Environment

Memory

Film

Participation

Letter

Editorial

Feature

Interview

Artist Project

Column

Review

Writer

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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Language

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

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

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Brick

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Luminato

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Oxygen

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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

Svetlana Romanova (Sakha/Even) is an artist and filmmaker born in Yakutsk, the capital city of the Sakha Republic, Russia, located south of the Arctic Circle. Her practice centres on the importance of Indigenous visual language, particularly in the Arctic regions, and gravitates toward critical self-historization.

_The Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) is situated in the Far Eastern region of Russia. It is home to several Indigenous groups, including the Sakha people. While “Yakut” was the term historically imposed through Russian colonial administration, “Sakha” is the self-designated name
and is increasingly recognized as the preferred term. The name “Yakutia” is still used on a state level to refer to the
broader multi-ethnic territory of the republic, encompassing all communities living within its borders._

_Yakutian cinema: umbrella term to talk about all the
films made in and outside of Yakutia_

_Sakha cinema: visual culture created by Sakha people,
Subarctic context_

_Even cinema: visual culture created by Even people,
Arctic context_ 


What does an image mean in Sakha and Eveny
cultures? The immensity of this question haunts me,
including in my own work. An image can mean so
many things, depending on its contextual placement.
Image production can be a historical moment that
transforms the perception of a culture (like the formation of the Republic of Sakha in 1991 and state
production company Sakhafilm in 1992), or it could
be a historic visual form (petroglyphs) that now equates to the visual representation of the culture. Images’
meanings are never tied to visuality or materiality only,
but rather found in the crevasses, informed by and contained in time. Those images permeate through the
spaces, leaving an aftertaste. Perhaps the question we
should be asking ourselves is: what makes those images Sakha or Eveny? How do we count authorship
and intent?

> _~The Othering~_

Russia’s geographic placement, where the power
centre aims to constantly prove its relation to Europe
(the West), while the rest is perceived and treated as
Northeast Asia, is essential to understanding its internal politics. _By dissecting its own territory into variants
of geopolitical weight, the empire manages to act out its
complicated past (fear of Asianness) through the implementation of governing divisions like regions, republics,
and peripheries._ The fragmentation of our land can be
broken into three territories: Siberia (a cultural imaginary), an umbrella concept for the regions that reside
within North Russia; Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), a
“self-governed” region with seven Indigenous groups
residing in Subarctic and Arctic territories; and Far
East, a broader geographic territory that fits all of Northeast Asia (not restricted to Russia). These divisions are
tied by imaginaries that feed the needs of the receiving
end—for example, externally, Siberia regionally places
the perspective of one in the West as an association to
the North; internally, Siberia as a territory holds very
little value, with no adjacent cultural ties, and is often
used in tourism to maintain the myth of its “remoteness.” The internal politics of Russia are rarely visible
in the international context, but rather the territories
are presented as pre-packaged and resource-filled, with
growing ties to Northeast Asia. This representation is
also a product of economic imagination. Racialization
of these territories through the disregard of the Indigenous population, who has struggled for visibility and
distinction, compromises their sovereignty as an ethnicity. _Yellow peril_ as a belief and political stance was
instrumentalized by Russia, as a part of Europe, in the
late-19th century [^1] as a form of outlived, harshened fear
of constant Asian vanquish (Genghis and Orda Khan,
wars with Japan, etc.), but also as a strategy to other its
own Indigenous population, specifically of the Far East
and Arctic.

> _~Punctures in Time~_

Image production forms specific senses of communality. The propagated state of friendliness of annexed nations asserted by Soviet visual representation,
which I would like to tag as _lens exotica_, was a vigorous machine that the state used to alter the understanding of belonging. Belonging to a nation, belonging to society, belonging to the state. The identitarian crisis was
resolved through a belief that all of the residents of the
Soviet Union, regardless of their cultural specificity,
were now within a certain hegemonic harmony under
the pretense of “united nations.” However, the dissemination of this idea was conveyed through mass cultural production, specifically cinema, which highlighted
each individual ethnos by showcasing their assimilation
into the industrialized world. The Soviet propaganda
worked so well in glorifying the erasure of the inherent
aesthetics of Yakutia, and persuading the populus into
thinking that they do belong, that their belonging was
contingent on their performance of “Russian collectivity.” Like that, Soviet time can be marked as exemplary
of the birth of “community,” as deformations in the perception and performances of that word have been elongated in the current state of late capitalism.

