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ICCA

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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, researcher and the Associate Editor of _C Magazine_. 

Associate Editor

Publisher

Designer

C’s Chorus issue marks the beginning of our new print look, shaped by Hwa-Jin Jun, where we also ask what becomes possible if we embrace changing physical formats and materials as an ethos. We think of chorus as a collective noun: for voices, noises, expressions (of rage, solidarity, and otherwise). This issue embraces polyphony, or simultaneity, a chorus that does not dissolve distinction within the collective. From voice as infrastructure, a way of rehearsing coordination and collective power amidst spreading fascist logics, to the dispersal of seeds, anti-colonial cosmologies, melancholic sound in the colour blue, attuning to ancestors in museum collections, and the subtle accumulations in working-class time, we bring a cacophony of grievance and desire.


Chorus

Review

Yasmin Nurming-Por is a curator and writer based in Toronto, Canada. She is Co-Founder of commercial gallery two seven two and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto.

The 15th Shanghai Biennale—“Does the flower hear the bee?”—opens with a small forest. Suspended from the cavernous ceiling of the Power Station of Art (PSA) are thousands of synthetic yellow trumpet blossoms that hang rootless in the air, some spilling onto the ground. Titled _Phantom Forest_ (2025), Allora & Calzadilla’s installation references _Handroanthus chrysanthus_, a tree species native to Central and South America. Sometimes used in landscape design for their aesthetic appeal, these trees contribute to the vital biodiversity of their native environments that are threatened by legacies of resource extraction and impacts of climate change. For the artists, this work connects movement and displacement to a gesture of “building a system of memory” by asking what it means, figuratively, to move this tree to Shanghai. When visiting, I found myself pondering: what if the artists had chosen to produce an “ugly” tree? Would that have shifted the work too directly from aesthetic to political dimensions, or is the choice of beauty a valuable entry point into a political discussion? This ghostly tree also invites participation: the audience is welcome to take fallen blossoms, many of which are also unknowingly transported on the soles of shoes across the museum—furthering their displacement.

In many ways, _Phantom Forest_ encapsulates the experience of this exhibition as one of reverence for the natural sublime. Curated by Kitty Scott with Daisy Desrosiers, Xue Tan, and PSA’s Emerging Curators Long Yitang and Zhang Yingying, this gargantuan biennial encompasses 67 artists and more than 250 artworks. The exhibition aims to centre sensorial engagements with and across artworks by looking to interspecies communication among the non-human world for inspiration and teaching, as suggested by its title. While the natural world and its alternative methods of communication are explored, humans nevertheless seemed to remain the protagonists. For example, Rirkrit Tiravanija’s text-based work _untitled 2019 (the form of the flower is unknown to the seed)_ (2019) mounts the eponymous phrase in capital letters on an entrance wall. Originally commissioned by ICA London in 2019, its prior presentation encompassed a sake bar that was intended for use. In Shanghai, a space for tea and gathering is located elsewhere in the PSA. Recontextualized within the Biennale’s exploration of cross-species communication, Tiravanija’s text takes on new meaning as a reflection of how nature is used as a metaphor or subject in contemporary art, where it often appears as a non-active participant against perspectives that are still human-centric. While the flowering of human interactions can certainly produce many unexpected forms, how is it possible to assume the knowledge of seeds?
Landscape, and its history of representation, is also a dominant thread. Continuing his fascination with 19th-century Romanticism, Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson contributes video, performance, and five unexpected large-scale oil paintings of Icelandic landscapes titled _Weekdays in Arcadia_ (2025). These paintings feature vast rocky and mossy scenes characteristic of Iceland with only the most miniscule figures of humans and sheep. While beautiful representations, these works intentionally set Iceland within Western art-historical traditions of landscape, which feels slightly at sea in the context of Shanghai.

