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Mercer 1

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Mayworks 1

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Contact 1

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Mayworks 2

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Mercer 2

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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

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


At the back of Wil Aballe Art Projects is a loft space. The small mezzanine, tucked high up the soaring white walls, is primarily used as the gallerist’s office. A presentation of artwork here might seem provisional, even lost, amid the venue’s rustic beams and skylights. But the work of Vancouver artist Justin Somjen dialogues fluidly with architecture. Or perhaps it is not dialogue, but incantation: the work enchants the architecture. 

 

The solo exhibition “Spines” comprises four artworks: relief sculptures in ornate, hand-carved wooden frames, finished with thick, velvety-smooth paint. Within each frame, moulded white figures are arrayed like charges on a coat of arms. Most are flora and fauna, but there are other symbols, too—candles, padlocks, ribbons. Some forms are chimeric, appearing natural at first glance but revealing their mythical hybridity on closer inspection. The figures play in both two and three dimensions, appearing at once emblazoned on the wood and also animate, inhabiting the frames. 

 

In _Frilled Agama_ (2024), the titular lizard hisses at the centre of her frame, neck fins flaring out over her eggs. She seems to recoil into a dense, powder-blue habitat. Flowers unfurl their tendrils beyond the borders of _Hand Feeding’s_ (2023) rich red frame, the centre of which shows a finger dropping blood onto the trigger hairs of Venus flytraps. 

 

The frames do not have glass. Rather, epoxy resin lattices wend across them, loosely screening the figures from the viewer. The beasts of _Dogfight_ (2024) are stark white against the black background, evoking an urban scene glimpsed through a chain-link fence: two strays wrestling, struck by a floodlight at night. Yet, their almost heraldic forms—and the nearby presence of the legendary basilisk—make the image suddenly mystical. 

This collapse of the contemporary with the arcane, and the archaic, is partly why these works are so rewarding to read against architecture. The works in “Spines” entangle and experiment with centuries of design, which makes for an unexpected encounter at the top of a staircase in Vancouver’s Railspur Alley. At the same time, each frame contains such an engrossing depth of visual allegory that the surrounding architecture may cease to matter at all. 

  
An allegory of what? The exhibition’s title gives clues. Spines are skeletal structures and key conduits of the central nervous system; they are also defensive mechanisms, like quills and spikes. The creatures in “Spines” are engaged in acts of defence, perhaps against the viewer, whose spine allows them to stand upright. There are links, both poetic and tangible, between the human backbone and the terrors of the ongoing Holocene extinction. Somjen’s pale menagerie may be read as calcified remains, or delicately engraved cameos carved in remembrance of something lost. 

 

The final work in the exhibition, _Methuselah_ (2025), is named for the planet’s most ancient living organism: a bristlecone pine tree, nearly five millennia old. _Methuselah’s_ screen isn’t rigid and white, but sinuous and dark green, like its asymmetrical frame. Here, life persists—with all its spines, in their multitudinous forms. 

Writer

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"Spines" ran from 6 March to 30 March 2025 at Wil Aballe Art Projects, Vancouver.

“Spines” — Justin Somjen 

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

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

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

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

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

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




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

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“May We Return” — Sarah Elawad

Feature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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Spirituality

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


To Enshrine an Ululation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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



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Politics

History

International

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


The _KISSSSS_ of Yong Soon Min

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

<br/> <br/>


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

For Those Who Visit Us in Our Dreams

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

Salena Barry is a writer from Toronto, Canada, who is currently based in London, UK. She was a 2021 Frieze New Writer and a 2022 Jerwood Writer in Residence. She has written for institutions including Delfina Foundation and Site Gallery as well as for publications including _Frieze, ArtReview,_ and _Emergent Magazine._

Weaving Through the Binary: Qualeasha Wood's Textile Inheritances

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

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

Jasmine Gui is a Singaporean-born interdisciplinary artist, arts programmer, and PhD student based in Tkaronto/Toronto. She works in paper, ceramics, tea, and experimental book formats through the inter-arts and publishing space Teh Studio. 


Different Things in Different Scenes: Encountering Ichi-go Ichi-e in Tea

D. St-Amour (they/she) is a writer, book-maker, and recovering arts worker. Since 2011, St-Amour has held curatorial, administrative, and research positions at a range of institutions, including the AGO, the Walter Phillips Gallery, Art Metropole, and Galerie SBC. St-Amour regularly writes about artists’ books and publishing practices through the lens of visual arts and media history, and is slowly publishing a series of queer sci-fi and speculative fiction books through their slow-press project, specific. place (with co-editor S F Ho). Recently, St-Amour completed an MA in Art History/Visual Cultures at York University, and is currently an MLIS candidate at Western University in London. 


