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Luminato

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Griffin

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Manif d'art

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Neutral Ground

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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

Designer

Publisher

This issue begins from the tidal as literal image and metaphor for ceaseless movement and its force. We think alongside the inseparability of ocean and land, inspired by Barbadian poet and scholar Kamau Brathwaite’s idea of tidalectics that moves away from easy binaries—the ones that continually justify colonial and capital expansion. From Turtle Island to the Caribbean archipelago, Palestine, Central America, and Bidong Island in Malaysia, artists wade through interconnected and overlapping struggles across multiple shores, times, and material inheritances.

Tidal

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**Manif d’art – The Québec City Biennial** returns from February 28 to April 19, 2026, with its 12th edition, _Splitting Ice / Briser la glace_.

Splitting Ice: Manif d’art 12 Explores Winter, Territory, and Climate Transformation

Review

Danica Pinteric is a writer and curator born and based in Toronto. In 2022, she established Joys, an independent contemporary art gallery dedicated to exploring the politics of vulnerability and embracing the poetic opportunities in exhibition making. She volunteers at the Toronto Public Library on Tuesdays.

This winter, New York–based multidisciplinary artist Alice Gong Xiaowen presented _Heavy Fog_, a sculptural sound installation at Franz Kaka. The eponymous work—a mammoth geometric object composed mainly of tall, untreated drywall segments—stood as a shadowless figure in the centre of a sunless room, like a pale monolith, like a body.

The sculpture droned. A soft, wide hum filled the negative space of the gallery, threading into your bones when you entered. The moon-toned drywall bore many edges, delineating an interior and exterior. A glance around the other side revealed its surprising L-shape. This second vantage point featured a number of thin, vertical recesses that were punctuated by seven sharp lines emerging from the inside. Tightly wound, the vibrating strings pierced the air on a diagonal angle before receding into the other end of the object. Operating somewhere between architecture and instrument, _Heavy Fog_ is an impression, an invisible current, and a climate.

Using an electromagnetic system inside the sculpture, each string relents with an endless, yawning perpetuity that evaporates into all corners of the room. The sculpture’s nylon-wrapped strings are made for the guqin, an ancient Chinese seven-string instrument. For Xiaowen, who initially presented a version of this work at Gallery Vacancy in Shanghai in Spring 2025, the instrument carries a charge of political history. Prior to the Cultural Revolution in China, guqins were traditionally strung with silk, a material that was replaced under Mao to make them louder and more uniform, a signal of advancement. The state-ordered transformation of the instrument charted an ideological as well as a sonic shift.

An exhibition text by Fan Wu suggests, “Fog blooms by your being of it as much as in it, our prepositional logic dismantled, the grammar of our conventions vanishing in midair.” From Impressionist painting to mid-century ephemeral sculpture, fog has long held a special place in the stable for artists. (Fujiko Nakaya’s iconic fog installations come to mind as a conceptual neighbour.) As artists in the early 2020s have increasingly taken up issues of opacity, obfuscation, and refusal, likely as both direct and passive responses to stormy political realities, fog lends a hand as a potent metaphor while the air around us grows even thicker. Guqin strings are played in new ways.

Xiaowen refers to _Heavy Fog_ as being an “indexical” work, borrowing a semiotic framework that describes when a sign relates to an element in the exact context in which it emerges, bearing a direct relationship to its own matter. One outcome is that it produces its own system of perception and reference, embedding degrees of public memory, vibrational frequency, and control. A suspended swelling of sound; a minor key shift; a bouquet of resonance; Xiaowen plays us a version of what history sounds like.

Writer

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“Heavy Fog” ran from 7 November to 20 December 2025 at Franz Kaka, Toronto.

