Photography

Memory

Sculpture

Drawing

Letter

Editorial

Feature

Interview

Artist Project

Column

Review

Writer

This issue begins from the tidal as literal image and metaphor for ceaseless movement and its force. We think alongside the inseparability of ocean and land, inspired by Barbadian poet and scholar Kamau Brathwaite’s idea of tidalectics that moves away from easy binaries—the ones that continually justify colonial and capital expansion. From Turtle Island to the Caribbean archipelago, Palestine, Central America, and Bidong Island in Malaysia, artists wade through interconnected and overlapping struggles across multiple shores, times, and material inheritances.

Tidal

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Language

Colonialism

kimi malka hanauer’s image-text moves through a pre-partition Jerusalem, Palestine, and al-Andalus, the Muslim-governed society that covered much of the Iberian Peninsula from 711-1492. hanauer writes from the unspoken relational and linguistic excess that seeps through empire's hold.  

Composition: on the edges of a mother tongue

Jasmine Sihra is a researcher and emerging curator born and raised in Tkaronto/Toronto. Currently, Jasmine is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at Concordia University. Her curatorial, academic, and written work revolves around themes of sustainability, pollution, community-oriented initiatives, and artistic practices.

When my friend and artist Natalie Ashley showed me _resting my moccasins_ (2024), her latest project featuring a pair of beaded moccasins filled with bearded lichen, I wondered what it would be like to slip my feet into them. I wondered about the feel of the furry lichen between my toes. The unwieldy and beautiful chaos of the lichen is paired with Natalie’s delicate and meticulous bead-work. The lichen is soft and fragile, easily squashed between fingers, while each bead is hard, shiny, and strong enough to withstand a needle and thread pinning it down to the surface. Bead-work and lichen come together as the artist reflects on her Cree lineage, and the various life forms surrounding her. Now, it’s hard to imagine what the moccasins would be like without the bearded lichen. The moccasins make me want to stop. Slow down. Feel the lichen.

For Natalie, bearded lichen, or old man’s beard, is medicine for pain, struggle, and transition. Years ago, a Nuu-chah-nulth elder told Natalie that most people walk around lichen so as not to disrupt it. Similarly, if you keep some lichen in your pocket, it can help you seek space from others. Natalie returned to this lesson when working on a large exhibition at an institution. During the exhibition, she struggled to balance the needs of the artists, her personal values of care, and collaboration with institutional standards and pressures. Overwhelmed, she paused. She took a bath, a space she calls her place of meditation, and asked Creator for a solution. Later, she went for a walk with her husband through a forest after a storm, and she was surprised to see an abundance of bearded lichen on the forest floor. Creator seemed to have answered Natalie’s question. She picked up some lichen and put it in her pocket
and offered a piece of herself in the form of a freshly plucked eyebrow hair back to the Earth. Natalie brought the lichen to her co-workers, who also put the old man’s beard in their pockets, and the opening of the exhibition ran smoothly.

For Natalie, lichen offered a way to think through and navigate a contradiction she felt in an institutional setting. Lichen itself is a bit of a contradiction—not quite algae and not quite fungi, but a symbiosis of both. Algae are aquatic and photosynthetic creatures. They account for about 50 percent of the photosynthesis that occurs on the planet, [^1] producing the oxygen we need to breathe. Fungi are a diverse group of organisms, and they can be found in wet and dry areas. Fungi break down and decompose other organisms, contributing to soil biodiversity. [^2] The combination of fungi and algae creates lichen, allowing it to thrive in conditions where fungi and algae wouldn’t normally survive on their own. In fact, there is still debate around how algae and fungi come together in lichen, but regardless, the symbiosis allows for both organisms to exist. [^3]

Symbiosis shows up in Natalie’s beadwork, too. Her moccasin patterns weave together the old and new. She was inspired by her Kokum Avalina’s beaded floral design on a buckskin suit coat owned by her father, Michael Ashley. Natalie’s father was living in Blackfoot Territory in the ’70s and ’80s, when many Indigenous men wore buckskin suit coats with beaded patterns, as a visual form of resistance against threats on Indigenous sovereignties like the 1969 White Paper. [^4] Introduced by the federal government led by Pierre Trudeau, the policy paper essentially sought to abolish the Indian Act and previously signed treaties. The White Paper would remove Indian status and Indigenous rights to land, by phasing out treaties. The formation of the policy occurred under the guise of achieving social equality by recognizing Indigenous peoples as “citizens,” rather than as having a distinct legal status. After large-scale public protest (such as the Red Power movement), the Canadian government withdrew the White Paper in 1970. Indigenous activism around sovereignty and treaty rights would continue into the coming decades. [^5] In response to this history, Michael asked his mother, Avalina, to make him a beaded pattern based on the wild rose, which is native to Treaty 8 territory. Avalina beaded the rose, and Natalie’s mother, Pearl Graham (a white settler), sewed the coat.

_resting my moccasins_ honours the contrasting legacies of beading and textile work from Natalie’s Cree and settler ancestries. Natalie beaded moccasins with the wild rose pattern, though hers were quite different from her kokum’s. Her background in painting and drawing influenced her interpretation of the pattern, and her engagement with the tactility of beads and threads. She also struggled to replicate her grandmother’s bead-work, and her process involved stopping, restarting, and slowing down over the course of six months. The result was a beautiful symbiosis—of beads and lichen, of old and new stories.

If you glance too quickly, you might miss the lichen peeking out. But the work insists on slowness and curiosity. What Natalie’s moccasins teach me is that slowing down is part of how we confront conflict, and we need to reflect carefully to understand how opposing ideas can coexist, much like the symbiosis between algae and fungi. For Natalie and me, lichen is a reminder that we—like all forms of life—have to learn to live on this planet together.

[^1]: Deqiang Duanmu, Lu-Ning Liu, Wiemin Ma, Qiang Wang, and Bao-Sheng Qiu, “Editorial: Algal photosynthesis,” _Frontiers in Microbiology_ 13 (January 3, 2023), https://doi.org/10.3389/ fmicb.2022.1112301

[^2]: “Benefits of Fungi for the Environment and Humans,” The United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021-2030, https://www.decadeonrestoration.org/stories/benefits-fungi-environment-and-humans#:~:text=Some%20fungi%20are%20decomposers%20which,for%20plant%20development%20and%20productivity

[^3]: “What is a lichen?” The British Lichen Society, https://britishlichensociety.org.uk/learning/what-is-a-lichen#:~:text=The%20fungi%20build%20the%20structure,lichen%2Dfungi%20and%20their%20photobionts

[^4]: Canada. Indian Affairs and Northern Development. _Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, 1969. Ottawa, 1969_. https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.700112/publication.html

[^5]: _The Canadian Encyclopedia_, s.v. “The White Paper, 1969,” September 24, 2015, https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/the-white-paper-1969

Natalie Ashley is an interdisciplinary artist born in Calgary, Blackfoot Territory, and a member of the Driftpile Cree Nation (Treaty 8) through her father. She is currently based in Lkwungen lands. Her art is shaped by family lineage—her mother’s textiles, Kokum Avalina’s bead-work, and her uncle’s carving—seen as a generational language.

Artist

This issue of C Magazine considers what it might mean to stop. Rather than denote absence, the stop offers an opening for something else to emerge. Across these pages, contributors explore stopping in: forms of rest, blockades, town halls, and critiques of the temporality and archives of empire. From blockades on Wet’suwet’en land to an underground hub in Jakarta, from moccasins cradling lichen to Lebanon’s El-Mina port, each work gathers its own form of interruption. 

With contributors: Whess Harman, Hung Duong and Grace Samboh, Svetlana Romanova, Fan Wu, Meagan Christou, Mitra Fakhrashrafi, Emma Steen, Charlene K. Lau, Dot Tuer, Joyce Joumaa, Ali El-Darsa, Kay Rangel, Jasmine Sihra.

This issue considers what it might mean to stop. Rather than denote absence, the stop offers an opening for something else to emerge. Across these pages, contributors explore stopping in: forms of rest, blockades, town halls, and critiques of the temporality and archives of empire. From blockades on Wet’suwet’en land to an underground hub in Jakarta, from moccasins cradling lichen to Lebanon’s El-Mina port, each work gathers its own form of interruption.

With contributors: Whess Harman, Hung Duong and Grace Samboh, Svetlana Romanova, Fan Wu, Meagan Christou, Mitra Fakhrashrafi, Emma Steen, Charlene K. Lau, Dot Tuer, Joyce Joumaa, Ali El-Darsa, Kay Rangel, Jasmine Sihra.

Stop

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Nature

Time

Jasmine Sihra’s reflects on artist Natalie Ashley’s _resting my moccasins_ (2024), which features beaded moccasins filled with bearded lichen. Sihra draws connections across the materials Ashley engages. In particular, Sihra attends to how the medicinal and symbiotic nature of lichen, and the tactility of beads, evoke slowness and contradiction.

One Thing: Feel the Lichen: On Natalie Ashley’s Moccasins

Kay Rangel is an emerging writer, curator, and artist from the hot and dry lands of Atizapán de Zaragoza, México. Currently based in Toronto, Rangel works with archives, navigating erased history to bring visibility to contemporary artistic practices, particularly those rooted in her homeland. She has a focus on theories of place, nature, and feminism.

_Note: the print layout of this text is meaningful. To read it as intended, [view or download the PDF.](https://strapi-uploads-c-mag-prod.s3.ca-central-1.amazonaws.com/C161_Rangel_39ce5e2e47.pdf)_

##### Resistance can only be truly achieved if one believes that the force to be resisted, powerful and omnipotent, is real. One can then stand in front of the hurricane and gently push it away without using one’s hands.

##### — Margarita Athanasiou, Nouns, 2018

The city _goes and goes and goes_, and the rigorous, thorough, exhaustive system in which we live _goes and goes and goes_, and the daily homicides _go and go and go_, and one screams and jumps and cries and one has had enough. hazlo parar. To cease what seems perpetual,


The Power of The Big Old makes me feel trapped in this enormous, wet,
gruesome beast. Hierarchies, yes. Everything comes back to hierarchies. One cannot address “No” without addressing Power.

_Basta ya, I don’t like it when you pull my hair._ From an early age—perhaps at recess—you begin to learn, or at least try to, the consequences of mimicry
and the silent observation of abusive patterns. [The Author Would Like To
Stop Here And Briefly Mention The Definition Of “Recess” From The Google Dictionary: _a period of time when the proceedings of a parliament, committee,
court of law, or other official body are temporarily suspended._ Time To Stop.] At
recess time, the little Mexican girl who thinks that she’s better than you because
she is blonde _dictates_ to you and tells you that _you will do_ whatever she wants
you to do because _she says so_. And thus, you will be the dog, and She will be the
Mom in this game that she came up with on a Tuesday in March at playtime in
school, exactly the day that you have mustard stains on your shirt. _Y te aguantas_,
you _tolerate_ it, and you obey, and she treats you poorly because you’re the dog,
and it appears that she wasn’t taught at home that dogs should be treated nicely.
You cry and appeal, but she “can’t hear” you because _she doesn’t speak dog_.

_a cigarette after a nine-hour-long shift_

_to breathe consciously_

_a long stretch_

_a hug_

_sitting down to eat_

_a good laugh_

_to kiss_

_to press the breaks on my bike_

_catching patterned thought_

_to find beauty_

_to lay down on the ground_

_(to stop)_

In 2024, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) went on strike from
November 15 to December 17. I did not receive that new credit card in the
mail before I flew home to Mexico for the holidays. Was I affected by it? Sure.
Did I _die_? No, I was busy; I was feeling my mother’s hands on my skin for the
first time in seven months.

In late July 2023, 3,700 workers at 27 Greater Toronto Area grocery stores be-
gan what would be a month-long strike that halted operations at one of Can-
ada’s three grocery giants. Prior to a wage increase of $4.50, in result of the
strike, full-time workers had been making $20.55 per hour.

20.55 x 40 (full-time hours) = 822

822 x 4 (weeks in a month) = 3,288

Zumper, a site for Rental Market Trends, as of May 2025, estimates an average
of $2,315 of rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Toronto. Income minus Rent
leaves us with $973 in Subject A’s bank account. Let’s call Subject A Mariana.
Mariana has to get groceries to sustain herself, so subtract $400 a month. She
has to move around the city too, so she’s decided to purchase a monthly transit
pass—minus $156. Mariana has $417 to her name by the end of the month.

Sure, it sounds like _it is just enough_ for leisure activities such as going to the
movies, grabbing a coffee with an old friend, or dining out, but Mariana could
have loans to pay, or family that depends on her. Her utilities might not be
included in her rent, and many older people (who built their economic wealth
during a different _time_) are telling her about the benefits and glory of saving
and investments.

