md_Capilano_Web1_JulyJuly2025_Size B.jpg

sm_Capilano_Web1_JulyJuly2025_Size B.jpg

thumbnail_Capilano_Web1_JulyJuly2025_Size B.jpg

Capilano_Web1_JulyJuly2025_Size B.jpg

lg_Capilano_Web1_JuneJuly_SizeA.jpeg

md_Capilano_Web1_JuneJuly_SizeA.jpeg

sm_Capilano_Web1_JuneJuly_SizeA.jpeg

thumbnail_Capilano_Web1_JuneJuly_SizeA.jpeg

Capilano_Web1_JuneJuly_SizeA.jpeg

Capilano

sm_RMG_Web2_JuneJuly_SizeB.jpg

thumbnail_RMG_Web2_JuneJuly_SizeB.jpg

RMG_Web2_JuneJuly_SizeB.jpg

lg_RMG_Web2_JuneJuly_SizeA.jpg

md_RMG_Web2_JuneJuly_SizeA.jpg

sm_RMG_Web2_JuneJuly_SizeA.jpg

thumbnail_RMG_Web2_JuneJuly_SizeA.jpg

RMG_Web2_JuneJuly_SizeA.jpg

lg_C160_Cover.jpg

md_C160_Cover.jpg

sm_C160_Cover.jpg

thumbnail_C160_Cover.jpg

C160_Cover.jpg

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

Editorial Conception

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

Editor

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

Associate Editor

Designer

Publisher

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

Review

Anna Shah Hoque is an independent curator, doctoral fellow, educator, and writer. Her research examines the interplay between embodied and living archives, praxis, and visual art, centring on the work of Indigenous and South Asian artists and curators in Canada. She produced To Be Continued: Troubling the Archive, an arts podcast. Her writing has appeared in Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, C Magazine, Canadian Journal of Communication, esse, and the Journal of Palestine Studies, with a forthcoming
publication from Amherst College Press.

Curated by Ariane De Blois and Muhammad Nour ElKhairy, “P is for Palestine” emphasizes the importance of Palestinian archives, which have been a persistent target for destruction by Israel. These archives— spanning the embodied and the felt—have been produced across the intimate spheres of homes as well as academic and cultural spaces. Rehab Nazzal’s short film _Vibrations from Gaza_ (2023) offers a glimpse into the experiences of deaf children in Gaza who attend
the Atfaluna Society for Deaf Children. In December 2023, the society’s building was bombed and destroyed, and the fates of the children whom we see onscreen and with whom we fall in love are now unknown. Through the short film, we witness the children recount their memories of growing up amid Israeli bombardments. Nazzal captures the pervasive
soundscape of military drones—a persistent and unbearable sonic presence overshadowing Palestinian lives in Gaza. The film shows children playing on the shores of the sea, in the waters, and in the schoolyard. These images gain new significance in light of Gaza’s Government Media Office October 2024 statement citing the extermination of 902 Palestinian families by the Israel Occupation Forces (IOF) since October 7, 2023, supported by the United States and its allies (including Canada).

Intimate and experiential archives are also evoked
by artists Amal Al Nakhala and Bayan Abu Nahla, who
managed to flee Gaza in the early days of this ongoing
violence. In _Family portraits and scenes of everyday life_
(2022–2023), a series of inkjet reproductions on paper,
Abu Nahla’s drawn self is surrounded by loved ones, inviting a look into life under occupation. Al Nakhala’s _What the actual fuck? War diaries_ (2023–2024) chronicles her experiences of multiple forced displacements
within Gaza as she and her loved ones evade Israeli
bombings. On display are 24 reproductions of entries
from her original 50-page journal. Her diary entries
range from intimate observations of new white hairs
sprouting on her head, a stark testament to the relentless strain of living under perpetual military violence, to sketches of her cat, Zaatar. In one entry dated November 15, 2023 (Day 39), Al Nakhala recounts Zaatar’s desperate attempts to escape the terror of bombings, including his near-success at chewing through the cardboard box meant to shield him. Woven seamlessly into her accounts, Zaatar is a cherished family member, a companion whose survival is as precious as her own.

