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The New Gallery

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Maandeeq Mohamed is a writer and researcher. Engaging Black Studies and related cultural production, her writing is featured in _Real Life_, _C Magazine_, and _Canadian Art_. 

Reviews Editor

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

Designer

Publisher

Kink gives us an opportunity to question the limits of convention as they meet with hierarchical systems. Taking kink as a shapeshifter—a conscious negotiation of desire and relations based on principles like consent—this issue embraces queerness, disobedience, disruption, and complex embodiment. Through artistic explorations of BDSM, impact play, subspace, fan fiction, eroticized debt, Indigenous-settler relations, and more, contributors dive into the fleshy and political consequences of desire as sites to reinvent our bonds to one another.

Kink

Review

**Bianca Isabel Garcia** is a fashion researcher, writer, and artist studying Philippine history and American imperialism. Her writing is featured in the _Fashion Studies Journal, Hamilton Artists Inc., Fashion Research Collection,_ and _Fashion Education: The Systemic Revolution._ She holds a MA in Fashion from Toronto Metropolitan University. 

Julius Poncelet Manapul’s exhibition begins outside the gallery, in vitrines that display reconstructed and precisely assembled Philippine artifacts. On display in _Cabinet of Queeriosities_ (2014) are travel magazines, religious figurines, antique tableware, history books, and Philippine brand soaps. Beyond displaying nostalgic memorabilia, Manapul subverts Western museum practices of conducting specimen studies on the flora, fauna, and people of the lands they colonized. Instead, the anthropological gaze turns toward colonial legacies. A digital collage series titled _Balikbayan Bakla_ (2020) contains layered images of a Balikbayan box, whitened selfie silhouettes, 19th-century Philippine paintings, Toronto city grid maps, and homophobic Tagalog pejoratives in decorative script. Manapul evokes migration experiences involving the exchange of commodities for overseas labour and family separation, while asserting queer Filipinx subjectivity. 

Inside the gallery, Manapul’s labour-intensive paper-crafting begets a sensational spectacle: Catholic camp and Philippine iconography hybridize in a gay dance church club. Images of muscular bodies collaged into paper butterflies are the building material of arched gothic windows. Flashing lights pulse discordantly against dance music and church bells. Notably, the exhibition’s title, “Sila/Siya/Ako,” or “they/them/me” in Tagalog, reflects a different kind of trinity: one of church, colonizer, and colonized. _Sila_ (2023), a looming sculpture of the Catholic Philippine icon Santo Niño, demands worship as their otherworldly arms of red ribbon extend down toward the earth. Manapul adorns Santo Niño in a red satin gown embellished with paper latticework created from homophobic and racial slurs. The violence of this text has been ornamentalized into oblivion; only the Tagalog pronoun _sila_ (“they”), written in the pre-colonial Baybayin script, is legible. Even Santo Niño’s face is a mystery. Vacant of human characteristics, the face is a kaleidoscope of paper butterflies collaged out of disembodied white body parts from queer erotica. 

The artist’s queer decolonial aesthetic strategy appears again in _Siya_ (2023) and _Ako_ (2023), where paper sculptures of a Spanish conquistador and indigenous Philippine figure, confrontationally posed to face each other, embody the _siya/ako_ or colonizer/colonized dynamic of Manapul’s trinity. Tagalog and Spanish text on red ribbon held delicately by handcrafted paper pigeons between the sculptures repeats the phrases _“dumating ka para sakupin ako”_ (“you came to conquer me”) and _“vine a salvar tu alma”_ (“I came to save your soul”). Here, text and textile materialize an anti-colonial resistance against the civilizing ideologies that justify colonial violence.

Inside the gallery, it is as if the unassuming images initially trapped in the exterior glass vitrines were awakened and animated into this new hybridized world built out of the ruins of colonial violence. Rather than completely reject colonial aesthetics, Manapul excavates the material to forge a new world, however ephemeral. 

Writer

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“Sila/Siya/Ako” ran from 5 January to 27 April 2024 at A Space Gallery, Toronto.

