thumbnail_CanadianArtHop_April_SizeB.jpg

CanadianArtHop_April_SizeB.jpg

md_CanadianArtHop_April_SizeA.jpg

sm_CanadianArtHop_April_SizeA.jpg

thumbnail_CanadianArtHop_April_SizeA.jpg

CanadianArtHop_April_SizeA.jpg

ADAC

thumbnail_CraftCouncilNL_Web1_Apr1-May1_SizeB.jpeg

CraftCouncilNL_Web1_Apr1-May1_SizeB.jpeg

md_CraftCouncilNL_Web1_Apr1-May1_SizeA.jpeg

sm_CraftCouncilNL_Web1_Apr1-May1_SizeA.jpeg

thumbnail_CraftCouncilNL_Web1_Apr1-May1_SizeA.jpeg

CraftCouncilNL_Web1_Apr1-May1_SizeA.jpeg

Craft NL

sm_Optica_Web 1_mobile_April 15-May 15, 2024.jpeg

thumbnail_Optica_Web 1_mobile_April 15-May 15, 2024.jpeg

Optica_Web 1_mobile_April 15-May 15, 2024.jpeg

lg_Optica_Web 1_banner_April 15-May 15, 2024.jpeg

md_Optica_Web 1_banner_April 15-May 15, 2024.jpeg

sm_Optica_Web 1_banner_April 15-May 15, 2024.jpeg

thumbnail_Optica_Web 1_banner_April 15-May 15, 2024.jpeg

Optica_Web 1_banner_April 15-May 15, 2024.jpeg

Optica

thumbnail_PHI_WEB 1+2_May 2024_mobile.jpeg

PHI_WEB 1+2_May 2024_mobile.jpeg

lg_PHI_WEB 1+2+NL_May 2024_desktop.jpeg

md_PHI_WEB 1+2+NL_May 2024_desktop.jpeg

sm_PHI_WEB 1+2+NL_May 2024_desktop.jpeg

thumbnail_PHI_WEB 1+2+NL_May 2024_desktop.jpeg

PHI_WEB 1+2+NL_May 2024_desktop.jpeg

PHI 1

thumbnail_NewGallery_Web2_Mar1-May31_mobile.jpeg

NewGallery_Web2_Mar1-May31_mobile.jpeg

md_NewGallery_Web2_Mar1-May31_banner.jpeg

sm_NewGallery_Web2_Mar1-May31_banner.jpeg

thumbnail_NewGallery_Web2_Mar1-May31_banner.jpeg

NewGallery_Web2_Mar1-May31_banner.jpeg

The New Gallery

thumbnail_Function Ad 1 Small.jpg

Function Ad 1 Small.jpg

md_Function Ad 3 Small.jpg

sm_Function Ad 3 Small.jpg

thumbnail_Function Ad 3 Small.jpg

Function Ad 3 Small.jpg

Function 1

thumbnail_Workman_Web2_Mar 15-May 15, 2024_SizeB.jpg.jpg

Workman_Web2_Mar 15-May 15, 2024_SizeB.jpg.jpg

md_Workman_Web2_Mar 15-May 15, 2024_SizeA.jpg.jpg

sm_Workman_Web2_Mar 15-May 15, 2024_SizeA.jpg.jpg

thumbnail_Workman_Web2_Mar 15-May 15, 2024_SizeA.jpg.jpg

Workman_Web2_Mar 15-May 15, 2024_SizeA.jpg.jpg

Workman

PHI 2

lg_C_Magazine-PKB-simple.jpg

md_C_Magazine-PKB-simple.jpg

sm_C_Magazine-PKB-simple.jpg

thumbnail_C_Magazine-PKB-simple.jpg

C_Magazine-PKB-simple.jpg

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

Hannah Guinan is a queer sound artist, performer, and artist cheerleader. They enjoy creatively expressing themselves through play, collaboration, electronic experimentation, and deranged pop vocals. Guinan also supports other artists administratively and has been Director of the Khyber Centre for the Arts in Kjipuktuk/Halifax since 2014.