_Something from there_ (2020), a video work by Rana
Nazzal Hamadeh, features stories from her parents
on how soil bridges memories from Palestine with her
father’s life in exile in Canada. The video work is accompanied by a wall installation, _1/1000th of a Dunam_ (2021–ongoing), comprising five bags of soil. Each bag is marked with the name of the village from which
the artist sourced the soil. _1/1000th of a Dunam_ invokes a kind of cauterization that must occur when one removes soil from one’s land. At the same time, soil also offers a tangible opportunity for reconnection to home. Soil is an alchemical bridge linking Palestine to Kanien'kehá:ka lands. In this context, Nazzal Hamadeh’s work asserts Palestinian belonging by
grounding the viewer in land that marks Palestine as
ever-present. Nazzal Hamadeh’s work is placed within the sight-line of the works of her mother, Rehab Nazzal. The interplay between their practices transforms the exhibition into an intergenerational conversation,
where familial bonds manifest as a shared artistic commitment to documenting and resisting displacement.

Nada El-Omari’s video _from where to where_ (2021)
documents conversations between herself and her parents
in Arabic, English, and French. The softly lit, grainy film offers a nostalgic tone, as if to reinforce the persistence of heritage across generations. During the vernissage, El-Omari expressed how surreal it felt to be able to present her work alongside that of an artistic elder and idol,
Mona Hatoum, whose 1988 video _Measures of Distance_
influenced El-Omari’s own cross-generational and multilingual film. The juxtaposition of these two works gestures toward another form of continuity—one where an artistic call and response is skilfully evoked by the curators.

Muhammad Nour ElKhairy’s monochrome video
_I would like to visit_ (2017) takes the viewer through
his attempts to obtain a visa to enter the apartheid state of
Israel. We watch each word of his visa application being typed on the screen, deleted, reframed, and reworded, all to appease legal and political entities. ElKhairy is a Palestinian who grew up in Jordan, where his family
were displaced as refugees after the Nakba. The film’s
monochrome palette accentuates the bureaucratic monotony of ElKhairy’s visa application process and the dehumanizing reduction of his identity to mere text on screen—a poignant commentary on the discursive violence enacted on a person within regimes of apartheid and displacement.

In the accompanying exhibition leaflet, curators
De Blois and ElKhairy refer to the exhibition as an agora for a persistent promise of continuous belonging to a homeland that, for many, remains physically inaccessible due to Israeli settler-colonial occupation. As
I moved through the exhibit, one thought lingered: P is for perseverance. In this exhibition, Palestinians reveal their enduring love and honour for their ancestral lands, communities, histories, and stories, underscoring the commitment and longevity of the Palestinian calls for liberation.

Writer

lg_C160_SHAH-HOQUE.jpg

md_C160_SHAH-HOQUE.jpg

sm_C160_SHAH-HOQUE.jpg

thumbnail_C160_SHAH-HOQUE.jpg

C160_SHAH-HOQUE.jpg

C160_HOQUE.pdf

“P is for Palestine” included works from Bayan Abu Nahla, Amal Al Nakhala, Yara El-Ghadban, Muhammad Nour ElKhairy, Nada El-Omari, Mona Hatoum, Rehab Nazzal, and  Rana Nazzal Hamadeh.  The exhibition ran from 21 September to 14 December 2024 at Plein sud art actuel, Quebec City. Guest curated by Ariane De Blois and Muhammad Nour ElKhairy.

lg_C160_ShahHoque_Th (1).jpg

md_C160_ShahHoque_Th (1).jpg

sm_C160_ShahHoque_Th (1).jpg

thumbnail_C160_ShahHoque_Th (1).jpg

C160_ShahHoque_Th (1).jpg

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

Feature

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


Among the stacks of a library or adrift in a digital archive, I feel immersed in death. The accumulated pasts that I wade through are thick and they place me in time. There are many ways to trace the wake of others and ourselves, but I choose to focus on this textual anterior. Sometimes reading, writing, speech, and text are made mundane through use. They are so easily glossed over in constant cycles of desire and fulfilment, but through attention [^1]—long, slow looking in tandem with long, slow thinking—I want to make them strange again, restoring their jagged edges.