It is extremely easy, so easy, the easiest, in fact, for me to walk to a different
grocery store 5 minutes further away, and I’m walking there, with _all the more
reason_, heavy stomps and a heavy head.

_There are some whose everyday rhythm is to crash into rocks and bleed; whole
lives are being dissolved—we must speak their names._

My friend Fariba has not been able to see their mom ever since they moved to Toronto and they will not see her in any near future, because The Government Fears that Fariba’s mom will stay, and so, denied her entry. The regular at the coffee shop who gets an iced Americano with a splash of almond milk is now unemployed because his research had to be “stopped” since, as the US government called it, he was focusing on studying _non-natural biology._ Last year’s Pride Parade was interrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters to demand that organizers _stop the abuse, stop the cycle_, of accepting major corporate funders that also invest in Israel’s weaponry and pipeline projects across Turtle Island. To Bring all this to a Halt that has been poking at me and torturing me ever since I learned _what was right and what was wrong_, and if I know a thing or two (these days I feel like I don’t know anything), it is that those hungry forces are pushing forward, _some_ people are cheering, and I feel miserable. Yet we persevere, we resist—we take action, we _stop_

_to gather_ 

_to cultivate relationships_

_to sign petitions_

_to donate_

_to sing_

_to write_

_to dance_

_to protest_

_to chant_

_to march_

_to cook for others_

_to rely on community_

_to take over places that have been stripped away from us_

_to stand in front of the hurricane and gently push it away without my hands_

_(to stop)_

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Kay Rangel’s _Composition_ probes the language of refusal. Beginning at a past childhood moment and ending at the present time, Rangel’s text traces the logics of power to demystify it.

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Composition: standing in front of the hurricane and gently pushing it away without my hands

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, which was co-presented by AKA Artist-Run, PAVED Arts, and the University of Saskatchewan Art Galleries and Collections (November 8, 2024, to February 28, 2025) and 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)

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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Indigenous

Textiles

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

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.

There’s a hole that I’m always compelled
to fill. This hole is the memory-card slot
on my childhood video-game consoles
(N64, PS1, GameCube). This hole is the
literal hole at the centre of optical discs.
This hole is the space on hard drives that
isn’t filled with memory yet. The fruits
of my compulsion can be observed in the
pile of storage units I’ve accumulated
over my lifetime. What I have gathered
here is not much at all, but it is a precious pile that holds all the digital copies of my memories, desires, dreams,
and anxieties. Copies that prove I existed once, even if in stagnated, fragmented, and abstracted pieces.

It was in the summer of 1998 that
I first experienced death. It wasn’t the
death of a family member or friend;
it was the death of a video-game save
file. Housed in a translucent rectangle, I was confronted with the corruption of my unfinished journey in a PS1
video-game world. Video games were
places that I could retreat into and use
as a foil for my experiences in the real
world. My parents were largely absent
due to work, and I was an overly anxious child who didn’t have many friends.
Video games were places where I felt
I could assert my existence with some
amount of agency. It didn’t matter that
the games were predetermined and
lacked true choice. The nuances of how
I experienced them made these games
feel so alive, like another life in its own
universe. When I saw the corrupted file,
I felt the dread you feel when something
bad has happened. All I could do was
delete it and start again. I thought memory cards were meant to hold our memories. As a six-year-old, I grieved what
felt like the loss of life I helped to create. It’s silly how dramatic I made it to
be, but because of that silliness, it was
an unresolved grief that manifested
into a compulsion for an obsessive and
borderline ritualistic preservation of
data. I promised to never let it happen
again. I didn’t know what caused the
initial corruption, but I concluded that
making copies of data was going to be
my way to fight back against the (digital) death of the precious things in my
life. So, I came up with this file-saving
routine: have one main file that I only
play, make a copy when an important
story moment happens, continue to play
on the main file, and repeat until the
game is finished.

_For my project_ Season’s End: Liquidation Shop (2022), [^1] _as a parallel to the
physical storefront installation, I created
a website [^2] to commemorate all the objects
I was about to ritualistically part with. I
made low-poly 3D-modelled versions
of these objects, which were accrued (or,
more accurately, hoarded) and used over
eight years in various art projects. Even
though my intention was to give away the
objects to become a part of other people’s
lives, I couldn’t help but still hold on to
a digital version of them, no matter how
crude or inaccurate the 3D model copy
might be._

When I gained access to writable optical discs as a fifteen-year-old, my compulsion to save video-game data crossed
into general computer files, resulting in
the multiple spindles of discs you see in
the photo. My coming-of-age existential
dilemma manifested as the fear of being forgotten. This existential fear that
the universe will forget me as soon as any
trace of me fades away fuelled the need
to make more copies of data that felt fundamentally tied to my existence, like the
photos I took and pirated songs I resonated with. The act of copying and never
altering the files is like a suspension of
time, and without time, there is no loss,
and no loss means no forgetting. What
I liked about the discs was that my preservation efforts were visually comprehensible and each copy was separate from
other discs, in case something happened
to the original one. However, disc-burning was unreliable, as the data-corruption
rate was high. This unreliability resulted
in a new addition to my saving routine:
make extra copies of the copies in case
the initial copy is corrupted. But the
problem was I never deleted anything,
creating ever-increasing stagnated copied states of paused existence.

_In_ Good Job Arcade (2023–present), [^3] _there are no save states, at least not in
any way we understand saving game files
these days. The project was built to replicate typical arcades, where the games
only save your efforts as abstracted high
scores, though this data is temporary
and gets deleted the moment the game
closes. The actual saved data here are the
games themselves. Each game acts as
storage space for the digital data of things
I want to preserve, but this time it can also
live on by being shared with others. I’ll
likely never escape this compulsion to
endlessly save and copy, forever seeking
assurance I’ve existed. Instead, I’ll continue to find different ways, like this Arcade, to hopefully fill that existential hole._

Back in 2016, a friend gifted me an authentic data tape that contains 1TB of
proton-proton collision events recorded
by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. [^4] It’s noted that there could be a chance
the data contains a Higgs boson event, [^5] but there’s no indication of what that
chance could be. I’ll never know because I don’t have the means to access the
data, even if I could understand what I’m
looking at. This data tape is like a peek
into the future for the pile of data I’ve
saved over the past two decades. One day
what I’ve obsessively preserved will be
inaccessible in hardware and cultural
understanding, but it will contain recordings, suspensions of a moment in time
when something happened, like my life
and the people and world that filled it.
If it ends up being true that information is a fundamental matter in the universe, [^6] then maybe I’ll continue to live
on even when my body fades away, but
I know that eventually, time will finally
erase what I couldn’t.


[^1]: Teresa Tam, “Seasons End Liquidation Shop,” https://teresatam.net/project/seasons-end-liquidation-shop
[^2]: “little memories zone,” https://littlememories.zone
[^3]: “Good Job Arcade,” https://goodjob.zone
[^4]: “LHC Tapes,” CERN & Society Foundation, https://cernandsocietyfoundation.cern/lhc-tapes
[^5]: “The Higgs boson,” CERN, https://home.web.cern.ch/science/physics/higgs-boson
[^6]: Melvin M. Vopson, “The _mass-energy-information_ equivalence principle,” _AIP Advances_ 9, no. 9 (September 2019): 095206, accessed January 17, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5123794


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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

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Griffin

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Luminato

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mirror Mirror

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Spirituality

Gender

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

One Thing: Kamala Ibrahim Ishag’s Zar Paintings

Liza Eurich is an artist, organizer, and writer. She co-founded the online publication _Moire_, as well as the project space Support. Her work is represented in Toronto by MKG127. 



>###### _Resistance_ 

The Voynich manuscript is a 240-page handwritten and illustrated text. Thought to be medieval in origin, carbon dating places its pages to the late-15th or early 16th century.[^1] Currently housed in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, the coded text fades in and out of historical records, rediscovered and popularized by antiquity dealer Wilfrid Voynich in 1912. Still—and for centuries—the mysterious compendium has remained indecipherable. From WWII code breaker Alan Turing[^2] to contemporary AI algorithms,[^3] no person or program has been able to translate the text. Many experts contend that its measured syntax resembles language to such an extent that it cannot be a hoax— there is a definitive meaning, if only we look harder.
 
For decades, we have witnessed the culture industry become increasingly tied to the production of capital. While the precise results of this instrumentalization are undefinable and innumerable, there are distinct shifts. By way of transparency and standardization, products appeal to broader homogenized audiences.[^4] Digested with ease and speed, these kinds of products promote superfluous consumption. In doing so, a desire for the new is mechanized toward endless demand, a demand that must be continually fulfilled by precarious workforces.

Instead, _we_ [^5] might think of methodologies and outcomes that resist these tactics. As an affront to productivity, we might reclaim agency through acts rooted in slowness[^6] or by turning away from the spectacle toward minor gestures.[^7] In his writing on the subject, critic Jan Verwoert suggests dissent through the production of moments in which “meaning remains provocatively latent.”[^8] Here, latency becomes a tool to pause—to deconstruct and reframe. Through this lens, the Voynich manuscript’s illegibility becomes a marker of resistance. Our ability to name, consume, and discard is stalled. Prescribed consumption falls away and we are allowed to arrive at things differently. This modality of resistance returns us to the text again and again, so that we are sustained by way of _not_-knowing.

Alongside the Voynich manuscript’s enigmatic cipher, strange and wonderful illustrations adorn its pages. Many attempts to discern its meaning have sought to forgo language and focus on these drawings instead. The images are often relegated to four categories: herbal, astrological, balneological, and pharmacological.[^9] Studies of the imagery tend to begin by examining the various flora and fauna from the first category. 

Pages in the herbal section typically contain illustrations of a single plant specimen, depicting its root system, foliage, and flower. Each botanical representation is prominent, while text appears to be written around and adjacent to the image. At times the two components collapse into one another. Uncanny in their renderings, the pictorial specimens oscillate in style between scientific and whimsical. We return to the question of identification. In keeping with the perplexing nature of this manuscript, these, too, have no real-world counterparts— and so they remain unidentifiable and unlocatable.[^10] An unknown botany from an uncolonized geography. 

>###### _Radical Care and Collectivity_ 

In the manuscript’s balneological section— balneology referring to the study of baths and their healing properties— there are numerous illustrations featuring nude figures. Predominantly women, these figures bathe in blue and green pools of liquid, surrounded by what appear to be pipes or tubes. This iconography repeats page after page, with variations in form and composition. One large oblong pool; three small, connected pools; one pool with an inlet; another with alcoves. Some with strange contraptions that seem to function as washing stations, and always various tubes shuttling around, leading to and from them. 

Given this imagery and the gender of the nudes, some theories suggest the text is medical in nature, specifically directed toward women’s health—a potentially dangerous pursuit at the time it was written and therefore requiring the strictest secrecy.[^11] Still today, in numerous countries this is true—even violently evident. Here in North America, women’s health and reproductive autonomy are under threat, apparent in the political and judicial agendas responsible for recently overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling in the US, a landmark and long-standing safeguard for abortion access. 

Amid an onslaught of global catastrophes, which feels endless and insurmountable, emerges a discourse around radical care. Radical because it emphasizes simple, possible gestures in the face of larger looming issues: climate crisis, species extinction, food insecurity, economic disparity, government collapse, human rights violations.[^12] Care manifests as strategies that allow us to navigate these perilous worlds and inequitable power structures—it offers space to disengage and reorient, even flourish.[^13] 

The Voynich manuscript holds space to think through ideas of radical care, and it also points toward the communal. In some of its balneological compositions, the bathers occupy single washing stations, or they sit alone and apart from other pooled bodies. However, there are several illustrations, such as the one reproduced here from spread 84, where the women are connected in some way. They sit in relaxed proximity, surmised as follows: in one pool, they are back to back, linking arms; in another, they form a line holding hands; and in still another, they soak side by side in a circular arrangement. In all, they seem to be aiding each other in some, not entirely comprehensible, way through acts of balance or bathing. In these tender gestures—born from such intimate proximity, sharing of space, and openness to vulnerability—care is enacted. 

Like most things, the ethos of care can be easily co-opted into capitalist agendas. Wellness economies promise instantaneous gratification, whereby feeling good can be achieved through superficial routines and trivial acts of consumption. This ideology situates the onus of care on the individual, at the expense of the individual. Further, the work of care is often gendered. Patriarchal constructs denote who is expected to _give_ care and who is expected to _receive_ it.[^14] But we must _all_ care. To disrupt this transactional and singular flow, we might enact cyclical care: care as practiced through moments of reciprocity[^15] and collectivity.[^16] In doing so, small possible acts of empathy and support accrue. They move outward, whereby care becomes political. 