Anni Araújo Spadafora (she/ her) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto. Her work spans performance, music and sound, and textiles. She regularly studies at the Marshfield School of Weaving (Vermont). Recent project and performance sites include Extrapool (Nijmegen, NL), Milieux Institute (Montreal), Gardiner Museum (Toronto), The Khyber Centre for the Arts (Halifax), and the Art Gallery of Ontario. She is also a founding member of the band New Fries, who have released music with Telephone Explosion Records (Toronto) and Soul Jazz Records (London, UK). New Fries has toured across Canada and internationally and opened for The Pop Group, Neil Hagerty, The Ex, and Xiu Xiu (among others).


Marking Time Spent Absurdly

Amanda Shore is a white-settler arts worker, critic, and curator based in K’jipuktuk (Halifax, NS). 


Love Made Object

matt lambert is a non-binary, trans, multidisciplinary collaborator and co-conspirator working toward equity, inclusion, and reparation. Their practice is based in polydisciplinamory, entangling making, writing, curating, collaborating, and performing. lambert is currently a PhD Researcher at Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden, in Artistic Practice in Visual, Applied, and Spatial Arts. Their research focuses on mapping collaborative movements with craft through a developed methodology of cruising. They have published, curated, exhibited, and been collected internationally. 


_Exploratory Touch_ by Trevor Novak: Text

We’re very excited to announce Magally Zelaya as the winner of the Indigenous Art Writing Award 2024! Zelaya’s text "Notes on Paper: Spiritual Healing for Artists and Other Humans” dives into artist Michelle Peraza’s work with amatl, the ancient Mesoamerican paper made from the bark of the wild fig tree. Zelaya skillfully covers much personal, historical, and cultural ground with a sense of poetics. Jurors were reminded of the often uncredited yet spiritual role materials play in art-making, where this sacred paper has survived banning and the largest massacre by Spanish colonizers in Mexico and Central America. “The artist heals the paper. The paper heals the viewer [...] The paper heals.” Zelaya’s piece will appear in a future issue of _C Magazine._

We also extend warm congratulations to Vance Wright and Jordyn Hrenyk, who have been named runners-up for their strong texts.

Wright’s “The Legacy of the Potlatch Ban and Indigenous Art Production” felt to jurors like a fresh view of the disruption of the Potlatch ban (1885–1951) instigated by the settler colonial government of Canada. Wright places the Potlatch ban not as a place of sole negation, but a moment where the transfer of art practices and cultural knowledge had to change, casting Indigenous Art History as existing on a continuum where colonial tactics did not end or contaminate these practices.

Hrenyk’s “Looking Indigenous Beadwork in the Eye” weaves the historical context of beadwork on Turtle Island and its colonial market with grounded personal reflections and institutional critique in the experience of organizing the show “_Pe-kīwēwin_: Confronting
Commercialized Spaces with Stitched Relationality” (Massy Arts Society). Hrenyk defines an Indigenous entrepreneuring practice as turning something very colonial—a “market”—into something very Indigenous, namely a community. 

The IAWA continues to be organized by _C Magazine_ and the [Indigenous Curatorial Collective / Collectif des commissaires autochtones (ICCA)](https://icca.art/), and was created to support, compensate, and platform Indigenous-identified writers who are advancing creative critical thought about Indigenous contemporary art. Stay tuned this summer for submissions to open for the next award.

Thank you to everyone who participated, and to last year’s jurors Mikinaak Migwans, Justine Stilborn (ICCA), and Joy Xiang (_C Magazine_).


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**Magally Zelaya** is a Salvadoran-Canadian writer and journalist born in Mexico City and raised in Winnipeg. Her creative writing has been published in _The Acentos Review_, _Sin Cesar_, and _The Normal School_. Her reporting has appeared in _The Guardian_, _Al Jazeera America_, _Cosmopolitan UK), _The Christian Science Monitor_, and CBC. She holds an MFA from Rutgers University–Newark. Before giving her life over to the written word, she worked on film sets and tomato farms, in call centres and ESL classrooms. Recently, the ukulele has laid claim to her heart. 


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**Vance Wright** (they/them) is a reconnecting two-spirit member of the Tl’azt’en Nation, and was raised on the unceded territories of the Sinixt Nation in what is colonially known as Nelson, BC. Currently residing in the occupied and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations in Vancouver, they are an emerging artist, curator, and writer. They hold a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University, with a major in Critical and Cultural Practices and a minor in Curatorial Studies. 