Seated on a bar-stool in a bespoke leather suit, Arjun Lal performs an acoustic guitar cover of Hoku’s 2001 hit song, “Perfect Day.” I’m saddled in a folding chair among a large crowd in a multi-purpose room. Giddy-up. My nipples are exposed and cold, staring at Lal like a second set of eyeballs. My leather vest crackles against my leather pants as I excitedly cheer toward the close of the song. The room comes together as they ask if anyone has seen _Legally Blonde_ (2001), and absolutely everyone raises their hand. Lal then lifts the neck of their guitar and dips into an original love song about the actor who portrayed Elle Woods:

>…Reese Witherspoon  
Tall heels around the room  
The way that she flutters  
Makes me feel lighter  
Her dimples and cheeks  
Candy strawberry so sweet  
Like a flower  
Where do you get your power…

Lal’s ballads are followed by a screening of a video that begins with clips from an episode of _The Wizard of Odd TV_—a YouTube series that describes itself as showcasing “amazing stunts and humans doing extraordinary things.” Featured in this episode is a pony play gathering set against a grassy New Orleans field. Through interviews and subjectively sexy demonstrations, the ponies and their partners share how they commune through athleticism. Participants leap over saw-horses, pull carriages, and complete blindfolded obstacle courses in a heroic celebration of their supportive and kinky spirits. A jump cut reveals Lal as a leather pony, standing in a highly saturated, blurry green landscape. They gallop, neigh, and exhibit their solo pony talents, all while wearing a carefully beaded horsehair headdress as a mane, and a leather whip as a tail.

The audience erupts in laughter as ponies trip over hurdles, and while pony-Lal’s bare ass and cat-o'-ninetails sway back and forth in slow motion. A family seated behind me gets up to leave. Ride on. Although the room shares laughter, our reactions come from a variety of experiences and responses to the work. I observe discomfort and shyness, as well as reactions from those who, like myself, are entirely elated.

Leaving the performance, I enter the white gallery where Lal’s sculptures and photographs are spotlit from above and soaked with natural light coming through a tall window. A plinth in the centre of the room holds _Prize_ (2023), a classic horsehair body brush featuring black bristles, gold-painted wood, and a black leather hand strap with gold and silver zari embroidery. Mounted on black, white, and cobalt leather hide with small gold nails are _Champion_ (2023), a black leather bondage mask with gold zari and pearls; _Ganesh_ (2023), a pliable neonpink latex and PVC mask; and _Pony_ (2023), which is the same headdress that Lal wore earlier in their video.

Lal wears these latter garments to embody distinct characters. In one photograph, they don the neon-pink _Ganesh_ in all its inflated glory, while sipping beer from a pilsner glass through a long, curved straw. In a second portrait, Lal sports the iconic _Pony_. With their face in profile, they avert our gaze and look contemplatively toward the bottom left corner of the frame. Lal’s allusions to Indian iconography and equine role-play subvert the aesthetics of dominant Western queer and fetish circles to convey desire on their own terms. I can imagine Lal’s team of self-insert protagonists engaging in a playful competition, training together toward some kind of fantastical greater good.

In a conversation with Lal, I learned that they once went to a gay bar in Berlin for an Oktoberfest party, where they proudly owned the fact that they were the only one dressed in full lederhosen. I also know that Elle Woods went to a law school party dressed as a sexy pink Playboy bunny, and despite being laughed at by her cohort, she fully slayed. I am thinking about courage and hope, and how people come to find their heroes both inside and outside of themselves. Exiting the gallery with a crew of other artists, we happily sing the refrain: “forever as I am, on this perfect day.”


Writer

lg_C157_GUINAN.jpg

md_C157_GUINAN.jpg

sm_C157_GUINAN.jpg

thumbnail_C157_GUINAN.jpg

C157_GUINAN.jpg

“Leather Bar in Bangalore” ran from 7 April to 9 June 2023 at Eltuek Arts Centre, Sydney, NS.