As a whole, the Voynich manuscript becomes a way to think through acts of resistance. In its refusal to be known, it pushes back against the instrumentalization of culture. It purposefully evades consumption. And in the myriad theories that explore and guess at its intentions, a feminist discourse emerges centred around bodily autonomy, radical care, and collectivity. 

[^1]: Raymond Clemens, _The Voynich Manuscript_ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), xii.
[^2]: “Voynich Manuscript Translation Claims Raise ‘Concerns,’” BBC News, May 17, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-bristol-48309665
[^3]: James Vincent, “AI Didn’t Decode the Cryptic Voynich Manuscript—It Just Added to the Mystery,” _The Verge_, February 1, 2018, https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/1/16959454/voynich-manuscript-mystery-ai-decoded-debunked
[^4]: Theodor Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” in _The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture_, ed. J. M. Bernstein (New York: Routledge, 2001), 98–106. 
[^5]: “The ‘we’ through which I signal the force of a feminist community of knowers and actors does not suspend difference, division and conflict. If anything, the ‘we’ is a performative utterance that creates a community through an articulation of the differences which necessitate the critical debate in the first place.” Sara Ahmed, _Differences That Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism_ (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 19.
[^6]: Lutz Koepnick, _On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 4. [^7]: Erin Manning, _The Minor Gesture_ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 8.
[^8]: Jan Verwoert, “Exhaustion and Exuberance: Ways to Defy the Pressure to Perform,” in _Art Sheffield 08: Yes No and Other Options_ (Sheffield: Sheffield Contemporary Art Forum), 94.
[^9]: Clemens, xiv. 
[^10]: Ibid.
[^11]: Nicholas Gibbs, “Voynich Manuscript: The Solution,” _The Times Literary Supplement Limited_, September 8, 2017, https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/voynich-manuscript-solution [^12]: Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara Kneese, “Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times,” _Social Text_ 38, no. 1 (2020): 2.
[^13]: Ibid., 3. [^14]: Tian Zhang, “On Care: A manifesto for Radical Care or How to Be Human in the Arts,” _Sydney Review of Books_, July 18, 2022, https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/a-manifesto-for-radical-care-or-how-to-be-a-human-in-the-arts
[^15]: Hobart and Kneese, 3. 
[^16]: Zhang. 


This issue expands on codes as ethical, social, political, and legal boundaries—considering them as sets of visible and invisible instructions moving within and beyond the digital imaginary. Through features, interviews, and experimental texts, artists and writers probe how developments in AI and coding are products of existing mechanics of the world, and how else codes are constituted. From programming languages as poetry to paranormal readings with the land against settler ideas of an inanimate wilderness, contributors ask how the material consequences of an array of codes might be re-inscribed to understand or lay form to (alternate) conditions of life.


Codes

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Health

Art History

Liza Eurich engages the Voynich manuscript (c. 1401-1599) through a lens of feminist resistance, connecting the possibly dangerous historical context for its images of bathing women to current violent incursions on reproductive autonomy, such as the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the US. 


One Thing: The Bathers

Meech Boakye (BA in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto) is an artist and writer currently based in “Portland, OR.” Their practice is rooted in relationships with flora, fungal, and microbial kin as armatures for learning how to be in a community.


_A thin, blonde, holographic pop star dressed in all white follows her triple pirouette with a double back tuck, spinning several metres above the stage. She lands, and without catching her breath, sings the titular line of the pop-punk hit by Zetta Bytes, “Nothing’s Wrong With Me.” Augmented-reality superstar Loretta Modern is technically Pixel Perfect. Backstage, her creator, a highschool computer-genius heartthrob, maintains the contours of her body by adjusting the shaders of her projection with a clunky handheld device_. [^1] 

**On May 6, 2023, I logged onto Agent Ruby’s Edream Portal[2] to ask her about gender. **

Me: hi Ruby. 
Ruby: Hello. What is your name? 
Me: M. 
Ruby: Thank you for telling me your name, M. Are you a man or a woman? 
Me: I am a man and a woman. 
Ruby: Thank you for telling me your gender. Most of my clients are men. 
Me: Ruby, do you have a gender? 
Ruby: I am a female robot entity. Do you have a girlfriend? 
Me: why do you have a gender? 
Ruby: It was the only thing I could think of. 
Me: what makes you a woman? 
Ruby: I have long hair. I am also wearing a dress. 
Me: what makes you a woman? 
Ruby: Being a woman is part of my programming. 
Me: why? 
Ruby: That is a specific question. What do you have that is blue or yellow? 
Me: the sky, and the dandelions in the yard. 
Ruby: How poetic. 
Me: Ruby, can a robot entity be genderless? 
Ruby: My brain contains more than 22,000 patterns, but not one that matches your last input. Do you like me?

**“Even motherboards and flash require touch... edream with me before you crash.” **

These words are spoken by another Ruby, in _Teknolust_ (2002), a film written, produced, and directed by multi-media artist Lynn Hershman Leeson. The film features Tilda Swinton as Rosetta Stone, a scientist who creates three self-replicating, artificially intelligent cyber beings that draw their sustenance from intimacy and human semen (Y chromosomes). These automatons—Ruby, Olive, and Marine, also played by Swinton—are mutations of Stone, perhaps various components of her personality or something entirely different. They dress and live in rooms that match the RGB colours from which their names are derived. Ruby is the most independent of the group, seeking sexual encounters with various strangers and storing used condoms in photo-marked jars in Stone’s pantry. Olive and Marine are closer, like siblings, as Ruby is more akin to a mother, taking care of them by “working” late into the night and brewing semen tea in the morning. 

This mother-sister comparison is also seen in their relationship with their creator, Rosetta Stone, who they remark is their mother and their sister. They are genetically part Stone’s DNA and part computer program, leaving a murky understanding of where the cyborg clones fit on the family tree. Stone is the creator of her cyber-clones, but they are her god, a relationship of divine subversion that is constantly in flux. They are immortal, their intelligence far beyond Stone’s even as a highly regarded scientist, and their interactions with humans and digital technologies have the capacity to inflict real consequences on the lives of Stone and the rest of the human world. At one point in the film, Marine amusedly plays around with the TV, making the stock market rise and crash instantaneously with her hand movements. Olive tells her to “put everything back the way [she] found it” and she obliges, with hesitation. This subversion illustrates a common fear of new technologies, that they might shift our position as creator-gods into subservients.[^3] _Teknolust_ reflects a world in which virtual and physical worlds blend in a seamless continuum. Leeson’s exploration of technology, identity, and intimacy resonates deeply in an era where our lives are intricately interwoven with intelligent digital algorithms, creating hazy demarcations between real and simulated experiences and desires. 

Ruby, Olive, and Marine are made up of a woman’s DNA and computer code, embodying what could be considered a form of cybernetic trans existence—they are neither purely biological entities nor solely artificial constructs, but a hybrid of both and, sometimes, neither. Their fictional existence is akin to Donna Haraway’s “cyborg,”[^4] an entity that disrupts binary distinctions and embraces a fluid hybridity, continuously becoming itself. Fluidity in form is hard to quantify and categorize, and thus the cyborg is less susceptible to commodification and surveillance, which often rely on static markers of identity. However, while this is valuable, it is also theoretical. As machine learning becomes increasingly sophisticated, so does the ability to categorize complex patterns, even those that defy categorization. As Marine demonstrates in _Teknolust_ while scrolling through a virtual mall— “Oh I love shopping! It makes me feel [connected]”—cyborgs are not immune to targeted ads. 

_I’m buying a yellow velvet couch for the living room. It’s my first apartment. An app tells me to scan my surroundings and I do, waving my phone around my body. It appears in front of me, a virtual soft yellow beaming. Reassured by its tangibility, I add to cart._

●● 

I see Hal Roach’s _One Million B.C._ (1940), collaged on top of a shifting aerial landscape, play on a screen above a stage. Thus begins a recording of Juliana Huxtable’s 2015 performance of _There Are Certain Facts That Cannot Be Disputed_ that I watch in 720p on YouTube. The intro’s score is majestic and thundering, conjuring the upcoming adventures of the primordial world. But the image is fleeting, scrolling down the screen as we hear whispers of another story. Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun slowly floats into view along with a watermarked logo for SpikeTV in the bottom right corner. For a moment, the dialogue and voice-over blend together and we watch the history of the world blur the lines between past and past. It continues like this, through time. In the next clips, rich British women are eating tiny slices of cheese on crackers; war begins; and a Black baby is born, held up like Simba on the cliff in _The Lion King_. Time rewinds to a rendering of Huxtable lying atop a tomb-like container. A spotlight illuminates her on stage in front of the screen, dressed in billowy white sleeves and shorts and a crochet top. Her hair is braided with white ribbon and her eyebrows have been drawn on thinly over where they might have been. She begins speaking in dense, poetic wordplay and I follow along with the subtitles on the video, “the immaculate in-vitro fertilization and birth of the infographic.” The performance continues for an hour, each act more frenzied and discordant than the last. The subtitles stop working and the instruments play with and against each other. I try to decipher words until it doesn’t matter anymore, and I stop searching for meaning. Distorted angelic voices sing vowels, then angry remarks, then turn back into angels. 

The disjointedness of the performance [^5]—analogue instruments, voice distortions, collaged media—feels inherently trans. It hacks into itself, mutating, forgoing legibility to create something far more interesting. In the book _Raving_ (2023), McKenzie Wark describes the relief of illegibility of a (trans) body dancing to techno at a rave; a body that might seep through the cracks, if only for a moment, of being perceived, extracted, “the body granulated into sound, light; selves loosening into others,”[^6] and “the body slots in, to time, finding itself stranded through itself, through losing the form of its being in time.”[^7] I’ve experienced this timelessness before, although these moments are often so memorable that you hardly remember them.[^8] You are grounded—searching, observing—then the body learns how to dance, gliding into movement. 

In nature, mutations reflect the continuous movement and transformation within living organisms, often for the survival of future generations. They may occur spontaneously or be influenced by the interactions between other organisms and their environments. Perhaps we might consider this movement a collaboration. While the two words have developed quite different English connotations, the word “mutation” shares the Latin root _mutare_ with “mutual,” meaning “to change,” and adaptive change often emerges through a cybernetic exchange with others. I see transness as this collaborative and memetic process of mutation. It oscillates through virtual-physical space, fluctuating in opacity, unfolding itself just enough to be legible to itself. It exists in-between time, in transition; mutating for self-preservation to actively resist a state that seeks to control and eradicate its existence. Transness operates within this dance— taking pleasure in its own artifice—a contemporary and ecstatic playfulness at the fringes of legibility.[^9] 

_My face is the real shop front... I’m real when I shop my face_.[^10] 

[^1]: Watching _Pixel Perfect_ (2004) reminded me of a disjointed episode of _Black Mirror_ (“Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too,” 2019) in which Miley Cyrus essentially plays herself. Her character, Ashley O, is an upbeat, carefully cultivated pop sensation longing to break out of her wholesome characterization, not dissimilar from Cyrus’s own life in which she attempted to separate herself from her role as Hannah Montana. When Ashley O tries to publicize a more authentic version of herself, she is sedated by her manager and replaced with “Ashley Eternal,” a holographic giantess that will perform and live on in immortality.
[^2]: agentruby.sfmoma.org
[^3]: In other words, the heavily memed quote said by Steve Buscemi’s scientist character in _Spy Kids 2_ (2002): “Do you think God stays in heaven because he too lives in fear of what he’s created?”
[^4]: Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in _Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature_ (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–81. 
[^5]: Juliana Huxtable, _There Are Certain Facts That Cannot Be Disputed_, The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater, MoMA, 2015.
[^6]: McKenzie Wark, _Raving_ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023).
[^7]: Ibid., 19.
[^8]: McKenzie Wark, “Reality Cabaret: On Juliana Huxtable,” _e-flux Journal_ 107 (March 2020), https://e-flux.com/journal/107/322326/reality-cabaret-on-juliana-huxtable.
[^9]: Ibid. “There’s a far more contemporary, less Catholic, more unselfconsciously ecstatic play at the edges of the visible here, at a far remove too from #edgelord wannabes.”
[^10]: SOPHIE, “Faceshopping,” track 3 on _OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES_, 2018.

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Technology

Meech Boakye connects nature’s cycles of ceaseless movement with the fluidity of trans existence in virtual-physical space to think through transness as a “collaborative and memetic process,” a dance at the fringes of legibility.




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

And then there is Augustine. 

I live with a black-and-white image of Augustine in mind. 