_C Magazine solicits online review pitches for publication in C Online on an ongoing basis. We welcome reviews from across Canada and internationally, and are especially keen on reviews that engage with art outside of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. C Magazine offers competitive compensation to our writers. Email your review pitches to pitches@cmagazine.com._

“Sila/Siya/Ako” — Julius Poncelet Manapul 

Column

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_.

##### “Always a flower planted on this body made of layers of shadows”<br/>

>>>>> ##### —etel adnan [1]

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_Note: the print layout of this text is meaningful. To honour that, we've chosen to upload it as images. [Read or download the PDF.](https://strapi-uploads-c-mag-prod.s3.ca-central-1.amazonaws.com/C157_Salah_75ca3055b1.pdf)_

[^1]: Etel Adnan, _Night_ (New York: Nightboat Books, 2016), 20.

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Language

Memory

Politics

Trish Salah’s poem layers personal grief with current political violences to explore the paradox of a love that persists amidst brutality. 

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Composition: give up your own

Darian Razdar is a writer, photographer, and textile artist with roots in the Great Lakes and Caspian Sea basins. Practicing in both independent and community contexts, his work emphasizes poetics, landscape, abstraction, and collaboration. darianrazdar.info

During a post-screening discussion of “Foggy: Palestine Solidarity, Cinema & the Archive,” b.h. Yael (who cocurated the program alongside Marc Siegel, Lior Shamriz, and John Greyson) tells us of how the screened films ask “what _was_ and what _is_” Palestinian freedom. Taken together, the films use oral history, performance, fabulation, deep looking, and elegy. “Foggy” not only looks into an archive caught between—after Mahmoud Darwish—Palestinian presence and the absence wrought by Zionism, but looks again from a queer angle. In doing so, the films describe an alternative archival practice of redoing, remaking, and restaging rather than filling in the faulty archive so shaped by colonialism, capitalism, and queerphobia.

“Foggy” opened with Hadi Moussally’s _Sultana’s Reign_ (2023). A carefully stylized portrayal of New York –based Palestinian drag queen, the titular Sultana oscillates between mundanity and tragedy, and between her glory and longing. Sultana tells us about how she grew up, as a Cairo-born Palestinian living between Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon at the whims of political tragedies, only to land in New York City by 1996. The term “oral history” doesn’t do _Sultana’s Reign_ justice. Scenes of her in full old-Hollywood drag lingering in Parisian cafes and épiceries, recounting her love for parties, Fairuz, and Egyptian divas feels more akin to hanging out with an old friend. We can also view _Sultana’s Reign_ through the lens of performance. Sultana calls herself a performer “representing another aspect of the Middle East, another sexuality [...] [and her] complexity as a character.” With patient detail, Moussally documents Sultana’s nuances while she conveys a performance of gender and sexuality so often made absent. Sultana, then, doesn’t fill in an archive—she is one.

If Sultana’s Reign is an oral-history performance of a queer Palestinian abroad, Elias Wakeem’s _Homecoming Queenz_ (2023) performs the archive of queer Palestinians living under Israeli occupation today. Relayed from the first-person perspective of a shaky hidden camera, Wakeem gives viewers intimate access to a drag quick change while seated in a descending airplane, before being confronted by border guards at Ben Gurion airport. Wakeem enacts a different kind of archival practice—one that does not wait for queer Palestinian experiences to enter the archive, but performs an archive through the body, no matter the cost.

In _Even a Dog in Babylon_ (2023), filmmaker Lior Shamriz stages a conversation between themselves and actor Myriam Ali-Ahmad. With the director playing director, actor playing actor, and viewer eavesdropping, we learn about the development of Shamriz’s new film. Based on a letter from an ancient Babylonian king that asserts “even a dog in the city will be free,” Shamriz speculates on a Palestine without occupation and a West Asia without colonialism—or rather, they speculate on the idea of making a speculative film on these matters. Metacinematically, Shamriz’s subtly fabulous method puts the absence of a free West Asia in haut-relief.