> _~Colonial Time Is Contemporaneity~_

The past, or some would say history, is usually measured from the perspective of “discovery.” The point of
ascension (awakening, coming to being) of a culture is
defined by its contact with settlers. This perverse entitle-
ment of perception is usually a dominating narrative in
colonial states, where the ongoing processes of the same
instrument of power remain in stasis. When “discovering” Yakutia, imperiality extracted our knowledge
through the destruction of our ways of being by developing the concept of “republic,” and established the
“Arctic” as a place and territory. With this act, the state
erased the original ontologies of a place that are transmitted through people—referred to as aesthetics, ways
of perceiving life. Now, the state extracts the actual matter (resources and minerals), hollowing out the land they
have narrativized into a country. If the beginning of
Arctic exploration has created the fertile soil for further expansion, now its seeds of fear are in full bloom.
These crops are blossoming on the cruxes of cultural
voids, filling the wells of despair with prosperity. Harvested to feed the original inhabitants, these kernels
have been inside us for centuries, morphing and adding to our aesthetics.

> _~Essence of the Dissent~_

In 1957, on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, a young
family welcomed their third daughter—my mother was
born in Bykov Mys. Her birth marked the beginning of
the Soviet turmoil that would ultimately lead to the Union’s dissolution. The ’60s marked the era of kolkhoz [^2]
collectivization and excessive deforestation (ongoing) in
Yakutia, also as a part of broader mining research. [^3]
Through forced collectivization, the state came up with
a scheme where workers of the mines were sustained by
and dependent on produce coming from the Arctic regions. Arctic people were deployed to submit their resources (deer) for the “bigger cause.”

The Soviet collapse was not only in the change of
governance, but also in the change of societal beliefs.
The ’90s and early aughts were a race where rampant
economic opportunities mixed with the remnants of
communal ideologies, forming the era reminisced by
bandit soap operas. _Lens exotica_ rebranded into national television, which used images to form endless
narratives depending on the demand. One of these
leading narratives was an Arctic frontier that had become excessively militarized under the rule of the new
president, Putin. Exotic images of Arctic dwellers covered in fur, smiling or going about their business, were
replaced with oil barrels. The projected imaginaries
of development on the thawing ice and the Republic of
Sakha (Yakutia) became that of a resource colony with
a high migrant working population. The visualization of
our presence is always dictated by time, and rendered
by the political interest that at its core is nothing but an
economic imaginary.

> _~Exposition of Vice~_

As practitioners of image production who are of
Indigenous descent, we should be questioning the residual mechanisms of colonization that are ongoing
in various forms. These variations are at times too tricky to expose yet, once detected, are haunting in their
nature. But at what point, with respect to the complexities of the colonial past, can we say that the internal lens
has been enticed by modernity? What are the threats of self-exoticization?

Internal exoticization does not always imply a set
of rudimentary ridicules that are easily detected, but
may suggest complex layers of violent historical past in
correlation to factual realities within the state of contemporaneity. Let me present two examples in relation
to the territoriality of cinema—one producing the myth
and the other reacting to it:

> 1. The alleged profitability of our specific geographic location—the coldness and vastness of the
Arctic. Commodifying the intrinsic aspects of our daily life is like highlighting the obvious. When you
are from within the community, is the reproduction of your obvious a thing of interest? What about
the allure of (commercial) cinema, which is presupposed to teleport you to unknown places and provide
a glimpse into unfamiliar feelings? This constant presence of discovery, of escape, is what makes the cinema now exotic; therefore, when you repackage
your mundane, you are (un)willingly self-mythologizing. Exoticization happens when the external
gaze consumes the labours of your “narrativization” and deploys them against you.

> 2. Woven into the fabric of reality, the territoriality of Yakutian cinema can be viewed in its details: how culture is presented, how it represents itself, what is visible, and what is left unseen. It is
necessary that the territoriality of cinema is a language that can be understood by people from the place or culture. Otherwise, cinema gets consumed with objectification and altered narrative projections.