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**Dr. Jordyn Hrenyk** is a Michif (Métis Nation Saskatchewan) researcher. She is a Provost’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. Jordyn’s research is focused on Indigenous entrepreneurship and values-aligned business, with a focus on Indigenous arts-based self-employment. As part of her dissertation research, Jordyn collaborated with 23 Indigenous beadwork artists to develop an exhibit focused on beadwork as an act of community care and resistance. While she was born on her home territory in Treaty 6, Jordyn has grown up in different urban centres around what is now known as British Columbia. She now lives on the territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat Peoples in Tkaronto. She strives to walk lightly on these lands, and works to cultivate meaningful relationships with this place with the Peoples who have stewarded it since Time Immemorial.

Indigenous Art Writing Award Winner 2024

The Indigenous Art Writing Award is an initiative created to support, compensate, and platform standout individuals who are advancing critical and creative thought about Indigenous contemporary art. The award is presented by _C Magazine_ and the [Indigenous Curatorial Collective / Collectif des commissaires autochtones ](link)(ICCA).

Indigenous writers in the first decade of their career are invited to submit a single text up to 2,000 words in length about an artist, project, exhibition, performance, event, initiative, theme, and/or phenomenon therein.

Applicants must identify as an Indigenous person. There are no geographical restrictions, although we strongly encourage those based in Canada to apply. Submissions should be primarily in English, but may include non-English words or phrases. For submissions entirely in another language, we require translations. It is free to make a submission. Please note for the purposes of this award, submissions must not be previously published or slated for future publication elsewhere.

The award is adjudicated by ICCA staff, _C Magazine_ editors, and an external juror. The winner receives a cash award and editorial support to prepare their article for publication in _C Magazine_, and the runner receives a cash award. All participants receive a subscription to _C Magazine_.

The 2022 winner was awarded the Momus Emerging Critics Residency, supported in part by [Momus](https://momus.ca/), together with the presenting partners.

Submission

Partners

Indigenous Art Writing Award

Program

Presented by _C Magazine_ and the Indigenous Curatorial Collective / Collectif des commissaires autochtones. The Indigenous Art Writing Award is an initiative created to support, compensate, and platform standout individuals who are advancing critical and creative thought about Indigenous contemporary art. 

We’re very excited to announce Magally Zelaya as the winner of the Indigenous Art Writing Award 2024 and extend warm congratulations to Vance Wright and Jordyn Hrenyk, who have been named runners-up for their strong texts.


Indigenous Art Writing Award Winner 2024: Magally Zelaya

##### Call for Pitches for TIDAL

##### C162—Winter 2026

##### Accepted until: May 16, 2025


For this issue, we begin from Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite’s conception of _tidalectics_, which he describes as being “like our grandmother’s–our nana’s–action, like the movement of the ocean she’s walking on, coming from one continent/continuum, touching another, and then receding (‘reading’) from the island(s) into the perhaps creative chaos of the(ir) future.” Brathwaite troubles any easy binary distinction that would separate land from water, and instead prompts us to think through the two categories together, particularly in the archipelagic space of the Caribbean. This helps us trouble colonial logics that separate the land (organized into nation-states and private property) from water. Like the ebb and flow of waves hitting the shore, or the edge between land and sea, we seek capacious engagements with “Tidal”– that which becomes possible when we dissolve colonial binaries. We invite pitches that take up fluidity, borderlessness, the oceanic, and movement and its metaphors in cultural production. What else, more than water, can be tidal?

Thematic feature, artist project, and column pitches accepted until **May 16, 2025.** Review pitches, not required to be on theme, are accepted on a rolling basis.
 
Send pitches to [pitch@cmagazine.com](mailto:pitch@cmagazine.com), with a subject line that starts with the word PITCH and indicates the submission type (review, essay, interview, One Thing, for example). 
 
Please include ~150 words about your subject and how you’ll approach it, along with hyperlinks wherever relevant. An estimated word count is appreciated. If you have not written for us recently, include a link to your website—or a copy of your CV—and one or two writing samples (ideally ones in a style similar to your pitched piece). We do not publish reprints or previously written pieces. Please see our [writer’s guidelines](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://cmagazine.com/about/submissions&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1697147081646416&usg=AOvVaw2LThVx84yWvZVSHyA0KeCG) for more information.

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Call for Pitches for TIDAL

Call

Thematic feature, artist project, and column pitches for C162 accepted until May 16, 2025.

Call for pitches for TIDAL

Now in its 16th year, [the C New Critics Award](https://cmagazine.com/programs/c-new-critics) is designed to help identify, develop, and promote the work of emerging art critics, and to encourage creative discourse on current art practices. Writers are invited to submit an 800-1,000 word review of a recent exhibition, performance, publication, or moving image work, by **May 30, 2025.** The winner will receive $750, editorial support to prepare their article for publication in a future issue of _C Magazine_, and a two-year subscription. All participants will receive a one-year subscription.