If _Even a Dog in Babylon_ is solidarity with Palestine, then Annie Sakkab’s _The Poem We Sang_ (2023) is resistance. The introduction to Sakkab’s _The Poem We Sang_ features the Palestinian director calling her film a “gift to Palestinians,” rather than a documentary for an outside audience. The curatorial decision to screen resistance cinema to an audience of mostly non-Palestinians begs the question: why does how artists tell the story matter?

In the absence of family archives, Sakkab explores her family history from the Nakba to today via a plethora of found and documented imagery—primarily, contemporary and archival footage of Palestinians as well as original animation and photography. Sakkab’s process of archival fabulation stitches together a family portrait through the image of others. The personal, familial, and national intertwine not only in image but in sound— particularly in a recording of Sakkab’s uncle describing his displacement from Jerusalem in 1948, and the poem “We Are a Proud Nation” (1925) by Khalil Al-Sakakini sung by the filmmaker.

How Sakkab tells the story matters distinctly—in the fogginess of absence, Sakkab refuses to fill in an archive to “prove” Palestinian trauma. Rather, she uses the many affordances of cinema to devise a different kind of archive completely.

Within absence, the protagonist of Iraqi Canadian filmmaker Noor Gatih’s _Layla_ (2021) daydreams. Set in a sterile interior common in this part of North America, a young woman imagines anonymous hands washing a pink dress. A close-up of another person pans from their chest to chin, with gold earrings and long dark hair falling past their shoulders. Gatih knowingly omits verbal language in her film, instead preferring a visual language. By fabulating an alternative reality in dream space, the quietness of Gatih’s dreamer references, as she says in the post-screening discussion, the “silent presence of queerness” in many West Asian communities.

Excelling in the art of silence, Essa Grayeb’s _My Whole Heart Is With You_ (2022) looks deeply at political language. By cutting, layering, and looping pauses in former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s 1967 resignation speech, the film requires us to watch differently. Over nine minutes of entrancing repetition, cropped to only show microphones and Nasser’s mouth, Grayeb creates an entirely new speech—one that drips, drones, and struggles for words. In a moment where many of us are at a loss for words, _My Whole Heart is With You_ shows us that sometimes there are none.

Toronto-based filmmaker Mike Hoolboom has no trouble finding words. Using a method he calls “deep looking,” in _Nazareth_ (2023) Hoolboom asks, “Would it be possible to stop and look, to see for the first time what we have seen so often before?” Hoolboom uses an almost forensic approach as he deconstructs a black-and-white photograph from 1948 Nazareth, during the Nakba. In it, a local family stands facing the camera and toward a foreign soldier, or as Hoolboom calls him, “a kid who’s dressed up as a soldier on the street.” Unpacking the minute body language of those photographed—the step of a foot, lift of fingers, spreading of arms— Hoolboom asks us to pay attention to the ways occupation speaks through the body. Hoolboom asks us to see this photo in a new light, even as a “family portrait.” Making an archive of a single photograph, _Nazareth_ tells a story of presence and absence one detail at a time.

Dedicated to Amy Gottlieb—the Jewish anti-Zionist artist, activist, and educator who called Toronto home until her death in July 2023—the explicitly political stance of “Foggy” is also an homage to Gottlieb’s life’s work. Gottlieb’s contribution to “Foggy”—_Tempest in a Teapot_ (1987)—is an elegy to her mother’s activism. Set to a triumphant symphonic score and narrated by the artist, Gottlieb peruses the archive her mother left behind. Included in this is a teapot her mother brought back from a trip to Soviet Russia, and what appear to be her ashes, which the artist lays out decoratively on a dark blue sheet. An elegy for a woman whose radical activities attracted even the attention of the FBI, Gottlieb’s film is an homage to the freedom fighters we’ve lost. Now that Gottlieb herself has passed, we’re left not only to ask “what _was_ and what _is_?” but more crucially, when the fog clears, what _will be_?