The space between human and natural worlds is more closely explored by works such as Cheng Xinhao’s video _Stratums and Erratics_ (2023–2024), which responds to the limitations imposed by borders on landscapes. In this 50-minute film, the artist is depicted walking 800 kilometres on roads in the landlocked Yunnan province, from Kunming to the China–Myanmar (Burma) limits while kicking the same rock that is eventually reduced to a pebble. In a captivating and perplexing test of endurance, the artist moves across urban, rural, and other natural contexts, eventually tossing the rock in a river at the walk’s conclusion. The work prods at the collaboration between humans, living things, and natural matter raised elsewhere in the exhibition, such as by Aki Inomata’s _How to Carve a Sculpture_ (2018–ongoing). Inomata placed wood in beaver enclosures in five zoos in Japan; after the wood was chewed by the animals, the artist removed it and, through a mixture of working with sculptors and CNC (computer-automated) machines, further “collaborated” to resolve the sculptures. Included in this list of collaborators are the longhorned beetles who continued to burrow inside the wood. Presented on two plinths, the sculptures at beaver and human (or CNC) scale are compelling pseudo-modernist sculptures. Yet, what does it mean to “collaborate” with non-human actors without equal continued agency? In this context, approaching animal interventions as ready-mades may offer a counterpoint to the singularity of human authorship. Acknowledging animal mark-making could potentially radically challenge understandings of interspecies collaboration within artistic and creative processes.

With an exhibition title focused on hearing, sonic works, or those that allude to sound, are given particular emphasis. Brian Jungen’s _Pull to Refresh_ (2025) presents an oak piano shot with handmade arrows. Here, I imagined the noises and sounds produced in its creation as a kind of score, and the sculpture itself as a record of the performance. Tania Candiani’s _Prólogo. 7 Campanas_ (2024) suspends a series of large-scale wicker and rattan “pods” in the shape of large cones or hats that visitors can enter to experience different soundscapes such as cows calling, rivers rushing, or wind blowing. Despite the array of different sounds, the works produce an inviting sonic landscape. Christine Sun Kim’s large-scale mural _Heavy Relevance_ (2024) uses distorted musical notation to create an experimental score. On a wall, the musical staff bars in Kim’s score dip under the suggested heavy weight of single notes, forming peaks and valleys. In reference to ASL communication where the usage of signs is responsive to specific contexts, the artist expands the implication of sound to architectural levels, or a kind of sonic landscape.

The Biennale also included off-site projects, most notably at the Jia Yuan Hai Art Museum. Located in a rural setting, US-based French artist Maxime Cavajani displayed a series of works made while in residence on Fogo Island. With a research focus on the use of red on the island, as an alchemical reaction between ochre and blood, these works brought markers from one geographic location to another—here, red against the yellow-green of the surrounding agricultural area.

Collectively, the scale of this biennial and its various exhibition spaces evoke a series of microclimates brought together with both congruent and contesting cross-pollinations. While the beauty of landscape and nature is visually celebrated, the challenges of translation (across species and language) remain a gap in communication. For me, one of the clearest and most poignant takeaways from the Shanghai Biennale is that there is a difference between sound and hearing, and between being heard and being understood. In our contemporary moment of increased political and environmental crisis, many of us are grasping at other ways of knowing that might lead to a new direction. Unique from many other international biennials, Shanghai’s has an increased level of governmental support and orchestration: while visiting, I learned that all artists and artworks are subject to official approval for inclusion. As part of the international art press, I found my own body in the space of unexpected cross-pollination: invited to the opening reception dinner—a boat cruise on the Huangpu River—my presence as a Canadian journalist was met with surprise by my consulate. I had entered visa-free using my European passport, without realizing that my Canadian passport might have made my visit more challenging. Akin to my quick engagement with Shanghai, the immersive works in the exhibition remain those most resonant and visually effective within the production of the natural sublime and its entanglements with human-based assumptions and desires.

Writer

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The 15th Shanghai Biennale: “Does the flower hear the bee?” ran from 8 November 2025 to 31 March 2026 at Power Station of Art, Shanghai.


“Does the flower hear the bee?" — 15th Shanghai Biennale

Feature

Below is the third dispatch from “Open Hearing: Dreaming in Dark Times” to be published in the magazine. [**A full public
transcript of the event is also available**](https://cmagazine.com/articles/open-hearing-dreaming-in-dark-times-full-public-transcript). 

**[00:28:27] Karl Beveridge:**

Thank you. I’m a visual artist, photographer. I’ve been involved in, and a member of CARFAC. Worked around A Space for many years and generally try to make trouble. 

The first thing I wanna say: I think it’s kind of interesting that the reference for this talk is the Art Workers Coalition in the U.S.. We’re always deferring to the U.S.—and I think there’s an interesting history in Canada that parallels that history in the U.S. And, I’m thinking in 1968, CARFAC was founded. The Art Workers Coalition was 1969.