For the purposes of the award, an emerging writer is defined as anyone who has not published more than one piece of writing in a recognized print or online publication, exclusive of student-run journals and magazines. The competition is open to anyone residing in Canada, regardless of citizenship status, and to Canadians living abroad.

Exhibition and performance reviews must address work that occurred no earlier than January 1, 2025, whereas book and moving image work reviews must address work made in the past two years. Submissions must not be previously published, or slated for future publication elsewhere.  See our [submissions](https://cmagazine.com/about/submissions) page for more information for writers. 

One submission per person. Upload your submission here at [award-submission.cmagazine.com.](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfmdQtEJQBWkGhRk_0tfc7d--3DYdLYqMeiO6VN9WcrKpeEYA/viewform) Mail or fax submissions will not be accepted. Please let us know of any accommodation we may provide during the application process. Note that measures are taken to ensure that the identity of entrants remains unknown to adjudicators. If you have questions please direct them to [editor@cmagazine.com](mailto:editor@cmagazine.com)

Submissions will be assessed by Joy Xiang, Editor at _C Magazine_, alongside **Christina Battle** and **Dr. Andrew Gayed**, who we are pleased to welcome as this year's external jurors.

**Christina Battle** is an artist, curator, and writer based in amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton), within the Aspen Parkland: the transition zone where prairie and forest meet. Her practice focuses on thinking deeply about the concept of disaster: its complexity and the intricacies entwined within it. She looks to disaster as a series of intersecting processes including social, environmental, cultural, political, and economic, which are implicated not only in how disaster is caused but also in how it manifests, is responded to, and overcome.

Battle’s practice prioritizes collaboration, experimentation, and failure; she has exhibited internationally in festivals and galleries as both an artist and curator.

www.cbattle.com 

**Dr. Andrew Gayed** is Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at OCAD University, where he teaches courses on global contemporary art. An Egyptian-Canadian art historian, Dr. Gayed has an academic background in diasporic art, queer visual culture, and Middle Eastern art histories. Before joining OCAD U, Dr. Gayed was the Visiting Scholar at NYU’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality where he researched the artistic practices of the queer diaspora. Gayed holds a PhD in Art History and Visual Culture from York University, where he was awarded the Provost Dissertation Award, and earned an M.A. in Art History, and a B.F.A. in Visual Arts. 

Gayed's research is located at the cutting edge of interdisciplinary and transnational inquiry in art history, gender studies, and critical race theory. His scholarship has appeared in books including the _Routledge Handbook of Middle Eastern Diasporas_ and _Unsettling Canadian Art History_, in addition to peer-reviewed journals including _Journal for Studies in Art Education_. Dr. Gayed’s first monograph, _Queer World Making: Contemporary Middle Eastern Diasporic Art_, published with the University of Washington Press (2024), shares innovative new research in visual art and culture that transforms our understanding of queerness and multiculturalism. By studying contemporary art, _Queer World Making_ foregrounds decolonial politics and unexpected histories of homosexuality in the Middle East as a way of better understanding the issues today that queer diasporic people of colour face.



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---

**Congratulations to Louis-Philippe Savard, winner of the 2024 C New Critics Award!** Savard impressed the jury with [his review of "The Traces That Remain"](https://cmagazine.com/articles/the-traces-that-remain-shaya-ishaq-po-b-k-lomami-zinnia-naqvi-lan-florence-yee) at MAI (Montreal, art interculturels), which was curated by eunice bélidor and featured the work of Po B. K. Lomami, Zinnia Naqvi, Shaya Ishaq, and Lan “Florence” Yee. His piece carefully considers the moment of encounter between exhibited works and their publics, with respect to subjectivity and the politics of the archive, and it was published in C159 Mirror Mirror. 

**We would also like to congratulate Lins Demchuk** on being named runner up for her review of Audie Murray's exhibition, "To Make Smoke," at The Mackenzie Art Gallery, Regina. The jury noted that her piece also functioned as a meta-commentary on the genre of the exhibition review itself. Demchuk offered a generative critique of the interpretive contexts within which the category known as "Indigenous art" is engaged, without losing sight of the exhibition itself. 

Thank you to everyone who participated! We are also very greatful to Nadia Kurd and Alice Ming Wai Jim, who adjudicated the award alongside _C Magazine_'s Associate Editor, Maandeeq Mohamed.

Call for the 2025 C New Critics Award 

Award

Now in its 16th year, the C New Critics Award is designed to help develop and promote the work of emerging art critics. Submit by May 30, 2025.

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For Those Who Visit Us in Our Dreams

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Indigenous Art Writing Award Winner 2024: Magally Zelaya

Call for pitches for TIDAL

Call for the C New Critics Award