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“Foggy: Palestine Solidarity, Cinema & the Archive” was screened on 4 December 2023 at Cinema Politica, Montreal; Bachir/Yerex Screening Room, Toronto; and VIVO, Vancouver.


“Foggy: Palestine Solidarity, Cinema & the Archive” — Noor Gatih, Amy Gottlieb, Essa Grayeb, Mike Hoolboom, Hadi Moussally, Annie Sakkab, Lior Shamriz, and Elias Wakeem

Artist Project

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.


In my memory it feels like it took us forever to connect, but it wasn’t actually very long. Looking back to eight years ago, I realize that time/space/proximity messed with Mo and me from the start: winding our paths toward each other and then away again, playing with our bravery and curiosity, dancing with when to bring us into deeper connection. Laying sticky threads between us across the sidewalks, studios, couches, and facilitation rooms where our first meetings happened. 

When time/space/proximity brought us into shared artistic practice, the result was destabilization. Our work together spilled into, around, and through other areas of our lives. It messed with how we thought about intimacy, what our boundaries were, our relationships with our partners. How could it not have? We were fierce with ourselves and one another, insisting on being both rigorous and tender, working in the space where we pulled both away from and toward one another. Together we were sieving our curiosities, fears, and boundaries through the ultimate site of vulnerability and power—the body. 

Now, as I look at Mo’s work, I see that same power and vulnerability enacted through the landscape of their dolls. The relationship between Mo and me is different in this project—their work is in the foreground while I am protected by the veil of curation—but I still feel aspects of the same beautiful tension I felt when we created together. A phrase from the call for pitches for this issue keeps coming back to me—“Kink, after all, is a shape-shifter; a negotiation of desire as it meets with another’s.” In one sense, I see these dolls doing exactly this—actively negotiating desire through and in relationship. But the work of these dolls goes much further. The more I interact with the work, the more I realize the layers upon layers that are at play. In my mind’s eye I begin to see those same threads I mentioned before, the ones laid by time/space/proximity, but this time they are everywhere. They emanate from Mo toward their dolls, from the dolls toward each other, over and through the camera lens, around shadow, along background and foreground. They shift and move, changing texture, colour, and luminosity, almost as though glowing with each relational shape they highlight. Unwinding, enfolding, pulsing, gliding, rubbing, suctioning onto limb/curve/flesh/plastic/colour/crack. The threads take on their own lives, manipulating the multidimensionality that is possible when we—no, when the dolls—allow themselves to shapeshift. 

Because the “doll-ness” of the dolls themselves is critical here. They can inhabit and enact a world that we have yet to see. They can expose their gouges, cover the holes through which they breathe, meld into one another, and adorn themselves in vibrant, viscous clay. They can occupy their landscape without consequence, separate from us. Their freedom to live in their fullness may be painful, funny, playful, curious... but it is always glorious. 

The dolls inhabit their world, but if I listen to my own body resonance, I know their threads also snake out toward and around us. I feel the suction cups on my skin too, the smoothness of clay against the back of my neck. Boundaries blur. There is an implication that, if we let it, spills out of the work and onto/into us, the witnesses. Doll allies. After all, multiple things can be true—we are distanced by the page from the world of the dolls, and yet they are also part of the world in which we live. A world of constant negotiation. Of chosen and imposed manipulation. 

Questions arise in me as I contemplate all this, following the track of those early meetings with Mo through to now, as I see their work pulse on the page. Mo’s own threads are, again, rigorous and tender, sieving their curiosities, fears, and boundaries through the ultimate site of vulnerability and power—the body. 

Does Mo show us a world that could be, or a world that must not be?

In the time/space/proximity dance of our world, must we choose?