 

#### Yes, Dorotea. It was the murmuring that killed me.
> —Juan Rulfo, _Pedro Páramo_, 1955

About halfway through Juan Rulfo’s _Pedro Páramo_
(1955), the central narrator, Juan Preciado, dies. Much
of the book is ostensibly narrated from the grave he
shares with Dorotea, whom he encounters upon arriving
in Comala, a fictionalized version of a town in Mexico.
He was sent by his mother to that ghost town, as she lay
dying, to find his eponymous father. In a more conventional text, the death of the narrator would be equated
with the death of the story, but here, in the shared grave,
Preciado encounters a past in dreamlike remnants that
are hard to place in a linear understanding of time. Rulfo
uses multiple forms of punctuation (‘’, “”, «», —) to
indicate shifts in voice and time. Different characters’
voices emerge from stories of others. In the text, death
is a portal. It leads him out of his body and into the past
with Dorotea as one of his many co-narrators. It is here
that one voice bleeds into many.

The book is awash in spooky conundrums that entwine questions about life, time, order, and the ambiguity
and relativity that pervades them. It begins with a strong
declaration of place: “I came to Comala because I was
told my father lived here, a man named Pedro Páramo.” [^2]
On the level of language, the reader is given a location
that also gestures toward both an individual and a social
identity, as “I” is often taken as the ultimate declaration
of personhood and autonomy. It is the foundation of a
self that we grow into.

In _Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing_ (1993),
Hélène Cixous writes, “We need to lose the world […]
to discover that there is more than one world and
that the world isn’t what we think it is. Without that, we
know nothing about the mortality and immortality
that we carry.” [^3] The acts and results of making are often aligned with birth and new life, but the fingerprints
of death rest on them as well. Like the concepts of new
and old or time and space, the dyad of life and death
are inseparable. You can’t speak about the beginning
of something without invoking the concept of its end. Any invocation of life holds the trace of death looming like a silent letter.

One of the reasons I keep returning to text and writing is the possibilities they provide for questioning
the boundaries that construct the space between self
and other, along with concomitant boundaries between
life and death. Writing is a form that recognizes the
failings (or perhaps the contingencies) of an idea of the
“self” as an entity contained to a discrete body. It can
be a place of non-division from which many questions
and declarations of separation and clarification can be
unwound, demolished, or left to decompose.
 
 

#### Writing is learning to die […] to live at the extremity of life…

> —Hélène Cixous, _Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing_, 1993

Visual artist and writer Sarah Tripp’s _You Are of
Vital Importance_ (2014) takes on scenarios I rarely
encounter in literary fiction. These vignettes dramatize the events of an experimental spatial workshop
and chart the history of a restaurant that has become
a social hub in the arts community of a city. One piece
in particular, “Studies of practice,” documents the experience of a person who steps into the working methods
of various artists as if these constellations of materials,
times, and locations were a glove that one could don
and shed. The unnamed narrator sits in a small, dark
cupboard and paints with their fingers, following the
casual guidelines of its usual inhabitant. They also poke
around in the word processor of an anxious writer. [^4]

These studies offer the impression of time spent
outside of oneself. Through the patterning of experiences, the narrator flickers between possible selves,
possible days in the studio; they imagine through research, and the strange social guises art can take on,
how their life could be just a bit different. A reader
is guided into that mundane empathetic space.

I take “Studies” as documentation of a series of
actions that, while they may or may not have happened,
dwell in a small and secretive space not usually known
to an audience. Any artist can tell you that most of the
work of practice is private or, at least, happens in a cascade of private spaces: homes, bedrooms, studios, notebooks, computers, headphones, web browsers, etc. Part of what ignites Tripp’s “Studies” is the possibility of
climbing into the driver’s seat of another person’s practice and performing a kind of possession.

In horror, possession is often characterized as the
worst type of violation—a forcible evacuation of the
self in order to control a person’s body—but the fantasy
of seeing from another’s perspective can be seen here
as a far more familiar and benign longing. Though it can
be regarded as naive, sentimental, or spurious, the ability to induce empathy in a viewer upon encounter, even
across great physical and temporal distance, is a central fascination in art-making.