There is an arguable urge to perform your identity when you are operating outside of your cultural context. Is that similar to putting a haryskhal [^4] on your chest? Is that a method of adaptability? Did we abandon our own principles of time and, in a race with contemporaneity, outrun our nativeness and unground our films?

> _~In Bloom~_

Reformulating and unpacking the mechanisms
of colonial perception is the most important task of
the cinema of the alleged peripheries of the world.
Indigenous cinema, or films that come out of a very
specific place—culturally or geographically tied cinema—has an inherently political lens. There are tasks,
in their grit and weight, which are so staggering, so
crucial, that we need to recognize _ourselves as natives
to our home_ first for our movies to be charged, not
empty. For our cinema to live up to its inherited politicalness, we should embody the rigour of our own
resilience, not shy away from it. Sakha and Even cinema should hold its form of relationality, through developing its own sovereign yet recognizable visual
language, which mirrors the values of hereditary aesthetics—culture.

Imagine Yakutian cinema as a beast, as a being, as an animal. A beautiful deity that is crossing the frozen currents of coloniality, swiftly dismantling constructed artifices. Can you hear its roar resonating in the thawing waters of your deepest boreholes? How do we look through the eyes of the loved, trusted, forgotten? How do we see ourselves?


**Arctic Imaginaries: Nimkan** [^5] 
In this proposed chimeric script, I am asking you to imagine the beast, I am asking you to join me in this reverie, known as film.

**Romanova was the 2023 recipient of the Indigenous Art Writing Award, organized annually by _C Magazine_ and the [Indigenous Curatorial Collective / Collectif des commissaires autochtones (ICCA)](https://icca.art/). We are honoured to bring this text to print.**

[^1]: Akira Iikura, “The Precursors of the Yellow Peril Theories: Mikhail Bakunin and Charles Pearson,” _RIAD Bulletin_, International University of Japan, no. 3 (March 1995): 257–292. https://iuj.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/789/files/3_257-292.pdf
[^2]: A collective state farm in the Soviet Union.
[^3]: This deforestation caused a thermokarst depression and the creation of Batagaika crater. Regardless of environmental catastrophes that were known, imperial demands for riches have been ignited by the allure of minerals in the region. Endless expeditions to locate diamonds resulted in the discovery and development of the Mirnyi and Udachny diamond pipes in the 1950s.
[^4]: Protection talisman.
[^5]: The word nimkan in the Even language denotes different narrative forms of folklore: myths, heroic tales, legends, fairy tales, and more. Methods of presenting nimkan are singing, recitation, and storytelling. Nimkans had a significant influence on the formation of the worldview of the Evens: they included knowledge about the surrounding nature, the origin of the world, the history of the people, all carrying spiritual meaning.

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Colonialism

Svetlana Romanova, winner of the 2023 Indigenous Art Writing Award, explores colonial temporality in Soviet imaginations of the Arctic and “Far East.” Through poetic prose, experimental scripting, and layered histories of extraction, she begins shaping an emergent visual language for Sakha and Even cinema within contemporary Indigenous filmmaking.

Cinema as the Beast Is the Demise of Contemporaneity

Hung Duong (b. Vietnam) writes independently. His criticism of Southeast Asian contemporary art is founded on exchanges with regional art makers about art’s versatile roles in society. He runs his own website sea-through.net as a reservoir for his sprawling thoughts, while actively contributing to _Artforum_, _Frieze_, _ArtAsiaPacific_, and other platforms.

As a person who constantly wonders, Grace Samboh has found an outlet for her curiosity through a diverse array of art history research, writing, and curatorial projects. Whether she’s cataloguing archival items with Hyphen—, a research initiative that she co-founded with Ratna Mufida and Pitra Hutomo, or cooking up exhibitions at the experimental gallery/
art space RUBANAH Underground Hub (Jakarta, Indonesia), to Grace, curating is about understanding and making at the same time.

For as long as we have known each other, Grace has firmly believed that everyone needs to have at least three copies of themselves. I joke that it is because none of us ever gets enough sleep. Our shared interests once manifested in a 2021 curated virtual dialogue titled “Sleep-page,” in which I invited Grace and other participants from Vietnam and Australia to ponder the role of rest and sleep in our creative and mundane life. Hypothesizing sleep as resistance to neocapitalist forces, we collectively dreamed of a world where rest is celebrated and not villainized, and where sleep can be a portal through which we dare to envision a brighter, post-slumber future.