Curator

Mo Glitch is a visual and performance artist who opens up new possibilities for how to live in this world in non-normative ways. Their practice utilizes academic research methods, inquiry through embodiment practices, and experimentation with materials translation. Glitch studies queer/trans art and theory, ecology and wildness, critical phenomenology, and nightlife. They draw huge pictures, sculpt small creatures, and leave trails of neon scraps behind them. With a background in facilitation and community organizing, Glitch brings years of experience to gathering groups and hosting collaborative processes that centre justice and care. Glitch is an emerging artist who opens portals to surviving within the confines and crumblings of modernity. They attended NSCAD University and live in Kjipuktuk/Halifax.


Artist

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Relational

Sensory

Guest curated by Liliona Quarmyne, Mo Glitch’s artist project features photographs of staged dolls engaged in acts of “unwinding, enfolding, pulsing, gliding, rubbing, suctioning onto limb/curve/flesh/plastic/colour/crack” to trouble our distinction between reality and its representation.

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_proxy_ by Mo Glitch: Text

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eunice bélidor uses BDSM protocols of consent, boundaries, communication, negotiation, and accountability to explore how to safely navigate relationships with art institutions and each other.

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What is the Safe Word?

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.

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

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

Holly Chang is an artist, curator, researcher, and writer living in Toronto who has recently completed her MA in Communication and Culture at TMU/York University. Her overall artistic work explores the themes of her second-generation mixed-race identity. She maintains cultural ties with her cross-cultural identity and draws on her hybrid background for inspiration. 


The Moon and Material Kin: Interview with Akash Inbakumar

Suzanne Morrissette is an artist, curator, and scholar from Winnipeg. Her father’s parents were Michif- and Cree-speaking Métis with family histories tied to the Interlake and Red River regions and Scrip in the area now known as Manitoba. Her mother’s parents came from Canadian-born farming families descended from United Empire Loyalists and Mennonites expelled from Russia. 


Shalaka Jadhav is based between Block 2 of the Haldimand Tract (Kitchener, ON) and Treaty 1 (Winnipeg, MB). Trained as an urban planner, they took the advice of an aptitude test to pursue curatorial studies and currently practice as an independent curator, writer, and service designer. Shalaka curates projects for Textile, a hyperlocal project on the Haldimand Tract, and is a Visiting Curator at the University of Manitoba’s School of Art Gallery. They currently hold roles at OCAD University and, more recently, at the Blackwood. 


Tilling: The Centre for Cultural and Artistic Practice: In Conversation with Luther Konadu

Hannah Hanski (b. 1985) is a Canadian neo-folk artist blending textile and digital media. With a deep belief in the power of narrative, she pursued her studies in Folklore and completed her MFA at Carnegie Mellon in 2017. She currently resides in a church in rural Nova Scotia with her dog, Moshe.


Cat Bluemke (b. 1993) makes art about work and play. She graduated with an MFA in Design for Emerging Technologies at SAIC, and is currently Digital Exhibitions Consultant at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina. Recently, her practice has spanned augmented reality, game design, performance, and risographic prints.



Jonathan Carroll (b. 1990) is an artist and programmer creating games, software, and performances. His work unfolds as a dynamic collaboration between artists, audiences, and their interactive digital interfaces. He lives in rural Nova Scotia where he creates digital-art tools.

From Algorithms to Aesthetics: Unlocking the Mind of CritBot.AI, Pioneering Critic

Stevie Ada Klaark is an interdisciplinary artist, adjunct professor, and writer. She holds an MFA in Visual Art from Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. Their work appears in _Paprika!_ (Yale University), _Chicago Review_, and _Mn Artists _(Walker Art Center). Klaark lives on unceded Anishinaabe lands in Michigan. 



Untangling Beauty from the Elite

Erin Reznick is a curator, producer, and publisher whose research tends to the assembly of community, specifically in social spaces that negotiate public and private domains. She is a graduate of the Master of Visual Studies in Curatorial Studies program at the University of Toronto. She was the Co-Editor in Chief of _Phile Magazine_. 