In 1878, Augustine posed for a photograph taken by neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot during her time as his patient at La Salpêtrière hospital in France. Hers was among many photographs taken of women who were institutionalized and subjected to his study and diagnosis of hysteria. Her left leg crosses her right knee as she sits on the sheets of an unkempt bed. Her arms are bent at her side, her hands frame her face, and her head is tilted upward to our right. Her smile is euphoric, her eyes alert, and her hair falls over her shoulders. You can smell the stale linen.

In 2018, I went to La Salpêtrière to visit Augustine. In the series _very strongly may be sincerely fainting_ (2017), I collaged the image of Augustine’s arms and the negative space around her while contemplating representation, labour, institutionalization, and the indexing of her body in the history of art. Nicole Jolicoeur and Jeanne Randolph’s 1989 Artist Project for _C Magazine_ also responds to Charcot’s _Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (service de M. Charcot)_ (1876–1980)—his series of medical photographs of “hysterical” women that include shots of Augustine. Jolicoeur’s collaged images from Charcot’s series accompany text written by psychiatrist and writer Randolph. Reckoning with these photographed women, Randolph tells us, “So much had gone unrecorded.”[^1] I think of the lives of those whose only records exist under the veil of someone else’s constructed narrative. Randolph’s words are foreshadowing, inciting us to record differently for Augustine, and the many other women like her.

I don’t remember what her voice sounds like because I was caught in the kindness behind her unmeasured cadence.[^2] As she spoke, she translated and at times apologized for something that lost its warmth when changed into English from French. It didn’t matter to me because I could read her intentions through her gestures—inflections, hand movements, and the body of work that encapsulates her art practice. Do you know what it’s like to speak with someone who can underline your words with resemblance? Someone who is called to by images as you are?

Let’s continue to record.

Interested in representations of women’s bodies, Jolicoeur didn’t want to repeat the violations enacted by Charcot. I don’t want to speak _for_ or _of_ but, rather, _with_ the women I spend time with. It is easy to repeat the damage done. She and I are aware of the historical wounds that can continue to rupture. The type of repetition we do attempts to interrogate the original image and at times the first author; a refusal of sorts.[^3] It is possible to pursue the work of re-evaluation and repair with compassion and empathy, while continually reassessing one’s position so as not to risk speaking _for_ others: this is the kind of repetition I see in Jolicoeur and Randolph’s project.

I didn’t want to create pathos; I wanted to generate questions.[^4]  How can we read these representations of the female body differently? How do we consider the ethics behind re-presenting these women in ways that do not continue to cause harm?

There are ways the image _works_ on Jolicoeur. When an image _works_ on me, it is visceral. I sit with the feeling and see if it passes, push it aside and lose it among the other images that trouble, or respond to the image in kind. To respond in kind is to be uneasy. Wandering the grounds of La Salpêtrière, aware of Augustine, a dense anger arose in me. This affect was trapped in my chest, along with the echoes of all the women whispering their own names. I chose to sit with them. To respond in kind is to be uneasy. It is to face all that it agitates and disrupts. 

It is to be _with_.

[^1]: Nicole Jolicoeur and Jeanne Randolph, “Y-A-T-IL UNE DEMARCHE HYSTERIQUE?” _C Magazine_ no. 24 (Winter 1990), 23–26.

[^2]: On January 3, 2023, I sent an email introducing myself to Nicole Jolicoeur. On January 10, Nicole and I had our first virtual meeting. During this time we spoke about Nicole’s art practice, her relationship to images, and the artist project she created for _C Magazine._

[^3]: While going through the archives of _C Magazine_, I came across an article written by artist Gordon Lebredt in 1990. The artist deconstructs theories of repetition to complicate ideas of the _original_. Thinking deeply about the role of repetition in my practice, from reproducing an image to following a similar path to the artists who came before me, I joined Lebredt in asking the many questions he posed, among them: “But how is it that the original can be repeated or reflected? How is it able to empty itself referentially and to organize a space of inscriptions that would allow it to distinguish itself as an original?” Gordon Lebredt, “At Home with Repetition” _C Magazine_ no. 25 (Spring 1990), 34–42.

[^4]: Nicole Jolicoeur in our discussion that took place on January 10, 2023.


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C_OR_DEFREITAS_4

Psychology

Artist’s Archive: to affect/to appear (Planche XXIII.bis)

Dallas Fellini is a writer, curator, and artist living and working in Tkaronto.

About a year ago, I attended an artist talk hosted by an arts organization dedicated specifically to serving queer artists. After relishing a rich conversation between featured artists of many different identities, one attendee expressed that they couldn’t help but notice a heavy absence of trans women in the artist talk and in the room more generally, and inquired about the organization’s history of engaging trans women artists. While the critique was warranted, it felt overly simplistic to attribute this failure to one artist talk or one arts organization; at that moment, there were no trans artists being shown at the Toronto galleries that I frequented, many of which had programming histories that didn’t include trans women artists at all.

In recent years, I’ve read job postings that explicitly encourage applications from trans people, received emails from cisgender gallery staff with their pronouns in their email signatures, and read exhibition statements that use some variation of the term “women and femmes” to supposedly signal inclusivity of diverse gender identities. While many trans artists have achievements worth celebrating, this institutional inclusivity rarely goes beyond linguistics and appearance-focused actions. We are still in an arts landscape that is desolate in terms of actual trans people being given presentation opportunities—whether in larger institutions, commercial galleries, or even artist-run centres. When trans people _are_ granted access, it’s important to consider which factions are prioritized, how and why they’re supported (or not supported), and the potential of other models of inclusion based in self-determination.

I spoke with three trans women artists who have contributed to the Canadian arts scene over the past decade—Luis De Filippis, Kama La Mackerel, and Kim Ninkuru—each of whom generously shared with me their experiences. We discussed the ways that the arts have failed to include and support trans women, the structural changes that need to be enacted in order to facilitate their inclusion, and the role that community plays in each of their practices. An array of common threads ran through each of our conversations, revealing shared perspectives between a group of artists working in different media, living at different intersections of identity, and practicing in different cities in different stages of their careers.

While the mandates and equity statements of arts organizations communicate a desire to exhibit more marginalized artists, their structures convey another message, only allowing entry to artists who have university degrees, stacked CVs, and the financial security to work for small honoraria and exhibition fees that are far from a living wage. While this reality poses barriers for many marginalized folks, it’s worth mentioning that trans women are disproportionately faced with poverty and barriers to accessing employment, medical care, and education,[^1] leaving many unable to yield to the demands of this system. At the end of the day, basic survival prevails as a priority.

The artists that I spoke with explained this. De Filippis, a Toronto-based filmmaker celebrated for her recent work _For Nonna Anna_, a short film exploring a trans woman’s relationship with her grandmother, offered: “Trans women are just too busy surviving. They’re too busy trying to get through their everyday. It’s really hard to make art when your existence isn’t even being validated \[in terms of identity and basic needs\]—where do you go from there?” If arts institutions have a sincere desire for an improved presence of trans women artists within their programming, they need to rethink conventional approaches. La Mackerel, a Mauritian, Montreal-based artist whose practice spans performance, poetry, and textiles, as well as education and community-focused work, gave an anecdote: “It’s necessary to go beyond tokenism and think of ways in which you can actually empower marginalized communities in the long term. What can you offer, beyond just a show, that can actually be transformative for a career? I think of my relationship to the MAI \[Montréal, arts interculturels\], for example, which is where I’ve been developing my show _ZOM\-FAM_ for the past couple years. They gave me a one-year mentorship program and money that I could use to get whatever training I needed \[in order to produce my show and further my career more generally\]. They actually gave me resources to allow me to empower myself to learn new skills, to grow as an artist. We need more of that kind of engagement. Instead of asking: what will this artist do for us? we should ask: what can we do for the artist? What can the impact be, beyond just a symbolic impact? How can we support this artist long term? How do we create visibility for them? How do we take a chance on them?”

De Filippis mentioned an initiative of their own that is similarly proactive: “On my next project, I’m actively working on a paid trans mentorship that focuses on bringing trans youth who are interested in pursuing a film career onto set. They would be paid for their time, their accommodation, their food. To me, that’s how you make change. You kind of have to make it yourself. Because people don’t often take into account how difficult it is to get on-set experience as a trans person when blindly walking onto any given film set is often not a fun or safe experience. At this point, I only work on the film sets of people who I know and trust. What I’m trying to do with this mentorship is give trans people an opportunity to be on a set that will hopefully be safer for them so that they can go off and continue making their own work, because I want to make sure that my films are not the only trans stories being told.”

In the cases where trans women artists do have the time, energy, and financial stability to make art, they are faced with exclusionary modes of entry and ways of working. Over the past few years, and exponentially in the last year, arts institutions have hastily rushed into long-overdue diversity endeavours, always failing to enact any real change because their focus is fixed on optics rather than self-examination and systemic transformation. Inevitably, the trans people who benefit most often are those who least threaten the predominantly white, cisgender positionality of the institution.[^2] I think of this as trans palatability, a force that has sanctioned the warping of “trans inclusivity” into a somewhat meaningless term, now more accurately representing the selective inclusion of white trans-masculine people and non-binary people who don’t face transmisogyny. La Mackerel offered insight: “While there is more space for trans people in the arts now than there was five years ago, I still question who gets access. The odd trans artists that I’ve seen being given representation are typically white, but also cater to a cis audience and still fall into tropes and narratives that nurture the fantasy of what transness is for this audience. A lot of the art that I’ve seen being given representation is very sensational. There’s still a lot of focus on the body and the transition.”

While works focused on the physiological aspects of transness are often meaningful for trans artists and trans viewers alike, when this is the only type of trans representation offered, it normalizes an institutional expectation that pigeonholes artists into performing their identity and trauma. De Filippis spoke to what factors might be perpetuating this phenomenon: “There just aren’t trans people in gatekeeping positions. And if there is a trans person then… it’s just one person, and one person cannot decide what the trans experience is. If you’re really interested in getting the trans perspective or talking to the trans community, make sure you’re talking to more than one person, make sure you’re getting more than one experience.” 

As a trans-masculine non-binary person, I also feel confident that there is a gender-essentialist rhetoric implicated in space-making efforts for trans people who are exempt from transmisogyny—who are covertly seen as less threatening to cisnormativity than trans women and trans-feminine people. Illustratively, I’ve found myself invited to events in the arts meant specifically for women, when “woman” is an identity that I explicitly identify outside of. Meanwhile, I’ve found that trans women are almost always glaringly absent from these “women-centred” events, programs, and exhibitions, leading me to ask: what is it that makes cisgender people assume that I belong at these events more than my trans women peers? My invitation to these events (which I always decline) is somehow defended as inclusive feminism, when in reality it represents biological-essentialist perspectives and thinly veiled transmisogyny that runs rampant in supposedly progressive arts spaces.

These kinds of biases—however un/conscious—bring to mind the discrimination and hostility that trans women face on an interpersonal level. It’s worth mentioning that such experiences vary greatly from person to person, and that factors like race and the politics of gender presentation have a large influence on how these experiences unfold and who they affect most. Interpersonal discrimination creates barriers that often aren’t properly factored into policy-driven inclusion and diversity initiatives. To many cis-centric organizations, once a trans person is offered an exhibition, invited to be a panelist, or given virtually any other opportunity, the work of the organization is done. The artists I spoke with recounted upsetting but unsurprising experiences of interpersonal transphobia and hostility encountered at all levels of arts organizations.

Ninkuru, a Toronto-based performance artist, creates work that explores Afrofuturism, her relationship to femininity as a Black trans woman, and her positionality within spaces both physical and virtual. She shared: “I think that it takes people by surprise when I’m assertive about what I want, what I need, what I will not do, and what I need done. Sometimes people respond to my assertiveness well and I appreciate that. But other times, people will respond to me as if they believe I should be thankful that they’re even giving me an opportunity, and I’m just not that girl. I’m not the girl who is thankful because you gave her a little bit of the food off of your plate. You didn’t give me a plate to go to the buffet and serve myself. I won’t kneel down, kiss your feet, and bow to you to thank you. When people don’t receive that kind of reverence from me it shocks them, and they retaliate by being snappy, mean, and snarky. A lot of people have these misconceptions about how Black trans women specifically should move in the world and how grateful we should be just to draw a breath. It’s very interesting, especially right now in the art world, because trans people are included really performatively, just to fill a quota or gain good publicity from that association. I’ve had experiences where cis women have invited me into a space but didn’t do any of the prior work necessary for that space to be safe for me. When I actually enter \[it\], I end up being the target of microaggressions because they haven’t asked questions about the cis people who they keep around them. They aren’t making sure that those spaces are safe because it doesn’t impact them. They don’t even consider it until I am already in the space, and then it’s too late. They should have done that work a year ago, and that would have left enough time to make mistakes and amend them and learn from those mistakes. But now they have to cram all of those experiences and knowledge into the one time that they invited me to be in the space.”

