and Deep South to expose the co-constructed foundational violences that are strategically disavowed in the liberal myth of an exceptional democracy. Smith enters the scene of a covered-up crime to show how it came to be. 

A volcanic element that has been iterated through her more recent work reappears in the objects of “The Deep West Assembly,” with banners and sculptural elements calling on eruptions that are not only a tear in the Earth but an interruption in anthropocentric time. Although it is the most subdued part of the show, the wax room features _NONCONFORMITY 1–5_ (2024), a serialized set of five cake-like rectangular landscapes whose sides reveal their multicoloured layers, dotted with burning tea lights that supply an additional sensorial, olfactory experience. With their jewel-bright colours, tassels, and dimensional cursive writing, the banners in the adjacent space might most evidently carry Smith’s aesthetic signature. Communicating a range of tones, the textile statements here are sweetly tricky (“your rock my world”), lucid or accusatory (“your past made my future”), intentionally citational (“...we must become a menace to our enemies,” from June Jordan), or unsettling or encouraging (“you survived”), mobilizing a tenor of militancy with poetic flair. 

A prosthetic space reached via a walkway houses the new video work that titles the exhibition. The aforementioned Black woman in pilgrim guise, actor Dionne Audain, is the main figure in _The Deep West Assembly_, an MC, narrator, and performer in a theatre of temporal crossings, unevenly imperiled life, and refusals to comply. Formally, the video unravels a pluralistic spool of landscapes and timescapes—painted backdrops of a land violently transferred from Indigenous caretakers to colonizing landowners; 16mm footage of two Black femmes holding a banner inscribed with “BLACK STUDIES IS EARTH STUDIES” in front of the once slave market now federal courthouse of Los Angeles; photographs of geological phenomena; the ecstatic formations of a room of Black people doing the electric slide; fiery footage conjuring the rebellions of summer 2020, which includes a glimpse of a protestor’s keffiyeh creating a thematic link to the two large flags at the entrance of the show. This duo of welcoming sentinels, piercingly titled _The Limits of Hospitality_ (2023) and _Swallowtail Seven Never Surrenders_ (2023), chromatically and symbolically index the history and present of Black-Palestinian liberatory kinship. 

As is often the case in Smith’s moving-image creations, the video’s script is a rich, polyvocal intertext, citing Black thinkers from W. E. B. Du Bois to Katherine McKittrick, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Orlando Patterson. The call of Black Study diagnoses and seeks to see beyond the terms of a world order shaped by the interlinkages of white supremacy, coloniality, and empire. With _The Deep West Assembly_, Smith considers an alternative global choreography through an older clock than theirs, a buried geological time. The video ends with a long stretch of darkness, timed to the arc of Nina Simone’s “22nd Century” (1971), beautifully and unbearably prescient: 

There is no oxygen in the air 
Men and women have lost their hair 
Ashen faces, legs that stand 
Ghost and goblins walk in this land 
When tomorrow becomes yesterday 
And tomorrow becomes eternity.

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“The Deep West Assembly” ran from 14 June to 15 September 2024 at the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo.


“The Deep West Assembly” — Cauleen Smith

Ella den Elzen is an artist and curator based in New York. She was a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2023–2024.


Produced between 2023 and 2024, the majority of works within Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill’s “M∗∗∗∗∗” employ found materials ranging from the keratinous to the botanical to the industrially produced, in order to explore notions of value, labour, extraction, and production—ongoing interests within the artist’s practice. My first sense to be stimulated upon entering the exhibition was scent —specifically the saccharine smell of rotting strawberries hanging from a structure of skeletal, disassembled umbrellas. As sculptures, _Site Parasite Dice Paradise_ and _Octom∗∗_ (both 2023) conjure notions of spawning through rhizomatic wire structures that branch repeatedly, with each arm holding a mobile of strawberries and found magazine clippings. This ready-made imagery, specifically consisting of photographs of fish eggs, tentacles, and the face of Nadya Suleman (an American woman who became famous in the media for being pregnant with octuplets, birthing them in 2009), conflates concepts of pregnancy with the parasitic and parasocial. Hill’s interest in the figure of the octopus is significant conceptually; the octopus, after all, only produces a child once in her life, subsequently dying after giving birth. Suleman’s image connotes notions of both social and physical injury, as her fame emerged alongside the public ridicule and scrutiny cast by her pregnancy.

