Column

Teresa Tam is an artist from and based in Calgary. She doesn’t specialize in anything, but likes to work with digital processes, functional installations, all things shaped in paper, excessive labour, and collections of mildly niche objects. She graduated from AUArts in 2014 and is the other half of Yolkless Press.

Writer

In this issue’s extended editorial note, Bracy Appeikumoh asks, “Was utopia, like extra lives, envisioned as a means of escaping death?” Among the haunting contradictions of living in the imperial core, whose violences seek their own immortality, to seize a different kind of “extra life” takes an extra real imagination. Across virtual game worlds, ancestral inheritances, unfinished revolutionary histories, artists’ data storage, and more, contributors to C160 reflect on extra life as a state both surplus and sacred—what persists in age-old cycles of decay.


Extra Life

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Exploring the existential questions of finding ways to be remembered, Teresa Tam investigates artistic and personal storage devices and how they can become tangible proof of existence.

One Thing: In Search of an Incorruptible Life

Wanda Nanibush is an Anishinaabe-kwe image and word warrior, curator, and community organizer from Beausoleil First Nation. She recently won the Toronto Book Award for her coauthored book Moving the Museum. She is the 2025 Helen Frankenthaler Visiting Professor in Curating in the PhD Program in Art History at CUNY. She is also part of the curatorial team for Counterpublic 2026, a triennial civic exhibition in St.
Louis. In 2024, Nanibush was awarded The Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for
Curatorial Excellence. Nanibush founded aabaakwad, an international yearly gathering of over 80 Indigenous curators writers, and artists.

_This poem extends from Wanda Nanibush’s billboard project at AKA artist-run centre (November 8, 2024, to February 28, 2025), which was translated into Arabic by Mohammed Abu Laban._ We Return _will next take place from June 1, 2025, to May 30, 2026, at Hamilton Artists Inc. The current text appears meaningfully in Plantagenet Cherokee font._

_To respect the layout, we’ve chosen to upload it in images. You can also [view or download the pdf.](https://strapi-uploads-c-mag-prod.s3.ca-central-1.amazonaws.com/C160_Nanibush_a8bec9bfa7.pdf)_

Images by the artist: 
1. Palestinian _ tatreez_ pattern woven with Anishinaabe saddle bag pattern (above) 
2. Photograph of cacti from the Nakba village of Lifta, marked with the word Palestine (article thumbnail)

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Indigenous

Textiles

Nature

In an extension of her billboard project at AKA artist-run centre (2024–2025), Wanda Nanibush relates Palestinian and Anishinaabe experiences of love, land, and children of the future.


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Composition: We Return

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Editorial

Bracy Appeikumoh was the Editorial and Programs Assistant at _C Magazine_ in 2024, in partnership with OCAD U Career Launcher. She is a writer and mixed media artist whose work centres reimagining desire and pleasure wholly divested from the diktats of empire and all of its baggage. Her erotic fiction takes place in queer futures embodying queer pre-colonial pasts; her non-fiction ponders how we get there. She is burdened by the urgent need to restore, preserve, and disseminate Indigenous ways of being and knowing. Octavia E. Butler, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, June Jordan, Lorraine Hansberry, Maya Angelou, Claudia Jones.

Maandeeq Mohamed is a writer and researcher and the Associate Editor of _C Magazine_. 

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_. 

##### Extra Life
##### by Bracy Appeikumoh

The concept of “extra life” evokes the surrealist reality of a video game at work—the player’s ability to be omnipotent and omniscient, while knowing that the game’s code will not cede all power to you; the spiritual euphoria of switching between different selves with ease; or the state of being absolved from tangible consequences in a virtual playground. An ever-present cautionary tale is how we cannot ignore the ways that virtual worlds, and their motivations and innovations, affect or further reveal the realities we walk in.

This is especially evident when I stop to consider how easily transferable the tools of war in video-game realities are to IRL. The same game controller that is used to pilot a war machine in a video game will be waiting for an army recruit when they join the military. In 2022, Lockheed Martin announced that it would implement Unreal Engine (a 3D game engine developed by Epic Games) in its training simulations, [^1] and in the ’90s, the military contractor contributed chips and graphics systems for arcade games through its spin-off company Real3D. [^2] In turn, the concept of pillage and conquest has become mainstay in several sandbox games: extract as many resources as possible for they will be replenished on a set timer, and if they do not replenish, you can blame faulty code, not your own vices. How do you interact with a whole world in which the only means of zooming in to see a bird chirping on a tree is to look at it through the scope of a sniper rifle? What meaning does that make?

Was utopia, like extra lives, envisioned as a means of escaping death? Is that why some pursue the dogged and absolute preservation of memory? Death is where the seeds of our becomings burst and take root. It is also painful and dreary and bleak. In the binary-code world of video games, death is an inevitability, where the constant looming threat of a “GAME OVER” is what keeps players agile, alert, always thinking and guessing. But you are only as dead as your last save file; in this way, encountering death is like skydiving, you feel all the rush and adrenaline of the plummet, but your parachute is your guarantee, your extra life.

Considering this, if reality has become more and more like a video game, who is afforded the luxury of extra lives? Who gets a redo whenever they choose? As a collective, we watched a tech oligarch perform a Nazi salute at the 2025 US presidential inauguration, but somehow have not been allowed to name what we saw. We have been bombarded by news outlets diluting what we witnessed with our eyes, ears, and bodies. [^3] This absurdism and hypocrisy amplified when the genocidal leader of a colonial state, who has denied those charges, [^4] rushed in to defend this tech oligarch from rightful accusations of antisemitism. [^5]

Collective amnesia surrounding settler colonialism facilitates the repetition of familiar state violences—this too is a kind of extra life, as colonial histories repeat themselves in the current moment. A story so uncanny that Orwell’s _Nineteen Eighty-Four_ (1949) feels pedestrian by comparison: in the 21st century, multiple tech oligarchs wage war to steal reality and sell it back to us at a premium as slurry. Life becomes increasingly divorced from the living. How then do we approach other concepts of extra life? How are we reborn away from the muck and filth of this? I consider the embodied knowledge of my ancestors, encoded within my very flesh, or within my cells, as they explode with life and meaning. How do we pay tribute to those who have lived and loved so that we too may do the same? Who lives through you as you breathe? In remembering and referencing these past lives, how do we use this embodied knowledge—these selves within selves experiencing new worlds through our bodies—as a guiding light? I mean this not just in knowing that our survival is guaranteed, as our ancestors did, but in terms of ensuring that survival does not become the only story that pervades us. Things will get better—it has been decreed and foretold by our very bones and brain matter. 

[^1]: Lockheed Martin, “Gaming Technology: The Future of Training,” November 28, 2022, [https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/features/2022/gaming-technology-the-future-of-training.html](https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/features/2022/gaming-technology-the-future-of-training.html)

[^2]: “Intel Acquires Patents, Technology From Real3D,” _Tech Monitor_, October 21, 1999, [https://www.techmonitor.ai/technologyintel_acquires_patents_technology_from_real3d](https://www.techmonitor.ai/technology intel_acquires_patents_technology_from_real3d)

[^3]: Katrin Bennhold, “What Elon Musk’s Salute Was All About,” _The New York Times_, January 24, 2025, [https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/world/europe/elon-musk-roman-salute-nazi.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/world/europe/elon-musk-roman-salute-nazi.html)

[^4]: “Israel's Netanyahu: Charge of genocide ‘outrageous’,” Reuters, January 26, 2024, [https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/netanyahu-israel-committed-international-law-will-defend-itself-2024-01-26]( https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/netanyahu-israel-committed-international-law-will-defend-itself-2024-01-26)

[^5]: Benjamin Netanyahu (@netanyahu), 2025. “@elonmusk is being falsely smeared…” X (formerly Twitter), January 23, 2025, 6:39 AM, https://x.com/netanyahu/status/1882392668497756279 (Archived: https://archive.ph/LVTqI); Mary Whitfill Roeloffs, “Netanyahu Defends Elon Musk Amid ‘Nazi Salute’ Allegations,” _Forbes_, January 23, 2025, [https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2025/01/23/netanyahu-defends-elon-musk-amid-nazi-salute-allegations](https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2025/01/23/netanyahu-defends-elon-musk-amid-nazi-salute-allegations)

##### Life, Redux
##### by Maandeeq Mohamed and Joy Xiang

In one sense, the notion of “extra life” carries the false promise of self-preservation found in the “muck and filth” [^6] of every violent incursion that replicates itself. In the imperial core, the mass death of empire’s others is compartmentalized in the name of security as collateral damage (this designation, too, relies on the language of the _ancillary_, or _extra_). 

Our reality is split: what feels surreal (unbelievable) can also mean that which is “super” real, from the French prefix sur. The uncanny sensation of what is extra real, when the moment of intense experience annihilates conscious narratives, is also a wordlessness. Grief is one of those experiences. To affirm life amidst death requires steadfastness. On March 18, 2025, a renewed wave of Israeli airstrikes conducted overnight killed hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza, breaking an already dubious ceasefire. [^7] The wilfulness to extend this life into something more takes an extra real imagination. How to do this amidst empire’s contemptible contradictions? And yet. 

This issue compiles such numinous responses to extra life. In their conversation, Yasmeen Nematt Alla and Shalaka Jadhav use the former’s installation _7anajer_ (2024) to think through the continued sense of liberation that persists through age-old cycles that include death and decay, like the choral echoes of collective ululation. Nematt Alla’s installation is itself named after the Arabic word for larynges. Nic Wilson’s essay attends to the afterlife of writing in the visual arts, and how text is taken by artists who want to question the boundaries between the self and other, between past and present lives. This use of text offers “a place of non-division from which many questions and declarations of separation […] can be unwound, demolished, or left to decompose.” And in the latest iteration of the One Thing column, Teresa Tam speaks of her compulsive pull to store artistic and personal data on copious storage devices. Tam’s wish for a proof of existence, “if it ends up being true that information is a fundamental matter in the universe,” has its own mass.

Other contributions to this issue explore the _extra_ in _extra life_—as those deemed excess to life itself: the subjects of empire, the fungible and the disposable. Yet, from this negation, other orientations emerge: alternative cosmologies, spectral inheritances, and counter-histories that unsettle the present.

In conversation with Toronto-based artist Camille Turner, Kai Trotz-Motayne explores the anti-Black conditions that structure Canada’s past and present. In performances like _BlackGrange_—a walking tour culminating at Peter Street in Toronto—Turner attends to the city’s erasure of its history of chattel slavery. The artist references the history of Peggy Pompadour, who was captured after the attempt to escape her enslavement. Pompadour was imprisoned in the city’s first jail, the King Street Gaol—now the site of the King Edward Hotel, where many in Toronto would have walked by countless times. 

This haunting presence of unfinished revolutionary histories also comes up in TJ Shin’s survey of Yong Soon Min’s enduring legacy, written on the occasion of _KISSSSS_—her posthumous exhibition at the University of California Irvine. Shin contextualizes Min’s practice within the various “minor wars, small revolutions, unsanctioned insurgencies and overlooked rebellions that are endlessly differing and deferred.” 

Diving into how virtual worlds can be spaces for testing different futures, Amanda Boulos writes about how players enact freedom of movement in video game open worlds in ways that cannot happen in real life without mortal consequence. Boulos discusses Firas Shehadeh’s video work _Like an Event in A Dream Dreamt by Another – Rehearsal_ (2023), which is based on footage from _Grand Theft Auto Online_’s modded Palestinian server “Magic City,” to explore how players express autonomous desires under occupation that may fuel the energy to envision the renewal of Gaza. Meanwhile, Steph Wong Ken peers at the enclosing pressure to extend the life of our arts organizations, where Alberta’s charitable gaming model provides artist-run centres thousands of dollars of provincial funding in exchange for volunteer shifts at licenced gambling establishments. Wong Ken notes that this casino funding model is at least more transparent than the often-confusing gamble of participating in other bureaucratic and opaque government granting processes.

In the Artist Project for this issue, Taylor McArthur portrays all that she has inherited from a lineage of Nakoda women, tracing points of life on their bodies: “veins, nerves, the heart, head, and belly are all points of convergence.” With an augmented reality component, readers can scan the marked pages to experience the fullness of McArthur’s project. As guest curator Tristan Sauer further writes, “There is resistance in deciding what is passed on to the next generation.” In the end, Wanda Nanibush consecrates children as future ancestors in her extended poem “We Return”: “We return love to our childhoods / We return again and again / Making, marking, matriating.”

[^6]: Bracy Appeikumoh, “Extra Life,” C Magazine #160,2025
[^7]: James Mackenzie, Nidal Al-Mughrabi, and Emily Rose, “Israel warns more to come as airstrikes kill over 400 in Gaza after two months of truce,” Reuters, March 18, 2025, [https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-military-conducts-strikes-hamas-targets-gaza-armysays-2025-03-18](https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-military-conducts-strikes-hamas-targets-gaza-armysays-2025-03-18)



Editor

Multimedia

Bracy Appeikumoh, previous Editorial and Programs Assistant at C Magazine, conceives of the issue’s theme and explores the idea of “extra life.” Editors Maandeeq Mohamed and Joy Xiang  reflect on _Extra Life_ as a theme in relation to this issue's contributions.


Editorial: Extra Life / Life, Redux

Feature

Shalaka Jadhav is based between Block 2 of the Haldimand Tract (Kitchener, ON) and Treaty 1 (Winnipeg, MB). Their research interests on spatial positionality and critical geographies of grief and public memory can be evidenced in exhibitions and programs they have curated in Halifax, Winnipeg, Kitchener, and Toronto. Shalaka has held roles at OCAD University and Blackwood Gallery, and is the Co-Director of Textile, a hyperlocal arts collective in Waterloo Region that supports writers and artists through mentorship, publishing, and curation. Trained as an urban planner, Shalaka took the advice of an aptitude test to pursue curatorial studies, and practices as a researcher, curator, and writer.

Yasmeen Nematt Alla is an Egyptian immigrant and settler on the unceded and stolen lands of Tkaronto and Waawiyatanong, Turtle Island. Her practice creates machinations that attest to the existence of the Brown Disabled Queer Self, resisting systems programmed to forget us. She has most recently exhibited at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Bronx River Art Center, Heaven Gallery in Chicago, and Xpace Cultural Centre in Toronto.

Poppies ferment in a glass vessel. An _athan_ clock calls for prayer. Artists and art workers Shalaka Jadhav and Yasmeen Nematt Alla reflect on religion, death, life, and more life, grounded in Nematt Alla’s installation _7anajer_ (2024)—named for larynges, a collective singing. _7anajer_ is an investigation of death as a state of existence and a futurizing of life beyond the apocalypse—a word that comes from the Greek _apokálypsis_, meaning “uncovering,” a derivative of the verb _apokalýptein_, meaning “to take the cover off,” a compound whose first element is the preposition and prefix _apó_—meaning “off” or “away.” Apocalypse means uncovering for the sake of revelation.

In pausing the premise of “death as finality,” _7anajer_ is instead a reminder that we will keep singing. This conversation considers the rituals and responsibilities held in practices of prayer, how we make space for resistance when we honour death and dying, and who is afforded extra lives.