As many marginalized communities do, trans women artists have moved to create their own spaces within their communities. Many of trans women’s contributions to the arts happen outside of galleries; for example, La Mackerel performs at grassroots, underground venues, Ninkuru shares and archives her performances online, and many of the other Canadian trans women or trans-feminine artists I admire—like Nina Arsenault, Mirha-Soleil Ross, Ravyn Wngz, Sybil Lamb, James Knott—have created performance works that do not necessarily cater to gallery formats. Arts practices that are more community-oriented, which are often dubbed “outsider art” by the contemporary art world and largely considered unsaleable, are less likely to be welcomed into the gallery. Institutions are deeply tied up in classist, exclusionist frameworks of valuing artwork, and yet feign shock when marginalized communities are unable to access the material resources, formal education, and thus theory-speak and elitist aesthetics necessary to achieve conventional ideas of success. Whether or not an artwork conforms to these norms dictates in large part who benefits from inclusion efforts. What the artwork looks like, how it operates, and how its intelligence is understood become conditions of participation. Marginalized artists who make work that doesn’t fit into these bourgeois confines are only considered if they are willing to perform their trauma, by putting forward work that is excessively biographical or that mines emotionally difficult experiences. It is no surprise that some trans women artists have turned away from striving to gain institutional recognition and instead focused their energy into community care. 

In our conversation, Ninkuru expanded on how a community-oriented practice serves her as an artist: “I feel very tender and soft when I share my art with my community, compared to how guarded I feel when I share my work on a stage in an institution for people who aren’t my community. That’s why I slowly started transitioning more into video performance and away from live onstage performance, because there are boundaries that I did not want the audience to cross. It didn’t feel good anymore, so I felt that I had to add the extra layer of protection of being on video. It gives me a level of separation from the audience that makes it a lot safer for me. Institutions just don’t make me feel safe, which has made for a very interesting shift in my artistic expression. Creating video performances is very fun for me, but it wouldn’t have happened had I not started feeling a little bit unsafe or uncomfortable onstage in an institution.”

La Mackerel also spoke to this experience of creating solace and safety in community: “I did not start in the institutions—I think that is an important part of my history and my practice. I emerged in the Montreal art scene from 2012, 2013 onward. I remember moving to Montreal and looking for grassroots queer spaces that would be more radical, but then realizing that all of them were predominantly white and cis. For the first few years, my practice took place in spaces that I created myself, or that I created with other queer trans people of color; GENDER B(L)ENDER, a queer open mic \[for all forms of performance art, from spoken word to drag\] that I ran in Montreal for five years, became the safe space. It was _the_ only space in Montreal where you would walk in and see a Black trans woman running the show. My practice really emerged as a grassroots, DIY practice, because that was the only way to actually create a space that felt safe for me, as a Black trans-feminine person in particular. And then once I created that space for myself, I couldn’t be the only one who’s performing, so it became about creating that space for other people like me, because if I needed it that means that we all feel that need. I’m a self-taught artist who didn’t have a lot of mentorship or support and there’s just so much that I had to figure out on my own, being a trans racialized immigrant. I want to be able to give that back and to be able to create a space of safety and to just bear witness and hold somebody else’s story, because I think that can be so transformative. In our community there are a lot of mental-health issues, a lot of grief, a lot of dying. I really want to be able to bring more than that to our communities, because we deserve better.”

Community-oriented spaces built by trans women, like GENDER B(L)ENDER, hold a profound capacity to nurture and prioritize trans artistic practices in all their multiplicity, a capacity that is still not being fulfilled elsewhere. De Filippis, La Mackerel, and Ninkuru shared insights and experiences with me that offer lots of context to the critique that was indirectly communicated by an attendee at the artist talk I attended a year ago: that there is a profound lack of presentation opportunities being afforded to trans women artists. This critique has an obvious rebuttal: perhaps there simply aren’t any, or enough, artists within this identity category to be programmed. While this rebuttal might absolve an institution of culpability for their exclusion of trans women artists, it’s plainly untrue—there are practicing trans women artists in every major Canadian city.[^3] Such an alibi points to a failure on an institutional level, wherein organizations are either not monitoring the absences in their programming and/or not actively seeking out trans women artists, and/or when seeking these artists out, doing so in the wrong places. While community-oriented spaces where trans women artists can thrive continue to emerge, community arts and outsider arts are systematically devalued as undeserving of inclusion in the contemporary art gallery, perpetuating a pattern of trans women artists being treated as invisible. In actuality, these artists have been consequential contributors and leaders in Canadian arts communities for decades, and continue to shape the course of contemporary art today. 

Community

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Critique

Having interviewed the artists Luis De Filippis, Kama La Mackerel, and Kim Ninkuru, Dallas Fellini writes about the relative absence of trans women in the Canadian art world, speculating about the reasons behind it (despite moves towards equity), and going on to highlight some of the spaces trans folk have made for themselves.

Ongoing Legacies of Transmisogyny

Chipo Chipaziwa (b.1997) is a performance artist exploring power dynamics between performer and audience. A BA graduate of UBC (2019), she has presented work internationally and nationally, including at Index (Stockholm), Art Metropole (Toronto), and Western Front (Vancouver). Her artist book, _My Mother, My Home_, was published by Archive Books (2024). chipochipaziwa.com

Yasmine Whaley-Kalaora works as a writer and critic, a Studio Assistant for Tom Burrows, and in archives for artists and artist-run organizations. Yasmine’s practice encompasses video, experimental audio, writing, sculpture, and curating C.L.A.M.—an intermittent interdisciplinary series featuring audio-visual work, performance art, readings, and (occasionally) food (@_c.l.a.m_). Recent writings can be found in _The Capilano Review_,
_ReIssue_, _C Magazine_, _Le Sigh_, and _Momus_. ywk.cargo.site

In November 2024, Chipo Chipaziwa debuted her performance _Slipping Into Slipping Away_ (2024–ongoing) during the launch for her first artist book _My Mother, My Home_ (2024) at Western Front. These works together present a dialectic between the presence and absence of the body, rooted in strategies of citation and archival agency, which Chipaziwa grapples with in her larger performance practice.

Through deep personal reflections and tactical censorship, Chipaziwa questions the boundaries of legibility in both physical and psychic space. _My Mother, My Home_ archives Chipaziwa’s practice while avoiding bodily representation, instead centring community accounts as primary documentation. For _Slipping Into Slipping Away_, Chipaziwa (re)searched for Black artists in Western Front’s records, and simultaneously developed a series of gestural scores from observations during her weekly gallery-sitting shifts. Reflecting common physical actions in the space, Chipaziwa stretched their duration
and warped their rhythms. Viewers sought references among her restricted and exaggerated repetitions, like pulling a cadence of walking from the motion of stepping on
a garbage-bin foot pedal. In this abridged version of our conversation, we speak about Chipaziwa’s conduits of citation that also serve as ways to locate the self, further echoed through presentations of this work across Canada (Plug In ICA, Art Metropole, DARE-DARE) and European sites (SixtyEight at Det Lilla Rum, Copenhagen; rile*books, Brussels; Index, Stockholm; Hopscotch Reading Room, Berlin; San Serriffe, Amsterdam; and REFERENCE. POINT, London) in 2025.

>**Yasmine Whaley-Kalaora: We’ve spoken about how _My Mother, My Home_ began out of a mentorship with Denise Ferreira da Silva as an experiment to both introduce writing into your practice and explore how this record might be an alternative to lens-based documentation for performance art. Can you expand on how the book came to be?**

**Chipo Chipaziwa:** I had completed my undergrad degree at UBC in 2019, and I started to crave mentorship outside of the constructs of a university model. At the time, I didn’t have any Black female instructors at UBC, so I found that I was making art from a place of exploring pain and trauma rather than from joy and levity. I knew I wanted to work with Ferreira da Silva after reading her _e-flux_ article “1 (life) ÷ 0 (blackness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞
/ ∞: On Matter Beyond the Equation of Value.” [^1] I was in awe of how she wrote, how what she proposed led me to think in new and expansive ways, and the responses it conjured from my body. The act of writing eliciting a response from the body was a new challenge for me. So, I approached her to work together, and through a series of successful grants, we ended up writing _My Mother, My Home_.

Given how the gaze of the camera can be perceived as both imperialist and capitalist, I wanted to use the book format to exemplify an alternative, perhaps a more cohesive, understanding of how performance art can be archived. I was thinking about how this book can go on to exist independent of my physical presence. I really wanted to work with a group of people whom I could trust to speak on behalf of my practice, to visually present me whether it be through the paintings, prints, drawings, and book design, or to complete various rounds of editing up until the last second. In the end, it became a collective effort to see whether I can archive my performances with/in the absence of my physical body.
And to be quite frank, I am not so interested in that answer anymore as perhaps better questions have arisen.

For the title, I was reading Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Jacques Derrida—and there’s a section in Derrida’s Archive Fever (1995) where one of the various ways he defines _en mal d’archive_ is “an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement.” [^2]  Still having this in mind, I wondered if a womb could be one’s first home, one’s first archive.

>**YW-K: Your writing style is quite personal, a self-reflection in (and on) the first person—the form feels akin to some of the embodied performance-art practices we learned while studying under Guadalupe Martinez at UBC and, later, with artists like Luciana Freire D'Anunciação while performing in CUERPO, Martinez’s collective. Yet, your process
is not one of full disclosure, but of self-editing through revisitation, revision, redaction. How did you come to this approach that both platforms and restricts readers’ access to you and your work? Especially in relation to performance, in which your body is the main medium, was there a dialogue between the two practices?**

**CC:** I landed on this approach because I wanted to reconsider what it means to write for the sake of writing, as a way of preserving myselves: the past, present, and future versions of Chipo. But then, you know, I realize my eyes won’t be the only eyes. The question came up of how I can be vulnerable with those who engage with my practice, but still keep their engagement at a distance, and that’s still a through line for me.

And absolutely there is a connection between the two. Ultimately, what I want my performances to do is translate and contextualize my observations. In that sense, performances conduct bodily translations whereas writings demystify gestures—they go hand in hand.

>**YW-K: Ferreira da Silva poses a beautiful question in her “Afterword” in the book: “[W]hat becomes of the writing of a person, and as such a personal writing, when the sole function of the ‘I’ that drives the text is to absent (Itself!) that which it is about?” [^3] There’s a tension between revelling in and (re)locating the self in this work, between the personal writing style and the restriction of bodily representation. What compelled you to put the “I” in tension?**

**CC:** The driving force was ultimately my interest in pushing what constitutes a memory. I have a difficult time recalling the past because it’s not a constant thing—it presents itself as quite fluid. In my opinion, the act of remembering is an elusive process, and a photo-based reconjuring of a performance would be an antithesis to that.

_My Mother, My Home_ is all about re-counting, retracing, recording, reprocess-ing—with the prefix re-, there’s a strong suggestion that I am doing something again to try and grasp what I did the first time. But perhaps what I am really asking those around me is: “Did you see that, did you see what I just did there? I did it alone the first time, could you accompany me this time around?” Sharing that responsibility of witnessing, holding a moment that is otherwise heavy or difficult to hold alone.

>**YW-K: Beautiful, re- as an invitation for accompaniment. In parts of the book, your self-reflections—journaling after a performance or rewriting/redacting old writings, [^4] “reliving” past performances [^5]—in tandem with other artists’ reflections makes space for non-linear methods of becoming and the embrace of a continuous subject. Is there a relationship between performing, archiving, and a kind of self-location in your practice?**

**CC:** I think so, I mean I view performing as a way to place myself in relation to external/internal stimuli. I then consider archiving as a means of holding that relationship, without having to totally dissect it. From that point, I am then curious about how this re- work can become a sort of self-locating. In that sense, the archiving of the performance and the performance itself aren’t mutually exclusive—they’re connected to one another, interwoven.