Placed in conversation with the sculpture are a series of works on silk tissue, hand-dyed in blackberry ink. _Curtains and Fadeout_ (both 2023) are overlaid with pencil drawing and collaged xeroxed photographs of parasites, open-mouthed organisms, spores, and eggs. At first glance, I think the small clippings might be berries, but upon closer inspection, I am struck by how abject the found imagery is. The scans merge suckling with sucking, hinting at ideas of postpartum physical and psychological depletion. Fleshy and viscous collaged clippings are made more unsettling through the olfactory experience of moving through the exhibition space. The discomfort this produces intentionally speaks to larger parasitic structures of colonialism. In the accompanying exhibition text, Tania Willard writes: “Himalayan blackberries are one of the most invasive and widespread plants in the Vancouver area, in xwməθkwəyə̓m, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ territories. Some naturalize, some continue to threaten native species.” For Hill, who is of Cree and English heritage, the blackberry ink as material holds multiple potential meanings, gesturing both to the specificity of her own autobiography and to the larger context in which she grew up. In a 2023 profile for the Sobey Art Award, Hill asks, “What circumstances brought blackberries here? Because they are from England, they were an invasive plant that came here with British people, but they are also a plant I used growing up. Me, my mom, my kokum, my brothers and my dad, we would go berry picking. And that was something my grandmother had grown up doing and passed down to us.” 

This relationship to the land contrasts the private property and dispossession central to the formation of what is now known as British Columbia, the homeland of the xwməθkwəyə̓m, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Nations where Hill currently lives. Notably, this was where Joseph Trutch served as the first lieutenant governor of British Columbia, after a career as a land surveyor and chief commissioner of land and works in the newly formed colony. His hostile and genocidal policies, such as a memorandum he issued in 1870, denied Indigenous presence on the land by asserting that settlers were entitled to the territory through their “productive” use of land—policies that continue to impact Indigenous land claims today. To Trutch, Indigenous peoples’ relationship to the land did not fall under a British conceptualization of property use. Hill challenges this legal paradigm of property through the evocation of blackberry ink—a trace that is embedded with forms of embodied and ancestral knowledge, and an assertion that berry picking is a kind of land use. These works on paper are part of a larger series of works including _Out of Time_ (2023), _Echo Body (2023), Shadow_ (2024), and _Project_ (2024), which integrate repetitious burn marks, 16mm splicing tape, hair, hair ash, and glue into their material vocabulary. Hill conjures notions of the corporeal and decay, using debris-like materials that are deigned to be of little value, conversely supported by silk tissue substrate. Silk, a precious fabric, is produced by moth larvae who are also killed in the process of the material’s making, further hinting at the cyclical processes of birth, hatching, and death.

In particular, the 16mm splicing tape as material is also used in the artist’s eponymous two-channel video work, _M∗∗∗∗∗_ (2023), the most evocative work within the space of the exhibition. Created by repeatedly burning holes and layering hair over 16mm tape, Hill produces a diptych of imageless video works. Abstracted through this process of enlargement and projection, the burns and hair can be read as moving drawings. The images themselves almost look like organic cells under a microscope, recursively appearing in the projection. Each tape is played through a 16mm projector placed atop a stack of institutional chairs, resting upon four running shoes at the corners of the chair legs. Hill often incorporates pieces of her own clothing in her sculptures, such as in _Counterblaste_ (2021), an earlier work gesturing to sustenance. Here, the presence of these personal articles animates the assembled materials. The projection machines are devices for infinite production and self-replication, yet the forms of extraction she references feel more sinister than those in Hill’s previous work. In particular, the absence of a camera refutes the extractive legacy of image making. Photographs, alongside maps and surveys, enabled the circulation of imagery of “uninhabited” land ready to be delineated into parcels and settled.
 
Hill combines her own autobiography with familial and colonial histories to interrogate the forms of extraction that occur throughout processes of artistic labour. In censoring a word associated with birthing and caring for children from the title of the exhibition, Hill contextualizes this subjecthood—“Mother”—as one that remains entirely unuttered, especially within the context of the art world, and one’s career. This is perhaps the most direct understanding that the title suggests, although the diverse constellation of materials and media that Hill engages allows for a porous set of interpretations to emerge, prompting one to consider: how much is one willing to give and to give up, for the sake of production?

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“M∗∗∗∗∗” ran from 6 July to 31 August 2024 at Mercer Union, Toronto.

“M∗∗∗∗∗” — Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill

Louis-Philippe Savard is interested in what challenges the dominant conceptions of art. Currently an Art History master’s student at Concordia University (Tiohtià:ke/Montreal), his thesis project investigates the relationship between performance art and its documentation. Supported by a SSHRC scholarship, it aims to historicize and theorize the interplay between embodiment, archival memory, and political discourses in contemporary performance practices.

##### _C Magazine_ would like to congratulate Louis-Philippe Savard on winning the 2024 C New Critics Award, and Lins Demchuk on being named the runner-up. In its 15th consecutive year, this program gives the magazine the opportunity to identify, support, and promote the work of promising new writers, who often become regular contributors. We sincerely thank all those who applied, as well as this year’s jurors: Nadia Kurd, Alice Ming Wai Jim, and _C_ Associate Editor Maandeeq Mohamed. Measures were taken to ensure that the identity of entrants were unknown to adjudicators. 