Fast forward to now, and Grace and I are once again reunited for a conversation on rest. This time, _REST_ takes the form of the acronym for “Ruang Elok Sarat Tempo,” an exhibition that she organized with her partner Julian Abraham “Togar” at RUBANAH and ARTJOG in 2024. Often described as an artist, musician, and pseudoscientist, Togar engages sound as a space-making instrument to unpack the complex algorithms that interlink art, technology, and the realities of our surrounding environment. His work _OK Studio_ (2020–ongoing) first transformed his residency studio space in Amsterdam into a tangible place for music jams and recordings and a theoretical space for imagining the function of art in public. As the project migrated to institutions across the globe, ironically, Togar needed space from the structural and administrative challenges that hindered the work’s original functions. REST was born as a reset button—a place to just unwind and gather, without foregrounding the creative productivity associated with a studio.

I first experienced _REST_ at ARTJOG, the longstanding contemporary art fair in Yogyakarta. The space was carpeted, soft, and inviting. Drumsets, guitars, and a record player adorned the room, along with household items that gestured toward a cozy living room. From the small TV screen, I could see Togar jamming with his band. After a whole day standing and moving from one art display to another, something in me softened. I sat down on the sofa, closed my eyes, and unknowingly drifted into a quick nap. As I recounted this experience to Grace, our conversation unravelled into the nature of making a physical and public place that invites rest, while navigating the institutional parameters, vulnerability, and mutual responsibility of maintaining such near-impossible space…

**Hung Duong:** How would you describe your involvement with _OK Studio_ and _REST_? You also mentioned that in one of these spaces, you fell asleep in public for the first time?

**Grace Samboh:** My first experience with _OK Studio_ [in 2022] was that of an audience member, while with _REST_, I am more organizationally involved. I wouldn’t describe my involvement with _OK Studio_ as curatorial; I was rather a companion with whom Togar bounced ideas.

Some invitations for _OK Studio_ were not always easy. At Carnegie Museum of Art, it became an installation with limited activation, since the museum schedule couldn’t afford to keep it accessible 24/7. At the SculptureCenter, it was easier to convince their team of five that _OK Studio_ would still work within their logic of institution running. And the idea didn’t work at all at Nottingham Contemporary: even though it is supposed to be a public space, the institution didn’t allow the audience to come in and interact with the instrument that Togar set up—which frustrated him.

Thus, there’s always this constant navigation about how we define and treat a studio. As it moves around, the hosting space also changes what _OK Studio_ may or may not mean. Nonetheless, there remains a constant ethos of hacking the host’s economy, to share their space and make it functional among friends. That’s why it’s hard to make an _OK Studio_. So I think _REST_ is really our way of saying, “Let’s press pause and try something else.” There is less focus on sonic production and interception, and more on unwinding and just watching things.

For _REST_ at RUBANAH, there were a lot of people sleeping, me included. Once you take off your shoes, you change into something else… I also wrote about this in the introduction text for it: you can sleep because it feels like home.

**HD:** To me, Togar’s _OK Studio_ functions as an interjection. It reroutes how space-making can happen in an exhibition, the kind of space that we can make together and its purposes. So, I am wondering, why the word “OK”?

**GS:** There is a lot to unpack from that, actually, as we’re trying to make a book for _OK Studio_. Slowly, the space has grown into something else… Yeah, it has become rest. While it’s too early to share many of my thoughts around _OK Studio_, as you need some years to observe someone’s practice, Togar’s idea of rest always comes with being OK. The different manifestations of _OK Studio_ still carry the word “OK,” such as “Ghost strokes” (Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, 2025) or _BIOSPOKE_ (Gwangju Biennale, South Korea, 2024). We’re also going to show _BIOSPOKE_ in Jogja, so friends who helped us make the film can see it. That screening is also going to be titled “BOK Studio.”

I think being OK is something that the studio carries as a nice state of rest. In Bahasa Indonesian, the word _cukup_ can mean “OK” or “well.” Yet, when it’s used, it often means “enough.” So, rest stems from feeling enough in your mind. Not super amazing, but OK. I think rest graduates from OK.