“Leather Bar in Bangalore” — Arjun Lal

**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. 

lg_Manapul_Ako Details 1_img by Selina.jpg

md_Manapul_Ako Details 1_img by Selina.jpg

sm_Manapul_Ako Details 1_img by Selina.jpg

thumbnail_Manapul_Ako Details 1_img by Selina.jpg

C_OR_GARCIA_1.jpg

“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]

Salah S1.jpg

Salah S2.jpg

_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.

C157_Salah.pdf

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. 

lg_C157_Salah_T3.jpg

md_C157_Salah_T3.jpg

sm_C157_Salah_T3.jpg

thumbnail_C157_Salah_T3.jpg

C157_Salah_T3.jpg

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_?

lg_C157_RAZDAR.jpg

md_C157_RAZDAR.jpg

sm_C157_RAZDAR.jpg

thumbnail_C157_RAZDAR.jpg

C157_RAZDAR.jpg

C157_Razdar.pdf

“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

Print and Digital subscriptions are available for individuals and institutions

C Magazine

Subscribe to

Feature

C157_Belidor.jpg

C157_belidor.pdf

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.

C157_bélidor_th (1).jpg

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.

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

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)

"Worlds appear from her big mouth": The Mutiny of Online Open Letters

We're marking the launch of our Spring 2024 issue, C157 Kink, with a drop-in gathering hosted by our friends at [Issues Magazine Shop.](https://issuesmagshop.com/) From 6:00 to 8:00 PM on May 7, join the _C Magazine_ staff and community in celebrating the new issue and the contributors who made it what it is. 

C157 embraces queerness, disobedience, disruption, pleasure, consent, and play, challenging convention and confronting the consequences and possibilities of our desires. From indigenous-settler relations to eroticized debt, subspace and fetish aesthetics, the physicality of protest, and love amid brutality, artists and writers in this issue engage kink to consider how we could “fall in love (or lust) again...with this shivering world, in all its confrontations.”

[Explore C157 Kink](https://cmagazine.com/issues/157), read the editorial, and mark your calendars. All are welcome! 



C157 Kink Launch

Event

C157 KINK Issue Launch

Join us for a conversation between Mo Glitch and Liliona Quarmyne, the artist and curator behind the artist project for C157 and the dolls who pose in playful, messy entanglements for the opening pages of the issue. Titled _proxy_, Glitch's series of photographs both enact and exceed human worlds.

Glitch and Quarmyne's discussion will elaborate on the project and the ways it troubles our distinction between reality and representation. As Quarmyne reflects in her curatorial text—also a tender meditation on the pair's creative partnership—the dolls “inhabit and enact a world we have yet to see…and yet they are also part of the world in which we live. A world of constant negotiation.” 

[Register to receive the zoom link. 
](https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_RR5yfSXPSByjThjBCv5Ijw#/registration)


This event is generously supported by [RBC Emerging Artists.](https://www.rbc.com/community-social-impact/emerging-artists.html)

![RBC_Emerging Artists](https://strapi-uploads-c-mag-prod.s3.ca-central-1.amazonaws.com/emergin_artist_logo_en_1ed21f5fb5.png)


Artist Project Sponsor

Proxy: Mo Glitch with Liliona Quarmyne

Talk

Mo Glitch in Conversation with Liliona Quarmyne

Now in its 15th 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. Writers are invited to submit an 800-1,000 word review of an exhibition, performance, publication, or moving image work, by May 30, 2024. The winner will receive $750, editorial support to prepare their article for publication in the Winter 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, 2024, 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://award-submission.cmagazine.com). 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](https://mailto:editor@cmagazine.com)

Submissions will be assessed by Maandeeq Mohamed, Online and Reviews Editor at _C Magazine_, alongside our two external jurors: Alice Ming Wai Jim & Nadia Kurd.

**Alice Ming Wai Jim** is an art historian and curator based in Montreal. She is currently Concordia University Research Chair in Critical Curatorial Studies and Decolonizing Art Institutions and founding editor-in-chief of the journal _Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas_ (Brill, with Concordia University and NYU). 