The late curator Okwui Enwezor surveyed the archival turn in contemporary art in his seminal exhibition “Archive Fever” (2008), titled after Jacques Derrida’s formulation. In the 15 years that have passed since the show, the archive as an area of inquiry still fascinates. It captivates a collective imaginary in a way that underscores how deeply entwined archival institutions are with our lives, and the symbolic meaning that collecting institutions occupy in collective processes of memory-creation. “The Traces That Remain,” curated by eunice bélidor, interrogates the political and the personal experience of memory-making. The exhibition questions those bits and pieces involuntarily left after an event has passed, and the acts of preservation that persist outside of institutionally defined boundaries of history-making.
 On one end of the gallery is Zinnia Naqvi’s series _The Professor’s Desk_ (2023), composed of photographs evoking the evolving space of a professor’s office. The title references the case of Dr. Kin-Yip Chun, who was denied tenure and dismissed from the University of Toronto in 1994 after 10 years of service. It wasn’t until 2000 that Dr. Chun was offered a permanent faculty position as part of a mediated settlement. In _Before the Settlement – Professor Chun’s Desk_ (2023), a headline reading “systemic racism and universities” is juxtaposed with a flyer asserting that “education changes the world,” a geology book titled Agents of Chaos, and various paper ephemera documenting the professor’s family life. Naqvi’s assemblage collapses distinctions between the personal and public/professional to critique the flawed discourse of multiculturalism in Canadian politics, which maintains the marginalization of racialized communities. 

Following Naqvi’s series, Po B. K. Lomami’s _aksanti 33 (part 2.01)_ (2023) presents the aftermath of a performance held on March 4, 2023, at FOFA Gallery in Montreal. The performance consisted of the artist taking the last dose of their medical treatment, which was discontinued by Pfizer. An accompanying text guides the spectator through the artist’s experience with pain, their anticipation of the disappearance of this drug, and the almost simultaneous passing of their aunt, with whom Lomami was sharing their medication. The installation identifies the peak of the performance as the final point in a series of harrowing events. But in _aksanti 33 (part 2.01)_, there is no direct representation of the loss nor of the original performance. Rather, absence is metaphorized through empty chemistry equipment. Glass test tubes and jars are methodically laid on a table covered with a white cloth. Four small cathode-ray tube televisions mirror the same equipment, now in “use,” with one of the test tubes containing a small plant, and the bell jar containing a vial of, perhaps, the discontinued medication. Lomami’s representational middle ground traverses the quasi-scientific organization of the archive and the ultimate inaccessibility of memory, despite the accumulation of traces, to productively obscure rather than neatly resolve the souvenir of both the performance and the event it was based on. 

In Shaya Ishaq’s a _boundless love_ (2024) video, two animated pieces of a blue handloom weaving float over a cloudy sky, lightly undulating in the softly pixelated glimmering of the digital rendering. The poetic prose of the voice-over discusses the ineluctability of time, culminating in the definitiveness of death. “Time sweeps in like a plague in the night without warning,” the narrator tells us. _a boundless love_ opens to the ways craft can be a channel for re-encountering the deceased. Placed in the centre of the exhibition space, Ishaq’s video acts as a poetic bridge between the clean, functional aesthetic adopted by Lomami and the soft textures and shadows offered by Lan “Florence” Yee’s installation. The suspended liminality and dreamy character of the work force a pause to ponder the materiality of memory and the equally immaterial quality of the documentation of our lives. The ghosts of what is irremediably lost is to be retrieved in material and knowledge. 

At the end of the exhibition, Yee’s _Whole to me_ (2023) and _Tangerine, After Grapefruit_ (2022) assemble the poetic with the tactile, with an intimate, open-ended approach. Texts are embroidered over cotton gauze and silk organza, contained by spruce structures that evoke walls whose planes are disjointed and scattered through the space. These texts associate emotions like love, tenderness, and sorrow with the mundane and familiar: tangerine, tomato pasta, even a blender overlay the printed images of a lamp, houseplants, and glass bricks. The haptic quality of the different textures, with the shadows and translucence produced by the gallery lights, prompt the viewer to wander/wonder within the installation, and to feel interpellated by the evocative texts. One is drawn to—at least mentally—enact the poetic instructions proposed by the pieces: to “Whisper a regret into a tomato,” as mentioned in a textile titled _PIECE TO SAFELY LOOK BACKWARDS_ (2021), or to “Eat [a tangerine] while thinking of / a loved one” and “send them the leftover peels,” as in _EXCHANGE PIECE_ (2020). Yee literally offers the installation as a gift, when on a nearby wall, the viewer is invited to take a collectible booklet home with them, which includes compiled photographs of _Tangerine, After Grapefruit_’s embroidered prompts.