 

#### The earlier culture will become a heap of rubble and finally a heap of ashes, but spirits will hover over the ashes.

> —Ludwig Wittgenstein, _Culture and Value_, 1970

For nearly a decade, Ron Terada worked on a series of paintings based on the book _Jack Goldstein
and the CalArts Mafia_ (2003), [^5] comprising dramatized first-person accounts by Goldstein and a long list of his
peers from the California Institute of the Arts in the ’70s. The book documents the rise and fall of Goldstein’s career in the rapidly commercializing art world of the ’80s. Each of Terada’s canvases in the _Jack series_ (2009–2018) presents a facsimile of the text with obvious visual allusions to book pages, but also to stone
tablets and, by the end of the series, large memorial slabs embedded into the floors of cathedrals.

These canvases perform several circuitous plays—
commenting on the position that Goldstein (along with many other members of the so-called Pictures Generation) holds in art history, marked by a shift in global attention from the conceptual work of the ’60s (often
emphasizing the use of text) to the pictorial work of
the ’70s and ’80s (often invoking mass media forms). Terada cheekily turns this relationship on its head, reframing the biting text into the medium of large-format painting—one of the golden calves that propelled some of Goldstein’s peers into the post-conceptual, globalized art market.

I encountered part of the _Jack_ series in a large gallery, shifting from one aching foot to another, slowly
circling the room. The text is consumed by discussions
of money, rivalry, and backstabbing: all concepts that
I knew were part of art-making, but ones that are not
usually brought up in the glossy, sublime image of
“creativity” presented by art institutions. This seemed
like the dirt—the bits that you hear in a cab on the
way to drinks after an opening—which felt somehow
at odds with the slow, slightly monastic mental image
I had of the work’s construction. It implied a layer of
melding between this already polyvocal text and Terada, through the act of transcription.

The effect is a series of nested quotations that are obscured by Richard Hertz’s dramatization in the source
text, but also by Terada’s deadpan delivery. The intimacy
of voices blending, and the ambiguity of who is speaking
and what is said, quietly disturbs the expectation of art as
an individual pursuit. After years of working on the series, Terada said, “I catch myself repeating [Goldstein’s]
phrases.” [^6] This messy relationship is one in which all
parties are shaped by contact with one another, even if
that contact is across great leaps in time and space. At
least that is my hope. I can’t think of a life without the
company of the dead.

 

#### I think about my own practice—my installations—as a series of unfinished sentences with commas that lead to the next part or that remind us that there is no full stop in this conversation…

> —Kameelah Janan Rasheed, _No New Theories_, 2019

I used to spend time with the office administrator whenever I was visiting my father’s work. She would take
me to the photocopier and help me improvise compositions on the scanner bed that usually involved the palm
of my hand and scrap from the recycling bin. I liked to
hold the warm paper after it was spat out of the machine.
I kept these compositions in an empty office beside my
father’s. As he worked on editing a journal for scholars
of military history, my own research into the phenomenology of childhood developed next door.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed often works in the vernacular of copy toner, a material I often think of as
a bridge between spaces of research and the cultures of DIY music, art, and politics. In Rasheed’s _No New
Theories_ (2019), this material erodes many myths
about the aesthetics of knowledge and punctures the
neatness of theoretical speculation. Throughout the
publication, Rasheed builds texts from fragments and
layers of annotation, citation, revision, and accumulated voices she has invited or invoked. [^7] The black-and-white pages unfold as grainy, smeared sets of interstitial spaces connected by graphic elements that bare diagrammatic qualities as well as allusions to punctuation
and Arabic calligraphy.

Along with underlining the porous and unfinished
nature of writing, _No New Theories_ stands as a reminder
that “[w]riting and reading are not separate, reading is
a part of writing.” [^8] The core of the publication is a conversation between Rasheed and Jessica Lynne, which is
expanded, both conceptually and graphically, through
various interventions that fill in the background of
the exchange with quotations and annotations. These
layers of thought remind me of my own intellectual
development, slashing hurried and emphatic lines under the words of others and jotting half-formed sentences in the margins that would go on to underpin a
new piece.