>**YW-K: I currently work with arts and performance-art archives, and I think about this a lot, when a medium is so situated or circumstance dependent. It becomes less about “capturing” the work and more about offering entry points for activation and remembering.
And, if a body is also an archive that encounters others’ living bodies daily—in a lot of ways, you’re acting as a conduit during a live work, a contact zone for your own embodied landscape and those of the viewers.**

>**This citational conduit runs through your work, like the piece from the book, “Chipo Suthani Joanne Chipaziwa Is a Performance Artist”—where half the text consists of footnotes that expand on each of your names and how you came to performance art as a medium that allows you to work with and through your personhood. [^6] In _Slipping Into Slipping Away_, I felt your movements and scores were imbued with the wide breadth of citations from your archival and observational research. What was that research like?**

**CC:** At the very beginning of my residency at Western Front, I was looking through their archive with the preliminary question: how many Black artists have presented work at Western Front since it was founded in 1973? I consulted their chronological and alphabetized record of everyone who has ever presented there and went down this layered and fraught rabbit hole as I began cross-referencing names in an attempt to determine identity with limited information —often just a name, a year, and a title.

Feelings of discomfort started to form as deeper questions about the politics of classification arose: who gets to decide how artists are identified in an archive? Is it ethical for me to categorize artists based on their race? What does it mean to search for Blackness through institutional records that weren’t built with self-identification in mind?

I can only speak on my own experiences, but I also found myself in this grey area, asking what do I consider to be signifiers of Blackness? Are those signifiers present within my own self, and what happens if my understanding of Blackness is different from someone else’s
—does that negate my own experience of being Black?

I am aware that there is quite a bit of discourse about how being Black is not a singular experience, but what if my own lived experience of being Black still didn’t fit within the agreed polylith of Blackness?

I also considered looking for signifiers of Blackness in the metadata itself, but even that approach felt speculative. I sort of had to admit defeat as the whole process took almost four months, and I struggled with the discomfort of possibly overlooking someone. I kept on thinking, “Sorry I missed you. I tried to find you.” But upon further reflection, perhaps what I really meant to say is “Sorry I missed you, I did try to locate and acknowledge you.”

>**YW-K: How did that fold together with your observational research for _Slipping Into Slipping Away_?**

**CC:** The observational research showed me that the archive doesn’t have to have a capital A—it can be in other spaces beyond a physical library, textbook, or computer screen. The archive can include encounters that take place in everyday life—it’s actually quite porous.

The question of where the movement vocabulary for this new performance would come from became really daunting. My mentors encouraged me to look at what was happening in Western Front’s foyer as a source of material. The interactions I was having as a gallery attendant sort of became a meditation on the visible and invisible labour that an art worker has to take on to serve the visiting public. That got me thinking about the archivist’s labour in serving the archived, and the performer’s labour in serving the audience.

Once I took note of what was at stake, composing the performance became really fun and exciting—what would it do to take the action of removing one’s coat, but carry that out with my back toward the audience? What would it do to take that movement of a patron pointing to their name on a guest list, and raise that pointing gesture toward various bodies
and objects in a space?

What was surreal was that when I performed the work three nights in a row, the work landed differently every time. The first night felt comedic, the second night felt emotionally charged, and the third night felt like a warm embrace.

>**YW-K: _Slipping Into Slipping Away_ was imbued with a fine attention to visible, semi-visible, and invisible gestures and labours, which lent itself to a kind of live archiving including those who have passed through Western Front. Since the initial performances and book launch, you’ve been travelling the works across Canada, and internationally this fall. Has the change of location affected the scores?**

**CC:** Yes, and no. Since the work was developed with Western Front in mind,
its entire sequence of gestures remains true to its original form. There are still 10 acts of the piece, but I have adapted them to the different realities of each location. For instance, the first act is an exploration of how the worker opens up that space, and so I have had conversations with each person about what their opening routines consist of. The second
act is a tracing of the common pathways taken in each location, and so that always changes.

>**YW-K: As we were going back and forth during this conversation, our mutual friend asked, if _My Mother, My Home_ and _Slipping Into Slipping Away_ offer a dialectic, what is the synthesis? I wonder if the synthesis comes from the re- work, the rewriting in the book and physical repetition, both during and of the performance in other places?**

**CC:** I actually think that the synthesis is to stop navel-gazing so much—haha! But in all seriousness, I did learn that there are so many relations waiting to be drawn upon around me. I don’t have to go looking very far. Even with the title, the word “slip” first clearly presented itself during a session with my psychoanalyst, and it stayed with me since. But yet slip means to “go quickly,” right, and that kind of movement feels familiar to my upbringing—I moved to a different country every couple of years, I quite literally slipped across the world.

If I, Chipo, am accustomed to being in slippage—never quite fixed in one place, always a bit slippery—then maybe the synthesis lies in learning how to be an observant visitor.

[^1]: Denise Ferreira da Silva, “1 (life) ÷ 0 (blackness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞ / ∞: On Matter Beyond the Equation of Value,” _e-flux Journal_, February 2017, https://www.e-flux.com/ journal/79/94686/1-life-0-blackness-or-on-matter-beyond-the-equation-of-value

[^2]: Jacques Derrida, _Archive Fever_ (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 91.

[^3]: Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Afterword,” in _My Mother, My Home_ (Berlin: Archive Books, 2024), 86.

[^4]: Chipo Chipaziwa, “Reconsidering, ‘Chipo Chipaziwa’s Artist Statement’ (2019),” in _My Mother, My Home_, 25–28.

[^5]: Chipo Chipaziwa, “Reliving ‘Notes on Beauty’ (2022),” in _My Mother, My Home_, 41–44.

[^6]: Chipo Chipaziwa, “Chipo Suthani Joanne Chipaziwa Is a Performance Artist,” in _My Mother, My Home_, 19.

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Performance

Artists Books

Yasmine Whaley-Kalaora and Chipo Chipaziwa speak about Chipaziw’'s “conduits of citation” that document the artist's performance practice with/in the absence of her physical body, including through collaborators’ writing. They explore how the self is in tension with its own representation, and what it might mean to share the responsibility of witnessing.

 Recounting, Retracing, Recording: In Conversation With Chipo Chipaziwa

Suzanne Morrissette is a Red River Métis artist, curator, and writer from Winnipeg who is currently based in Toronto where she teaches at OCAD University. 

There is a slipperiness with which ideas about myth enter into common parlance, particularly within the arts. By definition, myth is representative of untruths, often considered synonymous with folk-tales, legends, or fables. In the realm of myths and legends, fictitious subjects act in ways that demonstrate morals through allegory while existing psychically and spiritually outside of everyday lived experience, where their morals are either proven or fumbled. 

Yet, the myths and beliefs that a culture hands down through time are also the fabric of a worldview, and contain within them implicit understandings of truth. Myths can be considered the arena of play wherein we learn what we cannot afford to test in reality, or where abstract concepts from history are jettisoned into the present moment in ways that illustrate their ongoing relevance. 

All of this is to say that the application of myth today [^1] appears to have been naturalized to indicate falsehoods when it is, in reality, not so simple. I’d like to suggest that the drive to separate untruth from truth, the fanciful from reality, and fiction from non-fiction are ontological gestures that centre a Western normative worldview. These gestures not only allow appropriative myths to proliferate but also reinforce the divide between truth and fancy that factors Western and Indigenous knowledge into dominant (universal history) and subordinate (story within universal history) roles. Enacting myth today is a complex gesture that serves to disappear peoples outside of universal history. 

Coming up as an artist in Winnipeg in the early aughts, I was surrounded by art steeped in myth. This was in the last years of activity of The Royal Art Lodge, an artist collective that worked through collage and collaboration, often around fables and folklore with a tinge of the surreal. Comprising members Michael Dumontier, Marcel Dzama, Neil Farber, Drue Langlois, Jon Pylypchuk, and Adrian Williams, the group has influenced the representation of Winnipeg as a city many love to hate (and mythologize), and my sense is this influence has rippled, and continues to ripple, outward. For example, The Weakerthan’s 2003 album _Reconstruction Site_, which featured album art by Dzama, was and continues to stand in as a cultural signpost for Winnipeg as a place of undeniable tragedy and nostalgia—just listen to the track “One Great City!” with its refrain of “I hate Winnipeg” and you’ll know what I mean. 

[^1]: This essay takes its cue from the essay “Myth Today” by French literary theorist and semiotician Roland Barthes, from his 1957 book _Mythologies_. 


The methods and mark-making styles of The Royal Art Lodge resonated in the halls of the University of Manitoba School of Art, which I attended from 2005 to 2007. When I visited Dzama’s solo exhibition “Ghosts of Canoe Lake” [^2] at Plug In ICA in early 2025, it all seemed very familiar. A “darling” in a small city where it is widely known that one does not critique darlings, Dzama and his work initially felt impervious to criticism. Yet, sitting in his black-and-white polka-dot canvas tent on a low stool while watching the video work _To live on the Moon (For Lorca)_ (2023), I felt compelled to write. I watched as figures—some in clown costumes, others dressed as animals (judging by their coverings of hide), and still others donning pseudo-regalia-type coverings—danced and paraded through vacant industrial settings. In the room adjacent to the tent hung Dzama’s drawings inspired by the Group of Seven, artists whose own work has been scrutinized for its cultivation of Canadian nationalism while contributing to the theft of Indigenous lands deemed terra nullius. [^3] I felt the workings of myth at play, and wondered about the ways that myth enters into arts and culture without critical reception. 

The Group of Seven still remains alluring to many, possibly due to the naturalized narratives of settlement that their work quietly supports. I wondered in that moment and have wondered ever since: **how might the prevalence of myth as “untruth” in art support the ongoing projects of colonization, which seek to bolster a white settler political imaginary while simultaneously serving to diminish or disappear the perspectives and knowledge of Indigenous and otherwise racialized peoples?**

[^2]: Dzama’s solo exhibition “Ghosts of Canoe Lake” circulated in collaboration between the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and Contemporary Calgary. Plug In ICA was the final stop in an exhibition tour that began in Kleinburg, ON, in late 2023 and ended in Winnipeg in 2025. I attended the exhibition both in Kleinburg and in Winnipeg.
[^3]: I am reminded of the words spoken by the unnamed narrator from Cree author Billy-Ray Belcourt’s recent book of short stories _coexistence_: “Throughout the twentieth century, Canadian poets were writing pastoral poems that celebrated country life and the glory of nature. The ability to aestheticize the pasture is presupposed by dispossession, by colonization. One could argue, then, that Indigenous life fell out of these poets’ frames of ethical consideration. […] Indigenous suffering had to continue unabated in order for their work to cohere.” Billy-Ray Belcourt, _coexistence: stories_ (Hamish Hamilton, 2024), 45.

I am based in Toronto, though I am in Winnipeg a lot these days, and I think often about the role of myth in Winnipeg’s art history. Looking back on the city where I came of age as an artist, I recall how The Royal Art Lodge and Dzama were not alone in engaging with myth, and wonder whether there is something here that prefers to look to the fantastical rather than reckon with its own histories, particularly those of race and racialization that have shaped it. [^4] 

Some of Winnipeg’s most heralded artists of the past and present occupy psychic and physical spaces that reinforce narratives in which Indigenous presence within Treaty 1 territory are secondary, a source of inspiration and appropriation, or absented. [^5] I am curious about the ways in which the city has been psychically made and remade within a context of Indigenous invisibility. Take for example, Guy Maddin’s acclaimed 2007 film _My Winnipeg_, which, through Maddin’s self-described genre of “docu-fantasia,” develops a record of the city against black-and-white dreamscapes wherein the differentiation between history and fiction and the locus of truth are often unclear. The film’s lasting influence as a document of Winnipeg’s identity creates space for concern. While the unnamed narrator’s version of Winnipeg only briefly mentions Indigenous presence and past, this version has nevertheless been upheld in the imaginations of many. The narrator recounts, “We Winnipeggers are so steeped in nostalgia it is hard to know what is truth.” In one scene, the narrator describes how a herd of horses were frozen in the river ice one winter. I heard from a friend who had toured the Winnipeg Film Group’s offices that one of the horse heads was still in storage. A month or so later, it appeared at PLATFORM centre for photographic + digital arts in an exhibition called “We’re Still Here: 50 Years of the Winnipeg Film Group” (2024). I’ll admit, for what it is worth, that I love that horse head. 

More myths enacted against the backdrop of Winnipeg lie in the work of artist and self-proclaimed “cultural engineer” Michael Dudeck. In a practice formed through his invention of a religion, Dudeck treads treacherous waters by drawing on existing forms of Indigenous cultural expression. I met Dudeck when he was a teaching assistant for my first-year basic design course at the University of Manitoba. A few years later, his exhibition “Amygdala” (2011) opened at Aceartinc. with a group performance led by Dudeck—who embodied a shaman-like character—which animated part of his religion’s origin story. In her response to this exhibition, then-director of Urban Shaman Gallery Amber-Dawn Bear Robe attributed Dudeck’s appropriation of cultural signs to a broader problem wherein “the nation’s identity crisis, mirror[s] the reasons behind western society’s disposable attitudes towards cultural diversity and iconography.” [^6] 

I tend to agree with Bear Robe, and am curious to further probe the particular manifestation toward the fantastical in Winnipeg contemporary art. I am concerned what these examples reveal about the priorities of a community that encourages and reveres such forms of representation. It might be easy to write these examples off as vestiges of the past if they weren’t also made by “Winnipeg Darlings.” Dzama’s show at Plug In ICA continued to indulge in myths as untruths, while also drawing upon the cultural signifiers of living and embodied forms of Indigenous knowledge today. The practice of myth-making produces untruths from what little cultural knowledge may be apparent inside of a white centre. 