Notably, the wall texts do not give exhibition visitors straightforward interpretations that they can follow. This allows each visitor to have an individualized encounter with the pieces. The resulting interaction between subjectivities is itself a political gesture of sharing and memory-making. The exhibition negotiates archive and memory not just as processes, but also as locations, where visitors can explore representations of personal loss and ponder on the very capacity of the exhibition to be a potent space for sharing these experiences and questions. In interrogating whose documents count as “traces that remain,” the exhibition offers encounter, poetry, and the fleetingness of memory as an answer. 


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“The Traces That Remain” included work by Shaya Ishaq, Po B. K. Lomami, Zinnia Naqvi, and Lan “Florence” Yee, and ran from 2 May to 15 June 2024 at MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels).


“The Traces That Remain” — Shaya Ishaq, Po B. K. Lomami, Zinnia Naqvi, Lan “Florence” Yee

Nataleah Hunter-Young is a writer and curator interested in creative inquiry and the relationship between aesthetic practice and social life. She is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University and International Programmer at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), responsible for feature selections from Africa and Arab West Asia. Her writing has appeared in the _Journal of Visual Culture, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, Current_ (Criterion.com), _The Museum of Dreams, PUBLIC, The Conversation, Xtra_, and _Canadian Art_.

How can we visualize and materialize what we are told does not exist? Anique Jordan’s “Underbelly” answers that question with methodology, conjuring visual territory for an engagement with space and time that is parallel to the “known world.” Embedded in nine wall-mounted performance-based photo works, a twin set of dual-sided light boxes, and a 21-piece amber glass sculpture is an insistence on the viewer’s structural and metaphysical access to the dimensions beyond, below, behind, and inbetween the images set forth.

Placed at an angle on the floor, two aluminum cans, two straw brooms and a small earthen mound guide visitors across the threshold to Jordan’s gathering of images. Mounted at the entrance, the hinged four-panel analogue photo _Like a Shoal_ (2024) shows Black figures at ease, configuring themselves and their objects along a long mid-century teak-wood TV stand with the same care reserved for an altar. The open drawers and spare ledges frame the subjects’ inheritance: vinyl records, cassette tapes, journals, and yellowing photo albums. The incomplete figures move in and out of frames, disappearing into the hinged breaks where each image connects to another. The fourth panel from the left completely breaks with the setting, transforming a glitch-like auburn overexposure into a portal to the beyond. Curving at either end, the photo peels forward off the walls to shade the space behind, shaping the air.

The artist uses shadows to extend time and space, sometimes tripling or quadrupling the photo’s central figures, as seen in the large-format analogue photo _Blink_ (2022). In greyscale, two blurred Black women relaxed on an indoor stairwell gaze outward. The image vibrates softly. The foreground suggests the seated woman is fixated on the viewer, but her shadow concerns itself elsewhere—through the frame’s right wall. The more time one spends with the shadows, the more they narrate their own presence—a haunting and precious third space challenging the viewer’s ability to perceive the image and its depth of field. Indicating an additional (or otherwise) presence, and giving the illusion of movement to static forms, those soft shadows repeat in varied scales throughout the works in the exhibition.

Though trained as a photographer and visual artist, receiving her MFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design, Jordan has long centred performance as a method. It remains prominent in “Underbelly,” as does the artist’s preoccupation with recollection as a way of knowing. Jordan’s practice explores methods for documenting, sculpting, and restorying the ephemeral into material confrontations with the past, present, and future. This diligent recollection (what Toni Morrison called “rememory”) drives Jordan’s quest for what she terms “impossible images,” requiring persistent historical confrontation, curiosity, and a compulsive commitment to fabulating new mechanisms for looking and seeing. As her biography explains, “Jordan’s practice stems from and returns to the communities that inform it.” In past collections—such as her photography series _Salt_ (2015), and exhibitions like “Ban’ yuh belly” (2019) or “Nowing: A Political History of the Present” (2021)—that creative thrust has meant a return to the artist’s family archives, neighbourhood, or city of origin, and her Trinidadian cultural heritage. In “Underbelly,” the artist revisits her family’s spiritual traditions (Shouter, or Spiritual Baptist) as well as the daily ritual of rest, itself a semi-conscious communion, with prone bodies and beds repeating throughout the show.

In her codex of movements titled _To Score the Marvelous_ (2023), approximately 30 individual high-contrast black-and-white matte paper-print photographs of the artist in motion hang vertically from one wall. The bottom of each page gently curls forward, echoing the shadows that emanate from each print. Together, the documented gestures depict the artist’s distillation of physical movements commonly found in the Shouter tradition, forming what Jordan calls “an alphabet, a set of notations, code.” The embodied language reconfigures anew in _To Score the Marvelous/Chorus_ (2023), the pair of dual-sided light boxes set slightly apart in the centre of the main room. Facing the entrance, the film positives portray a split horizontal image of the artist’s body in bed. The left light box shows the lying back of her upper body, the right box shows her lower body facing the camera. On the reverse, Jordan’s gestural lexicon returns as slides of transparencies overlaid on top of each other, compounding and contrasting, provoking new figures and forms. Like musical notation or choreography spoken in motion, Jordan’s language emerges in the gathering of its component gestures, which remain rearrangeable, again and again.