> **Shalaka Jadhav: Our conversations—unexpectedly to me—return to those about death, and I’m thinking about notions of commonality between our upbringings and their rootedness in faith. Can you speak more about how these topics bridge into one for you?**

**Yasmeen Nematt Alla:** Growing up Muslim, existence was divided into two realms: _dunya_ and _akhira_. _Dunya_—an Arabic word directly translating to “the world”—represents the current physical realm we occupy, one defined by labour, caretaking, joy, suffering, and an unrelenting race toward the _akhira_. In contrast, _akhira_—the afterlife—was not only a place of judgement, but also a realm of reward. It promised the flourishing of seeds planted during the _dunya_: acts of kindness, perseverance, and faith. It was imagined as a space where the weight of living was finally lifted, where life didn’t feel so heavy.

As I grew older, _akhira_ became a source of comfort, a reminder that this existence is not final. When I return to the soil, it will not mark an end but rather the beginning of a new journey—one beyond the burdens of the _dunya_. Perhaps in death, I will find a place where anxiety does not dull joy, where the unknown no longer haunts, where I can exist in the embrace of loved ones, with Friday dinners and laughter uninterrupted by life’s heaviness. In death, we end—and in death, we begin anew.

>**SJ: _Dunya_ is a word I recognize in both Hindi and Marathi; I didn’t realize its etymological roots in Arabic. In the ways you’re highlighting _dunya_ and _akhira_, I’m thinking about my curatorial interest in fermentation, pickling, and preservation. I recall there were always various achars at homes we visited, growing up across cities in India and in Dubai (my parents’ friends in Dubai were primarily of the Indian diaspora). In the ways that food can sometimes form a mental snapshot of a place, I remember, as each family would share the lineage of the achar, a window into their lives before their migration. Since 2017, I’ve been making kombucha on and off, comforted by its rhythms and how shareable it was, akin to achar perhaps. In 2020, like for many, fermentation and preservation projects took over the counters of my kitchen, and in 2021, while in school, I was thinking about these kitchen projects and specifically “kitchen project time,” an alternative timekeeping to digital calendars and reminders. In some ways, preparing for fermentation projects has some of the properties of _dunya_: they are of the earth, having full lives in gardens and farms, perhaps in the hands of stockists, before making it into our hands. In a studio visit we had together, we discussed one of your works, _7anajer_—I’m wondering how you were considering _dunya_ and _akhira_ in this work?**

**YNA:** I feel like so much of my work considers these two ends and beginnings. _7anajer_ was my final work during my graduate experience at Cranbrook Academy of Art, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. I remember thinking that the Cranbrook grounds deserved to hear the call of prayer, that this land—one that felt artificial in a way I could rarely grapple with—often made me feel like a stranger in it. I wanted to enshrine it with a call for prayer, almost like a call for the _akhira_ during the—perhaps at times frivolous—_dunya_.

I always felt at home whenever I heard an _athan_. Bloomfield Hills is located near Dearborn, the first Arab-American majority city in the US, with 55 percent of its population of 110,000 claiming Middle Eastern or North African roots. This meant that if I was ever in Dearborn, I heard an _athan_ from a nearby mosque and it never failed to delight me. I wanted to replicate that moment of recognition, of the _athan_ arriving, calling, out of seemingly nowhere, to me, and to others, for us to gather in the _dunya_ as we await an _akhira_ to come.

_7anajer_ (larynges in Arabic) is an installation made of a glass vessel holding poppies, olive oil, and vinegar. The olive oil ferments, the vinegar pickles, the poppies sit, trapped, held, alive and not. Five times a day on the site, an _athan_ clock offers the call for prayer, allowing this entity to make a calling for both the heavens and the earth. _7anajer_, for me, became this investigation of death as a state of existence and a futurizing of life beyond the apocalypse.

The piece was placed in a bog on the grounds of Cranbrook Academy, a site that, for the past two years, I had struggled to find myself within as an artist. I intended the work to serve as a tomb—a burial site—for martyred Palestinians, for Arabs, for my kin, and for myself. The bog felt like an appropriate setting for this gesture. Yet, even in its placement, the piece felt like a performance. It became a burial site for bodies that were never found, placed in a bog that was man-made—a constructed imitation of the natural. This dissonance made me question the nature of my act: what do we do when our gestures of care begin to feel like performances of grief? How do we reckon with the helplessness of envisioning liberation while remaining unable to activate it?

>**SJ: I’m really sitting with those questions lately, too, especially yeah, how to escape the clutches of helplessness and how important that is in envisioning and building toward a more liberatory politic. In this spirit, there’s lots of excellent writing floating around about the increasing privatization of spaces, hyper-individualizing, and the ongoing loneliness epidemic. When we stop sharing collective space, our shared responsibility to and with one another runs thin. I’ve been yearning over the last few years for some of the embodied experiences of being a part of a church congregation: the commitment from a group of people gathering regularly, who may not always be on the same page, but especially the collective singing, and how it instils a sort of collective effervescence. There’s a sense of intense shared emotional activation and unison standing among the pews, akin to the feeling in the stands at sporting events, and also to moving as a wave of people at protests and demonstrations.**

>**I think back to _7anajer_’s English translation to “larynges,” how the larynx functions as a voice box for producing sounds, but also how it plays a role in allowing us to breathe. These conversations cannot be held without naming COVID-19, which put our world on pause, precisely because it is a respiratory disease that inflames and swells the respiratory system and directly affects our breath. During the pandemic, conversations around disability, surveillance, and police brutality converged, presenting a political opportunity for protest against the social conditions that enabled these crises. Then, on October 7, 2023, we saw eyes turn sharply to the ongoing dispossession of Palestine, and the urgency to tap into our collective voice surged again. You asked a great question during our studio visit: “How do the dualities in _7anajer_—oil and vinegar, life and death, holding and releasing—reflect the tension between routine as stagnation versus as liberation?” Perhaps we’ve fallen out of this routine our bodies crave, of shared voice: singing together, rallying together. In my hometown in India, tablas provided rhythmic and percussive accompaniment to the hymns we would sing, a contrast to the churches I attended in Canada, where the organ’s sustaining chords guided congregational singing. Seemingly, we need both rhythms to sustain a collective voice: the crisp, sharp strikes of the tabla, and the harmonic depth of the organ.**

>**Growing up in a Christian household was inherited, as for many, through my parents and extended family practicing the faith. While both Islam and Christianity share a sentiment of renewal in death, I’ve never felt encouraged to consider the afterlife; rather, I found a fearfulness in fulfilling a version of a “best life” to get there. I grew up knowing that there would be a Day of Judgement, where my life’s “goodness” would be evaluated and considered alongside a faithfulness in my relationship with God. In the Christian faith, Jesus Christ gave his life so we may see a life forgiven of our sins. While this is rooted in a sense of relief and a deep sacrifice rooted in love, in practice, I felt a pressure of living a “good life” despite abiding by the “rules” that would bring me to salvation. Similar to Islam, the storytelling in Christianity is shared through a common text: in Islam, the Quran, in Christianity, the Bible. In there being a text, unlike religions with an oral storytelling tradition, there’s a sort of interpretation that is perhaps more “fixed,” as the forms of oral storytelling are inherently more interpretative. When I left the church, I left with many unanswered questions: how do we live a good life? Why is it structured around being God-fearing? Why was the history of spreading Christianity so violent in the ways it refused a coexistence, if Christianity itself centred non-violence and care?**

**YNA:** Totally. Organized religion has historically been a vessel through which people in power take away agency and exert coercive brutality against communities. It has bred violence, coloniality, manufactured consent for genocide. And yet, and yet, and yet. So many of us seek out this calling for the collective, this calling for a caretaking of one another, this calling for the beyond. Liberation is also found in a notion of _God_ that is expansive. God is, yes, this unknown entity, the universe, the Earth, the land, death, but it is also my mother, my sisters, my friends laughing as we cook together. Religion becomes a relational politic of existing, a questioning of surviving, of becoming, of liberating our souls from the confines of a coloniality that was enforced upon us. Perhaps these religions are really a way of telling us that we are still discovering what it means to exist.

Your question is both simple and devastating: _how do we live a good life?_ And in many ways, I believe I’m asking for a similar answer, but slanted: _how do we live toward a good death?_

We’re witnessing an unfolding of the world in ways that feel unimaginable, and
we are beginning to redefine our radical existences in ways that I find simultaneously gut-wrenching and heartwarming.
As artists and cultural workers, we wake
up each morning wondering, _okay, what
now, how do I be good? How do I live a
good life? How do I continue surviving
with those whom I love surviving with me
to the beyond?_ And it feels endless and
hopeless, and the other night, my roommate and I cried while watching a show
together over ice cream, and that morning, I watched Palestinians return to
their homes after 15 months away, and in both instances, I felt like God was with us in the room. It felt like _7anajer_,
the vessel, the oil and the vinegar, the
poppies, and the bog were calling for us
to a beyond I am reaching for.

> **SJ: I love that, and I’d love to think more closely about the bog as the site for _7anajer_. In a sense, a sort of “uncovering” (thinking back to the etymology for apocalypse) is ongoing across the wetlands in Ontario, to
further carve into the land and clear
land for development. In November
2022, Doug Ford, the leader of Ontario’s Progressive Conservative
Party, presented omnibus legislation that effectively disconnects policy mechanisms that enable understanding wetlands (the umbrella term that bogs fall under) and conservation areas as connected systems. [^1] By imposing this colonial thinking of categorizing and attempting to disconnect these natural systems, the deterioration of natural heritage and the loss of bogs as carbon sinks is inevitable. Natural systems don’t follow borders; rather, humans impose borders on natural systems to attempt to control them. Natural systems require connections between one another for survival.**

> **Healthy peat bogs are carbon
sinks, and act like sponges, absorbing run-off and preventing flooding,
allowing for a slow release of carbon
back into the atmosphere. When
bogs dry out, for example, disrupted by agriculture or development
pressures, the carbon stored in bogs
over time starts to oxidize in the
form of planet-warming carbon dioxide. Perhaps I’m choosing the
romanticized version here, but I’m
especially drawn to bogs, and their
undisturbed quality as oxygen-free
environments, offering protection
from the quicker decay of oxygenated environments.**

> **Something I keep coming back
to with _7anajer_ is the importance for
viewers to not come to full and complete conclusions about either why these poppies have been planted
into this vessel, or why they have ended up there. Instead, there’s an
invitation for possibility, perhaps
asking, what legacy are we memorializing, and what residue does
that memory work leave behind for
generations to come? I so appreciate how this work gestures to the memory-keeping manner of peatlands, while recognizing that these processes of gurgling and preservation are ongoing and invisible. Maybe what’s gurgling beneath the surface is the natural first question to ask, but the more difficult question is, perhaps, if we can find it in ourselves to give the unseen the space to fester.**

**YNA:** Isn’t that the biggest ask? Giving ourselves the permission to believe in the unseen and the unknown. Futurizing builds itself on a similar structure of faith: belief that a day will come where
we are more than we are now. I’m lucky,
honestly. I come from a culture full of
building faith upon the unknown. A vision of renewal is echoed in the ancestral knowledge of my people. The bog
as a site of the unknown offers a space
for the work and the audience to expand the vastness of the vessel in which the work is being held. How does the bog connect to the rest of the environment? Does it connect to someone I know but is far from me? Where does it end? Where does it begin? We talked about how _7anajer_ means larynges, the organ in the throat that contains the vocal cords. The glass vessel acts as the voice box of the bog, where sound should exist and be expelled from. Yet it is filled, with the poppies, with the liquids, holding them for both safekeeping and for a preparation for screaming.

> **SJ: I’m working on an exhibition essay where I’m digging into the terminology of “dirty data,” a phrase used in customer management systems. It can be understood as rogue data, data that’s inaccurate, incomplete, or inconsistent in a database: think giving a telemarketer a fake number, or handwriting your name onto a clipboard and the person digitizing it misses a letter. Dirty data is seen to be a hazard, a barrier: it means that the process of extraction (in this case, extracting “insights”) is taken off course. It makes room for inaccuracies, biases, and inconsistencies, resulting in unreliable insights and compromised decision-making. Most importantly to these customer management systems is that dirty data can be costly, measured as lost productivity. In _7anajer_, the processes are incomplete, they can’t yet (or perhaps ever) be tidied up. There’s a similarity in the limbo that dirty data enforces—it is material, but it is also not yet resolved. I see that with the visual of the oil and vinegar in _7anajer_. Yet, the _athan_ clock keeps time, keeps the structure in a sense.**

**YNA:** This concept of dirty data here is so intriguing. Thinking about this work as “untidy” satisfies the often spiteful part of me. I’ve sat with what it means to offer unresolved thoughts and questions to our audience members as artists. Dirty data seems to want to reject this unsettling. However, I think we both can agree that we are unsettling toward this rejection of the systems that govern us toward submission. The prayers of the _athan_ in the piece and in real life are callings for gathering, calling for mourning and ululations of temporality, and they do offer a structure. But! This structure is a flawed one. The _athan_ is set to Alexandria, Egypt’s coordinates, not the site that this clock existed in (Bloomfield Hills). The _athan_ times were not in accordance with the land that it settled on, furthering this complication of the other, of bringing the far near. Is prayer a space to build extra life where we exist both here and there? Can an _athan_ be a turning point for another life? Can it happen five times a day every day? Are rituals routine or are they a chance to re-begin life by intentionally surviving until the next ritual, as in staying alive from one prayer to the next: is sleep a small death until we are reborn in wake?

I don’t have many answers to these questions, if at all. But I am sitting with them in ways I didn’t know I was able to before. Perhaps we’re not supposed to reach them in this life. Perhaps the answer is to align ourselves with messiness, errors, disruptions, and a deep faith in a beyond we cannot see. The answers are often found in the cracks, after all.

[^1]: Fatima Syed, “Ontario weakens watershed protections (again) as natural resources minister gets new powers,” _The Narwhal_, March 7, 2024, [https://thenarwhal.ca/ontario-conservation-authorities-changes](https://thenarwhal.ca/ontario-conservation-authorities-changes)



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Spirituality

Yasmeen Nematt Alla and Sha-laka Jadhav use the former’s installation 7anajer (2024) to think through the continued sense of liberation that persists through age-old cycles that include death and decay.


To Enshrine an Ululation

TJ Shin is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Their writing has been published in Active Cultures, Asia Art Archive, _Mousse Magazine_, Vera List Center for Art and Politics, and more.