CARFAC, interestingly, different than what the Art Workers Coalition did, which the kind of two main points that came out of the Art Workers Coalition was one, the structure and policies of art institutions, and secondly, diversity—and in New York at the time, was mainly around gender and the Black and Puerto Rican communities. CARFAC, on the other hand, in Canada, went for the economics, and basically that artists get paid, and that, I think, had much longer-term impact. It’s still—CARFAC still exists today. 

The unfortunate thing is we don’t pay enough attention to it. We don’t get involved with it. CARFAC has managed to achieve many things and is working on many things, but it needs much more strength if we’re to deal with things like the AGO and their policies and those sorts of things, we need a strong organization. 

Which brings me to probably the immediate point that would need to happen is to get status of the artist provincially. [^1] That would allow us to deal with institutions all across the board. 

The federal status of the artist only affects federal institutions. So, we’re able to negotiate with the National Gallery and get a collective agreement, which is unique, I think, pretty well in the world. And, I mean, the thing about CARFAC is, it was unique globally too, in establishing fees and these sorts of things. But we do need status provincially in order to deal with all the other institutions that are under provincial control.

So, I’m gonna stop there, cause that’s the main point I wanna make is that: we really need to get together and organize. And I really stress that we need to build our union, which is CARFAC and make it strong and able to deal with a lot of issues that may come up today.

Thank you. 

[applause]

**[00:36:32] Amy Wing-Hann Wong:**

Hi everyone. Thank you for being here. I
didn’t even realize there was gonna be
an audience. I came to learn and I’m
learning so much from all the speakers. I’m an artist, professor, parent. I’m
a single mom. I live in Scarborough.

Grace Lee Boggs said that:

> “The only way to survive is by taking care of one another and to get out of the lens of self-interest and to centre relationship and community.” [^2]  <br/>


She advocated for the need to redefine representative democracy with a
reminder that you should never expect
that people in power will do things to
help us progress.

This forum is meant to address
the pre-existing and longstanding
problems at the heart of our cultural
structures. We’ve known about these
problems for a long time and have
been discussing, protesting, infiltrating systems for a while now.

Recent events are horrifying, to
say the least, but in some ways not
surprising. And despite ongoing activism, pushback, and—on the part
of institutions—diversity and decolonial statements, ultimately, I think
artistic and academic freedoms are
values that come from within us
and not prescribed to allow us. And
therefore, creative practice is inherently a form of resistance—not things that
are granted by institutions or policies.

We are facing a time where it’s
like lancing a boil. We are seeing the
grossest shit so that we can clear the
infection. I think we all agree that what
Toronto, the art world, or you know,
what the world needs right now is the
protection of basic human rights, safety, and security, holding governments
and institutions to account.

And especially as QTBIPOC
arts workers refusing to be window
dressing or merely window dressing,
I think, do not give institutions your
whole self. Continue the invisible and
small acts of daily change within one’s
power and always be suspicious. Call
to task the differences between representation, justice, and access.

Maya Mackrandilal reminds us
that diversity statements and hiring diversity candidates is not the solution
to the problem, but only a step in the
general direction where the problem
is occurring. [^3] Inserting women and 
people of colour into capitalist, white supremacist, cis-hetero, patriarchal spaces, does not magically dismantle
the very fabric of an institution’s culture. Amy Fung reminds us of those
who are happy to benevolently oversee and control diversity in all its frivolous forms but who immediately enforce the power of their laws the moment difference seeks actual power. [^4]

I’m also gonna quote Leanne Simpson:

> “We need to create and continue constellations of co-resistance that are firm, life and world-building at a time of acute racial violence and inequality.” [^5] <br/>
 
We need to protect and nurture
the voices of the arts community who
are the most vulnerable in some ways,
and especially the voices of young creative people who come after us. The
art world romanticizes this scrappiness
and perpetuates an industry of precarity, but we must prioritize sustainability.
I’ll just end with Grace [Lee Boggs] again that: “Another world is possible and that it is happening.” [^6]

I’ll end there. Thank you.

[applause]


**[02:36:16] Ananna Rafa:** Hey, I’m Ananna.

**[02:36:20] Ammar Bowaihl:** And I’m Ammar Bowaihl.

Last year, I found out that it’s
actually hard to think while being financially stressed. [laughs] What a
surprise. [laughs] The stress can’t be
explained: lots of bills, expectations
from family, and also ambitions that
are not met with actions. It all builds
up until you forget how things used
to be.