“Heavy Fog” – Alice Gong Xiaowen 

Feature

Chipo Chipaziwa (b.1997) is a performance artist exploring power dynamics between performer and audience. A BA graduate of UBC (2019), she has presented work internationally and nationally, including at Index (Stockholm), Art Metropole (Toronto), and Western Front (Vancouver). Her artist book, _My Mother, My Home_, was published by Archive Books (2024). chipochipaziwa.com

Yasmine Whaley-Kalaora works as a writer and critic, a Studio Assistant for Tom Burrows, and in archives for artists and artist-run organizations. Yasmine’s practice encompasses video, experimental audio, writing, sculpture, and curating C.L.A.M.—an intermittent interdisciplinary series featuring audio-visual work, performance art, readings, and (occasionally) food (@_c.l.a.m_). Recent writings can be found in _The Capilano Review_,
_ReIssue_, _C Magazine_, _Le Sigh_, and _Momus_. ywk.cargo.site

In November 2024, Chipo Chipaziwa debuted her performance _Slipping Into Slipping Away_ (2024–ongoing) during the launch for her first artist book _My Mother, My Home_ (2024) at Western Front. These works together present a dialectic between the presence and absence of the body, rooted in strategies of citation and archival agency, which Chipaziwa grapples with in her larger performance practice.

Through deep personal reflections and tactical censorship, Chipaziwa questions the boundaries of legibility in both physical and psychic space. _My Mother, My Home_ archives Chipaziwa’s practice while avoiding bodily representation, instead centring community accounts as primary documentation. For _Slipping Into Slipping Away_, Chipaziwa (re)searched for Black artists in Western Front’s records, and simultaneously developed a series of gestural scores from observations during her weekly gallery-sitting shifts. Reflecting common physical actions in the space, Chipaziwa stretched their duration
and warped their rhythms. Viewers sought references among her restricted and exaggerated repetitions, like pulling a cadence of walking from the motion of stepping on
a garbage-bin foot pedal. In this abridged version of our conversation, we speak about Chipaziwa’s conduits of citation that also serve as ways to locate the self, further echoed through presentations of this work across Canada (Plug In ICA, Art Metropole, DARE-DARE) and European sites (SixtyEight at Det Lilla Rum, Copenhagen; rile*books, Brussels; Index, Stockholm; Hopscotch Reading Room, Berlin; San Serriffe, Amsterdam; and REFERENCE. POINT, London) in 2025.

>**Yasmine Whaley-Kalaora: We’ve spoken about how _My Mother, My Home_ began out of a mentorship with Denise Ferreira da Silva as an experiment to both introduce writing into your practice and explore how this record might be an alternative to lens-based documentation for performance art. Can you expand on how the book came to be?**

**Chipo Chipaziwa:** I had completed my undergrad degree at UBC in 2019, and I started to crave mentorship outside of the constructs of a university model. At the time, I didn’t have any Black female instructors at UBC, so I found that I was making art from a place of exploring pain and trauma rather than from joy and levity. I knew I wanted to work with Ferreira da Silva after reading her _e-flux_ article “1 (life) ÷ 0 (blackness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞
/ ∞: On Matter Beyond the Equation of Value.” [^1] I was in awe of how she wrote, how what she proposed led me to think in new and expansive ways, and the responses it conjured from my body. The act of writing eliciting a response from the body was a new challenge for me. So, I approached her to work together, and through a series of successful grants, we ended up writing _My Mother, My Home_.

Given how the gaze of the camera can be perceived as both imperialist and capitalist, I wanted to use the book format to exemplify an alternative, perhaps a more cohesive, understanding of how performance art can be archived. I was thinking about how this book can go on to exist independent of my physical presence. I really wanted to work with a group of people whom I could trust to speak on behalf of my practice, to visually present me whether it be through the paintings, prints, drawings, and book design, or to complete various rounds of editing up until the last second. In the end, it became a collective effort to see whether I can archive my performances with/in the absence of my physical body.
And to be quite frank, I am not so interested in that answer anymore as perhaps better questions have arisen.

For the title, I was reading Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Jacques Derrida—and there’s a section in Derrida’s Archive Fever (1995) where one of the various ways he defines _en mal d’archive_ is “an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement.” [^2]  Still having this in mind, I wondered if a womb could be one’s first home, one’s first archive.