Writing is always gesturing at the ineffable, the unsayable, the unpronounced parts of itself. Punctuation that controls clauses and sentences. “I can’t be A
comprehensive sentence,” says _No New Theories_. The
work seems to demand that language be left open and
that we take up the work of that language. One page is
adapted from the Wikipedia article for the term “Hapax legomenon,” describing a word or idiom that occurs
only once in a given context, such as in an author’s body
of work or a specific language. The concept gestures toward the emergence of words or language used in novel ways to express particular phenomena. The shadow of this emergence is the chipping away at experience that
used to belong to the ineffable, and this brings with it a
small amount of grief.

In “11 Statements Around Art Writing” (2011),
Maria Fusco, Yve Lomax, Michael Newman, and Adrian Rifkin imagine a space of “non-division” where
assumedly discrete activities (like of practice and theory) can collapse and commingle. [^9] It may have one
foot in the realm of fantasy, but I like to think through
non-division when it comes to life and death. I think
about myself as inhabiting the afterlife of so many people who have lived and died before me. Text can be a
link to the world of the dead, but more often it is what
allows the smear of non-division between self and other, living and dead. Reading and writing give a sense
of transcending the boundaries of the corporal self
that is bound in time. Cixous says that “[w]hen I write
I escape myself, I uproot myself,” [^10] and that uprootedness is a small death, in a small neighbourhood of the
self and of language, that allows people to flow into
each other.

Endnotes
[^1]: “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.” Simone Weil, _Gravity and Grace_ (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116.
[^2]: Juan Rulfo and Gabriel García Márquez, _Pedro Páramo_, trans. Douglas J. Weatherford (New York: Grove Atlantic, 2023), 1.
[^3]: Hélène Cixous, _Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing_, trans. Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 10.
[^4]: Sarah Tripp, _You are of vital importance_ (London: Book Works, 2014), 74.
[^5]: Richard Hertz et al., _Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia_, 1st ed. (Ojai: Minneola Press, 2003).
[^6]: Tom McDonough and Ron Terada, “Time Is Different Now,” _Canadian Art_, March 9, 2020, https://canadianart.ca/features/ron-terada-time-is-different-now
[^7]: On her website, Rasheed describes “citation as a practice of deep lineage storytelling that centres knowledge production as a dynamic, interspecies and interdisciplinary process → this is not about ownership or authority.” Kameelah Janan Rasheed, “Colophon,” https://kameelahr.com/Colophon
[^8]: Cixous, _Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing_, 21. 
[^9]: Maria Fusco, Yve Lomax, Michael Newman, and Adrian Rifkin, “11 Statements Around Art Writing,” _Frieze_, October 10, 2011, https://www.frieze.com/article/11-statements-around-art-writing
[^10]: Cixous, _Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing_, 20.

lg_C160_WILSON.jpg

md_C160_WILSON.jpg

sm_C160_WILSON.jpg

thumbnail_C160_WILSON.jpg

C160_WILSON.jpg

C160_Wilson.pdf

Language

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

The Afterlife of Writing

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

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

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

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

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

lg_C160_MOSER.jpg

md_C160_MOSER.jpg

sm_C160_MOSER.jpg

thumbnail_C160_MOSER.jpg

C160_MOSER.jpg

C160_MOSER.pdf

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

lg_C160_Moser_Th.jpg

md_C160_Moser_Th.jpg

sm_C160_Moser_Th.jpg

thumbnail_C160_Moser_Th.jpg

C160_Moser_Th.jpg

“We Who Have Known Many Shores” — Alize Zorlutuna

Column

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

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


lg_C160_TAM.JPG

md_C160_TAM.JPG

sm_C160_TAM.JPG

thumbnail_C160_TAM.JPG

C160_TAM.JPG

C160_Tam.pdf

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

Print and Digital subscriptions are available for individuals and institutions

C Magazine

Subscribe to

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[^8]: Ibid.

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

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

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

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

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

C160_BOULOS.jpg

C160_BOULOS.pdf

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


When Play Confronts Power

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

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

The House Edge

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

For Those Who Visit Us in Our Dreams

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

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

To Enshrine an Ululation

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

The _KISSSSS_ of Yong Soon Min

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

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

In the Lacuna

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

A Vampire Walks Into a Funhouse

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.