I will give you some of the symptoms. My personal symptoms. I’m
home alone all the time, barely talking
or texting, and listening to lots of podcasts. I never thought I would feel this
way after school. But it’s all right. Things are in control right now. And I’m
out here in public, speaking about it.

Making money through the arts—
it’s hard. But it’s much harder when
you’re isolated. I don’t remember how
it started or why I found myself alone.
One of my mentors recommended therapy. Kept checking in. And this is
how I slowly recovered from my self-deprecating mind and perspective. It
wasn’t that hard. I needed someone
to tell me it’s gonna be okay, and help
me reset.

When you’re involved in a community, or sharing the journey with
friends rooting for you, it’s much harder to fall back to the darkness. These are the connections that can save
us. I urge you to check in on your
peers, mentor in your free time, provide a space for learning and growing together, as artists, as friends,
and as a community that cares for
one another.

**Ananna:** Art school was the first time we
experienced what it meant to be othered—to feel that we did not deserve
to be there, to feel that the work we
made, our histories, our cultures were
suddenly misunderstood, to feel that,
then, it was a waste of time.

And yet, we would not have known that both of us felt similar ways,
had we not had conversations that
seemed to be taboo.

And why should we not speak
out against systems that divide us? About institutions with the sole purpose of financial gain?

About ways of pedagogy that no
longer work?

These conversations need to be
had—conversations among friends,
family, students, colleagues: About
historic truths.

About the art world that no longer serves us.

About what the art world has
the potential to be and who can call
themselves an artist.

It is radical enough to continue
to live in this world as an artist, and
to continue to tell ourselves that we
deserve to be an artist. And it is definitely radical to tell other people—like ourselves—that you, too, can be an artist.

Art-making can be messy. It can
be volatile. And it needs to be touched
by the strengths and sorrows of our
world. We are the dreamers of today,
because somewhere along the way,
we have seen dreaming is possible for
people like us. It is our responsibility to pass on the knowledge of what
it means to dream, to others who yet
cannot imagine other worlds possible.

Thank you.

[applause]


**[01:17:57] John Greyson:** 

Thank you, Kiera
[host]. And, remembering back 40
years ago when all of us were sleeping together, we also were at war with
the Ontario Censor Board. 

The Censor Board claimed, at
that time, jurisdiction over any image
that was shown, any film or video that
was shown in the province, demanding prior censorship—whether it was a
new video by Andy Paterson or Richard Fung, or whether it was a documentary about farm workers. And so,
groups like A Space, The Funnel, and
Canadian Images were heroically fighting the Censor Board in the courts.

But that was incredibly debilitating. It was when trying to work within the terms of the system became
something that just—I think—perpetuated the fear or experience of being
silenced, feeling terrified about who’s
gonna get charged next, who’s gonna face charges next.

And so, a bunch of us, 40 years
ago, initiated what started as Six Days
Against the Censor Board and ended up becoming 11 Days Against the
Censor Board, a province-wide civil disobedience action where we collectively broke the law. I think there
was something like 30 or 40 arts organizations in 10 cities across the province, each of us showing whatever
we chose to show.

And that was the autonomy of
curating, curating what each group
wanted to show and making that decision themselves was central to the
premise of it. And the principle of it
was, if we all break the law, then no
one’s gonna get arrested.

And it was a complete victory,
not a single charge. And, in fact, we
ended up getting rid of the Censor
Board. It was the collective actions.
It was the court cases equally along
with civil disobedience.

Flash forward 30 years: Queer
Cinema For Palestine started a boycott of Tel Aviv Gay Lesbian Festival—a boycottable festival, identified
by PACBI [Palestinian Campaign
for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel]. And so, starting 10
years ago, we started to do a global
campaign trying to convince artists
to either not submit or to withdraw
from the Tel Aviv festival.

So, I’d get assigned Bruce LaBruce. And I’d be calling Bruce LaBruce,
trying to convince Bruce. And it was an uphill battle. The arguments were familiar in terms of, “Oh, it’s a queer
festival. How can it be boycottable?” Et cetera, et cetera.

But one of the things that came
out of that experience—we had a lot
of success. Every year, 10 or 15 filmmakers would withdraw. And it was
incredibly powerful seeing the courage of those filmmakers give, you know,
at cost, choosing to withdraw, choosing
to fight back against genocide, apartheid—and using that festival as a target.
But we also had that same experience of how withdrawal can often
feel counterintuitive to artists. It can
feel like a different sort of silencing—
withdrawing your work, taking your
work away from an audience.