You Only Live Twice

Christina Hajjar is a Lebanese artist, writer, and cultural worker based in Winnipeg on Treaty 1 territory. Her practice considers intergenerational inheritance, domesticity, and place through diaspora, body archives, and cultural iconography. Her writing has appeared in _BlackFlash Magazine_, _C Magazine_, _The Uniter_, _CV2_, _Prairie Fire_, and _PaperWait_.

Petal by Petal: Feminine Desire as a Conduit for Home

Coco Zhou is a writer and cultural worker living on an estuary where river meets sea, on the unceded territories of xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.

“A Political, Ethical, Existence Practice”: In Conversation with Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva

Mercedes Webb / ma̱lidi / məlidi (they/she) is a writer, art historian, and artist with mixed ancestry; Kunn janaas, Mama̱liliḵa̱la, Fort Williams First Nation, Italian, and Welsh. Language reclamation, currently Kwak̓wala, figures prominently in their practice. Central to their practice is perennially learning non-authoritative, anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and anti-ableist ways of being.


Kaylee Maciejko is a settler of Swedish, Polish, and Scottish heritage, and an artist and arts administrator based in Mohkinstsis/Calgary. 


masus wəλəɫəʔos? we hear the brook

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


spirit-flesh-soul-icon

Matt Nish-Lapidus’ practice probes the myth that computers should be useful rather than beautiful through examining contemporary technoculture and its histories and impacts. His work results in diverse outputs including publications, recordings, installations, performances, software, and objects. You can find Matt under various aliases and collaborations including emenel, New Tendancies, and, < blink >.

Joyful, Poetic Microworlds

Ruth Marsh (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist working in immersive, world-building practices. They are a queer, non-binary person of settler ancestry based on unceded Mi'kmaw territory in K'jipuktuk, Mi'kma'ki (also known as Halifax, NS). They are interested in playfully queering the intersections between DIY culture and science fact/fiction/fabulation to ponder positive mutations and imagine with beings and environments.

Composition: Full Moon Ritual

Alex Quicho is a writer and associate lecturer at Central Saint Martins. _Small Gods_, her book on terror and transcendence in drone technology, was published by Zer0 Books in 2021. 

Gossip After Dictatorship

Rouzbeh Shadpey is an artist, musician, and writer with a doctorate in medicine and inexhaustible exhaustion. He currently resides in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal.

The Injunction to Forget: documenta fifteen and the Test of Memory

Laurel V. McLaughlin is a writer, curator, and art historian based in New Haven, CT. Her work examines research-based sculpture, installation, new media, social practice, and performance concerning globalized migration and ecological networks. McLaughlin is completing her PhD in the History of Art at Bryn Mawr College, and her work has been published in _Art Papers_, _BOMB Magazine_, _The Brooklyn Rail_, _Performa Magazine_, _Contact Quarterly_, and _Performance Research_, among others.

One Thing: Silences in _Death of an Artist_

Emily Guerrero is an archivist and community librarian living on the unceded territories of the xᵂməθkᵂəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaɬ Nations. They last wrote about gossip for the journal _Archivaria_ in 2022. Emily is a parent and a Leo.

Gossipy Scraps, Gossip(ing) Archives

Marsya Maharani (she/her) is a researcher, arts administrator, and curator working with the collectives Younger Than Beyoncé and Gendai. Marsya’s doctoral research explores practices of collective care and radical friendship as grounds for work culture and labour practices.

Petrina Ng (she/her) is an artist and organizer. In addition to her work with Gendai, she is also a member of the collectives Durable Good (a small publishing studio) and Waard Ward (a floristry and gardening initiative that supports newcomers).

We Should _Talk_:  Obvious Truths About Working in the Arts

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

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What is the Safe Word?

C Mag

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“Sila/Siya/Ako” — Julius Poncelet Manapul

Composition: give up your own

“Foggy: Palestine Solidarity, Cinema & the Archive” — Noor Gatih, Amy Gottlieb, Essa Grayeb, Mike Hoolboom, Hadi Moussally, Annie Sakkab, Lior Shamriz, and Elias Wakeem

proxy by Mo Glitch: Text

Issue 157

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