One Thing: Kamala Ibrahim Ishag’s Zar Paintings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bhenji Ra Dances at the End of the Rainbow

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

Floor Drawing Series by Aubin Soonhwan K: Text

Aman Sandhu is an artist and writer working between Montreal and Glasgow. His installations often include drawing, moving image, sculpture, and text. He considers them as ensembles of objects that come into view through improvisation.

Sahar Te is an artist and writer whose practice exists at the intersection of text, installation, and time-based media. Her interest in media, politics, literature, theatre, and acoustics inform her work. Te’s engagements span language and poetics, aesthetics and semiotics, social dynamics and inter-species, and oral histories.

Our Third Sun

Emma-Kate Guimond is a performance artist and writer based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. She has published essays in _Espace art actuel_ (2023) and _Inter, art actuel_ (2024), and works as a creative ally for the theatre company Joe Jack et John. Her recent exhibition and short film _The Plot_ (2024) was presented at Centre CLARK in Montreal.

Gui B.B’s Performances and the Erotics of Debt

Raven Davis is an Anishinaabe, 2-Spirit artist and educator, born in Michi Saagiig Territory, Toronto, ON. Davis investigates land-based and archival research, with calls to action, healing, and works authenticized by lived and intergenerational experience. Davis utilizes movement, visuals, and sound/media in their practice. For over 30 years, Davis has advocated for equitable, IBPOGM art and liberated futures.

Cara Tierney (they/them) is a transdisciplinary artist and educator who lives/works on unceded Anishinaabe Algonquin land. A settler of Scottish-Irish-Italian descent, their work investigates the way meaning is structured in, around, and through the body. They are oriented toward building more equitable and sustainable futures.

Hard Limits, Soft Landing

Adrien Crossman is a queer and non-binary white settler artist and curator currently residing on the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe in so-called Hamilton, ON. They are interested in the affective qualities of queerness: how queerness can be felt through specific aesthetics and sensibilities. Crossman cofounded and co-runs the online arts publication off centre and is an Assistant Professor in the School of the Arts at McMaster University.

Fetish Aesthetics and Fan Fiction in Dana Buzzee's Philosophically Pornographic Practice

Andrea Dávila is a researcher, writer, and museum professional interested in the cultural and disciplinary intersections within art history, focusing on the visual dialogues and continuities within contemporary Latin American art. She graduated from Barnard College, and has held curatorial internships at the Dallas Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

One Thing: Tracing Fragments of Queer Desire


Erica N. Cardwell is a writer, critic, and educator currently based in Toronto. She is the recipient of a 2021 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Her writing has appeared in _ARTS.BLACK_, _Art in America_, _Frieze_, _BOMB_, _The Believer_, _The Brooklyn Rail_, _C Magazine_, _Studio Magazine_, and other publications. She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Toronto Scarborough and a Terra Foundation Research Fellow for _Threewalls_, a Chicago-based arts organization. Her book, _Wrong Is Not My Name: Notes on (Black) Art_ will be published by _The Feminist Press_ in March 2024.


Sinister Pleasure: Interview with Ja'Tovia Gary

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

A Good Animal on Wet Sheets: Disobedient Gasps in Subspace

Born in Kjipuktuk (Halifax) and currently living in Tkaronto, traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples, Trish Salah is the author of the Lambda award-winning poetry collection _Wanting in Arabic_, and of _Lyric Sexology Vol. 1_. Her writing is widely published in journals and anthologies, and translations of her work have appeared in French, Greek, and Arabic. She has co-edited special issues of _TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly_, on cultural production, and of _Arc Poetry Magazine_, showcasing trans, Two-Spirit, and non-binary writers. She is also an Associate Professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University, and Editor at the _Journal of Critical Race Inquiry_.

Composition: give up your own

eunice bélidor is a curator, researcher, and writer born and based in Montreal. Her current curatorial research focuses on letter writing as creating affective archives; she is interested in the intersection of epistolary writing with care, feminism, anti-capitalism, and racial issues.