And so, Queer Cinema For Palestine, five years ago, launched a counter-move, which was not just about
withdrawing, but also a counter festival inspired by the model of Six Days
of Resistance and cities around the world programming work in solidarity with Palestine, queers speaking out
in solidarity with Palestine.

And so, we’re in the process right
now of initiating our third edition.
Call for submission next week. So, if
you’ve got a video, you can find us online at Queer Cinema For Palestine,
and the festival’s gonna be in June, [^7]
all through pride month, doing a
targeted solidarity action, a global
solidarity action with Palestine.

Thanks.


[^1]: Status of the Artist legislation came out of recommendations from UNESCO, which argued that artists needed special legislation to ensure their rights. The federal government of Canada legislated Status in 1992, which gave artists collective bargaining rights but only for federal institutions: namely the National Gallery of Canada. All other institutions and galleries (including private galleries) come under provincial labour law. Only Quebec has recently achieved provincial Status.

[^2]: Grace Lee Boggs, interview by Amy Goodman, _Democracy Now!_, April 2, 2010.

[^3]: Maya Mackrandilal, “Diverus,” _Mice Magazine_ 1 (2016), https://micemagazine.ca/issue-one/diverus, and “Radical Looking: Newly Seeing Art With My Baby,” _Momus_, May 30, 2024, https://momus.ca/radical-looking-newly-seeing-art-with-my-baby

[^4]: Amy Fung, Before I Was a Critic I Was a Human Being (Book*hug Press, 2019).

[^5]: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Robyn Maynard, Rehearsals for Living (Knopf Canada, 2022), https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/675719/rehearsals-for-living-by-robyn-maynard-and-leanne-betasamosake-simpson/9781039000650/excerpt

[^6]: Boggs.

[^7]: The third edition of Queer Cinema For Palestine, titled “No Pride in Genocide,” took place throughout June 2025. See: https://queercinemaforpalestine.org 

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

Speaker

Karl Beveridge lives and works in Toronto. He (and his late partner Carole Condé (1940–2024)) collaborated with various trade union and community organizations in the production of their staged photographic work over the past 50 years. Their work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally in both the trade union movement and public art galleries and museums.

Amy Wing‑Hann Wong (b. 1981, Toronto, she/ they) is an angry Asian artist, parent, and Assistant Professor at OCAD University, whose practice explores feminist, anti-colonial, and maternal methodologies. Through painting, drawing, and collaborative forms, Wong asserts unseen practices of care as cultural transmission and critical intervention.


Ammar Bowaihl is a Yemeni, Saudi-born, Toronto-based street photographer focussing on the human condition and topics of immigration and relocation. Since high school, the camera has been his preferred method of capturing details of life in the
city. His experiences living in the Middle East and
establishing himself in Canada has propelled him to explore Toronto’s diverse communities and give voice to many stories often unheard.


Ananna Rafa is a Bangladeshi-born artist working between Vancouver and Toronto. Her practice emerges through notions of learning and unlearning, weaving together personal and collective narratives of migration, memory, and the afterlives of
colonialism. She holds a BFA in Photography from TMU and is currently pursuing an Art History diploma at the University of British Columbia.


Ananna and Ammar, united by their lived experiences as working class, immigrant artists, continue
to create accessible arts education for youth from
underfunded immigrant communities in Toronto.

John Greyson is an award-winning Toronto video/
film artist, whose features, shorts, and transmedia
works include: _Unauthorized Amplification Devices_
(2026), _Gauze_ (2025), _Door Prize_ (2025), _Death Mask_
(2024), _Photo Booth_ (2023), _International Dawn_
_Chorus Day_ (2020), _Mercurial_ (2018),_ Gazonto_ (2016),
_Murder in Passing_ (2013),  _Fig Trees_ (2009), _Proteus_ (2003), _Lilies_ (1996), _Zero Patience_ (1993), _The Making of Monsters_ (1991), and _Urinal_ (1989).