**HD:** I think of how “OK” also means to reassure. You say it to soothe someone, to remind them that things are not too bad. When you are OK, you allow yourself to just be, and rest.

For _REST_ at ARTJOG and RUBANAH, what differences did you notice in terms of spatial structure and visitors’ engagement between the two sites?

**GS:** ARTJOG was a nice occasion to observe how _REST_ can function in a larger, more public set-up, since it is a semi-art fair. I was helping Togar and the ARTJOG team organize the set-up, since I have curated shows at their space, the Jogja National Museum. Even though our text clearly gave people permission to organize their own activities within the space, people didn’t necessarily take up our offer. They thought they could just tap the drums or pluck the guitars, and that’s it. It’s also the curse of exhibition set-up, which usually comes with “no touching” signs and other restrictions. Thus, people don’t feel they have autonomy to just do things, even in public spaces.

**HD:** In contrast, at RUBANAH, I think about the word “fluid.” Rest is fluid, a return to a non-structural state, a temporary pause, which can be challenging for institutions to accommodate. In addition to RUBANAH’s experimental ethos, its architecture also enhances this sense of fluidity: there is no wall or division, just open ground, which was covered with carpets. To us in Southeast Asia, carpet is always an invitation to lie down, to gather, yeah?

**GS:** And beanbags and cushions! _OK Studio_ and _REST_ are always dominated by carpets. Half of them were made by Togar, while the other half come from different communities that he meets and works with. The carpet is also present because Togar’s a drummer. All drummers need carpets beneath their drumset; otherwise, it will slightly move around during the jam.

**HD:** So the carpets actually carry memories of relationships. For me, the carpet or the mat is where we eat, sleep, rest, and chat. It witnesses our navigation of different relationships. It’s more welcoming than a table, which has a sense of division. Like, which side of the table you are sitting carries political connotations.

**GS:** There is formality in a table’s architecture. Also, it is not suitable for children of certain ages.

**HD:** Yeah, there’s hierarchy. You also have to learn table manners in order to sit at a table. It has become so ingrained in us, the table, that we rarely question how we unconsciously function around it. Meanwhile, the carpet is ground-based. There is a sense of rootedness and togetherness, which I think is important to be able to relax and rest. It’s also nice that Togar conceptually expanded his studio space to invite people in. It is a trust move.

**GS:** Which can also be a threat. You don’t know whose space you are entering, or whom you are inviting into your space.

**HD:** True, rest can be dangerous. When we are resting, we’re vulnerable.

**GS:** Yes, _REST_’s literally an invitation to be vulnerable. But can you afford it? Are you there yet? Are you confident enough to show your vulnerability and all that? Moreover, to make a space is easy, but to maintain it is not. Can a space like _OK Studio_ or _REST_ last? How long will it last? Does it need to last? While I think nothing should last forever, it should be enjoyable while it lasts.

**HD:** I think that’s the underlying tone of spaces like _OK Studio_. A transitional site, shifting as people pass through it. It is an apt metaphor for rest, how rest has to be navigated and sometimes fought for, how rest demands vulnerability from us as we ease into it. Rest is where you feel safe and connected, even though it is a solitary activity. In rest, we have the permission to let go, to press pause.

**GS:** There’s a stop in rest, but it's not a complete stop… As it is temporary, it needs to exist within a space. Yet, most exhibition spaces are not equipped to host time-based media. That's why people tend to isolate them, put them in black boxes or give them headsets.

**HD:** Remember our collaboration on “Sleep-page” in 2021? At the time, you were going through stress with the Jakarta Biennale, and now with the country’s political situation, with President Prabowo’s eerie similarity to Suharto. I am just wondering how your views on sleep, dream, and rest have changed since then, if at all?