Composed of six photographs, Yong Soon Min’s _Defining Moments_ (1992) connects crucial moments in political history to key dates in her life as a South Korean–born American artist, curator, organizer, and professor emeritus at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). The coinciding dates are: 1953, which marked the end of the Korean War, establishing the division of North and South Korea, the death of Joseph Stalin and a shift toward liberalization in Soviet leadership, and Min’s year of birth; April 19, 1960, the date of major student-led demonstrations in the First Republic of South Korea that led to dictator Syngman Rhee’s resignation, events that Min witnessed as a child; May 18, 1980, the Gwangju Uprising and massacre of South Korean students demonstrating against martial law, which Min describes as an “awakening of her political consciousness”; and April 29, 1992, the Los Angeles uprising and unrest in Koreatown after the beating of Rodney King by the Los Angeles Police Department, which happened around the same time as Min's birthday. [^1]

The political events Min names and defines, varied and disparate in geopolitical regions and cultural histories, propose a conjunction between historical time and lived experience of the Cold War that is simultaneously discrete and distributed in terms of its spatial contours and diachronic outcome. In _Specters of Marx_ (1994), a series of lectures presented at the University of California, Riverside in 1993, philosopher Jacques Derrida describes a “ghostly presence”—a _spectre_—that haunts Marxist thought and history. In the wake of communism’s collapse, the rise of liberal democracy and the expansion of global free markets in the post–Cold War era led many to perceive these developments as what political scientist Francis Fukuyama called the “end of history”—the final stage of communism, where freedom became increasingly equated with the marketplace. [^2]

Challenging the foreclosure of Marxism, Derrida argues that the Marxist inheritance is not simply a historical event or perspective one is given, but an invocation to name and disavow the histories that exist “as much _in front of us as before us_.” [^3] This appeal to forgotten pasts as much as to the futures to come forms a political pact to which we are pledged—a process of injunction—that establishes the present scene as a newly founded _place_ and _time_. In other words, this injunction renders historical time contingent and politically indeterminate, creating the conditions for it to be reimagined and reconstituted. _Defining Moments_ can thus be understood in doubled terms: definitive moments representing a historical reality, or a proposition to insist on the moments yet to come, defining what follows in history.

The spectre—the haunting of unresolved ideological presence—returns across disparate places and disjointed times, reappearing in the strange lapse between generations and effects, even if its institutional form dissolves in the purported “end of history.” Its repetition is, therefore, never self-identical and its visitation is always different in appearance. What historical scenes did Min revisit in her work, invoking this repetitive return? What does her frequentation of the past reveal about that experience of convocation and the task it carries? Min’s posthumous exhibition _KISSSSS_ (2024) at the UCI Contemporary Art Center (CAC), on view from October 5 to December 14, 2024, explored such questions of inheritance and its effects. It presented her past works and last commission: _Both Sides Now_ (2018), featuring five print collages; _Still/Incessant_ (2018/2024), comprising five handbound artist books alongside an archival mural print; and _KISSSSS_, dated as “unfinished” due to Min’s passing before its completion.

Collected during her travels to the Joint Security Area (JSA) in South Korea and North Korea in the ’90s, _Both Sides Now_ features tourist postcards that present the two perspectives of the Korean border. The two images are systematically spliced and reassembled into a singular reconstruction, resulting in a perspectival fullness characterized by a distended landscape or dispersed timescale. Subjects appear disbanded in protest; national guards encircle the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ); a ceasefire treaty remains perpetually in negotiation—suggesting how war, and its exceptional violence, increasingly occupied by spatial and temporal logic, becomes a habitual or "temperamental" condition in the context of the Korean War, where North and South Korea are still technically at war. [^4]

The backs of the two postcards together feature the phrase “post/post/card/card,” but this could also be read as a double entendre: a “post-post” condition or a late-stage periodization of war, echoing what scholar Jodi Kim calls the “_protracted afterlife_ of the Cold War.” [^5] The splicing pattern of the photo collage is reminiscent of SMPTE colour bars, used in analogue video production in the ’60s to early aughts to test the standardization of picture and sound in broadcast transmission. This structure, created to meet the demands of global distribution and immediacy beyond their sites of production, underscores the sense of “now” reflected in the work’s title. The perpetual state of the Korean War, combined with the demand for its image circulation, highlights the limits of translatability and communicability whereby partial and disputed perspectives are redirected and spliced to form a dyadic image of North and South Korea.


One of the postcards—an image of the negotiating table in Panmunjom where the 1953 Korean Armistice Agreement was signed by representatives of China, North Korea, and the United States, putting into force a ceasefire and cessation of hostilities—serves as the sole subject of the book _Still/Incessant_. The image is repeated across the pages, with each successive page becoming progressively redder until the contours of the negotiating table gradually merge with the background, until the object and landscape unify into a single red image. The final spread features a fully realized red backdrop. 

Scholar Christine Hong describes, via cultural theorist Raymond Williams, the longue durée of the Korean War as a “structure of feeling” [^6] whereby peace itself is “agnostic—profoundly militarized and perilous.” In _Still/Incessant_, Min analyzes the consequences of this conceptual elision of “peace” and “state violence” on representation, as an organizing structure of aesthetics of politics that regulates what is visible and invisible. This delimitation of perceptual and political experience operates through modal distinction—variations in intensity and degrees of resemblance to a determined object or concept—where sense and meaning _incessantly_ extend like a sequence of cause and effect or a progression of one degree of red to a second degree of red. Consequently, the affective-aesthetic distinction between the negotiating table, the demilitarized zone of Panmunjom whereby peace is enacted and war is waged, and the red backdrop dissolves as historical norms intensify and conceptual differences fade in this representational order.

Whereas _Both Sides Now_ and _Still/Incessant_ examine the limits of historical representation and periodization that accrete the present into geopolitical convention or genre, Min’s last and unfinished work, _KISSSSS_, produces a different social reality. This multimedia installation features 14 photographic prints, two documentary photographs, and seven brick stations with research notes. The prints on the wall depict two or more figures embracing and kissing, their heads wrapped in international flags including those of China, South Korea, North Korea, the Soviet Union, the UN, and the United States—international bodies involved in the division of Korea and other proxy conflicts in the Asia-Pacific Cold War. The flags disguise the lovers’ identities. Referencing René Magritte’s _The Lovers II_ (1928), in which two figures kiss while their faces are veiled in cloth, the prints re-enact this intimate pose, but with different flag pairings and combinations presented in the photographs. 

In _The Inoperative Community_ (1991), philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy writes that if communism is the “unsurpassable horizon of our time,” we should recognize its exigency and trace “an entirely different line” of community. [^7] Traditional forms of community, Nancy argues, are conscribed around identification with a predetermined origin, structure, or institution. While these communal forms may provide the possibility for unification, they also operationalize the political collective through the enforced representativity of work and efficacy, risking totalization in the form of national sovereignty, nostalgic yearning for a supposed lost past of an imagined nation, and a presupposition of unity within any state, party, or productive workforce. 

In opposition to communities as “productive or operative projects,” Nancy introduces the concept of an “inoperative community” characterized by the jouissance that emerges through the shared experience of exposition that does not aim to resolve differences or work in a productive sense. Rather, the inoperative community exists in the moment of its sharing, to make visible to the other its own finitude, and recognize the limits of its presence.

_Inoperativity_ presents itself in KISSSSS as a series of unworkings of community. Instead of expressing communion or the consolidation of international polities, the lovers, suspended between repressed desire and failed intimacy in the folds of the flags, expose ideological confusion and insecurities between: inside/outside, domesticity/diplomacy, polity/dissent, and Eros/destructive drive. Some of the photographs stage the kiss in front of a white backdrop in a living room, yet the cropping of this domestic environment transforms the dramatization into something more official and sanctioned. Following scholar Amy Kaplan’s notion of the domestic as the private sphere of the home and of the nationalizing projects that then extend into the _foreign_ or “out of doors,” the kiss exposes the process of domestication that enables the nation to be imagined as a home, and the home to be excluded from the war waged _over there_. [^8] The kiss of the lovers “exposes the unworking and therefore the incessant _incompletion_ of community. It exposes community _at its limit_.” [^9]


The seven brick stations in _KISSSSS_, arranged in chronological order, represent official events in the Korean War spanning from 1945 to the present. Each station holds one or two sheets of paper that form a collection of research—archives, newspaper clippings, scans, and email correspondence between Min and her collaborators (notably including C. Ryu, as referenced by footnotes and annotations). The compiled state-sanctioned narratives and fictions of North and South Korea reveal the shifting consolidation between the domestic and the foreign, armed conflicts and minor wars. [^10] In exploring the non-linearity of historical events and their impact on collective consensus, the installation likewise informs the archival practices of Min and her collaborators. Rather than imagining documentation as a mode of recovery, adaptation, or revisionism that seeks to reconcile differences into a diachronic representation of nationalist historiographies, it assembles the stakes, effects, and contradictions of historical disjuncture, as well as Min’s unfinished work, into a multiplicity of knowledges. 

At the breach of these formal boundaries, Min reveals the community that holds together the disparate. Two documentary photographs from _KISSSSS_ show Min’s collaborators in her home assisting in the production of the photo series, unveiling them as the masked lovers. The press release identifies her extended collaborators as Yun Gi Ahn, Patty Chang, Young Chun, Albert Kyu Hyun Choi, Yaeun Stevie Choi, Luka Fisher, Chuck Sung Hohng, Weiwei Huang, Peter Kalisch, David Kelley, Kristina Klochok, hannah lee, Candice Lin, Audrey Min, Erin Min, Gina Osterloh, Jordan Ruffin, C. Ryu, Connie Samaras, Kayla Tange, and Jungmok Yi. One segment of the _KISSSSS_ public programming brings together several of these collaborators—her students at UCI, participating artists from curatorial projects, roommates, friends, and mentees—who reflect on the pedagogy, curatorial projects, and organizing Min shaped and influenced. In the second public program, contemporary artists, scholars, and curators Simon Leung, Sunny Xiang, Steven Lee, and Amy Kahng extend the project’s legacy through a critical analysis of _KISSSSS_ in relation to their respective art and research practices.

If an inoperative community is a community at its limit, its incompletion allows the inhabitation of plurality within a single injunction. _KISSSSS_ and its multiple propositions contend with a material present arising from manifold Marxist traditions and historical contingencies—the spectral non-events of unacknowledged conflicts, minor wars, small revolutions, unsanctioned insurgencies, and overlooked rebellions that are endlessly differing and deferred. Likewise, _KISSSSS_ reckons with the naming of events as disclosure of one concept of history, exposing the structural gaps and the frequentation of spectres preceding or following the present. 

What binds the forked lapse between the two—event and non-event, and all the possibilities in between—Min suggests, are lovers and communities gathering toward political imperatives and radical disjunctures, where the present remains an open, unfulfilled promise. The incomplete community, organized around a shared reality without predetermination or operativity, becomes the shifting contours of the moment that crystallize the multiplicity of demands into a _coming_ of events. In other words, the political and historical indeterminacy of our inheritance draws together the inoperative community and the conditions for its recurrence. Whereby the community we invoke and unwork affirms the spectre and transforms the invisible, the absent, and the departed into knowledge, we inherit the very thing that allows us to bear witness to it—_the kiss of Yong Soon Min._


[^1]: Elaine H. Kim, “‘Bad Women’: Asian American Visual Artists Hanh Thi Pham, Hung Liu, and Yong Soon Min,” _Feminist Studies_ 22, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): 597.
[^2]: After the fall of socialist governments and rise of liberal democracies in Eastern Europe, highlighted by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, American political scientist Francis Fukuyama argued in _The End of History and the Last Man_ (1992) that history, particularly communism, followed a linear progression. He claimed these events marked “not just the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” It is important to note that many of the key cultural events Fukuyama discusses frame the Cold War as a bipolar confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States. 
[^3]: Jacques Derrida, _Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International_ (New York: Routledge, 1994), 19.
[^4]: Sunny Xiang writes in _Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of Asian Inscrutability During the Long Cold War_ (2020) that “Because the cold war in Asia was a highly mediated regulation of norms, a temperature-controlled feeling of normal, it requires us to engage “war” as a temperament rather than a timeline.”
[^5]: Jodi Kim, _Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 4. 
[^6]: Christine Hong, “The Unending Korean War,” _positions_ 23, no. 4 (2015): 598.
[^7]: Jean-Luc Nancy, _The Inoperative Community_, trans. Peter Connor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 8. 
[^8]: Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” _American Literature_ 70, no. 3 (1998): 581–606. 
[^9]: Nancy, _The Inoperative Community_, 38.
[^10]: The research attends to overlooked histories, such as the financial, military, and political support from United States, the Soviet Union, and their aligned countries; the surprise invasions across the 38th parallel by both South and North Korea; President Truman’s intervention, seeking the U.N. Security Council's assistance to condemn North Korea as an aggressor; the re-education of communist sympathizers; the military ceasefire agreement despite the absence of a formal peace treaty; the devastation faced by civilians; the solitary confinement and psychological torture of prisoners of war; the POWs who refused repatriation; the indiscriminate targeting of rice paddy workers; the exportation of South Korean adoptees; and the mourning of displaced families yearning for unification. 



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Politics

History

International

TJ Shin surveys Yong Soon Min’s enduring legacy, written on the occasion of "KISSSSS"—her posthumous exhibition at the University of California Irvine. Shin contextualizes Min’s practice within the various “minor wars, small revolutions, unsanctioned insurgencies and overlooked rebellions that are endlessly differing and deferred.”


The _KISSSSS_ of Yong Soon Min

Steph Wong Ken is a writer currently based in Tkaronto, near a forest of black oak. [stephwongken.com](http://stephwongken.com)

A few years ago, I sat on the board for an artist-run centre (ARC) in Calgary and was asked to volunteer for a casino shift. The shift was at ACE Casino Black foot, formerly known as Cash Casino (stylized “ca$h ca$in♥” on its sign), a squat, two-storey building off Blackfoot Trail with beige stone tiles, fake Romanesque windows, and an entrance done up to resemble a discount medieval castle. ACE Casino Blackfoot is the oldest casino in the city, and the first privately owned charitable casino to open in Calgary. On a Tuesday morning, the parking lot was mostly empty, as pickup trucks and SUVs zoomed by on the main road, kicking up snow sludge. I was led by a casino attendant through the main floor, past neon slot machines and plastic-fronted card tables, where a few dealers stood waiting for regulars to turn up. The windows were covered, the lights pleasantly dimmed, and the air was only mildly tinted by the smell of lingering cigarette smoke and cooking oil from the all-day buffet. I walked over the freshly vacuumed carpets, a riot of overlapping red, blue, and yellow lines designed to disorient you into staying inside for hours, feeding the machines.  

The back room was sparse: a couch, a table, and a shelf with old magazines and self-help books on how to make money fast. The other volunteer, the executive director of another ARC and a veteran of the casino volunteer circuit, napped on the couch. Working in shifts, for around ten hours, we ran chips to the dealers at the tables and took turns going to the buffet for lunch with our meal vouchers. Between chip running, we hung out in the back room, traded local art world gossip, and scrolled in silence on our phones. After three to four days of this volunteer cycle, where each volunteer completes different casino-related tasks that range from running chips to counting the cash in the cage at the end of the night, the ARC will qualify for enough charitable funding to pay for the majority of their operating costs, ranging from $60,000 to $100,000.