C163_OpenHearing.pdf

Collective

Institutional critique

“Open Hearing: Dreaming in Dark Times” was initiated by EMILIA-AMALIA as a town hall that gathered more than 200 artists and cultural workers in Toronto to confront urgent issues including Palestine solidarity, censorship, and labour. Inspired by the 1969 Art Workers’ Coalition open hearing in New York, this final dispatch features transcripts from Karl Beveridge, Amy Wing-Hann Wong, Ananna Rafa and Ammar Bowaihl, and John Greyson.


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Open Hearing: Dreaming in Dark Times, Dispatch III

Letter

##### Dear C,

It has been more than a decade since I first read the Kamau Brathwaite quote that guides m. nourbeSe philip’s contribution to the previous issue: “Hotels are Squatting on my Metaphors.” When I read this sentence for the first time, I was a student in London, writing a dissertation on Guyanese post-independence art under the supervision of Richard Drayton—the son of Harold Drayton, who helped establish the University of Guyana. Richard would talk about Brathwaite and Rupert Roopnaraine as old family friends, and introduced us to Eric and Jessica Huntley, the community leaders, activists, and publishers who ran the Walter Rodney bookshop in West Ealing. These were people who breathed radical poetics for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and whose lasting impression made me believe that one day, my writing could have the wings it needed to change dynamics of power.

Today, I feel very far from the fierce hope and admiration I felt then, seeing my own metaphors squatted on by hotels and mining projects. Just like the families of Magally Zelaya and Michelle Peraza, my mother’s family shed their Indigenous traditions, culture, and language. For my family, this meant coating their Yakut heritage with a fierce belief in Communism, until the repression under Stalin shattered everything. My great-grandfather was shot, and my great-grandmother and her two daughters were exiled. Belief in the Communist dream was replaced with poetic revolt, as my great aunt took to the stage, reading and distributing censored poetry and prose.

Traumatized by the previous generation’s struggle, my parents turned as far away from politics as they could, choosing mathematics and leaving “the black ink, the red paint” (Zelaya’s ancestors’ metaphor for writing). Eventually, we migrated to Sweden, the land of welfare and engineering, but even as a kid I found myself too restricted by the pragmatism of the protestant country. I fled to London, seeking the black ink but finding instead a tower of insurmountable rents and rising costs. Eight years later, I found myself voluntarily displaced to yet another old imperial centre on the Atlantic coast: Lisbon. Wherever I went, I remained haunted by squatters of metaphors. In Portugal, hotels and tourists have taken over urban and rural coasts. Inland, the gropy fingers of capital threaten to mine everything within sight for so-called green energy, be it water, wind, sun, or mountain.

What if we, as Brathwaite writes in _The Namsetoura Papers_, instead dreamed of libraries on the beach, so that our children could learn to read while looking out over the sea? Is there a way that our metaphors could break free and allow us to dream again? And if they could: What would they dream?


##### Sincerely,
##### M. Vulfson



#####Dear C,

Magally Zelaya’s elliptical fragments oscillate between a personal, analytic, and historical register—a dérive through consciousness. As a writer, this strikes me as the only way to respond to art. Not only because it is more honest; not only because it is true that the personal is political (or if you prefer, its inverse), but because it seems to be the only way to cache the surplus of meaning art generates.

Zelaya’s reverence for amatl—the ancient Mesoamerican paper that is artist Michelle Pereza’s material of choice—comes through in the way her text identifies in amatl both a shared history and the possibility for deviation or opposition. No oil, no canvas, no frame, and in the words of film critic Manny Farber in his 1962 essay “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art,” no “square, boxed-in shape and gemlike inertia of an old, densely wrought European masterpiece.”

Farber’s conviction lies in his call to turn to the termite and its aimless, ceaseless locomotion. The image of the termite artist is one I find terribly seductive—this is an artist who does not preside over art, but instead inhabits it, remains complicit in it. Termite-like activity imbues art with a current that makes it an alive thing. It seems to me that this pulse is not discrete from the materiality of an artwork, from surfaces that allow for touch and breath and crawl, like the regenerative skin of amatl.

Like the frame, the institution mimics the constriction of the tomb, an amber even more unctuous than the past. But this undercurrent of death is not absent from termite art. What is essential to paper and other telluric materials is not only their origin in the earth, but their ability to revert to it. The termite is autophagous, “eating its own boundaries… leaving nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity,” and we should be glad for it.