**GS:** Those were restless days for sure. But on restless days, you need sleeping discipline. I actually try to sleep more now, because there’s just so many things to do and you can’t afford to be sick. One way to avoid it is really to have proper sleep so it becomes kind of like a remedy that you need to maintain. Everything drains your energy, so sleep is a means to self-preserve. I wish sleep could be more like protest or resistance, but at this point, it is really self-preservation. You know, it has been three months now since Togar stopped talking to most people. He sleeps more now, and he seems to have passed his angry days. I wish I could have the same luxury…

As I type out these final words, natural disasters are wreaking havoc across Southeast Asia. Earthquakes in Myanmar and Thailand, fires in Malaysia. Political unrest seems normal, while we are still expected to break our backs and contribute our creative labour unconditionally. In an era ridden with the neocapitalist script of “progress” and “development,” we desperately need the attitude of _REST_ to reclaim our autonomy by tuning in to ourselves and each other. To allow rest to become a form of resistance. But are we there yet? To embrace our vulnerability and put a halt to this rollercoaster before an existence-on-fire is completely normalized?

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Hung Duong and Grace Samboh discuss the relationship between rest, resistance, and curatorial practice. From Jakarta’s experimental RUBANAH Underground Hub to iterations of OK Studio, they reflect on rest as a kind of space-making that is fluid, vulnerable and a challenge to institutional norms through the embracing of pause.

Between Restful and Radical: In Conversation with Grace Samboh

 Deniz Yilmaz is a Toronto-based writer and researcher. She is a graduate student at the University of Toronto interested in social theory and media studies.    

“How could such a deep fresh water lake appear in such an inland place?” wonders filmmaker Alisi Telengut about Baigal Nuur (Lake Baikal), located in Siberia near the Russia-Mongolia border. Her most recent hand-painted short film, [_Baigal Nuur – Lake Baikal_](https://alisitelengut.com/Baigal-Nuur-Lake-Baikal-2023) (2023), reimagines the birth of the lake through textured visuals, made of both found and organic materials. The oscillation of images, like waves, washes over the viewer, accompanied by the narration of a Buryat elder who can still recall words in her endangered Buryat-Mongolian language.  

 

Baigal Nuur, the deepest fresh-water lake in the world, sits in a rift valley where the Earth slowly pulls itself apart. Indigenous peoples have lived near and with the lake for generations, and it persists as a spiritual site for many shamanic beliefs and practices, especially for the Buryat. Facing threats from a hungry transnational mining industry, like much of the so-called Global South, the region and the people who live there must navigate an uneven modernization project.  

 

These tensions set the context for my conversation with Telengut, whose work straddles the boundaries of archiving and reimagining, moving backwards and forward in time simultaneously. I’ve felt moved by her contributions to Mongolian culture through her careful engagement with traditional beliefs and historical context. In Mongolian cosmology, shamans can traverse space-time, taking various human-animal forms to navigate the spirit world, heal community members, and access knowledge—shamans use their spiritual technologies for individual and collective well-being. In this same vein, Telengut holds the past like a mirror reflecting into the future. I hope our conversation about her practice, motivations, and processes follows this way of understanding time and space. The continuous cycle of life is the rhythm of the Earth, which sets the backdrop for all things.  

 

**Deniz Yilmaz: Reverence for nature is a big theme in your works, like _Baigal Nuur - Lake Baikal_ and [_Nutag - Homeland_](https://alisitelengut.com/Nutag-Homeland-2016) (2016), which focus on the physical and cultural landscape of Mongolia and Siberia. How do your and your family’s relationships with nature inform your art practice? 
**
 

Alisi Telengut: I’ve always been interested in the relationship between humans and nature, and in general between humans and non-humans. My grandparents used to live as nomads on the Mongolian grasslands. I think one of the main features of nomadic traditional lifestyle is that people form a very deep connection with nature. It’s considered that humans are part of nature, never separate or dominant.  

**DY: Every still of your films is like a painting composed of materials both natural and artificial, intermingled so deeply that it’s sometimes hard to separate one from the other. The nature-culture continuum is something you interrogate in projects like [_Long Live Forest_](https://alisitelengut.com/Long-Live-Forest-2017-2019) (2017–2019). What inspires you to work with these materials? **

 

AT: _Long Live Forest_ was a series of paintings that became videos later. Throughout the painting process, I started gathering materials from the environment around me. I started really noticing the moss, trees, and plants in my daily life. The whole experience somehow heightened my sensitivity to non-human friends—I was really aware of the smallest elements and started noticing these beings every day. And so, I hope my work can pass that on to the audience. In these times, we have human-induced negative environmental changes, so I think it’s important to be wary of the anthropocentric point of view that’s rooted in modernity.  