This is Alberta's charitable gaming model, where charitable and religious organizations volunteer at licensed casinos, bingos, and raffles to qualify for thousands of dollars of provincial funding. Once an ARC applies to be in the pool of casino funding, they qualify indefinitely, unless they voluntarily withdraw or violate the rules and are not allowed to participate. The ARC must apply for a gaming license 90 days before their casino date, which is set by Alberta Gaming, Liquor, and Cannabis (AGLC), and organize all required paperwork to complete their casino shifts with a certain number of volunteers. Though this charitable gaming model used to be common practice in several provinces across Canada, Alberta is the only one to still use this model, with the most recent version established in 2003 by the Progressive Conservative government. Alberta’s charitable gaming model accounts for the majority of the millions of dollars earned by charitable and religious organizations each fiscal year, providing much-needed funds for these groups to function. [^1]

Like any funding model, the exchange is meant to be mutually beneficial in visible and invisible ways. It forces arts organizations to donate volunteer time to access funds, and it rebrands casinos as charitable donors, a pipeline to large amounts of charitable funding. It also comes with red-tape requirements and their associated labour to qualify for the money, from filling up volunteer shifts to fling paperwork to get a gaming licence and fulfilling all its conditions. So much of ARC administrative work, from staff to board members to volunteers, is unpaid or underpaid labour, leading to apathy, a scarcity environment, and burnout. The tasks associated with filling volunteer positions for charitable gaming requirements only add to this workload. As Alexa Bunnell notes in their piece for ReIssue, “It is difficult to disentangle organizations from the scarcity mindset that is systematically encouraged in them, especially when jobs, opportunities for artists, and community programming are at risk.” [^2]

On a more fundamental level, this funding model creates a disconcerting relationship between gambling and artistic survival. Casinos like ACE Casino Black foot profit off of gambling addiction. Arts workers gather in the back rooms of casinos for a few shifts every year, tread over chaotic carpets and feed chips to the tables, so they can add an extra life to the sustainability of arts organizations and continue to build an artistic ecosystem in the city. It’s a necessary exchange that nevertheless ties art to gambling, and highlights how difficult it is to separate capitalistic values from the charitable system.

But given the competitiveness and bureaucratic nature of the typical granting system, and the continual struggle for ARCs and artist spaces to survive off the scarcity of government funding, where every application submitted feels like a gamble, is the charitable gaming model really that much worse?  

The majority of our lives are governed by visible and hidden bureaucracies. Designed to maintain uniformity and control, bureaucracies are so deeply em bedded in our current social order, they have become an essential and unavoidable part of daily life. An org chart, an email thread, a budget spreadsheet, a grant portal with a login and password, a grant application with required sections and headings. The checking of boxes, the click of buttons, the finding of the right words for the allotted character count, seamlessly completed on bright white paper or a glowing screen. A system of excessively complicated administrative procedures we engage with in some form every day. But arts administration, particularly grant-writing, falls into a particular category of bureaucracy that is so antiquated and static, it has become codified.  

Writing a grant is like filling out the most generic dating profile for a project, and praying an anonymous, many-eyed panel will swipe right. As a former grant writer, and the recipient of arts grants, I’m often asked: what makes a successful grant application? And if I’m feeling honest, I’ll answer: I have absolutely no idea. Like the random number generator responsible for shuffling cards at a casino, there is an invisible hand that guides the outcome of a grant application, and it is often impossible to gauge or control.

The application itself is the first barrier, a great example of visible bureaucracy at work. The language of the grant application uses the language of the generic: flat, utilitarian, impersonal. It may have been born out of the intention to provide a level playing field, where everyone answers the same prompts and is then assessed. But unlike answering test questions, boiling down the nuances and complexities of a project into the tidy boxes of an application can feel like an exercise in cognitive dissonance, a proving of value or worth that is often more about semantics than it is about the actual stuff of the project. This doesn’t even account for the need for the application to (most often) be in English, to be well-written, and to use recognized keywords to demonstrate that you under stand what’s being asked of you. All required documentation must be submitted by the deadline, X date at X pm EST, no exceptions. _Your application is incomplete. You are missing your documentation. Thank you for submitting your application; we will contact you shortly if you are successful._
 
Sure, there are tactics or strategies for writing a strong grant application, and like any effective bureaucratic system, you become more at ease with its procedures the more you engage with it. But this can only add to the labour of arts administration, rewarding those who manage to figure out how to fill in those tiny boxes, relying on words that can feel so generic they start to lack meaning, soft language that performs well in the context of an application.  

The bureaucratic hold on the language we use to describe a project in a grant application can also extend to how we conceive of these projects in the imagination and in actuality. This flattening of language may also flatten the possibilities of a project, reducing complexity and nuance to simplified art lingo and generic exhibition descriptions, as we continue to gamble on concepts that may have a higher chance of getting funding. This also extends to the visibility of identity, where BIPOC applicants always feel they must declare themselves as part of the “other” checkbox to feel more “deserving” of funding. The demands of a bureaucratic system to be legible and digestible can then be unintentionally absorbed by artists, implying it’s only possible to receive financial validation by meeting such demands, a perpetual cycle that reflects the potential far-reaching effects of conforming to this system. 

After all the labour and effort of an application, the dopamine rush when you press the submit button feels like throwing out little packets of hope and waiting to see if they boomerang back to you. The second barrier, the assessment of the application, is the hidden component of this type of bureaucracy, a process that involves anonymous assessors, scoring rubrics, and more data-feeding to output a decision. The invisibility of this process means the applicant has no sense of control over the outcome, which is contingent on factors like who else has applied, the types of projects in the pool, the amount of funds available, and the assessors, with their conscious/unconscious biases. The funder, a.k.a. “the house,” like a casino, has the ultimate edge, making decisions on who is funded based on the application submitted, along with other factors that may or may not overlap like random lines of luck. If you’re not successful, your option is to apply again, engaging once more in a cycle that implies just enough possibility of success to keep you coming back.

Despite the questionable ethics of casino fundraising, there is a communal aspect to the strange, liminal experience of a casino shift. In a small nondescript back room, you’re paired with someone involved in the arts you may or may not know, whittling away the allotted hours in a setting you would otherwise never be in to support another year of arts funding. People in the community collide here for a few days every year, from arts workers to artists to someone’s family members, willing to volunteer their time for the life of the organization. In Calgary, often a circuit of the same people volunteer for each other’s casinos, like an art opening with an all-day buffet and a pot of funding at the end.

Begrudgingly accepted as part of the labour required to be part of a functioning arts community, casino fundraising can feel a lot more predictable than a grant application or a funding system that depends on the mechanics of invisible bureaucracy. Transparently transactional and complemented by obnoxiously colourful carpets, the setting seems ironically more honest about the exchange of labour for money than a grant application could ever be. But when it comes to a system of arts funding, there are other, better possibilities than a grant portal or a casino shift. This includes more transparency and less hidden bureaucracy around the assessment process, different ways to complete an application besides filling in tiny boxes to the allotted character count, and more no strings-attached funding where the arts community is given autonomy to create outside of the constraints of a system that feels transactional. In a world where the funders seem to hold the ultimate edge, a change in how Canada’s art funding operates is long overdue. 

[^1]: “Alberta’s charitable gaming model,” AGLC, https://aglc.ca/gaming/charitablegaming/albertas-charitable-gaming-model

[^2]: Alexa Bunnell, “Charitable gambling: artist-run centres and the Alberta charitable gaming model,” _ReIssue_, March 2023, https://reissue.pub/articles/charitable-gambling-artist-run-centres-and-the-alberta-charit able-gaming-model

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Money

Games

Steph Wong Ken peers at the enclosing pressure to extend the life of our arts organizations, where Alberta’s charitable gaming model provides artist-run centres thousands of dollars of provincial funding in exchange for volunteer shifts at licenced gambling establishments. Wong Ken notes that this casino funding model is at least more transparent than the often-confusing gamble of bureaucratic government granting processes.


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The House Edge

Amanda Boulos (she/her) is a visual artist and educator. Boulos engages with fragmented oral national narratives from Palestine, Lebanon, and Canada to explore how those histories can morph into a future Palestinian diaspora. She is an Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at OCAD University, a member of the plumb, and a programmer for the Toronto Palestine Film Festival.

From my balcony in North York, I have a clear view of a small daycare sandwiched between my 18-floor building and two massive 50-foot towers. The children’s bellowing laughter fills this perfectly engineered sound tunnel. This summer, I woke up to an ensemble of children humming with excitement and went out to see what was causing them to shrill. I saw two uncomfortable-looking armed police officers and their car in the daycare’s lot. The children were lined up waiting for their turn to sit in the back of the police car.

When I Googled the activity, I found language reminiscent of art-school syllabi or grant proposals: “Police Lesson: Using _play-based learning_, kindergarten students will receive an _overall understanding of community helpers_ with a focus on police officers in _their communities_. Students will visit our miniature police station and see a real police car” (emphasis added). [^1] It was a reminder of how we’ve been groomed to accept and find comfort in armed officers, their guns, and the insides of their vehicles. I also consider how this “fun” experience of sitting in a police car creates positive associations that may distract future critical thinking about police institutions.

From a bird’s eye view, police-centred “play-based learning” allowed these children to interact with typically restricted objects. Children ran toward the vehicles, jumped into their seats, and embraced officers freely. Meanwhile, these same actions by adults could result in severe consequences or even death, and children in heavily policed communities are often taught very different “games”—like how to behave during police encounters to stay safe. These stark contrasts in early learning experiences shape divergent relationships with authority.

The number of police I’ve encountered in Toronto this year has been significant: at pro-Palestine protests, at my schools, and even at cultural events like the Toronto Palestine Film Festival. Most notable was the Hate Crime Unit’s installation of a police command centre at the intersection of Bathurst and Sheppard, which operated continuously with flashing lights for months. The stated purpose was to increase police presence, and to ensure residents feel a sense of safety and security. [^2] The command centre did little more than catch dust, burn a significant amount of the city’s money, occupy valuable parking space, and create a traffic hazard at an already busy intersection.

The Hate Crime Unit intensified its surveillance of pro-Palestinian activists and protesters throughout late 2023 and 2024, leading to increased arrests and confrontations. There were also many incidents where officers conducted home searches and seized possessions in the middle of the night. [^3] Many white protesters and anti-Zionist Jews quickly unlearned their early childhood lessons about authorities. The same unit went after them, reinforcing that the cops serve political interests instead of protecting citizens.

Palestinian artist Firas Shehadeh’s _Like An Event In A Dream Dreamt By Another - Rehearsal_ (2023) begins with a split screen: on the right side, 3D animated Israeli police officers frantically enter their vehicles in pursuit; on the left side, a character with tanned skin and a white T-shirt walks through residential alleys. Shehadeh uses footage from player modifications (“mods”) of the video game _Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V)_ and its online multiplayer counterpart _Grand Theft Auto Online_ (both released 2013) to construct an essay-based video work about Palestinians under colonial rule. The _GTA_ game series is well-known for its police chases and simulation of urban criminal activity. The opening scene’s stark contrast between the agitated police and the solitary figure evokes familiar power dynamics between Palestinians and Israelis and how they embody cop and robber archetypes: in protests, academic discourse, media coverage, and now, video games.

_GTA V_’s focus on pursuit and confrontation echoes documented patterns of policing shared by Palestine and Los Angeles, the city that inspired _GTA V_’s imagined “Los Santos.” These patterns are expanded and intensified (or manipulated and explored) by player mods that transform the game’s appearance, gameplay, and sound (for example, the “Realistic Gun Sounds” mod). _GTA V_ and its modded online servers thus deliver their own police lessons through play-based learning, revealing how digital spaces can mirror and critique real-world surveillance and control.

_GTA V_’s development involved more than 1,000 people and an estimated a budget of US$265 million. [^4] The team prioritized developing open-world mechanics where players can freely roam without linear game objectives, wreaking havoc on animated city folk and driving various vehicles around Los Santos maps. They focused on creating immersive traffic patterns, flora and fauna, and environmental textures meticulously modelled after Southern California. For the modding community, the game was well-suited for creative role-playing and world-building. Players developed custom online servers featuring unique rules, cities, and roles, where they share memorable experiences and create strong friendships while co-writing their day-to-day missions.

Shehadeh’s _Like An Event In A Dream_ incorporates footage from the online Palestine server “Magic City (Palestine),” where players have recreated Palestine under Israeli rule, including buildings adorned with huge Israeli flags and refugee camps with martyr posters. There is even a city centre with a huge Palestinian flag flying above a recreated Al-Aqsa Mosque. In this virtual space, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and police officers, equipped with tanks and rifles, replace standard law enforcement. Meanwhile, the Palestinian characters wear Louis Vuitton scarves resembling keffiyehs, traverse the landscape by helicopter, and use Molotov cocktails against tanks. All these characters—the IDF, Israeli police, and keffiyeh-clad Palestinians alike—are controlled by Palestinian players in the West Bank and the diaspora. 

The main character in Shehadeh’s work, the man with the white T-shirt, navigates the multifaceted landscapes typical of _GTA V_ while staying hidden under bridges, behind buildings, and on rooftops. These areas, known to players as police-free zones or escape routes, are rendered in remarkable detail and further transformed by the online mods. Shehadeh’s choice to keep the character in marginal spaces allows viewers to focus on the video’s narrated essay without the threat of a dramatic encounter with a cop. In one scene where the main character walks through parking lots and empty streets, the narrator digs deep:

> The US and European colonial domination over the Arab world can be seen through the colonial condition in Palestine, an intensified version of the United States with colonial violence, capitalism, racism, and other forms of discrimination, all justified with the idea of “liberty and guns” a core concept to the foundation of Israel and its Iron Wall.

The _GTA V_ Palestine server provides Palestinians a space for unrestricted movement and resistance without real-life mortal danger. Videos from the server highlight limitless potential: players can joyride, evade Israeli police, fly jets over Palestine, scale towers, and dance in public spaces. Virtual bodies know no boundaries, and everything—from cars to avatar bodies—can be regenerated after damage or death. In Shehadeh’s work, a heavily modded car with the words “Mashallah” and “High Boost” races through an urban landscape that resembles Ramallah and Nablus. Another Palestinian character performs daring motorcycle stunts on a highway, popping wheelies and executing acrobatic moves. The player excitedly shares this moment with online friends, declaring in Arabic, “These moves are for your eyes”—a sentimental expression of joy that contrasts sharply with the past year’s flood of Palestinian voices in distress. At this point, the split screen shows the protagonist approaching a check-point, with a watchtower looming above him on the horizon. Rather than attempt to cross the check-point, the character simply walks back to where they came from. Shehadeh’s video reinforces the fact that we can scarcely see a representation of a Palestinian, even a joyful Palestinian, without being reminded of their colonially victimized identities; their bodies are surveilled, pursued, and killed.

The narrator of _Like An Event In A Dream_ states that when Palestinians play _GTA V_, “The players aren’t going to Los Santos to die. They are going to find out if they were ever alive.” But the game offers more than an existential exploration—it helps players imagine alternatives. Play allows them to live a double life, between the real self and the made-up self, the truth and the wish. Playing on the server allows Palestinians to constantly make up their world in multiple “rehearsals” and try different actions to avoid a fixed destiny.