##### Namah

C163_Letters.pdf

Letters

Artist Project

Laurel Sprengelmeyer is a singer-songwriter and
multidisciplinary artist most known by her musical
moniker Little Scream. She's released three albums,
and contributed to numerous singles in support of
causes including Planned Parenthood, the ACLU,
Standing Rock, and Red Hot. She lives in Montreal,
where she's finishing an album with Mark Hamilton for their new project Brittle Dreams—songs
grown from a vision of the revolutionary power of
love across relationships to self, communities, and movements.


Featured on the cover of C163 CHORUS, Hajra Waheed’s globally-staged and ongoing trilogy is based on hummed compositions of songs of resistance from international solidarity movements. Sources include political prisoners like Kurdish musician Nûdem Durak, the leadership of women and mothers carrying struggle across generations, and labour movements, like that of dock workers in Europe shutting down Israeli weapons shipments. HUM is available in full in the print magazine, along with a text; in conversation with collaborator Laurel Sprengelmeyer between February and early March 2026, at the start of the US-Israel war on Iran and closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Waheed reiterates the urgent need to build and sustain practices of collective voice that can move across borders. Pickup or order a copy of C163 today! You can also access this Artist Project as a PDF when you purchase a Digital Subscription. 



Hajra Waheed is a multidisciplinary artist whose
practice explores the nature of power, the human
impact of displacement and incarceration, and the
transformative possibilities of liberation struggles.
Waheed has exhibited worldwide, including: the
36th São Paulo Biennial, 15th Shanghai Biennale, IMMA (Dublin), Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (Delhi), Sharjah Biennial 15, Centre Pompidou (Paris), Portikus (Frankfurt), Lahore Biennial 02, 57th Venice Biennale, and 11th Gwangju Biennale. She lives and works between Montreal and Yogyakarta.


Artist

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163_Waheed_Sprengelmeyer.pdf

Photography

Race

Memory

Hajra Waheed’s globally-staged and ongoing trilogy is based on hummed compositions of songs of resistance from international solidarity movements. Sources include political prisoners like Kurdish musician Nûdem Durak, the leadership of women and mothers carrying struggle across generations, and labour movements, like that of dock workers in Europe shutting down Israeli weapons shipments. In conversation with collaborator Laurel Sprengelmeyer between February and early March 2026, at the start of the US-Israel war on Iran and closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Waheed reiterates the urgent need to build and sustain practices of collective voice that can move across borders.

_HUM:_ FROM PRISON TO PORT by Hajra Waheed (preview)

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Editorial

This issue feels momentous for many reasons. As we launch a fully redesigned print magazine, we are so excited to further explore how form and language work together. In _C_’s new look, design director Hwa-Jin Jun embraces a sense of fluidity and responsiveness to the specifics of contributor texts. We also return attention to the physicality of printed matter, experimenting with different paper stock and a larger format for visual play (much like the earliest issues of _C_). We continue to push toward cultural discourses that feel aesthetically, ethically, and politically significant, while questioning what that can look like: what becomes possible if we embrace changing issue formats and materials as methodologies in their own right? How might genre-crossing content point us toward new kinds of knowledges?

At the same time as we launch this new design, we find ourselves in a financially challenging moment for the magazine, not uncommon among our arts non-profit peers in a periodical-publishing industry that sees shrinking sales, changes to public grant cycles, and the need to diversify funding sources. In response to this austere landscape, we have planned this redesign around lower material costs, too, without sacrificing quality. We hope to ground in this adaptability, and this scrappiness, to continue _C_ forward, as its stewards before us have done since 1983. We wholeheartedly thank our communities of artists, contributors, readers, board and advisory members, former staff, advertisers, and donors who have supported our critical fundraising campaign—and who may have seen what is important to them in Canada’s creative ecosystem, and its connection to global urgencies, reflected back by _C_ over the years.
The issue theme of _Chorus_ is a fitting one to introduce our new look. We think of chorus as a collective noun for voices, noises, and expressions. You might imagine a swell of layered sounds, or a repeated call-and-response in verse. Think of polyphony, or simultaneity: a chorus that does not dissolve distinction. As Hajra Waheed says of her ongoing multi-channel sound trilogy _HUM_, which opens these pages as the Artist Project, “voice is not only expression but infrastructure: a way of rehearsing coordination, care, and collective power under conditions where public speech is increasingly regulated, surveilled, and criminalized.” Conceived as hummed compositions of songs of resistance from international solidarity movements, including political prisoners like Kurdish musician Nûdem Durak, the leadership roles of women and mothers in carrying struggle across generations, and labour movements, the work—as Waheed says to collaborator Laurel Sprengelmeyer—carries the responsibility of preserving the individual within the collective. This has resulted in individual recordings of vocalists that form more than 1,000 mixed tracks per volume, mounted at sites from Lahore to Frankfurt to Bogota.