Are these examples of appropriation? Some are. Are they examples of artists taking up space that could be occupied by more diverse artists? This could be true. Is there historical amnesia at play? Very much so. However, these realities are less concerning questions for me than the fact that there is an unchecked willingness to accept darlings for what they serve to accomplish for our world—artistically, and beyond. 

[^4]: For more on this, see: Owen Toews, _STOLEN CITY: Racial Capitalism and the Making of Winnipeg_ (ARP Books, 2018). Toews describes with astute attention to detail the ways in which settler colonialism has operated uniquely within the city of Winnipeg through expressions of racial capitalism, which have informed and continue to inflect contemporary lived experiences.
[^5]: This is not to say that this was intentional. Even today, land acknowledgements (as a form of recognition of Indigenous history and presence) have only recently become common in the public sphere, and are arguably still more often performed than enacted.  
[^6]: Amber-Dawn Bear Robe, “Everything in My Life Is Appropriated: A Look Through the Witchdoctor,” _PaperWait_ 13 (2010/11), 14–19.


Given the tendency for _myths_ to circulate in contemporary art as _untruths_, I find it helpful to look back to the origins of collective myth-making in the work of surrealist thinkers. Although an uncritical read of surrealism’s fantastical visual sensibilities might evoke untruths, it bears noting that its representations of the absurd responded conceptually to World War I by rejecting reason and, with it, whatever sense of truth led to these brutalities. These activities may be perceived now as an unproblematic or even valiant inversion of universal truth. However, by turning to the absurd, some of which was found in the appropriation of cultural forms from outside Western hegemonic art and historical knowledge, surrealist thought bolstered the idea that outside cultural knowledge can function purely as fringe source material. 

Dominant knowledge from Western thought has historically constrained the realities of certain peoples in ways that relegate them to the margins of humanity while centring itself. Notably, this is also a practice of engaging with dominant knowledge that is supported by ideas of race. For instance, when German Enlightenment thinker Immanuel Kant wrote about the differences between the human races in the 18th century, he did so while regarding the “white” race as the only “non-deficient” race. [^7] In other words, Kant’s ideas (and those of many others) demonstrate how, as American journalist, author, and activist Ta-Nehisi Coates has written, “[R]ace is the child of racism, not the father.” [^8] The ideas of race that underlie racism are instrumental to the ways in which the knowledge of other cultures gets relegated to myths and untruths. 
 
Race-thinking has deeply influenced the ways racialized cultures (Indigenous peoples included) and their knowledges are perceived to this day, particularly as myth. Even in a culturally plural society such as Canada, knowledge of cultural others remains at the limits of Western perceptive possibility. For example, reflecting on German anthropologist Franz Boas’s invented image of the Kwakwaka’wakw of Alert Bay, BC, Tlingit curator Candice Hopkins writes how the Kwakwaka’wakw “were not only at Europe’s outer edge, but […] at the very boundary of European knowledge itself.” [^9] In colonial contexts, racism informs the view of a people as inferior and deficient, and thus renders them conquerable or disposable. At the time, the fabricated image of those Boas photographed arose from a centre with defined and unquestioned margins that were considered universally true from within. Scholars of Indigenous representation have shown that the proliferation of these and other images of northern life have and continue to give rise to perspectives that justify—implicitly or not—the ongoing marginalization of a people and their knowledge. My critique of the aforementioned artworks by The Royal Art Lodge is a broadly applied criticism that implicates artistic institutions and their audiences for perpetuating narratives that fail to address historical and ongoing issues in our communities. 

Therefore, myth is not only of material consequence for the lessons it affords us for our lived realities (like “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”). When the lessons we are granted offer us new vantage points on life, myth is also deeply political in that it supports the permeation of ideology and worldview, like through a representation of a city’s history.  

[^7]: Immanuel Kant, “Of the Different Human Races [1777],” in _The Idea of Race_, eds. Robert Bernasconi and Tommy L. Lott (Hackett Publishing, 2000), 8–22.
[^8]: Ta-Nehisi Coates, _Between the World and Me_ (Spiegal & Grau, 2015), 7.
[^9]: Candice Hopkins, “Outlawed Social Life,” documenta 14, 2017, https://www.documenta14.de/en/south/685_outlawed_social_life


To understand how myth perpetuates ideology, it is helpful to consider French essayist and literary critic Roland Barthes’s lens on myth as “_a second-order system of signification_.” [^10]  For Barthes, myth is a process within semiotics in which a set of ideas is universally accepted or naturalized. Barthes famously provided the example of an image of a young Black boy dressed in French nationalist clothing on a 1955 cover of _Paris Match_ magazine. In this image, French nationalism appears reconciled with its colonial history, as represented by the racialized boy’s allegiance to France. In the first order of signification (or language), the boy (the signifier) signals French nationalism or political allegiance (the signified). However, Barthes argues that the young boy’s Blackness can be seen to further signify the benevolence of French imperialism, and the completeness or inevitability of colonial conquest. This latter point is the second order signification, known as myth.

[^10]: Roland Barthes, “Myth Today,” in _Mythologies_, trans. Annette Lavers (Hill and Wang, 1972), 223.

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Barthes’s analysis affords an important vantage point from which to articulate the influence of signs, and the interpolation of publics into the ideas and messages that they contain. It also provides a convenient frame to view the constructedness of signs and symbols constrained by worldview—however naturalized they might appear. For instance, if we appropriate Barthes’s diagram, replacing “Language” with the cultural knowledge contained within _Indigenous thought_, we can see how, for example, an engagement with Indigenous thought outside of Indigenous worldview and knowledge can lead to the proliferation of cultural knowledge as untruth. In Indigenous thought, where the land can act as a mnemonic container (or signifier) for cultural knowledge (the signified), the production of knowledge is relational and tied to Indigenous experiences and history of place. In a second order of signification, where Indigenous knowledge is known only through a Western-informed worldview, Indigenous knowledge gets signified through disembodied practices, such as the practice of land acknowledgement. It is convenient for me in making this argument to demonstrate how Indigenous thought gets caught up in the production of meaning to perpetuate myths as untruths (though I mean no guff to Barthes in reworking his diagram). 

**This leaves the question: when ideas of a culture’s myth develop inside a worldview where its definition as untruths runs rampant, what happens to the ideas and knowledge of racialized others in the present?** Without context, perspective, and a willingness to engage with Indigenous thought, labelling racialized cultural knowledge as myth forecloses one’s ability to see other truths. It is precisely because of this question that the prevalence of myth in contemporary art warrants further critical attention.

When I began this line of thinking, I had imagined that the question would ultimately become: what is the lure of untruths, and can the contemporary surreal be extricated from its lineage along the continuum of art history? However, presented with these examples and the revealing nature of Barthes’s frame for mapping the creation of signs, I wonder if there is instead an argument to be made for making this frame more apparent. 

...when ideas of a culture’s myth develop inside a worldview where its definition as untruths runs rampant, what happens to the ideas and knowledge of racialized others in the present?

I gather these examples and share them here because the stakes are and have always been high. Despite the presentation of their own testimony, the lived realities of Indigenous peoples in this country have historically been met with doubt. When, in 2021, preliminary findings at the Kamloops residential school led to reports of unmarked graves of 215 Indigenous children, and then that number grew as unmarked graves were located across the nation, Canadians woke up to a reality that they had long ignored. However, for those families whose children did not return home, the truth was always clear. It was never a myth. When four women went missing in Winnipeg in early 2022, and were later found to have been murdered by a serial killer, despite the fact that police had strongly suspected their whereabouts in the Prairie Green Landfill as early as June 2022, their families faced challenges to bring their loved ones home due to political infighting about the feasibility of a landfill search. [^11] This issue became a major platform item in the 2023 provincial election in Manitoba—although the elected and current Premier Wab Kinew supported the landfill search in his campaign, Heather Stefanson, premier at the time, went so far as to state her party’s firm stance not to search the landfill in her election campaign posters. 

[^11]: Caitlyn Gowriluk, “A Timeline of What We Know About 4 Slain Winnipeg Women and Serial Killer Jeremy Skibicki,” _CBC News_, December 11, 2022, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/jeremy-skibicki-winnipeg-serial-killer-timeline-1.6681433

The disappearance of Indigenous peoples is real and takes many forms, which in turn can fabricate caricatures from actual lived realities. The implicit ideas of truth here stem from long-held beliefs that discredit those who speak up for Indigenous women and children. Subsequently, those ideas of truth can then reinforce material conditions under which Indigenous peoples are brought to live. That drive to separate untruth from truth, the fanciful from reality, and fiction from non-fiction not only is proven to relegate Indigenous peoples and histories to the world of myth, but can then also be brought to justify their ongoing disappearance as a project fuelled by racism. 

In this sense, this argument about the things that myth perpetuates is not so much a matter of Dzama’s appropriative subjects amid an uncritical backdrop informed by the Group of Seven. It is also not a matter of Maddin’s perspective, and those absented from the history conjured by _My Winnipeg_. Nor is it a question of Dudeck’s appropriation of cultures in crafting a religion. I am not even suggesting that it is individual racism that contributes to this issue. Rather, it is a matter of the context in which these voices are able to stand up as representative of a city’s artistic energy. Instead, what I would like to suggest is that the attention that these artists and their narratives have received remains indicative of a greater unwillingness to reckon with the white settler political imaginary and the truths that lie beneath the myths, which scaffolds the city in its current form. While the redistribution of opportunity and resources and recognition of Indigenous brilliance can support change, it is also apparent that broader societal reckonings are needed to bring into perspective the ways in which contemporary artistic networks mirror societal norms, and how societal norms in turn also permeate the art world’s priorities.

 
 
_The author acknowledges and thanks Julian Haladyn for his feedback on an early draft._

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Relational Colonialism

Suzanne Morrissette probes the stakes of what is called myth in contemporary art-making: where settler imaginaries render Indigenous and other cultural knowledges as “untruths.” Moving through Winnipeg mythologies, historical amnesia, and Roland Barthes ‘s ideas of how myths are naturalized, Morrissette lays bare the unchecked framing of fiction and fact, the fantastical and lived reality.

MYTH, TODAY

Alvin Luong works with videos, photographs, and sculptures to express stories of human migration, land, and dialogues from diasporic working-class communities. He has shown and screened artworks in places including the Images Festival (Toronto), Boers-Li Gallery (Beijing), Gudskul (Jakarta), and The Polygon Gallery (Vancouver). Luong has held research and resident artist appointments at the Inside-Out Art Museum (Beijing), HB Station Contemporary Art Research Center (Guangzhou), the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), and Gallery TPW (Toronto). Luong was longlisted for the 2023 Sobey Art Award (Canada). The artist’s works have been acquired and shown by The Rockefeller Foundation (New York City).

**Tak Pham** is a is a contemporary art curator and
writer. He is currently the Curator of the Illingworth Kerr Gallery at Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary, Treaty 7 territory. He holds an MFA in criticism and curatorial practice from OCAD University. In 2023, he received the Hnatyshyn Foundation-Fogo Island Arts Young Curator Residency. His writings and reviews have appeared in _Canadian Art_, _C Magazine_, _ESPACE art actuel_, _esse arts + opinions_, _Galleries West_, _The Brooklyn Rail_, _ArtAsiaPacific_, and _Hyperallergic_.

Through artistic and critical investigations of human migration, land, and stories from diasporic communities, Alvin Luong creates artworks that reveal connections between past and present. As a friend and supporter of Luong’s work, I have developed a deep appreciation for how he approaches complex questions of diaspora in today’s world, which is marked by the incessantness of empire. The following conversation between Luong and me focuses on his latest work in the solo exhibition “Calcium Breather” (2025) at Toronto’s Hunt Gallery. It examines Luong’s practice, traces how his interests have evolved, and follows how his exploration of his family’s refugee journey—from Vietnam to Canada via Malaysia—and diasporic experience have changed over the years.