The modded server gamifies the colonial context of Palestine. Shehadeh’s video features fictional members of the Lions’ Den, a real-world group of armed resistance fighters who target violent Israeli settlers and IDF soldiers, virtually protesting Israeli forces in Nablus. This online role-play transforms young Palestinian players’ grim reality living under occupation in the West Bank into digital resistance without the lethal consequences that often come from protesting. Online demonstrations and re-enactments of real-life events speak to how games and storytelling create meaning and explore the potential for social or political solutions. Players use the hashtag #GTAPalestine to share their re-enactments online for others to enjoy and witness as they pray for Palestine’s liberation.

One of the most intriguing aspects of this meaning-making is how Palestinian players role-play Israeli officers. These players follow protocol, break up protests, make arrests, and initiate military operations against Palestinians. They also stop at red lights and
wait for pedestrians to cross the road. By embodying the IDF and Israeli officers, they maintain order and ultimately bring adversarial “play” into this fictional world. The players even use the little Hebrew they know to amplify the realism. These players are negotiating their freedoms, trying to understand their own identities in relation to the systems that govern their lives. Shehadeh’s work proposes that the players apply their own hyperreality to rehearse their life under colonial rule. If the players were actually Israeli, it would breach the Palestinian players’ reality, and they wouldn’t feel that the game was voluntary or leisurely anymore. Game philosopher René Reinhold Schallegger describes this eloquently: “When play invades primary reality, it ceases to be play and becomes something else: political, ideological, didactic, or commercial manipulation, designed to shape, restrict, or take away freedom of choice in primary reality.” [^5] Through role-play, Palestinians can develop a collective understanding of their social and cultural circumstances that could teach them essential skills for survival and the power of collective action.

I confess to watching Twitch livestreams of video-game players, particularly those attempting “kaizo” challenges, named for the Japanese word for modification. Kaizo games have been hijacked by rogue modders to make a game’s official version unfairly difficult but exhilaratingly challenging. Success requires persistence, skill, and deep knowledge of game mechanics, traits a lot of video-game nerds pride themselves on. On April 28, 2023, Twitch streamer “iateyourpie” finally completed his nearly impossible “Kaizo IronMON” _Pokémon_ challenge after 7,788 attempts, including months and months of labour. [^6] I was thrilled to witness this seemingly impossible feat. I long for a similar resolution for Gaza, waiting for the moment the Israeli occupation dissipates. I remain patient, watching and hoping daily for an end to this cruel, rigged game of life.

Sometimes I dream of a _Stardew Valley_ version of Palestine, where everyone’s a bit damaged but still comes together to make a big cauldron of soup and celebrate life. The farm simulation game, which presents an inclusive world where players can marry any character
regardless of gender, also critiques corporate capitalism (Joja Corporation’s products are literally classified as “trash”). Notably absent are police, allowing the community to thrive and rely on each other. Other games, with their open-world formats, have seen direct digital protests take over their servers. On _Animal Crossing_, players hosted digital iterations of the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests, which were suppressed in real life through police force and strict COVID-19 pandemic measures. Banned from occupying the streets, protesters imported flags and images into the video game, creating banners declaring “Free Hong Kong – Revolution Now.” This digital activism led mainland China to ban sales of _Animal Crossing_ in stores and online. [^7] Similar protests emerged in _GTA online_, culminating in an epic virtual battle between players in Hong Kong and mainland China, fought through their avatars with water-cannon trucks and Molotov cocktails—with mainland China’s numerical advantage ultimately prevailing. [^8]

Different resistance movements lead to different strategies within virtual world-building games. In _The Sims_, modding communities create pride flags, trans-inclusive character options, and fashion choices. Young people have used _Roblox_ and _Minecraft_ for political discussions, protests, and memorials, in addition to using their chat functions to organize in-person protests. [^9] Throughout 2023, thousands of players (the majority being12–16 years old) on custom _Roblox_ servers waved Palestinian flags to protest Israel’s bombing of Gaza. [^10] Syrian players have recreated destroyed cultural heritage sites using _Minecraft_’s sophisticated world-building mechanics as a digital-preservation tool. [^11] In 2020, the basketball simulation game _NBA 2K_ paused its online servers for two hours and gave players “Black Lives Matter” and “I Can’t Breathe” T-shirts to honour George Floyd. [^12]

Can games be effective at imagining a better future? The answer depends on how well players can project their vision of a future within the limits of video-game spaces, and use these spaces to build real-world solidarity. Citing game designer and academic Gonzalo Frasca, Schallegger writes, “RPGs are not per se revolutionary tools, but they can affect [sic] evolutionary change in a society.” [^13] Role-play may not change things directly, but it can help us imagine change.

Games become spaces for reimagining power relationships because there is an active desire to do so. In games like _GTA V_, players can rewrite those early scripts about police authority—turning what was once seen as friendly and approachable to some into dynamics that are questioned, challenged, and overturned. As Shehadeh’s _Like An Event In A Dream_ reveals, Palestinians are using _GTA V_ to create their own form of play-based learning—one that teaches resistance, survival, and freedom of movement instead of compliance.

A good role-playing game sets the player free of their everyday to escape into another reality where autonomous meaning-making is central. Israel has devastated schools, healthcare facilities, infrastructure, and public services. In virtual space, games with modding capabilities could provide collaborative sites to envision the rehabilitation and renewal of Gaza. Can gamifying this challenge give us the creativity and energy we long for? Maybe. Through role-play, we can endlessly test different futures for Gaza together. It won’t liberate Palestine on its own, but it could help us further develop the awareness and critical thinking we need to move forward.

[^1]: “Teachers,” YorkRegional Police, https://www.yrp.ca/en/community/Teachers.asp

[^2]: “Toronto police step up patrols after communities voice fear stemming from Israel-Hamas war,” _CBC News_, October 12, 2023, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toronto-police-israel-hamas-concerns-1.6993684

[^3]: Martin Lukacs, “Inside the ‘shocking’ police operation targeting pro-Palestine activists in Toronto,” _The Breach_, June 17, 2024, https://breachmedia.ca/inside-the-shocking-police-operations-targeting-pro-palestine-activists-in-toronto

[^4]: Luke Villapaz, “‘GTA 5’ Costs $265 Million to Develop And Market, Ma-king It The Most Expensive Video Game Ever Produced: Report,” _International Business Times_, September 8, 2013, https://www.ibtimes.com/gta-5-costs-265-million-develop-market-making-it-most-expensive-video-game-ever-produced-report; Michael French, “InsideRockstar North – Part 2: The Studio,” _MCV/DEVELOP_, October 4, 2013, https://mcvuk.com/development-news/inside-rockstar-north-part-2-the-studio

[^5]: René Reinhold Schallegger, _The Postmodern Joy of Role-Playing Games: Agency, Ritual and Meaning in the Medium_ (Jefferson: McFarland, 2018), 54. 

[^6]: Iateyourpie, “It Took Me 2 Years to Beat This Pokémon Challenge,” YouTube, April 28, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01jR7IpZlG4

[^7]: “Hong Kong and mainland China gamers clash on GTA V,” _BBC News_, December 23, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50894769

[^8]: Ibid.

[^9]: Laura Molloy, “The kids are alright: why young people are protesting in virtual worlds,” _Dazed_, November 21, 2023, https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/61323/1/here-s-why-young-people-are-protesting-in-virtual-worlds-roblox-palestine

[^10]: Hayden Field, “Kids are attending pro-Palestinian protests on Roblox,” _CNBC_, October 26, 2023, https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/26/kids-are-attending-pro-palestinian-protests-on-roblox.html

[^11]: Alan Boyle, “Microsoft teams up with UNESCO and kids to revive lost monuments with Minecraft,” _GeekWire_, May 3, 2019, https://www.geekwire.com/2019/microsoft-joins-forces-unesco-kids-revive-lost-monuments-minecraft

[^12]: “NBA 2K players honoured George Floyd with a two-hour protest,” _BarDown_, June 6, 2020, https://www.bardown.com/nba-2k-players-honoured-george-floyd-with-a-two-hour-protest-1.1483691

[^13]: Schallegger, _The Postmodern Joy of Role-Playing Games_, 223.

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Colonialism

New Media

Amanda Boulos discusses how virtual game worlds can be spaces for testing different futures, which cannot happen in real life without mortal consequence. She explores how players express autonomy under occupation in Firas Shehadeh’s video work _Like an Event in A Dream Dreamt by Another – Rehearsal_ (2023), which uses footage from _Grand Theft Auto Online_’s modded Palestinian server.


When Play Confronts Power

Kai Trotz-Motayne is a Guyanese-Canadian researcher and writer from Tkaronto/Toronto. As a child, gatherings would end with tales of her family’s Caribbean past. Inspired by their imaginative retellings, these nights often left her wondering what stories she would one day tell. Her work now explores how storytelling practices, like identities, evolve and transform through movement.

_The first time I met you, I had to look up. Dressed in a bright red dress, bejewelled crown, and
dreadlocks wrapped in a bun, your already tall figure appeared so much larger to my child self. As
you, Camille, were grinning from ear to ear, my mom introduced you to me as Miss Canadiana—
your Canadian beauty queen alter ego. It was not until a few years ago, as an adult, that I thought
to ask who Miss Canadiana was. As a child, it didn’t occur to me that the identity you performed
was simply made up. My childlike belief in a Black Miss Canadiana preceded a loss of innocence,
when as an adult I realized that Black life was tied to non-being. And so, I always come back to
you, Camille, and your ability to reconcile with such difficult histories in a way that disrupts how
we approach our past, present, and future._

The following is a lightly edited interview with Camille Turner on the occasion of “Otherworld” (2024–2025) her solo exhibition at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto. The exhibition showcases
both old and new work, inviting viewers
into the Afronautic Research Lab (2016–ongoing)—a futuristic space filled with
article clippings, textbooks, and tools
that shift how we engage with colonial
archives. Turner offers us a powerful
methodological framework we can use
to approach these histories—one that
is deeply relevant to our current political landscape.


> **Kai Trotz-Motayne (KT-M): While
“Otherworld” centres on the figure
of the Afronaut, or African space
traveller, I want to start our conversation with where it all began: your
_Miss Canadiana_ performance (2001–2019).**

**Camille Turner (CT):** I came to Canada
from Jamaica when I was nine, and I feel
like there was never a moment where I
was not reminded that I did not belong.
_Miss Canadiana_ was a way of trying to
reconcile with both that and the multicultural way that Canada loves to see
itself, as this haven that welcomes everyone. There was a contradiction that
I was living with, and in one specific moment, _Miss Canadiana_ was born. I was
walking through a mall in North Bay and
everybody was just staring at me. In what
felt like a self-protection mechanism, I
just dreamt up this ironic character that
represented Canadianness. I saw myself
fully dressed in that one split second.

> **KT-M: Performance is a persistent
tool that you use throughout your
practice. How does performance,
rooted in critical storytelling and
the Black radical imagination, address the frustrations and questions central to practices like the Afronautic Research Lab?**

**CT:** I was teaching at New College [University of Toronto] at the time, and I
would always bring my students into the archive. I would tell them to find evidence of Canadian slavery. I would give them the name and date of a Canadian
newspaper, show them how to use the microfiche readers, and just set them loose.
They would see people being sold among
all the goods and services—people who
had bounties on their heads because they
stole themselves. I really loved those sessions because they were so powerful and
I didn’t have to say anything. Students
were experiencing a Canadian history
that was silenced, and they had all kinds
of questions. It was a very transformative moment for my students, and also for
myself, who witnessed them witnessing
their own history. And so that’s what I
wanted to bring to the public. At the
same time, I was asked to participate in
a group exhibition at the University of
Toronto Art Museum, and it was there
that I set up the first Afronautic Research Lab in 2016.

> **KT-M: Memory is often seen as
unreliable in historiography, but in
the Caribbean, we rely on informal
knowledge systems. In 2022, you
created _Nave_, a multimedia installation commissioned by the Toronto
Biennial of Art. On your website, you
write that _Nave_, “explores the entanglement of colonial Canada in
the transatlantic trade of enslaved
Africans through links between the
nave of a church, the hold of the
ship, the tomb, and the womb of the
world.” [^1] The work included performed rituals by yourself and Emilie
“Zila” Jabouin, accompanied by Ravi Naimpally’s oceanic sound track, and Ésery Mondésir’s cinematography. _Nave_ embodies ancestral memory, resilience, and the enduring strength of the African diaspora. Can you talk about how Caribbean
oral traditions and histories inspired
this project?**

**CT:** I decided that _Nave_ was going to be
an homage to the enslaved peoples that
were transported into the Americas on
ships built in Newfoundland. The earliest churches in Newfoundland were also
erected by the same builders and the same wood used to construct these ships.
This connection is what I wanted to look
at. When we arrived in Newfoundland, we
realized that the church that had been
found for us to film was not even made of
wood! Nothing had seemed to be working as planned. Feeling resigned by all
that was going wrong, I went to express
my defeat to my friend Emilie, who would
later become central to this project.

While working on _Nave_ I also learned
of Iwa Agwe, the Haitian god of the undersea world who brought those thrown
off slave ships into an underwater layer.
I was telling Emilie about this, and she
said, “My goodness, I have this song.”
She then sang “_Depi m soti nan Ginen_,” a Haitian Kreyol song evoking an ancestor who survives and triumphs over the
Middle Passage. [^2] Emilie’s performance of
the song was included in _Nave_. This song
is exemplary of everything that we brought
with us over the ocean and into our bodies—it’s encoded in our songs, in our dances, and in our worldviews. This all comes together in _Nave_. It was by chance that
the people around me at the time, like
Emilie and Esery, had their own stories
and songs that became integral to the
project. The song Emilie sang was an homage to our journeys across the Atlantic.
She plays an ancestral character that emerges from the ocean, and she’s reminding the African diaspora of where we came
from, and of what we’ve overcome.

> **KT-M: I was just talking to someone
the other day about the Caribbean
attachment to water and its ties to
the Middle Passage, and they told
me about Drexciya, the Detroit music duo that takes from the Haitian
story of Iwa Agwe as well. These cross-Atlantic stories that we created help us better sit with the violence attached to our existence.**

**CT:** Imagining into these histories is a way to empower ourselves, and to realize that life didn’t end. That we are still alive. I often think about how there’s absolutely no way for me to know whether my ancestors were on these same ships I’m studying.

> **KT-M: That unknowing is what brings us together. We convene around a shared history—one that “Otherworld” was speaking to—of communal knowledge systems. When I entered, I realized that you actually hear the exhibition before you see it, which is very Caribbean. It felt like entering a Caribbean household.**

**CT:** Julian Henriques said that Caribbean culture is primarily sonic. [^3]

> **KT-M: In thinking of Caribbeanness, I am going to ask you another loaded question: are these Afronauts duppies or jumbies? Or do they occupy a different ontological space for you?**

**CT:** That's a very interesting way of looking at them. The Afronauts in my practice were actually inspired by the Dogon people of West Africa. They say that their knowledge comes to them from the Nommo of Sirius B. This prompted me to ask: if the Nommos can come here, then what’s stopping us from going to Sirius B?
This idea of us leaving the planet is what
started my work on Afronauts. I am interested in collecting knowledge from different places, while always knowing that
Earth is our home, no matter how many
generations have passed. It is also important to realize that the Earth is in danger,
and our beloved planet needs our help.
And so, we Afronauts have come back
home to save the planet. Although, it’s interesting to think about these Afronauts
as ghostly figures. I hadn't thought about
it in those terms. To be Black and to be
Canadian is already like being a ghost.
Dionne Brand says to be Black in the diaspora is to live as a fiction. [^4]

> **KT-M: I also understood the Afronauts as people coming from another world. What if enslaved peoples weren’t killed during the journey over the Middle Passage? What
if instead, like those rescued by Iwa Agwe, they were able to flee this
world, and are now coming back to
tell us their story?**

**CT:** There are a lot of different forms that
the Afronauts take, but they always come
from the future. For instance, there is a
woman Afronaut in _Nave_ that walks along the coast of Newfoundland as a kind
of ghostly figure. She comes from an era
that she calls “the time of awakening,”
and arrives in our present moment, “the
time of silence.”