In “FIVE ESSAYS FOR KELLY MARK,” dispersed through the magazine like the artist’s posthumous show was across physical locations in Toronto, Daniella Sanader captures the subtle folds of labour, working-class time, and accumulation at the heart of Mark’s work. In “Sharing Seeds,” extended from a panel between Api’soomaahka and Christina Battle moderated by Lillian O’Brien Davis, the artists speak about the intentional dispersal and propagation of seeds as a form of collective survival. Meanwhile, Sebastian De Line focuses on notions of audibility in the context of caring for museum collections, where attuning to ancestors who reside there is a paradigm shift for what Western Eurocentric museum practices might call “objects.”

To mark the release of their debut album _In Blue Time_, Eddy Wang and Ryan Akler-Bishop of Ira Dot speak to Winnie Wang about their many influences, including the limits of language, Peking opera, Xi'an guyue, indie rock, racial melancholia, musique concrète, sound collage, the colour blue, avant-pop, and chamber folk. Expansive approaches to genre also inform Sarah Jane Cervenak’s “An Un/Written Proposition: Nolan Oswald Dennis Overturns the World.” Cervenak surveys how Dennis’s diagrams, based on International Astronomical Union constellation charts, layer references to global Indigenous cosmologies, the Black consciousness movement, and Black Panther Party iconography, toward an “anti-colonial defamiliarization of mapping practices.”
The final excerpt from “Open Hearing: Dreaming in Dark Times,” a town hall that took place in Toronto in March 2025, features the voices of artists calling for ways forward in response to challenges faced in our cultural sectors, from labour organizing to strategies against political censorship. We can’t think of a better way to end the _Chorus_ issue than on a cacophony of grievance and desire.

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C163_Editorial.pdf

Editors Maandeeq Mohamed and Joy Xiang reflect on the issue’s theme, _Chorus_ and its contributions.


Editorial: CHORUS

Wanda Nanibush is an Anishinaabe-kwe image and word warrior, curator, and community organizer from Beausoleil First Nation. She recently won the Toronto Book Award for her coauthored book Moving the Museum. She is the 2025 Helen Frankenthaler Visiting Professor in Curating in the PhD Program in Art History at CUNY. She is also part of the curatorial team for Counterpublic 2026, a triennial civic exhibition in St.
Louis. In 2024, Nanibush was awarded The Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for
Curatorial Excellence. Nanibush founded aabaakwad, an international yearly gathering of over 80 Indigenous curators writers, and artists.

Composition: We Return

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

When Play Confronts Power

**Nic Wilson** (they/he) is an artist and writer living and working between the Prairies and the Maritimes. Their most recent book, The ‘Ayin, was published in the summer of 2025.


The Afterlife of Writing

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

One Thing: In Search of an Incorruptible Life

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

The House Edge

Kai Trotz-Motayne is a Guyanese-Canadian researcher and writer from Tkaronto/Toronto, whose work takes inspiration from the many Caribbean people that raised her. She spends most days reminiscing about family gatherings that would end with tales of her family’s
Caribbean past. Inspired by their imaginative retellings, her mind now wonders what stories she will one day tell. Her work now explores how storytelling practices, like identities, evolve and transform through movement.

For Those Who Visit Us in Our Dreams

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

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

To Enshrine an Ululation

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

The _KISSSSS_ of Yong Soon Min

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

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

In the Lacuna

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

A Vampire Walks Into a Funhouse

Innas Tsuroiya is a writer living in Indonesia who works across poetry, criticism, translation, fiction, and divination. She has written for _C Magazine_, _e-flux Criticism_, _TANK_, _The Stinging Fly_, _Poetry Wales_, _Protean Magazine_, _ArtReview_, _Artforum_, _ArtAsiaPacific_, and more.


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.

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Editorial: CHORUS

C Mag

The Latest

“Does the flower hear the bee?" — 15th Shanghai Biennale

Open Hearing: Dreaming in Dark Times, Dispatch III

Letters

HUM: FROM PRISON TO PORT by Hajra Waheed (preview)

Issue 163

Chorus

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