The day before “Underbelly” was set to close, Patel Brown (and a generous anonymous neighbour in the lower studio) hosted an artist talk that featured Jordan in conversation with poet and cultural theorist Fred Moten, moderated by essayist and independent scholar (and close friend of the artist) Evelyn Amponsah. There, a packed audience listened to readings from _Underbelly_, the very limited edition book (only five copies exist) that emerged from Jordan’s thesis and was developed concurrently with the works in the show. Lyrical excerpts were also reproduced in the gallery.

Crafting a conversation that was both poetic and exploratory, Amponsah asked Jordan to reflect on her investments in performing the mundane and giving visual form to spaces previously denied the authority of common sense. Jordan described how the notion of an _underbelly_ became a methodology for her creative process. She situates herself outside the limitations of Western logics or linear temporal formations by gathering her palette of photographic approaches into a material document that “reflects in both directions,” to the past and the future. In studying her previous approaches while experimenting with new ones, Jordan explained, “[I am] trying to understand what it is that I have been doing and trying to figure out what it is that I’m drawn towards.” In a confident extension to the artist’s timetravelling visual practice and world-making inquiry, “Underbelly” proposes a ceremony where the archive meets the present in motion.

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“Underbelly” ran from 16 May to 15 June 2024 at Patel Brown, Toronto.

“Underbelly” — Anique Jordan

Excel Garay is an artist-curator, writer, and community worker operating on Mi'kma'ki in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, NS). Her work, in these intersecting roles, is informed by mutual desires discovered through acts of collaboration and her lived experience. She is Co-Director of The Khyber Centre for the Arts.


I was looking for an available spot among the already seated audience inside the black-box Bus Stop Theatre. The dark room was buzzing with anticipation for multidisciplinary performance artist Lou Campbell’s _PRUDE_. As the lights dimmed, the ’90s Eurodance hit “Get Ready for This” (1991) by 2 Unlimited suddenly blared out of the speakers, signalling the entrance of a masked drag character covered head-to-toe in a skintight millennial-pink bodysuit, with only their eyes and mouth exposed. A jewelled fuchsia fabric crown snugly hugged their head, while on their shoulders, a fuchsia mini-cape with puffed sleeves fluttered as Campbell took centre stage, under the spotlight. With bright, wide, gleaming eyes, and a large smile stretched across their face, the jester boisterously introduced themselves as “The King of the Party,” with much gusto. “Together we’re going to build an army of party royalty!” they exclaimed, addressing the audience in stand-up comedy fashion. “Look Hot, GET FUCKED UP, and find someone to hook up with as FAST AS POSSIBLE,” they proclaimed, emphasizing that these three vital rules were crucial toward becoming desirable in any party setting. At first, their overwhelming commitment to the bit was startlingly effective in disarming, and eventually engaging, with the rest of an audience that would be largely unfamiliar with their work.

_PRUDE_ is a theatrical performance that blends clowning, improv, stand-up comedy, and drag. Campbell adopts the character of the King of the Party as a method of both sharing and working through past and present difficulties as a trans asexual person struggling with substance use and their need for external validation. Topics range from appealing to the desires of boys throughout their teenage years, to using substances to facilitate social and sexual engagements, lying about their kinks and desires, and navigating attempts at polyamory to please their partner at the expense of their own unspoken needs. What all these anecdotes have in common is an intent to maintain an image of desirability through the act of mirroring others.

At one point, an exhausted King of the Party confessed, “It would be more accurate to say my sexuality is Sims.” They continued, “In the Sim World, sex is not a currency [Sims] have to pay to be accepted.” Adorned with a floating green diamond headpiece—an iconic reference toward the popular 2000s game series—Campbell slowly moved toward the audience in rigid Sim fashion, lip-syncing to a Simlish cover of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Run Away With Me” (2015). An omnipotent voice of a backseat gamer then interrupted the music, exasperatedly demanding that the player “make them make out with someone… Or at least speed things up a bit.” As if on cue, the music sped up to four times its original speed, causing Campbell to dance four times as fast. The voice of the back-seat gamer returned: “Wow, your character has been dancing for four hours straight, hasn’t made out with someone, and all the rest of the characters left the party… Aren’t they bored?” “I guess NOT!” was Campbell’s enthusiastic reply. In many ways, Campbell’s emulation of a Sim embodies theorist José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of disidentification. To Muñoz, disidentification describes an oscillation between identifying with and countering a majoritarian perception. Disidentification not only reveals how sociality affects minoritarian subjects, but also allows queer subjects to create their own worlds. Campbell’s Sim performance brings audiences into a world where the politics of sex and desirability have very little to no control over the performer. By having their self-loathing take the form of the omnipresent back-seat gamer, Campbell is finally able to separate that inner critic from themselves. The result: Campbell gets to be surprised by their own unexplored asexual desire.