 

My earlier animations made completely by painting were quite labour-intensive. When I started incorporating found objects, the process became more fun and interesting. I was also inspired by the work of William Kentridge, a South African artist who used a lot of charcoal because of its accessibility. His earlier work explored the theme of apartheid in South Africa and he viewed animation, because of its painstaking methodology at the time, to be a process of redemption. If you’re working on the subject of pain, especially other people’s pain, it can be a bit of a vampiric endeavour. Because animation takes so long, the time and labour put into the work was a way of redemption for Kentridge, and I really connected to this idea of redemption through the labour of the process.  

 

**DY: Why did you choose to make a film about Lake Baikal in particular?  **

 

AT: Lake Baikal is really famous—not just to people around the lake, but to so many peoples from Russia, Mongolia, and China. I found the formation of the lake fascinating, because how could such a deep fresh-water lake appear in such an inland place? You’d imagine such a deep lake would be close to the coast or have a river connection, but it’s like a lake just appeared in the middle of the land. It’s also a rift lake, meaning it was formed by volcanic activities millions of years ago.  

 

The film at first was really about the Buryat worldview about human-nature relations. Buryat people have this connection with the land that is reflected in their language. The Buryat woman I interviewed mentioned that the last word in the film, khun-shovoo, literally means “human-bird,” but also means “swan.” I asked her why it’s called that, and she explained that it has to do with clan and tribe systems in Buryatia. Her tribe believes their ancestor was a swan who was a human-bird. She said if I interviewed another Buryat person, they might have a different word for swan. That example really reflects human-nature relationships and the role of ancestry in shaping language.  

**DY: Given the importance of oral storytelling in North Asian cultures, can you talk about why you chose to have a Buryat elder tell this story about Baigal Nuur’s formation? ** 

 

AT: I still haven’t had the chance to visit Lake Baikal, because of pandemic lockdowns and the Russia-Ukraine war. There are various political reasons why it’s difficult to visit the region now, but I was trying to do interviews during lockdowns with members of the Buryat community. With a war going on, people’s minds were occupied. I was lucky to have a few Buryat contacts in Montreal, but they didn’t really speak the language. When I asked more Buryats, I found that the language is in great danger. 

 

I finally found someone who speaks a bit of Buryat living in Germany. She was nervous about the conversation because she was also forgetting her language, having lived as diaspora for more than 20 years. Originally, she was from the Lake Baikal region. There are no complete phrases in the film because it was difficult for her to speak complete sentences. I asked her to list vocabulary she knew in the Buryat language, a dialect of Mongolian, related to the formation of Lake Baikal. There are words that are very similar to Mongolian, maybe just with different pronunciation. After this project and throughout, I realized that language doesn’t have to be one standardized version—there are so many nuances with different regions having different accents. I think it’s important for the Buryat language to be respected and supported—it’s part of the Mongolian language even though it’s not the standardized version.  

 

 

**DY: As much as your pieces are stunning visual works, the role of sound is also very significant and immersive. Can you talk about what the sound process is like and how it intersects with your visuals?   **

 

AT: Each project is a bit different. I did sound design by myself for [_The Fourfold_](https://alisitelengut.com/The-Fourfold-2020) (2020), but I collaborated with a sound designer for _Lake Baikal_. In _Lake Baikal_, I wanted each scene to sound like the natural landscape. For the introduction scene, beginning with planets moving in space, we used sound recordings from NASA. It was supposed to be an authentic clip from space, but some people thought it was electronic music, which was funny. In my screening at Annecy International Animation Film Festival in France, there was a young child in the room. During the scene where mountains were moving, the sound was supposed to reflect a mountain roaring, and I heard the child start crying. I guess the sound scared them, but I kind of felt happy because it was supposed to sound like a giant mountain moving, which can be scary.  

 

The sound process comes after the visuals. In _Lake Baikal_ we also featured music by a Sakha musician. When it comes to sound, it’s really about the emotion. Sometimes I feel sound design is more important than the music, because I have to really hone in on and make the emotion clear. 