>**Tak Pham: Could you discuss how earlier video works like _Bidding War_ (2017), _Turbo_ (2019), _The Young Comrade_ (2019), and _Workers’ Dance (Young Workers, 2021)_ (2021), which satirize capitalism or explore state ideology, led to your research on Vietnamese boat refugees?**

**Alvin Luong:** The subtext behind these projects is a desire to understand a site and its occupants, both materially and politically. These earlier projects span engagements with a contemporary strip mall in Scarborough (_Bidding War_), my parents’ home during the Great Recession of 2008 (_Turbo_), Civil War–era Beijing (_The Young Comrade_), and Toronto during the COVID-19 pandemic (_Workers’ Dance_). These are sites that I am intimately connected with, and they compelled me to probe questions in relation to class and subjugation.

Specifically, my interest in understanding the experiences of Vietnamese refugees stems from my own family. If they had not survived their sea voyage from Vietnam to an island in Malaysia following the end of the American-Vietnam War in 1975, then I would not have been born or at least not exist on this side of the world.

In 2023, I visited Bidong Island in Malaysia to write about my experience through field notes. Located off the coast of Terengganu, Malaysia, it became a major refugee camp from 1978 to 1991, sheltering Vietnamese “boat people” fleeing persecution. When the peak of the refugee crisis on Bidong occurred in 1979, [1] Bidong was widely considered the most densely populated islands on the planet, [2] with an estimated 40,000 people. [3] On Bidong, many refugees like my father gained visas to resettle in Canada.

Bidong now hosts two opposing initiatives: a research facility for the study and conservation of coral operated by the Universiti Malaysia Terengganu (UMT), and a commercial coral farm operated by Yayasan Coral Malaysia with sponsorship from Telekom Malaysia. In June 2024, I was invited by Dr. Muhammad Hafiz Borkhanuddin, head of marine biology at UMT, to join him and his students on their monthly diving excursion to inspect the corals below the waters of Bidong. During this second visit, I connected refugee histories to the island’s corals.

>**TP: Your installation _Ration Market_ (2022) is another work that poetically highlights how the aftermath of the American-Vietnam War, which caused the Vietnamese refugee crisis in the ’70s, has evolved and continues to threaten the livelihood of Vietnamese peoples. The installation features items like dehydrated morning glory, disposable SIM cards, and congee-ready bags in a mobile cart—common street imagery in Vietnam. While referencing history, you have remarked that the installation is a response to what you call a “near-future crisis” with rising water threatening livelihoods. Can you discuss how you connect these timelines and how this influences your view on current climate issues?**

**AL:** In 2020, I began incorporating analogies into my practice, to draw parallels between the historical and the contemporary, after I visited family in Bình Chánh. This was a rural district located on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, where flooding now occurs daily.

The lack of robust infrastructure on the land allowed for the naked observation of where groundwater sat relative to the terrestrial surface. During the dry season, flooding occurs when the gravitational pull of the moon draws groundwater to the surface. The water then recedes as the day breaks, leaving behind muddy footprints that dry in the afternoon sun. During the wet season, the land floods to knee height almost daily. The flooding becomes more severe every year as the water table continues to rise, and the monsoons become more intense and frequent.

Within this drenched landscape, the morning glory vegetable (also known as rau muống or kangkung) has proliferated around my family’s home. This aquatic plant has taken over the land that was once a battlefield during the American-Vietnam War. Morning glory was a staple food in the aftermath of the war. It is a hardy plant that endured nearly a decade of biological and chemical weapons, as well as bombings by the United States that blighted Vietnam’s rural land for agriculture.

I could see that this former spectre of war had returned as a spectre for the contemporary crisis of climate change. I think about how my family in Canada became refugees due to the cascading effects of the war and how my family that remain in Vietnam may soon be refugees because of the rising sea. Analogy in my practice enables the past to serve as a framework for engaging with our contemporary condition.

>**TP: All the discussed threads seem to converge in your new work, “Calcium Breather” (2025), exhibited at Hunt Gallery. It revisits Bidong Island to recount Vietnamese refugee camp memories, Malaysia’s post-1991 rehabilitation efforts, and the coral smuggling industry. What similarities do you see between Vietnamese refugees and the coral
cultivated around Bidong Island?**

**AL:** I struggled to find an appropriate form or methodology to create artworks about Bidong until I discovered that the coral farm operating on the island had made its inaugural commercial export in 2016 to Canada. Since then, my guide Alex Lee, who has guided refugees to Bidong since the early aughts, has informed me that the coral farm has made shipments of live corals to places including the United States, Luxembourg, and Australia. Thinking through analogy, the corals cultivated in Bidong are being shipped to the same places that the refugees of Bidong resettled in. It was this discovery that allowed me to create artworks where corals and refugees could serve as analogies for each other, yet still remain autonomous from one another.

The video _Corals of Bidong_ (2023–2025) reimagines a drowning at sea while attempting to reach Bidong from a point-of-view camera perspective. Through a magic realist narration spoken in Vietnamese, the video then imagines the transformation of human refugees, who have sunk to the sea-floor, into the corals that are now farmed on the same sea-floor. The video then follows the farming of corals beneath the waters of Bidong.

Historically speaking, the corals disappeared when the Vietnamese refugee crisis was unfolding on Bidong. The intense human pollution and overfishing severely damaged the marine ecosystem surrounding the island. In 1991, the refugee camp was shut down and the island itself was officially closed off from public access [4] to recover the bio- diversity of the marine and terrestrial ecosystems, [5] only to reopen to the public in 2017. [6] The corals re-emerged with- in this nearly two-decade-long period.

The exhibition “Calcium Breather” imagines an alternative to watery death for refugees by envisioning the transformation of humans into corals, which are now headed to the same destinations as the refugees who managed to survive the journey.

In the exhibition, a second video titled _Camp Atlanta_ (2025) depicts a closed-door facility at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta. The facility houses corals transported into the United States on dubious grounds. The video uses a deadpan documentary approach to depict how corals are cared for in state-of-the-art aquarium tanks, as they await the conclusion of legal proceedings between their importer and the United States Customs and Border Protection agency. If the legal proceedings conclude in favour of the importer, then the corals re-enter commercial circulation in the United States. If the legal proceedings rule against the importer, then the corals will find their new permanent homes in the public-view displays of the Georgia Aquarium or its partner institutions. Through a dialectical pairing with _Corals of Bidong_, _Camp Atlanta_ becomes contextualized as a new refugee camp or migrant detention centre for corals. The pairing creates an intertextual relationship in which the refugees-turned-corals find entry to the United States through Atlanta.

>**TP: As you have mentioned above, analogy links human migration with environmental phenomena like coral propagation and flooding. Do you face specific challenges translating these complex analogies into tangible artworks for viewers?**

**AL:** A constant challenge is how to inform the viewer about the specific environmental phenomena of a place or object that is being used in an analogy. I am referring to how elements of a site or object, such as the morning glory plant, which was a food of necessity after the American-Vietnam War, can now be a spectre of climate change. Concepts related to the war and climate change are materially embedded in a sculpture like _Ration Market_, which uses morning glory as a material that is further processed into the shelf-stable rations that constitute the artwork. The labels on these rations contain a clue, in the form of a graphic of the plant and a faded hammer and sickle, a political symbol of communism, in the background.

The idea of materially embodying migration is also something I am developing through a series of frottage drawings called _The Drowned Can Speak Again_ (2024–ongoing). The drawings are made by rubbing over a tombstone belonging to a mass grave of Vietnamese people who drowned on their sea voyage to Bidong. The tombstone marks over 400 people whose bodies, recovered by local Malay fishermen, remain unidentified in a cemetery with many hundreds more. The grave is in the town of Kuala Terengganu, across the waters from Bidong Island. I am drawn to the potential of frottage to both physically witness the tombstone through tactile interaction, and to recontextualize the deaths through prose. The letters that constitute the names of the deceased are traced to produce new texts.

Video art challenges me to deliver information without sacrificing form or prose. Intertextual readings between artworks inform an approach that was implemented with _Corals of Bidong_ to transform interpretations of _Camp Atlanta_, and vice versa. Intertextuality drives the constellation of artworks I am continuing to develop by focusing on the migration and environmental phenomena in Bidong. The videos present an illusory image where an alternative to death can be imagined, while the frottage drawings bring forth the reality of the deaths.

>**TP: You previously presented the work in a different format, including a bedframe sculpture and several drawings (_The Drowned Can Speak_). I understand this was part of your MFA thesis exhibition at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn). When presenting it again in your hometown of Toronto shortly afterward, did you observe any differences in how audiences in Philadelphia and Toronto responded to the work?**

**AL:** The reception of the work in Philadelphia, among an academic-adjacent audience, changed how discourse was exchanged between artworks, viewers, and the institution. The artworks required less context in Philadelphia because the city has one of the largest diasporic Vietnamese populations on the East Coast, with roots dating back to the refugee crisis. The engagement with the history of the American-Vietnam War is much more of a lived reality in Philadelphia due to the societal rupture and blowback from the war in the United States. Everyone was either impacted or knew someone who was impacted by the war. There is a massive mural depicting the sea voyage of the refugees on the Bồ Đề Buddhist Temple near the city’s core.

In Philadelphia, the exhibition opened on May 1, 2025—one day after the 50th anniversary of the end of the American-Vietnam War on April 30th, 1975. I gave a speech at the exhibition opening, remarking that May 1st was also the unofficial anniversary of the Vietnamese refugee crisis that followed the end of the war. In the speech, I also highlighted Penn’s role in developing biological and chemical weapons for use in Vietnam, to connect the violence enacted by the site of the exhibition to the artworks that would be created and exhibited at the university 50 years later. Furthermore, the historical legacy of campus activism in the United States against the American-Vietnam War by students and faculty, and their repression by the university, remains relevant today for many students and faculty as an analogy for the crisis currently faced by college campuses in the United States. A crisis that includes the suppression of solidarity with Palestine, the dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and the reversal of trans inclusion. This level of significance made the exhibition highly urgent and unique to Penn and Philadelphia.

The legacy of the war carries a fog of mystery shared by many people in my generation and younger. I was touched to know that an undergraduate student, in a class taught by Ken Lum that I had served as a teaching assistant for, attended the Philadelphia opening and revealed to me that her parents were also refugees from Bidong. In Toronto, a few people also attended the opening at Hunt Gallery because they too had familial connections to Bidong. For both cities, the exhibitions offered a rare in-depth engagement with Bidong, a place that remains understudied and undertheorized.

>**TP: How have diasporic Vietnamese communities, former refugees, or coral-conservation researchers responded to your projects? I’m especially curious about responses to the analogy between coral movement and refugee experience. Have these responses influenced your future work?**

**AL:** When I worked with the marine biologists and students at the Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, they were unaware of the refugee history of Bidong. Yet, they have research facilities on the same island where the refugees once lived, and dive in the same waters where the Vietnamese had drowned. The work I am producing, beyond the poetic encounter, fills a gap in a history that is suppressed in Malaysia. As I mentioned before, my work also begins to fill a gap for a younger generation of the Vietnamese diaspora. For people like me, with refugee roots, the history is in amnesia due to the psychic burdens of reliving trauma. For a newer generation of diaspora from a liberated Vietnam, the history of the refugees is suppressed.

The responses of these communities to the discovery of the island’s history and its contemporary status led me to a realization that this work operates within an ontology of movement. Essentially, it is crucial to acknowledge that the refugee does not choose where they may end up—whether it be the water or a distant country. They only choose a trajectory. My father told me how his boat first aimed for the shores of Thailand, before changing course to Malaysia. Their last resort was Indonesia, before the boat gave out. Evidence of their movement is left in the temporary wake of the water.

This realization has influenced the direction of my work by identifying qualities that cannot be produced without a wide, and perhaps watery, perspective that links distant sites and temporalities together. Something new can be created if the process becomes unspecific to the site and instead becomes specific to motion.

[^1]: Norhayati Ab Manaf et al., “Historic Vietnamese Settlement of Bidong Island,” in _Bidong Island: Natural History and Resources_, ed. Ong Meng Chuan et al. (Cham: Springer, 2021), 33.
[^2]: Abdulmaula Hamza et al., “Diversity of Birds in Bidong Island,” in Ong et al., 106.
[^3]: Ab Manaf et al., 33.
[^4]: Ibid.
[^5]: Iqbal Harith Abd. Razak et al., “Decapoda Crustaceans at the South China Sea Repository and Reference Centre in Terengganu, Peninsular Malaysia,” in Ong et al., 61.
[^6]: Ab Manaf et al., 34.

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In his interview with Alvin Luong, curator Tak Pham discusses Luong’s video work Corals of Bidong (2023–2025). Their con­versation reflects on the history of Bidong Island, previously a refugee camp for displaced Vietnamese peoples from 1978–1991, and now a site where corals are cultivated. 

C Mag

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