What stood out for me in Campbell’s _PRUDE_ was their high level of self-awareness, which was gently veiled by campy millennial humor. By over-exaggerating the mask they use to present as the King of the Party, Campbell is able to explore the limitations of embodying the desires of others. Campbell’s levity reminded me that sometimes, all it takes is a bit of queer humour to process both the reflections and skewed refractions of the self. Like any successful clown, comedy requires both self-criticism and self-compassion. In negotiating preconceptions around desirability, _PRUDE_’s simultaneous self-deprecating humour and immense self-compassion offers possible ways for a queer asexual world to come into being. Tackling their own shame, Campbell lets us witness exactly who they are.

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_PRUDE_ was performed at the Bus Stop Theatre, Halifax, on 24 April 2024.

_PRUDE_ — Lou Campbell

Mercedes Webb / ma̱lidi / məlidi (they/she) is a language warrior, writer, art historian, vocalist, and artist whose ancestry is comprised of Haida (Kunn janaas), Kwakwaka’wakw (Mama̱liliḵa̱la), Anishinaabe (Fort Williams First Nation), and European. ma̱lidi lives as a guest in Mohkínstsis/Otos-kwunee/Wicispa Oyade/Guts’ists’i on Treaty 7 territory. FREE PALESTINE. END GENOCIDE IN KKKANADA AND BEYOND.


> There is only one thing the colonizer brought that is good. This is beads. They are a malleable weapon from which we can tell stories to expose them

> —Jobena Synese Marie Petonoquot, Instagram, September 14, 2024
 
 

Wake up into capitalist genocidal hell, the incessant demands come from all sides CONSUME YOU MOTHER FUCKERS, IDOLIZE. ʔit̓id.

This is what you want, right? Mirrors to reflect how you consume your consumption? To consume how others have been and continue to be consumed?

Apparent in Audie Murray and Nico Williams’s work is their awareness that consumption is consumption without binarizing “good” and “bad.” To live on this plane, all who consume under capitalism live in contradiction, forced into scarcity mindsets by shrinkflation and inhumanely low minimum wage. Absence is the fabric of life; the space between each cell is mimicked in bead-work.

> _Light and water leak, air passes._

Absence, to the ignorant, is just that: a void, nothing, bypassing context. When aware of larger historical contexts, absence speaks volumes. Centuries of ongoing and ever-present psychopathically genocidal conditioning sweep people away, passing its heinous hooks from one generation to another in attempted sublimations of spirit, severing people from their ancestors. Spiritual homesickness abounds in disconnected, lost people. No wonder we fall into these cycles of consumption. These systemic conditions are rendered here by artists who are keenly attuned to the subtleties between seemingly empty products.

> _Nostrils search in the corner for traces of stale smoke
and sticky beer._

In Murray’s _I recognize the ways you shift insides (Rugoru)_ (2021), Rugoru’s rag rug, probably constructed over many moons and transformations, spirals outward. Off the rug’s peripheries is another constant: plastic. Ancestors other-than-human transformed many times over, common though relatively unknown as ancestor, compose two six-pack rings that have been carefully adorned with fluorescent vermillion beads. The beads exude a false luminance, tiny moons. On a foldable TV table edged with the moon phases are six empty crushed cans of beer with black beading wrapping their labels. One can lies on its side; matte honey beads spill out, foam long dissipated, though funnily, each can’s tab is completely sealed. Leave it to Rugoru to spill closed beer. Rugoru is a transformer and trickster that takes the form of a wolf. Many Rugoru stories live in oral traditions, each with its own nuances. The moon figures prominently as a character in Rugoru’s life, adorning their seat; central to the top of a Rugoru bush beer painting is a fluorescent-pink eclipse and vulvic ellipsis with the full lunar cycle above it. A circular and fluorescent pink–bordered ashtray stand holds a c igarette, whose identifying marks are obfuscated by a delicately sewn black-beaded cuff with loose ends of thread jutting out. Each cuff encapsulates the circular forms like the effects of an eclipse that leaves small bands of white. Flowers hang on the wall, slowly drying until the installation completes and is possibly transformed into another part of Murray’s practice.

Shiny and evenly bumpy surfaces, constructed over many hours by multiple hands in many colours and finishes, glisten, reflect, and refract. Simulacra of disposable consumer ephemera: more connected to the traditions of the artists’ intergenerational relations than the fascist oligarchs that impose food scarcity and bar access to nourishment based on class. Sculptural renderings of objects so common that their lifespan from purchase to landfill, fire, or sewer pipe is dubious. The works here are weightier than what they mimic.