**DY: Your work really draws on the elements, both using them materially in the film and bringing viewers into the fold of Baigal Nuur’s birth. How does this animation style connect to animism within Mongolian cosmology? **

 

AT: The animation style is not tied to any specific Mongolian cosmology. In short, the reconceptualization of animism in our contemporary time emphasizes relationships between humans and non-human others. From this “new animist” perspective, I view animation differently: it is not about my animating inert materials and objects, but about my relationship with each object and material involved in the collaborative process. Each element carries its own story of how it relates to me through the process of creation. 

 

**DY: What are some new things on the horizon for you? **

 

AT: I’m working on a film in collaboration with a filmmaker originally from Brazil and based in Stockholm about breathing and air. It’s about how everything is breathing and how humans’ internal and external worlds are deeply intertwined. It’s an extension of my previous work about the connection between humans and nature, but focusing more on the bodily experience of that connection.  

Alisi Telengut is a Canadian artist and filmmaker of Mongolian roots. Her work has been screened and exhibited internationally, including at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures (USA), Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art (USA), Sundance Film Festival (USA), TIFF and TIFF Canada’s Top Ten, Annecy International Animation Film Festival (France), VIDEONALE at Kunstmuseum Bonn (Germany), OSTRALE Biennale (Germany), Anthology Film Archives (USA), CICA (South Korea), Zollverein UNESCO World Heritage Site (Germany), Images Festival (Canada), and Image Forum Festival (Japan), among others. Telengut is currently an Assistant Professor in Film Animation at Concordia University in Montreal.  

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Deniz Yilmaz speaks to filmmaker Alisi Telengut about the role of Mongolian cosmologies and animism in Telengut’s hand-painted animations, like _Baigal Nuur – Lake Baikal_ (2023).

A Lake Is Born: Interview With Alisi Telengut

Meagan Christou (b. 1991) is an Executive Board Member for OPSEU/SEFPO representing Toronto/GTA, the past Secretary of the Young Workers Committee, and a union steward and Strike Captain for Local 535 at the Art Gallery of Ontario. She successfully wrote and passed constitutional amendments to prolong union membership for precarious workers and a resolution opposing the practice of two-tier bargaining. Meagan helped launch the first series of Labour for Palestine Educationals, winning the OPSEU/SEFPO Human Rights Award in 2024.

Mitra Fakhrashrafi is a curator and archivist mapping legacies of colonial infrastructure and the resistance which has always followed.

Charlene K. Lau is an art historian, critic, and Curator of Public Art at Evergreen Brick Works and Nuit Blanche Toronto 2025. Her writing has been published in _Art in America_, _Artforum_, _The Atlantic_, _The Brooklyn Rail_, _frieze_, _Fashion Theory_ and _Journal of Curatorial Studies_, among others.

Emma Steen is a curator, writer, and the Outreach & Membership Coordinator for the mma Steen is a programmer, curator, and writer from downtown Toronto. Her area of interest lies in art and writing that explore intimacies, bodies, and gathering with feminist and anti-colonial intention. Emma works at the Royal Ontario Museum as a Performance Program Coordinator, bringing live arts performances, parties, and cultural events to the country’s largest museum.

Fan Wu writes, performs, and teaches. He is currently studying Daoism and its capacities to transform our Western political-aesthetic paradigms.

EMILIA-AMALIA (since 2016) is an intergenerational, in-flux working group that employs experiments, citation, annotation, and autobiography to activate feminist art, writing, research, and living practices. Active members include Cecilia Berkovic, Annie MacDonell, Gabrielle Moser, Zinnia Naqvi, and (_C_ editor) Joy Xiang, with support from Jennifer Harwart.

Dot Tuer is a writer and artist whose work explores the intersections of cultural memory, visual storytelling, and decolonial histories. She divides her time between Corrientes, Argentina, and Toronto, Canada, where she teaches at OCAD University.

Fan Wu reflects on the first installment of “Open Hearing: Dreaming in Dark Times.” Initiated by EMILIA-AMALIA, the   gathered over 200 cultural workers in Toronto to confront urgent issues including Palestine solidarity, censorship, and labour. Inspired by the 1969 Art Workers’ Coalition open hearing in New York, the dispatch features transcripts from Meagan Christou, Mitra Fakhrashrafi, Emma Steen, Charlene K. Lau, and Dot Tuer.

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