What is the Safe Word?

Liliona Quarmyne is a dancer, choreographer, actor, singer, and organizer based in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, on the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Mi’kmaq people. From Ghana and the Philippines, she has an eclectic background that has taken her through many performance styles on four different continents. She performs and creates both as a solo artist and with various companies, facilitates community programming, and is an experienced curator and artistic director. The scope of Liliona’s artistic work is broad, but is particularly focused on the relationship between art and social justice, on the body’s ability to carry ancestral memory, and on the role the performing arts can play in creating change. Liliona loves to work in collaboration and community, and is mom to two wonderful kids.


_proxy_ by Mo Glitch: Text

C the Visual Arts Foundation, with the support of its board of directors and staff, re-articulates the [public commitment we made to the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) in 2021](https://www.instagram.com/p/CPeJinntzMy/). In line with PACBI guidelines, we will (as paraphrased by Writers Against the War On Gaza): 

1)	Boycott all cultural products and events that are funded, commissioned, or sponsored by 
an official Israeli body. 
2)	Boycott complicit Israeli institutions. 
3)	Boycott normalization projects. 

We do this because, as Shiv Kotecha and Rainer Diana Hamilton write in [“PACBI Now,”](https://thenewinquiry.com/pacbi-now/) “boycotts shorten the perceived distances between moral actors.” The Canadian state is deeply complicit in providing military and political support to Israel. In the period since October 2023, we have seen Palestinian solidarity across Turtle Island—including in our cultural sectors—increasingly censored and criminalized. Meanwhile, as Rana Nazzal Hamadeh and Alia Hijaab write in [“Art as a Mirror: How Canadian Institutions Are Complicit in Silencing Palestinian Voices,”](https://cmagazine.com/articles/art-as-a-mirror-how-canadian-institutions-are-complicit-in-silencing-palestinian-voices) nearly “200 historical and cultural landmarks have been damaged or destroyed, and two of the four museums in Gaza have been levelled entirely.” We witness this colonial violence and identify its analogues within so-called Canada, from Wet'suwet'en land defenders who are fighting off the Coastal GasLink pipeline, to Six Nations of the Grand River’s ongoing defense of their unceded land across the Haldimand Tract, to Grassy Narrows First Nation’s fight against the government-sanctioned mercury poisoning of their homes, to the implementation of Bill C-5, which prioritizes extractive industries. The settler colonial project across the Americas is deeply imbricated with global imperialism: the maintenance of both structures relies on ongoing violence here on Turtle Island and abroad. As a cultural institution situated in so-called Canada, by participating in PACBI, we hope to, alongside our peers, be a part of a cultural formation that refuses complicity not only with routinized violence against the Palestinian people but also all Indigenous life.

PACBI targets institutions, not individuals, complicity, not identity, and is endorsed by the absolute majority of Palestinian cultural and mass movement organizations. According to PACBI guidelines, the boycott [“subscribes to the internationally-accepted definition of freedom of expression as stipulated in the United Nations’ International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).”](https://bdsmovement.net/pacbi/cultural-boycott-guidelines)
 
With this reaffirmation, we align our organizational and existing publishing values. We are honoured to be part of the groundswell of peer cultural organizations in Canada who recognize that PACBI is the floor, not the ceiling. This provides a starting point for our cultural sectors to be part of a horizon of change oriented towards a free Palestine. 
 
The full guidelines for PACBI can be found [here.](https://bdsmovement.net/pacbi/cultural-boycott-guidelines)
 
In solidarity,
 
C The Visual Arts Foundation

Comments and questions may be directed to [board@cmagazine.com](mailto:board@cmagazine.com)

Support for the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel 

Announcement

C the Visual Arts Foundation, with the support of its board of directors and staff, re-articulates the public commitment we made to the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) in 2021.

Header

When Play Confronts Power

C Mag

The Latest

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

The Afterlife of Writing

“We Who Have Known Many Shores” — Alize Zorlutuna

One Thing: In Search of an Incorruptible Life

Issue 160

Extra Life

Subscribe to

Upcoming

C The Visual Arts Foundation Recommits to PACBI