Beads and rugaru are agents capable of transformation: sand to glass, to strand, to constellation, to sculpture, human to wolf, to human.

> _Change is constant here._

One of the glass beads could break and require repair. A thread comes undone and lets loose a fall of beads. Atop a clear IKEA cake stand sits a perfectlysculpted white cake, Murray’s _Consume_ (2024), with pink and blue teardrops around the side and gently draped pink and blue strings of beads; rich, red-tufted caribou hair and a blue border filled with multicoloured sprinkles decorate top of the cake. I imagine biting into it: I can feel the beads bumping against ridgy molars, tiny high-pitched squeaks, and the bristle of caribou tuft tickling my lips. It’s similarly deficient in nutrients, like cake. Mohkínstsis bus stops had a “let them eat cake” campaign critiquing Loblaws/Provigo’s unfettered greed. Rent has also risen beyond affordability for many. The impacts of imposed scarcity have always been present in rural areas, which face inflated grocery prices in perpetuity. Williams’s beaded Provigo flyer _Provigo (a.k.a. Loblaws)_ (2024) acts as another reminder and record of Galen G. Weston’s capitalistic terrorism, an embarrassment to his Irish ancestry. Weston and other oligarchs are closer to those who are starving people in Palestine, Myanmar, and elsewhere. Cans, chip bags, and cookies shimmer off the flyer page, recognizable by colour combinations and general shapes. Dappled sun passes through blue beads composing the beaded life-size IKEA bag _Feast_ (2024), which holds 49 plain wooden IKEA spoons. One spoon for each distinct Anishinaabe clan, whose feast spoons’ individual complexities have been erased by colonization. We can fill this beaded IKEA bag whose pattern is from smaller Anishinaabe bags that would have been trusted companions portaging the Great Lakes.

> _Bigger isn’t always better._

Indigenous survivance is perennial.

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“Eat It Up” ran from 12 July to 5 October 2024 at The Bows, Calgary.

“Eat It Up” — Audie Murray and Nico Williams

Angel Callander is a writer, editor, and curator in Toronto. She is currently a PhD candidate in Art History and Visual Culture at York University. Her work can be found in publications such as _CBC Arts, Canadian Art, BlackFlash,_ and _esse arts + opinions_, among others, as well as in _Imagining Futures of Experimental Media_ (Pleasure Dome, NIMAC & OddSite Arts, 2023) and _Architecture and the Smart City_ (Routledge, 2020).


Filmmaker John Greyson recounts The Clichettes’ notorious lip-sync performance of Motörhead’s “Go to Hell” (1982) at Toronto’s Pride Day in 1985. Wearing dishevelled mullets and nude, muscle-bound bodysuits complete with removable penises, they thrashed and kicked and “screamed,” as is common in expressions of men’s fury. At the end of the performance, they would take off their penises and kiss them.

Curated by Ivana Dizdar at the McMaster Museum of Art, the first retrospective of the collaborative work of Louise Garfield, Janice Hladki, and Johanna Householder between 1978 and 1993 codifies the significance of this period for the development of feminist performance art, and The Clichettes’ contribution to it. Amid the many costumes, video clips of plays and lip-sync performances, and vitrines of ephemera emerges a larger picture of the frailties and affectations within culturally inscribed genders. Camp, drag, satire, and theatrical choreography came to define a burgeoning sect of performance in the ’70s, and for The Clichettes, these strategies were part and parcel of posing questions about performances of gender that still linger today. Namely, what underwrites manhood and womanhood, the nuclear family, whiteness, and commodity fetishism?

The Clichettes shared the stage with many fellow travellers at local Toronto rallies and events for political causes, including former poet laureate Lillian Allen, who describes the ’70s context they were working in to be one of “polite bias.” Feminist critique at the time sought to break apart the auras of deference and tact by developing political stakes for issues like reproductive rights and gender-based violence. At the heart of these issues, and of the group’s performance work, was an effort to disrobe the patriarchal symbolic order and its impacts.

The Clichettes’ first play, _Half Human, Half Heartache_ (1980), was conceived of to give structure to their lip-sync performances in a more narrative and consolidated way. Three aliens arrive on Earth disguised as human women to study girlhood in order to perfect it, creating a girl band. A voice-over clearly states the premise of the play, which doubles as a dramatization of the performance collective’s inception: observing that clichés made up a great deal of human cultural expression, they named themselves “The Clichettes.” In the spirit of girl groups from the ’50s–’60s like The Ronettes and The Shirelles, the trio used a strategy of “living inside” girlhood’s orthodoxy in order to deconstruct it. The play ends with the three, having learned all about the business of getting and losing a man, lip-syncing to Connie Francis’s “Who’s Sorry Now” (1958) and Timi Yuro’s “Hurt” (1961), plunging knives into their hearts and stomachs, and dancing with the severed head of an ex-boyfriend.