Previously Concordia University Research Chair in Ethnocultural Art Histories, 2017-2022, she co-convened the NYU Global Asia/Pacific Art Exchange, _GAX 2019 Tiohtiá:ke (Montreal): Asian Indigenous Relations in Contemporary Art_ on the theme of curatorial hospitality. She is currently working on a SSHRC-funded oral histories project that examines Afrofuturism and Black Lives Matter in the Canadian art scene. Recent projects include the WPC 2023 “Worlding Tiohtià:ke/Montreal: Bridging Knowledges, Practices, and Beings” conference at Concordia University, 31 March –1 April 2023 about how global, transnational, and transcultural public narratives are being represented in universities, museums and other spaces of art and culture, focusing on the unique art ecology of Montreal. Jim was recipient of UAAC’s 2022 inaugural Award for the advancement of equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility, and is a member of the College of New Scholars of the Royal Society of Canada.

**Nadia Kurd** is an interdisciplinary curator and art historian with a PhD from McGill University. She has special interests in museum practices and advocacy, contemporary Muslim visual culture and Islamic architecture in North America. In addition to working at diverse arts organizations such as the Ontario Association of Art Galleries and the Prison Arts Foundation, Nadia was the Curator of the Thunder Bay Art Gallery from 2010-2018, where her focus was on community engagement and emerging artists in Northwestern Ontario. In recognition of her work, she was awarded the Northwestern Ontario Visionary Award in 2014 and the Canadian Council of Muslim Women’s Women Who Inspire Award in 2016. She was the recipient of the 2017 Hamad bin Khalifa Symposium on Islamic Art Fellowship and was the 2018 Arts-Writer in Residence at the Banff International Curatorial Institute. Nadia currently serves on the Editorial Committee for _BlackFlash Magazine_ and is the Curator at the University of Alberta Museums Art Collection. 


unnamed Small.jpeg


--- 

##### 

2023 C New Critics Award winner: **Francesca Bennett**, for her review of Woojae Kim’s exhibition “With a heart that sings the stars, I will love all things dying,” which was published in C156 "Craft" (Winter 2024).

**Francesca Bennett** has supported artists' practices on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations since 2003. Informed by her work in collections, archives, and administration, her curatorial and writing practices are centred on the extension of personal transformative encounters with objects toward their multitude of social relations.
  
**We would also like to congratulate Julia Trojanowski, who was chosen by the jury for Honourable Mention.** Trojanowski’s review of “Ominous Chaos” (Centre A, 8 April to 3 June 2023), an exhibition curated by Bahar Mohazabnia and featuring artists Homa Khosravi and Marzieh Mosaverzadeh. 

[More information](https://newcritics.cmagazine.com)

Call for C New Critics Award 

Award

The annual C New Critics Award is designed to help develop and promote the work of emerging art critics. This program gives _C Magazine_ the opportunity to identify and support promising new writers, who often become regular contributors. Writers are invited to submit an 800-1,000 word review of an exhibition, performance, publication, or moving image work by the annual deadline. The winner receives a financial award, editorial support to prepare their article for publication in the forthcoming issue of _C Magazine_, and a two-year subscription. All participants receive a one-year subscription. 

*Submissions must not be previously published or slated for future publication elsewhere.


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

Submissions are assessed by _C Magazine_ editors and external jurors, announced each year. Note that measures are taken to ensure that the identity of entrants remains unknown to adjudicators.

Submission deadlines vary from year to year. Exhibition and performance reviews are expected to address recent work, occurring no earlier than this year. Reviews of book and moving image work must address work made in the past two years.

Submissions are restricted to one 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. More information for writers is available on our [Write for Us page.](https://main.d2v45yttl0ocvf.amplifyapp.com/opportunities/write)



Submissions

C New Critics Award

Program

Applications for the 2024 C New Critics Award are open until May 30.

Program information

The C New Critics Award is designed to help develop and promote the work of emerging art critics. This program gives _C Magazine_ the opportunity to identify and support promising new writers, who often become regular contributors.

Now in its 15th year, the C New Critics Award is designed to help develop and promote the work of emerging art critics. 

Header