> **KT-M: What is the role of death in
all of this?**

**CT:** The Afronaut almost defies death.
If you think about time as simultaneous,
and not linear, then we’re sharing space
and time with those who are departed
and those in the future. Time is this continuous now. So in a way, death is of no
relevance to the Afronaut.

> **KT-M: The two words that came
up the most in the exhibition were
“dreams” and “haunting.” As much
as the exhibition is about haunting,
it’s also about dreaming. I was thinking about how in the Caribbean, too,
the two words (and worlds) are so
entangled because we are taught
from a young age that spirits visit
you in your dreams.**

**CT:** In Jamaica we often call these types
of dreams _travelling_. Through these dreams, you can travel to a different world
and access things that would be physically impossible to access. But in dreams,
there is no separation between the worlds of the living and dead. Everything is
all one.

> **KT-M: Community is such a strong
part of not only creating “Otherworld” but also showcasing it. Can
you speak to the role of the participant or the viewer in the exhibition? When entering the room, the viewer becomes an Afronaut, and
therefore part of the work itself.**

**CT:** I see “Otherworld” as an invitation
to take part in this conjoining of past
and present, in order to dream a different dream. I’m inviting everyone to be
part of this story. I centralize Blackness
in what I do, but everyone is invited, and
everyone is a part of that story. They have
different relationships to that story, but
it’s basically an invitation to come and witness. I am not the subject of the work—
the subject of the work is whoever is there
witnessing. I’m just the vehicle that facilitates this witnessing.

> **KT-M: Your immersive arts practice
began with sonic walks: guided journeys that weave soundscapes
and vivid storytelling to uncover and
animate the hidden histories embedded within a landscape, allowing participants to experience the past as they move through the very
spaces where it unfolded. [^5] From sonic walks to the Afronautic Research Lab, how has your approach to storytelling and community engagement changed or grown?**

**CT:** My current approach to storytelling
is very different from when I first began
my practice. I try to include the embodied experience of walking on the street as
part of my teaching, because I think that
people learn so much from experiencing. In contrast, when I first started this
work, my teaching focused primarily on
where I was situated. For instance, when
I was performing _Miss Canadiana_, the
work of engaging history still felt a bit
new for me. Instead of stepping into history, I was pointing to it. In later years, I
tried to find different frames and different ways of getting people to step into
and experience history in embodied
ways. It wasn’t until I learned about Peggy Pompadour, from historian Afua
Cooper, that I was able to approach different ways of telling embodied histories. In the archive I met Pompadour,
who alongside her children, was enslaved to Peter Russell (after whom Toronto’s Russell Street is named). Pompadour ran away from him on numerous
occasions. She was a woman who would
have walked the same streets I walked.
I lived right where she would have worked, on a big farm owned by Russell
around what is today called Peter and Queen Street.

> **KT-M: I feel like Canada is so much more haunted because histories of state violence are still being unearthed.**

**CT:** I absolutely agree with you. There’s
just so much that has been overwritten.
A buried silence. I always begin where I
am located, so when I lived in the neighborhood surrounding Peter and Queen
Street, I decided that I wanted to know more. This inquiry opened up this whole
world of Black diasporic histories. I walked
through a door and now I can’t go back
to the world where I didn’t know about
Pompadour working and escaping Peter and Queen Street.

> **KT-M: To me that is the crux of your work—these alternative lives in another world or a parallel universe. Your retelling of how learning about Pompadour was akin to entering a new world is what a political awakening must be like.**

**CT:** Yes, absolutely. And through the
figure of the Afronaut, I’m trying to
give other people the tools to be able
to encounter these other buried histories as well. Anyone can be an Afronaut, or researcher.

> **KT-M: You spent your early years in
Jamaica, your formative years in Toronto, and now you move between Toronto, Los Angeles, and Costa Rica. Your life, like the astronaut, has been defined by movement—can you tell us how that inspires you?**

**CT:** On a trip to Senegal, I realized the
histories of slavery that I encountered
there were intertwined with the histories
of slavery that I encountered in Canada. In Senegal, as I was looking at the Atlantic Ocean, I thought, “My God, the same story that haunts me over there, in
Canada, is haunting me here, in Senegal.” A year later, I found myself looking
at the same ocean, this time from the
coast of Newfoundland. I recognized
this transnational version of myself on a
journey through places where I’m piecing together this story that I’m part of.
Ultimately, this is a story that accompanies me everywhere I go. Standing at
the door of no return, I realized ancestors were waiting for me, so they could
say, “She’s here. Finally.”


[^1]: Camille Turner, “Nave,” accessed February 13, 2025, https://www.camilleturner.com/nave

[^2]: Laurent Dubois and Jacques Pierre, “Depi m Soti Nan Ginen,” _Transition (Kampala, Uganda)_ 111, no. 1 (2013): 2–3.

[^3]: Sabine Sörgel, “Julian Henriques, Sonic Bodies. Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques and Ways of Knowing,” _Volume!_ 13–2, no. 1 (2017): 226–27.

[^4]: Dionne Brand, _A Map to the Door of No Return_ (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2001).

[^5]: Camille Turner, “Sonic Walks,” _The African Canadian Literature Project: Primary Source Documents, Videos, Web Materials_, accessed February 2, 2025, https://www.yorku.ca/acc/sonic.html

Speaker

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In conversation with Toronto-based artist Camille Turner, Kai Trotz-Motayne explores the anti-Black conditions that structure Canada’s past and present. In performances like _BlackGrange_—a walking tour culminating at Peter Street in Toronto—Turner attends to the city’s erasure of its history of chattel slavery.

For Those Who Visit Us in Our Dreams

Nic Wilson (they/he) is an artist and writer who was born in the Wolastoqiyik territory known as Fredericton, NB in 1988. They are now based on Treaty Four Land in Regina, SK.


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Language

Nic Wilson’s essay attends to the afterlife of writing in the visual arts,and how text is taken by artists who want to question the boundaries between the self and other, between past and present lives. 

The Afterlife of Writing

Letter

##### Dear C,

After reading Christiana Myers’s article, I could not find a better one-liner than “A Vampire Walks Into a Funhouse” for Mitchell Wiebe’s term “reverse magical realism.” The phrase evokes a vampire disappearing into a mundane site that projects this mythical being’s grotesque and fantastic essence.

The title of Myers’s article drops a seemingly moot question: what happens when a vampire—a fictitious creature with no reflection—enters a hall of trick mirrors? Just like we interpret vampires as metaphors for “the feared foreigner, sin, sex, capitalism, and modernity," contemporary art criticism entails a metonymic reading of art, where imaginative, mythical, and ideological associations—rather than direct resemblance and reflection—command the interpretation of images.

Since the vampire has been on my mind recently, I thought of another “vampirical” work I encountered—_Nosferatu, Me and the Grid_ (2023) by Canadian artist Millie Chen. Like Myers and Wiebe, Chen is attuned to the otherworldly. Specifically, Chen explores how horror movies tap into our fear of the unknown, the invisible, and the Other. The mosaic pattern dominating Chen’s work alludes to a zoomed-in view of a forest scene in F.W. Murnau’s 1922 film _Nosferatu_. The forest appears after our first sighting of Nosferatu in his coffin. It is after this scene that the vampire rises from the coffin aboard the ship. The chthonic forest therefore becomes a moment of anticipation, a space between the present and a speculative terror in the future. Now I can see that it also bridges the worlds of fantasy and realism. The landscape haunts us not only because it forebodes death and turbulence, but also because, as Chen notes, it makes us anticipate how the cinematic dread will unfold sociopolitically and economically on the land.

To quote British artist Elizabeth Price, “The interpretation may be perverse, but it is not a lie.” Put differently, mythmaking allows us to better make sense of a historical period or our surrounding environment. I am reminded of the myth of Pygmalion, in which the sculptor’s ivory statue becomes a living woman after he admits his desire to Aphrodite. Perhaps it was not long after Galatea came to life that a vampire walked into a funhouse.

##### Sincerely,

##### Moyu Chen


##### Dear C,

When reading Ella den Elzen’s review of Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill’s “M∗∗∗∗∗,” I remembered the works-in-progress Azadeh Elmizadeh showed me when I visited her studio. Loose pieces of fabric that would have previously collected outside debris were now stretched over wooden frames, in a studio environment where they were neutered of their ability to collect dust from the land. This disjunctive life of the material is analogous to the transformation of the Madonna from living woman and receptive mother to inert muse. Rachel Cusk touches on this idea in her essay “Louise Bourgeois: Suites on Fabric” (2011), which opens with a brief bit on the Madonna as both maternal perceiver and the perceived (a common condition of an art piece). I often think of Mary’s loose clothes, how they gather beneath her as she’s carrying Christ, her robes like grief frottages heavy with anguish, registering the creases on her face.

The lines in Hill’s silk tissue drawings trace uterine wall grooves that bifurcate like orbitals or magnetic fields. Jacqueline Rose writes on the connection between “mothering and the contours of the universe” in her essay “The Agony and the Ecstasy” (2018). She cites William Maxwell’s 1937 novel _They Came Like Swallows_, where a young boy perceives the world relative to his mother: “All the lines […] of the room bend toward his mother, so that when he looked at the pattern of the rug, he saw it […] in relation to the toe of her shoe.” I think there’s a similar cartographic current across this line, Elmizadeh’s frottages, and Hill’s silk tissue pieces.

Hill steeps us in a compendium of resonant visceral matter and their cosmic associations. The tact pencil lines recruit an image of cavity linings and magnetic fields. The umbrella wires evoke whalebone ribbing, octopi arms, and a scrappy solar system. This act of indexing vastness through land-based and laborious methods exhibits an admirable resourcefulness, an attempt to recoup contours of the body, the land, their histories, and their cosmic tremors—a frottage-based endeavour, if you will.

##### Sincerely,

##### Salma Ragheb

##### Dear C,

Innas Tsuroiya’s musings on Kamala Ibrahim Ishag bring a recollection to mind: the experience of working front of house in the Sudanese painter’s exhibition “States of Oneness” (2022–2023). In any exhibition, gallery hosts (i.e. attendants, docents, guards, or invigilators) gain a more sustained and intimate relationship with the art than perhaps anyone else. Yet, at the same time, they serve as static, puppet-like soldiers under the institution’s command. Observing (but also under watch via the grainy CCTV). Listening. Standing, all day long (ouch). Worrying about fallen arches and spidering varicose veins. Waiting. Being magnificently bored because higher-ups discourage talking amongst colleagues (despite the fact that an unspoken camaraderie across the front-of-house team runs deep). Although the rare visitor will engage staff in conversation, people often keep their distance. It seems gallery goers frequently act as they believe they should in a contemporary art gallery: serious, quiet, and cold. Furrowed brow. Squinting eyes. Frowning mouth. Hands clasped behind the back. But “States of Oneness” was different. The experience of working Ishag’s show was unique thanks to the artist’s cultivation of a heartening alternative.

Throughout the duration of the exhibition, the building became the site for a joyous communion. In the thick of it, the artist was not only physically present in the space, but also surrounded by friends and family in an ongoing celebration of this well-deserved recognition of her innovative career spanning over sixty years. The resulting atmosphere was enriching, and for the front-of-house staff, the job became more pleasant. Gallery hosts’ faces softened, and gallery goers appeared more at ease (while also elated to see the person behind the mystical artworks). All the while, stiff ideas about how one should behave around contemporary art broke down and cohesive conversations opened. Her numinous paintings and the social gatherings coalescing around them animated the gallery. By fostering a pulsing communal ambiance, Ishag inspirited the building with a tangible, warm affect.

##### Sincerely,

##### Alexander McMillan


Letters reflecting on issue 159, “Mirror Mirror.”

Letters

Editorial Conception

Associate Editor

Designer

Publisher

Artist Project

Tristan Sauer is a new media artist and curator critically interested in technology and capitalism, viewing their relationship as a potential modern-day Pandora’s box. His work explores the intersections between our digital and physical worlds, and how an inside-out look at internet culture and the mythologies of the digital can reveal more about the human condition. Working with wearable technology, electronic sculpture, net art, and more, Sauer takes an Afrofut-urist lens to imagine and critique the outcomes of our relationships with technology. He has presented at the plumb, Meridian Arts Centre, Gallery 1313, Whippersnapper Gallery, and Nuit Blanche Toronto; and curated for Long Winter, Symbiocene Gallery, Reel Asian International Film Festival, Xpace Cultural Centre, and Ed Video Media Arts Centre.

Through the screen, Taylor McArthur
has found a way to open a portal—to a
universe created outside of our own, yet
inside of us all. McArthur has always
experienced extremely vivid dreams. Set
in otherworldly, often sci-fi-feeling landscapes, they have at times presented her with cryptic messages beyond her understanding. Through her connection to her culture as a member of the Nakoda First
Nations, and to a history of Nakoda women experiencing visions as dreams, McArthur has come to understand these dreams as visions from The Creator. Using digital tools like Blender and Unity, McArthur has found power in her ability to bring these landscapes to life, recreating them to explore Indigenous futurity
and spirituality in the digital realm, deeply influenced by Nakoda culture and stories. Her work contains a meticulously-selected mixture of inspirations from biology, spirituality, and the universe: cells become galaxies, bodies become lights, and beadwork becomes the human genome. Nothing is without meaning; she collides parts of our reality with the unknown and creates worlds at the intersections.

In video games, death is essential, a way to learn, adapt, and try again, a second chance, a second existence. In McArthur’s words, “We have always lived in cycles of resurgence and reclamation, refusing to be erased despite colonial attempts to press ‘game over.’” Colonization, as a tool of violence and oppression, has sought to be the end of the story for Indigenous peoples. To McArthur, “extra life” in the context of Indigenous existence goes beyond resisting these structures and includes breaking cycles of generational trauma created by them. There is resistance in deciding what is passed on to the next generation. This idea has led McArthur to view dying in digital spaces as a form of reincarnation, questioning if it’s possible to return as a compounded version of oneself, an amalgamation of all the lives that came before. This connected lineage has always been
a way for Indigenous peoples to protect
and reclaim their languages, lands, and
cultures. The concept of an extra life includes an act of rectifying the past, by
creating alternative realities where colonialism is not part of the story, and dreaming of futures beyond the cycles of
generational trauma. As McArthur says,
“We are always more than one existence at a time [...] If we are given an extra life,
how do we ensure we do not just repeat the
past but truly transform? If survival is inevitable, how do we make it meaningful?”