The period of the late ’70s to early ’90s, the one that brackets The Clichettes’ work as a collective, was particularly significant for articulating a politics of visibility—both in the sense of a desire for and mistrust of it. Feminist film theorists teased out how the binary between visibility as power and invisibility as weakness was ultimately false. The political appeal of visibility often comes from the hope of being enfranchised, and perhaps incorporated into a canon, but it also comes with the traps of being recognized as the other, and therefore subject to fetishism, increased control, and surveillance.

These are just as much the mechanisms that circumscribe the particular brands of girlhood and masculinity that The Clichettes lampooned in their work. Choosing comedy as their critical methodology, the group anticipated a knowing audience that was in on the joke about the limits, definitions, and archetypes that are socially and culturally available to inhabit. What this method ultimately offers is a means of making things hypervisible, rendering the absurdities and excesses of gender roles in their pop context.

When The Clichettes dressed up in powder blue, bedazzled leisure suits and crop-cut wigs to lip-sync Paul Anka’s 1974 hit “(You’re) Having My Baby” on Cityline, the grotesquerie of lyrics about being “a woman in love” and “lov[ing] what’s going through you” (in this case, literally growing a fetus) is laid bare for the obscene, proprietary cornerstone of normative relationships with men that it is.

Even the plain fact of a _Globe and Mail_ review by Ray Conlogue, shown in the exhibition’s vitrines, referring to The Clichettes’ theatrical expression of female rage in the play _Out for Blood_ (1990) as “childish violence” betrays another obscene context between women’s deeply felt pain and how they can express it in public as defined by masculinity.

Their use of lip-sync was much less about faithful imitation than it was a tool for elaborating the cultural signifiers that underpin relationships and interactions between men and women. In 1984, when The Clichettes travelled to Houston for the national lip-sync competition—for which they received first prize—the group went on stage dressed in blue “wave” skirts, sailor hats, and cardboard boat-shaped bodices to perform Austrian pop star Lolita’s 1960 song “Seemann (Deine Heimat ist das Meer)” [“Sailor (Your Home Is the Sea)”]. Making suggestive references to the wordplay of the German “Seemann” while caressing the bows of their boats, they invoked how masculinity so often represents itself through militarism, adventurism, and sexual conquest. Meanwhile, their competitors seemed poised to emulate “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” without the same air of critique.

The Clichettes’ approach to comedy and performance—coming from formal training in disciplined, embodied forms like ballet, mixed with a hint of vaudeville— manifested as parody personified. Their fearless and seductive brand of campy satire has become less common in the mainstream, even if we are still trying to send and receive virtually the same messages.

In an afterword to the retrospective’s catalogue, curator Wanda Nanibush recalls inviting Householder to perform as part of the Art Gallery of Ontario 2016 exhibition “Toronto: Tributes + Tributaries 1971–1989.” Nanibush’s point, bluntly made, is that the way museums tend to exclude performance results in a dearth of knowledge about Toronto’s distinctive contributions to art history. The Clichettes, and their many acknowledged collaborators from Toronto’s ’70s Queen West scene, have much to teach about the context they were responding to. At the same time, this exhibition also reveals that perhaps things are roughly the same as they ever were.

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“The Clichettes: Lips, Wigs, and Politics” ran from 21 May to 22 November at the McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton.

Header

C Mag

Issue 159

Mirror Mirror

Credits

Letters

Letters

Editorial

Editorial: Mirror Mirror

Explore Issue by Images

Features

Bhenji Ra Dances at the End of the Rainbow

```````````````````To Return

In the Lacuna

Black, Alive, and Looking Back at You: In Conversation With Karice Mitchell

A Vampire Walks Into a Funhouse

Cinema, Nostalgia, and the Excess That Remains: A Conversation With Tiffany Sia

Artist Projects

Floor Drawing Series by Aubin Soonhwan K: Text

Columns

Composition: The Hardest Part Is Getting to the Beginning: On Lily Wang's Silver Repetitions

One Thing: Kamala Ibrahim Ishag’s Zar Paintings

Reviews

“Sun Moon Stars” — Rochelle Goldberg

“The Deep West Assembly” — Cauleen Smith

“M∗∗∗∗∗” — Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill

“The Traces That Remain” — Shaya Ishaq, Po B. K. Lomami, Zinnia Naqvi, Lan “Florence” Yee

“Underbelly” — Anique Jordan

PRUDE — Lou Campbell

“Eat It Up” — Audie Murray and Nico Williams

“The Clichettes: Lips, Wigs, and Politics” — The Clichettes (Louise Garfield, Janice Hladki, Johanna Householder)