The work here is born from the experiences and memories of women throughout McArthur’s matrilineal lineage. Her
mother and kokum (grandmother), who surrounded her in life, are symbolically represented by the women in the circle
of figures. One of the women, visibly pregnant, a life-giver, symbolizes McArthur and what she has carried through her life,
what she has inherited from her lineage, and what she chooses and refuses to pass
on. Golden lines trace points of life on her body: veins, nerves, the heart, head,
and belly are all points of convergence. Ripples of this energy form a protective circle, resemblant of cultural ceremonies,
and evoke a sense of healing, endurance,
and shared histories. Circular rings of water, the source of all life, further enclose all the figures. A saskatoon berry
bush and a raspberry bush, common in the area McArthur’s family is from, grow
in front of two of the women. Their crystal skin is representative of memory, ancestry, and transformation. A dream-like
haze, inspired by the early morning sunrises of the Prairies, paints the environment,
lush with wild grasses. In these pages, McArthur has created a place for an imagined future, guarded by these women; it
is alive for whoever inherits it next.


_To experience the fullness of Taylor McArthur’s artist project, readers are invited to download the [Artivive](http://onelink.to/zv6vjz) phone app and scan the marked pages of the print magazine to unlock their augmented reality._








Taylor McArthur (Nakoda of Pheasant Rump Nakota First Nation) was raised in Southwestern Manitoba and currently resides in Montréal. She is a Computation Arts Specialization undergraduate student in Concordia’s Fine Arts faculty. McArthur is a digital artist whose work spans 3D animation, interactive art, and video. Her practice is informed by Indigenous futurisms and she seeks to situate her Indigenous culture within both modern and potential future visions.

Artist

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Technology

Guest curated by Tristan Sauer, Taylor McArthur’s newly commissioned digital works draw upon themes of Indigenous futurity seen through Nakoda matrilineal inheritances. An augmented reality component, accessible through the print issue, envisions fuller possibilities.

_If time had listened_ by Taylor McArthur: Text

Review

Alper Turan (he/they) (b. 1993, Ankara) is a curator and writer. Turan is a PhD student in Art History at the University of Toronto; was a 2023–2024 Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program; and was awarded a 2023–2024 General Idea Fellowship at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Walking into “flipping through pages keeping a
record of time” feels like a necessary pause in the fall
of 2024, in the pre-election atmosphere in the US. Outside, the city brims with uneasy vigilance, the anxiety of choosing between the worse and the worst. In here, the air shifts: a quiet pulse seems to radiate from the artworks as if the room itself is holding its breath. Curated by Toronto-based Jacob Korczynski, the exhibition places Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Jimmy Robert
into a conversation that spans decades, continents, and
languages. Together, their practices unfold the limits and possibilities of the page, transforming it into a space for gestures, erasures, and interruptions, where meanings
expand and layers accumulate. The effect of the whole is a quiet resistance—not another urgent declaration, not
another blunt warning, but a murmuring. Language refuses containment in the end; materials push beyond their
perceived limits. The exhibition offers reading as an act that simultaneously rewrites the past work, and writing as
an act that anticipates its own future reading, where both fold into what has been and what is yet to come.

Guided by an intuitive spark, Korczynski recognized Cha and Robert’s shared concerns: both were trilingual; each used and transformed the page through
performance and text; and each insisted on language as a tactile, transgressive medium. This resonance propelled him across archives, from the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive—where Cha’s estate is held—to Jimmy Robert’s early studio documentation. In choosing only Robert’s pre-2010 work—before the curator ever met him—Korczynski constructs a parallel historicity, preventing the late Cha’s foreshortened output from being read solely as “the past” and Robert’s as “the present.” Instead, he casts the
artists as contemporaries in an ongoing conversation on how the page can be folded, obscured, or caressed into new ways of seeing and reading. Korczynski’s approach attends to the ephemeral and improvised nature of both practices.

Cha (1951–1982), a Korean American artist, writer, and filmmaker, explored the materiality of language, often treating the page as an extension of the body. Her experimental writing, most notably in _Dictée_ (1982), collapsed linguistic, historical, and personal time, marking reading as a sensory and embodied experience. Robert (b. 1975), a French artist born in Guadeloupe and based in Paris, similarly invests in the page as both material and
conceptual ground. Working across performance, sculpture, film, and drawing, Robert treats paper as a surrogate
for the body—one that bends, creases, crumples, and resists easy legibility.

The exhibition unfolds as a careful choreography of
surface, volume, and movement of paper. Robert’s subtle, angular wall drawing near the entrance (_Untitled,
2008–2024_) resembles folded paper, invisible at first
glance, but becoming evident as you exit the space
later. On the same wall hangs Cha’s pencil-on-paper
work _Untitled (le 22 juillet)_ (1976), in which lines of
text are repeated to form double stanzas. In both works,
the handwriting-cum-drawing appears faint, vulnerable,
and delicate, something between inscription and erasure
as the imprints appear to fade as the surface absorbs
them. For Cha’s works on paper, viewers are compelled
to lean in patiently, scrutinizing the textured surfaces,
becoming acutely aware of the physical, labour-intensive
process of writing—a performance of the hand itself.
The show’s shifting architecture also becomes an instrument of constraint and release: the open entryway;
a semi-transparent projection in the centre; a floating
screen through which light filters; walls layered with unframed, unbound, pinned, and folded works on/made
of paper. At the back of the space, a restrictive passage-way directs the body’s engagement. Every week, multi-disciplinary artist Raymond Pinto performs Robert’s
_Object/My affection_ (2007–2024) between these two narrow walls. Informed by the gestures in Robert’s related
film, Pinto’s body intersects with the projection as they press, lean, and slide against the surfaces. The performance unfolds as a live negotiation between image and
body—gesture becoming inscription, the body becoming a page.

Cha’s works anchor the exhibition: her texts always summon the body and mirror Robert’s performances and gestures in their own ways. Her typewritten texts undermine mechanical regularity through breath-like line breaks, the textual hesitation of repeated words,
and disruptive spacing. They suggest the embodied struggle of language slipping, being held, and being
displaced. _Untitled (Empreinte)_ (1976) is a rupture,
and it is the only warning of the show: “america land of excess deliberate mirror images upon itself / wanting to
be erased and be no more reflected.”

The exhibition constantly stages the tension between the material fragility of paper/body and the force of inscription, which contours and contains meaning. Robert’s
signature sculptural gesture—a tall plywood board leaning precariously against a wall—returns in _Untitled_
(2009), this time bearing a translucent sheet. Where the wood in his other works subjected paper to bruising by its full weight, the page now appears partially
freed—only to be taped in place, still hovering between an illusionary release and inexorable confinement. Floating pages, another signature gesture for
Robert, also appear in his projected film _Emma/Mystique_
(2001), where a friend tries to hold the dissemination of pages caught in the wind. The motif references Hokusai’s _Ejiri in Suruga Province_ (c. 1832), later reimagined in Jeff
Wall’s _A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai)_ (1993).
Where Hokusai captures the fleeting chaos in wood-block print and Wall monumentalizes it through staged photography, Robert returns to the image as a
meditation on the possible failures of materiality: a persistent exploration of how representation, like papers in the wind, resists stability, always teetering on
the edge of disintegration.

Yet, it is Robert’s aluminum sheets in the sculpture _Untitled_ (2005), mimicking windswept paper on a cardboard box, that holds the exhibition’s most profound sense of precariousness, and its victory. Lia Gangitano, director and founder of PARTICIPANT INC, warns that they are not paper but metal. This materiality transforms perception. The sheets appear
weightless, their form an attempt to hold something
that cannot be held—an impossible stillness. They mark the exhibition’s unresolved gesture: a resistance to containment, a refusal to let language, movement,
or material settle into fixed form.

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“flipping through pages keeping a record of time” ran from 6 September to 3 November 2024 at PARTICIPANT INC, New York City. Guest curated by Jacob Korczynski.

“flipping through pages keeping a record of time” — Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Jimmy Robert

Elliott Ramsey is Curator at The Polygon Gallery. He has sat on numerous art juries and advisories including the Sobey Art Award, the VIVA Awards, the Portfolio Prize, and the Barbara Spohr Memorial Award for Photography. His recent exhibition “As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic,” featuring work from the Toronto-based Wedge Collection and presented by Aperture, is currently touring.  


_Never have I ever_. The rules of the game are simple:
someone says, “Never have I ever…” followed by something that they’ve done. Anyone who’s also done it takes a drink. And there is plenty of drink here. The filing
cabinet at the front of the room is stocked with alcohol:
red wine, white wine, Jameson, beer. There’s a squat glass bottle of tequila, and a Ziploc bag of limes to pair with it. Autumn Knight has come prepared.

This is all part of a performance piece, titled _Documents_. The game of “Never Have I Ever” transpires before _Documents_ opens to the public—a secret, unlisted
performance, by invite only, for a Black audience.

The atmosphere at the beginning is relaxed, even
festive: a gathering of friends, old and new. Knight dances breezily through the aisles. At the front of the room,
her set consists of a table and chair and filing cabinet,
blandly bureaucratic, sitting in cold juxtaposition to
the warm and convivial mood. High up the wall, close
to the ceiling, is a grid of four projected images. Each is a cloudy red circle, at first glance resembling lunar
eclipses, except that there’s a fleshy quality to them.
They look like images captured inside the body.

Knight doesn’t address these images at first. She begins by inviting the audience to come closer; to scooch
in, and round out the rows so that they fall out of an austere and linear formation. From here, she transitions
into her charismatic oratory, halfway between stand-up comedy and spoken-word poetry. She reads from a paper but liberally goes off-script, laying out the structure
of this performance—a performance that she has mounted five times before, in Houston, Champaign, Montreal,
Ottawa, and Toronto. Vancouver is its sixth stop on her “North American Tour,” and apparently the largest all-Black audience yet.

_Documents_ unfolds across six chapters. In each, Knight teases apart the systems of verification that one
must navigate to prove one’s legitimacy. “Never Have I Ever” transpires during the first chapter, on class. She counterbalances levity and gravity: libations can be equally serious and silly, and the way she weaves across
this fine line sets the tone for the whole performance.

Sometimes, hilarity interrupts, unscripted. When Knight
says, “Never have I ever relied on food stamps,” only to be met with an audience cry of “We don’t have food stamps in Canada,” her gobsmacked disbelief conjures laughter even as we contemplate difficult circumstances.
And even though class status is the first topic of discussion, race looms large over it. Race is the theme of the second chapter. Knight asks the rhetorical question,
“Do you speak your native tongue?” On the subject of
migration, across borders and seas, citizenship is the
third chapter of _Documents_. For this, Knight has printed a large blow-up of her own driver’s licence and passport. It circulates throughout the crowd, laying bare
her vital statistics. There’s more to come. She rummages in the filing cabinet and produces…Grapes. Bread, cheese, a whole rotisserie chicken,
still implausibly warm, which she cuts and hands out
in pieces to anyone who wants some. On the one hand,
it seems on the nose, even uncomfortably caricaturing,
to be serving her Black audience chicken. On the other
hand, this hard pivot from documentation to picnicking marks an utter dismissal of the very notion of proof
and validity; a rejection of being reducible to one’s date
of birth, place of birth, assigned sex at birth.

Birth: those four images still hovering overhead are
the inside of a uterus. Knight discloses this as she transitions to the fourth chapter, on gender. She ponders
aloud how race becomes gendered. She asks, “Is your
gender connected to misogyny?” which raises an internal
question: _how could it not be_? Interiority is key to the
fifth chapter, sexuality, during which Knight asks those
in attendance to close their eyes and picture the person they most want to be intimate with. There is no
obligation to share. This is, rightly, safe from any
form of documentation.

Thus, it is bleakly, tautologically funny when the sixth chapter—occupation—consists entirely of Knight asking the audience to document this event. After all, if it isn’t on social media, did it really happen? For all her refutation of perfunctory and performative systems of proof, Knight brings it full circle, back to the ways in which people now police and validate one another. Instagram is administrative; TikTok is hierarchical. Twitter—
yes, we still call it Twitter—is a bureaucratic nightmare.

So it’s a relief when _Broad: Say Less_, a collaborative sound performance between Knight and Lisa E. Harris, washes all this away. The Libby Leshgold Gallery transforms from the institutional blankness of Knight’s office to a sonic chamber, lit with blue ambience. Harris stands in a spotlight, wearing a shaggy fur hat and black dress. As its title suggests—say less—the performance moves beyond words; Harris sings as if speaking in tongues, moving from scatting to what sounds and feels like a spiritual. The only discernible words are recordings of her family members—her grandmother and her nephew—which loop in the soundscape she’s building. Even
then, the words are hard to parse.

There is music, too: high, eerie, tonal music, a series of pitches that Harris appears to manipulate with her body. It looks as if she is physically compressing or stretching the sounds between her hands. In a way, that’s exactly what she’s doing. Her instrument, the theremin, is played without physical contact, with position sensors that translate movement into sound. Its inventor, Leon Theremin, developed it by accident while working on Soviet state–sponsored security devices. It’s a poetic conclusion to Knight’s _Documents_, refashioning surveillance into art.

After Harris is finished playing, Knight is nowhere to be found. The 8pm performance of _Documents_ is the public, interactive reading that the website promised. It consists of a filing cabinet, standing unattended. Those who rummage through it may find empty booze bottles and half-eaten snacks: tangible evidence of life lived.

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Broad: Say Less and Documents were performed on 22 November 2024 at the Libby Leshgold Gallery in Vancouver.

_Broad: Say Less_ and _Documents_ — Lisa E. Harris and Autumn Knight

Zach Ngin is an art worker and writer based in Providence.

The earliest work in Sarah Elawad’s exhibition is a risograph zine titled _in the bloom of their joy and the flower of their happiness_ (2023). Its transparent plastic cover
is adorned with an assortment of puffy stickers: blooming hearts and flowers, a love-struck kitten, Buttercup
from the Powerpuff Girls with tears spilling out of her
eyes. Each page inside is similarly maximalist: pixelated hearts and flowers form a kind of affective moiré
pattern, too deep and layered to be teased apart. The
feeling of sentiment is so strong that it seems to dissolve, like the powdery quality of printing itself, into
your hand, in alternating shades of romance, adoration, and devotion. One page is full of messages that
recall WhatsApp “Good Morning” graphics (“May God ease your morning and may God ease your affairs,”
one reads); other pages recall Arabic-language advertisements and retail signs. Several spreads are entirely filled
with terse phrases: “BEDAZZLED SPIRITUALITY”; “LAND OF THE BLACKS”; “REUNITED SOULS”;
“EID MUBARAK.” At times, the messages are so sweet they contain a premonition of loss. On one page,
a central pink blur is encircled by lines of incantatory text: “True love is not a flower, true love takes time to grow. True love is not a flower, true love must be forever. True love is not a flower, true love is stronger.”

Aside from this zine, the works in the exhibition
date from the past year of acute crisis in Sudan. Across these works, the exceptional circumstances of mass
displacement and genocide meet more familiar diasporic
affects of longing and love. The exhibition, titled “May
We Return,” was part of the Seeing the World through
Sudan conference convened at Brown University in
October by Bayan Abubakr, Jordan Mulkey, and Luvuyo
Equiano Nyawose. Centring the perspectives of Sudanese scholars and cultural practitioners, the conference
sought to examine recent events in Sudan within deeper historical and political context. The December Revolution of 2018 was a breakthrough against decades of
state oppression, but this victory was soon threatened
by forces of reaction, including a military coup against
the transitional government in October 2021. In April
2023, war broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
Many thousands have been killed and many millions
displaced in the ensuing violence, ethnic cleansing, and
famine. In line with the analysis of writers and organizers like Lina Dohia and Rabab Elnaiem, among others,
the conference organizers framed the current crises as
counter-revolutionary wars against the people’s uprising
and its resistance committees. Elawad’s work is shadowed by an awareness of this ongoing dispossession.

In an accompanying pamphlet, Elawad states simply
that the exhibition is “a prayer spoken in unison, for all
those who no longer feel they have a home to return to.”
The exhibition is named after a large-scale tapestry that
shares the zine’s psychedelic palette and curlicued lettering. Its protodigital knitwork shows a layered pattern
of fruits, leaves, and other plants native to Sudan, along
with the titular text. The work was inspired by a recorded
conversation with the artist’s father, in which he described his home—one that was taken amid the recent war.
The tapestry expresses the hope for reunion with the fruit
trees and the land. Nearby, a short animation echoes
this sentiment. The text “May We Return” is overlaid
by neon flora and clips from Sudanese cooking videos: a dish being stirred in a pot, leaves being separated from a stem. The visual maximalism of these works
makes it difficult to extricate the text: perhaps this
style indexes the layers of distance between here and
there, home and here. But the message is never anything other than heartfelt.

A second textile work, _Gateway to Freedom_ (2024), is
composed entirely of strips of patterned fabric, indicating the artist’s interest in everyday acts of adornment.
Its boxy geometric pattern resembles tile-work and quilting, but also perhaps an array of windows on a computer
screen (the artist’s background is in graphic design). Its
narrow horizontal strips of floral fabric also recalled,
for me, the tactile pleasures of stray ribbon or washi
tape. Nearby hang three watercolour paintings on paper
mounted on satiny fabric. These works veer between
illustration and abstraction: red roses are stretched, copied, and haloed by fields of gold, surrounded by line-work that recalls calligraphy, textiles, topography, and
crowds. Fragments of protest signs can be glimpsed
among the rallying masses: this imagery was drawn from
the past year’s demonstrations for both Sudan and Palestine. Land, in these works, is inseparable from the people who raise their voices in defence of it.

Elawad is ultimately interested in the tender space
where public speech meets private memory and desire.
Much like the collaged messages in her risograph zine,
the images in her exhibition shuttle between a variety
of scales and registers, from the bold print of banners
and shop signs to the handheld intimacy of text messages and love notes. During a walkthrough for conference attendees, Elawad shared that displacement in
Sudan has also meant that members of her family have
experienced unexpected and bittersweet reunions. Even
as her work anticipates a future return to land and home
in Sudan, it is equally concerned with the encounters
that take place in the interregnum or the break: souls
reunited around kitchen tables, at protest marches,
and in WhatsApp groups.




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“May We Return” ran from 11 October to 31 October 2024 at Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, Providence. Guest curated by Bayan Abubakr, Jordan Mulkey and Luvuyo Equiano Nyawose.

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“May We Return” — Sarah Elawad

Leah Triplett is a writer and curator currently serving as Curator of Contemporary Art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, PA.

In _Biennial Boom: Making Contemporary Art Global _,
Paloma Checa-Gismero historicizes the explosion of
biennial exhibitions since the ’80s, and the related networks of making, displaying, collecting, and supporting contemporary art that manifest in these temporary exhibitions. Checa-Gismero argues that despite how such exhibitions aspire to be the most radical stage for new ideas and modes of making, their structures are indebted
to those of North Atlantic modernism, and ultimately risk homogenizing the host city’s local cultures in relation to internationalism.

Checa-Gismero proposes the concept of “aesthetic conversions,” or the process through which artworks
evolve in meaning according to the context and politics
of how they are displayed (including domestic spaces,
museums, or temporary exhibitions). If seemingly objective, expository rationales of display informed the modern encyclopaedic museum of the 19th century;
in postmodern exhibition-making, audiences assume the
position of power, “converting” the meaning of artworks
through a confluence of subjectivities. However, these
new meanings, Checa-Gismero argues, are still shaped
by Eurocentrism.

Checa-Gismero explores these aesthetic conversions
through case studies of what she terms “early boom biennials,” which took place throughout the ’80s and ’90s
—a period that saw the demise of the Soviet Union, the
formation of treaties like NAFTA, and the creation of
the European Union. This new porousness of borders
and capital enabled a newfound mobility and internationalist tastes for elite networks of artists, dealers, collectors, curators, and audiences, as well as the subsequent coalescence of particular local aesthetics into a
category that came to be known as “global contemporary art.” For example, the planning and implementation of the Bienal de La Habana from 1984 to 1991, organized by Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam, featured organizing committees composed of _especialistas_ who engaged artists and projects that might
have an international reach but could also activate local aesthetics. Argentinian artist Julio Le Parc’s 1986 festival of kinetic art was, for instance, an interactive,
convivial sculptural event in which an ordinary Havana
park became the site for publics to envision new possibilities in their everyday surroundings. Le Parc’s work
(exhibited throughout South America, the US, and
Europe) was legible to a specific kind of art audience
that understood itself as global.

The text’s remaining case studies, “inSITE94” and
“inSITE97” (held in Tijuana and San Diego), as well as
“Manifesta 1” (1996) in Rotterdam, consider why and
how socio-political conflict conciliation came to inform
the respective biennials’ curatorial strategies. Checa-Gismero suggests that the rise of site-specificity and relational aesthetics in the ’90s cast history, contemporary politics, and geography as contextual backdrops for engaging the exhibited artworks. These biennials
placed artworks, provocative to a general audience but
recognizable to the art world, within socially charged
public spaces to attempt to effect social change. For example, Terry Allen’s _Cross the Razor/Cruzar la navaja_ (1994) installation for “inSITE94” facilitated conversations between people on both sides of the US-Mexico
border using sound systems and translators. But the
idea that this public installation could materially change
the world seems startlingly naive in the context of America’s militarized border with Mexico, until you remember the neoliberal politics that underwrite socially
engaged artworks. Checa-Gismero references art historian Claire Bishop, who contextualized how artists working in an austere milieu were pressured to address
social issues through their work in exchange for funding. Many such socially driven works only yield publicity for the artists, or for a particular issue, instead of leading to material change. An example of this phenomenon might be found in Ronald Rael and Virginia San _Fratello’s Teeter-Totter Wall_ (2019), in which the designers placed hot pink see-saws through either side of the border wall between Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas. Despite its notoriety and accolades, did this
artwork materially change the dynamic at the border?

While throughout her case studies Checa-Gismero exhaustively appraises these biennials’ respective politics and effects, how biennials are instrumentalized for neoliberal means isn’t as assiduously or clearly critiqued until the book’s conclusion. There, she writes that cultural or political aspirations of early boom biennials with altruistic intentions ultimately unintentionally caused harm to the communities they sought
to serve the most, as they began catering to moneyed,
mobile individuals seeking to boost their social capital.
Checa-Gismero’s careful consideration of the myriad
political, social, and economic shifts of the post–Cold
War neoliberal world order positions biennials as critical to the construction of what is referred to as “global contemporary art,” laying the groundwork for future
study. Her study is a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of exhibition histories, through its critical examination of the politics of display. With it, artists and curators can be cognizant of how their work might be operationalized on a global stage, to envision more equitable art worlds.

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Biennial Boom: Making Contemporary Art Global was published by Duke University Press in 2024.

_Biennial Boom: Making Contemporary Art Global_ — Paloma Checa-Gismero

Gabrielle Moser is an art historian, writer, and independent curator. She is the author of Projecting Citizenship: Photography and Belonging in the British Empire (Penn State University Press, 2019) and, with Adrienne Huard, co-edited a special issue of Journal of Visual Culture on reparation (2022). A founding member of EMILIA-AMALIA, she is an Associate Professor of Aesthetics and Art Education in the Faculty of Education at York University in Toronto, Canada

When I walk into Alize Zorlutuna’s solo exhibition
on a hot summer’s day, I run headlong into curator
Suzanne Carte, a pair of garden pruners in one hand,
a cluster of pink hydrangea blooms in the other. The
flowers have come from the gallery’s greenhouse,
just down the hall, and are destined for the many vases, vessels, and incense holders scattered throughout “We Who Have Known Many Shores,” an ambitious,
textured, multimedia installation that spans textiles,
papermaking, ceramics, collage, sculpture, and video.
Over the course of the show’s four-month run, Zorlutuna’s container technologies were host to an ever-changing cast of seasonal guests, from tulips and flowering Solomon’s seal, to roses, marigolds, astilbe, and lavender. Many of these flowers have their origins in Asia and North Africa, but have been brought to Europe,
and then North America, through the trade routes of
modern colonialism. Hydrangea, in particular, is native
to Asia and the Americas, first cultivated in Japan, and
was imported to Europe and North America in the 18th
century by a colonist. Named for their voracious consumption of water, and for their seed pods’ resemblance to water pitchers, the etymology of “hydrangea” is from the
Greek, meaning “water vessel.” The history of the flower is representative of Zorlutuna’s wider practice, which investigates—with remarkable subtlety and intimacy through the artist's materials—experiences of diaspora,
cultural loss, and intergenerational memory.

Anchoring the exhibition is a sculptural installation
that extends Zorlutuna’s ongoing collaborative work,
_leaving the table_ (2019–ongoing), in which the artist serves
sumac tea to invited guests. They write in their artist
statement of this “as a gesture of hospitality and a way to
contend with our relationship as treaty people in Canada.”
Sumac has been an essential material in Zorlutuna’s work
since 2011, when they attempted to locate a lost rock
carving made by the late Cuban American artist Ana
Mendieta along the Scarborough Bluffs in Toronto.
In the course of their research, Zorlutuna learned that
North American sumac is the cousin plant of sumac
found in Turkey: the plant, the artist reflects in _Akimbo_,
“has become a kind of material bridge between my homelands, a way to materialize diasporic grief and longing, and the complex responsibility of living on occupied territories as a settler and descendent of immigrants.” Positioned between a low plywood bench and a handmade ceramic fountain (made in collaboration with the collective Waard Ward and art historian Reza Nik), the tea service is surrounded by plush pillows, ottomans, and
bean bag chairs, and grounded by a series of hand-tufted
carpets, made in collaboration with SF Ho, that depict
important waterways in Ontario intermixed with motifs
from Egyptian and Anatolian rugs (_Su Yolu Bulur: Water
Finds Their Way_, 2022). Evoking the arched shape of the
mihrab (as depicted on prayer rugs), the carpets act as
portals, inviting the viewer to imagine the trade networks
that bring tea, water, and people together while also providing a soft place to land, rest, and plan for the future. On an adjacent wall, the word “belong” appears as white
text stretched out to an absurd length against an azure background, spelled out in rings of handmade lace collected from women in the artist’s familial and social circle (_Belooooooooooooooooooooong_, 2024). Together,
the works invite viewers to contemplate what it means
to “leave the table” of promised multicultural belonging and inclusion in Canada, and to invent different facilitating environments better equipped to support
collective rest and collective action.

The works that orbit the central axis of the exhibition extend these themes through experiments with mediation between and across materials. Ebru, the traditional Turkish practice of paper marbling, and sumac are central characters across the tableaux Zorlutuna creates throughout the gallery, and attest to the artist’s commitment to relearning and reviving craft technologies from the Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) region, while filtering them through the experiences of diaspora. In one corner, long swathes of pink satin, ornamented with blue marbling, cascade from the ceiling into ceramic vessels and onto the floor in _Spill_ (2024), while in another,
a headscarf belonging to Zorlutuna’s grandmother provides a hammock for a branch of sumac flowers, suspended above a hammam bowl filled with water balanced
atop a buoy: together, the composition suggests the risks
of containment under transnational migration (_Re-membering how to hold what we carry_, 2024). Nearby, a series of screen-printed graphics (drawn from kilim patterns)
and texts set atop Ebru patterns evoke the absurdities of
borders for non-human agents: “The inconceivability /
of a border / to a river / to a seed,” they read.

The role of borders as both imaginary and projective
continues in a series of videos installed on the opposite wall, in which Zorlutuna traces the contours of the landscape with their outstretched hand, caressing its folds, ridges, and waterways, sometimes literally making contact with its features, creating a queer embodied intimacy with geography that disrupts any notion of the land as a blank slate for colonial occupation. Across two vitrines, _An index of Inheritances_ (2024) combines textiles (a spread of ikat fabric as well as ancestral el işi: hooked handwork used to make doilies, handkerchiefs, and place settings), hand-marbled paper, and natural materials (including rose water, dried jasmine flowers, eucalyptus and olive leaves) to frame and obscure photographs drawn from _National Geographic_ and from family albums that depict figures that Zorlutuna describes as ancestors, ascribing an inheritance to these (sometimes Orientalist) images that surpasses the intentions of their creators. Covering the faces of the subjects with dried rosebuds and licorice leaves, the artist returns the right to opacity (in Édouard Glissant’s terms) to these historical actors, drawing the viewer’s attention to their clothing, jewellery, and head coverings as signs of cultural continuance in the Anatolian region. Much like Mendieta’s work, which has inspired
Zorlutuna’s practice for the past decade, “We Who Have Known Many Shores” figures the body and the land as sites of vulnerability but also of cultural sovereignty, creating a space of containment where the viewer might contemplate the precarity of memory and cultural transmission.

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 “We Who Have Known Many Shores” ran from 10 May to 1 September 2024 at the Art Gallery of Burlington.

Header

C Mag

Issue 160

Extra Life

Credits

Letters

Letters

Editorial

Editorial: Extra Life / Life, Redux

Explore Issue by Images

Features

To Enshrine an Ululation

The KISSSSS of Yong Soon Min

The House Edge

When Play Confronts Power

For Those Who Visit Us in Our Dreams

The Afterlife of Writing

Artist Projects

If time had listened by Taylor McArthur: Text

Columns

One Thing: In Search of an Incorruptible Life

Composition: We Return

Reviews

“flipping through pages keeping a record of time” — Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Jimmy Robert

Broad: Say Less and Documents — Lisa E. Harris and Autumn Knight

“May We Return” — Sarah Elawad

Biennial Boom: Making Contemporary Art Global — Paloma Checa-Gismero

“We Who Have Known Many Shores” — Alize Zorlutuna

“P is for Palestine” — Bayan Abu Nahla, Amal Al Nakhala, Yara El-Ghadban, Muhammad Nour ElKhairy, Nada El-Omari, Mona Hatoum, Rehab Nazzal, Rana Nazzal Hamadeh

“Mort heureuse” — Xie Lei

“Beyond the Vanishing Maya: Voices of a Land in Resistance”