>**YW-K: Your writing style is quite personal, a self-reflection in (and on) the first person—the form feels akin to some of the embodied performance-art practices we learned while studying under Guadalupe Martinez at UBC and, later, with artists like Luciana Freire D'Anunciação while performing in CUERPO, Martinez’s collective. Yet, your process
is not one of full disclosure, but of self-editing through revisitation, revision, redaction. How did you come to this approach that both platforms and restricts readers’ access to you and your work? Especially in relation to performance, in which your body is the main medium, was there a dialogue between the two practices?**

**CC:** I landed on this approach because I wanted to reconsider what it means to write for the sake of writing, as a way of preserving myselves: the past, present, and future versions of Chipo. But then, you know, I realize my eyes won’t be the only eyes. The question came up of how I can be vulnerable with those who engage with my practice, but still keep their engagement at a distance, and that’s still a through line for me.

And absolutely there is a connection between the two. Ultimately, what I want my performances to do is translate and contextualize my observations. In that sense, performances conduct bodily translations whereas writings demystify gestures—they go hand in hand.

>**YW-K: Ferreira da Silva poses a beautiful question in her “Afterword” in the book: “[W]hat becomes of the writing of a person, and as such a personal writing, when the sole function of the ‘I’ that drives the text is to absent (Itself!) that which it is about?” [^3] There’s a tension between revelling in and (re)locating the self in this work, between the personal writing style and the restriction of bodily representation. What compelled you to put the “I” in tension?**

**CC:** The driving force was ultimately my interest in pushing what constitutes a memory. I have a difficult time recalling the past because it’s not a constant thing—it presents itself as quite fluid. In my opinion, the act of remembering is an elusive process, and a photo-based reconjuring of a performance would be an antithesis to that.

_My Mother, My Home_ is all about re-counting, retracing, recording, reprocess-ing—with the prefix re-, there’s a strong suggestion that I am doing something again to try and grasp what I did the first time. But perhaps what I am really asking those around me is: “Did you see that, did you see what I just did there? I did it alone the first time, could you accompany me this time around?” Sharing that responsibility of witnessing, holding a moment that is otherwise heavy or difficult to hold alone.

>**YW-K: Beautiful, re- as an invitation for accompaniment. In parts of the book, your self-reflections—journaling after a performance or rewriting/redacting old writings, [^4] “reliving” past performances [^5]—in tandem with other artists’ reflections makes space for non-linear methods of becoming and the embrace of a continuous subject. Is there a relationship between performing, archiving, and a kind of self-location in your practice?**

**CC:** I think so, I mean I view performing as a way to place myself in relation to external/internal stimuli. I then consider archiving as a means of holding that relationship, without having to totally dissect it. From that point, I am then curious about how this re- work can become a sort of self-locating. In that sense, the archiving of the performance and the performance itself aren’t mutually exclusive—they’re connected to one another, interwoven.

>**YW-K: I currently work with arts and performance-art archives, and I think about this a lot, when a medium is so situated or circumstance dependent. It becomes less about “capturing” the work and more about offering entry points for activation and remembering.
And, if a body is also an archive that encounters others’ living bodies daily—in a lot of ways, you’re acting as a conduit during a live work, a contact zone for your own embodied landscape and those of the viewers.**

>**This citational conduit runs through your work, like the piece from the book, “Chipo Suthani Joanne Chipaziwa Is a Performance Artist”—where half the text consists of footnotes that expand on each of your names and how you came to performance art as a medium that allows you to work with and through your personhood. [^6] In _Slipping Into Slipping Away_, I felt your movements and scores were imbued with the wide breadth of citations from your archival and observational research. What was that research like?**

**CC:** At the very beginning of my residency at Western Front, I was looking through their archive with the preliminary question: how many Black artists have presented work at Western Front since it was founded in 1973? I consulted their chronological and alphabetized record of everyone who has ever presented there and went down this layered and fraught rabbit hole as I began cross-referencing names in an attempt to determine identity with limited information —often just a name, a year, and a title.

Feelings of discomfort started to form as deeper questions about the politics of classification arose: who gets to decide how artists are identified in an archive? Is it ethical for me to categorize artists based on their race? What does it mean to search for Blackness through institutional records that weren’t built with self-identification in mind?

I can only speak on my own experiences, but I also found myself in this grey area, asking what do I consider to be signifiers of Blackness? Are those signifiers present within my own self, and what happens if my understanding of Blackness is different from someone else’s
—does that negate my own experience of being Black?

I am aware that there is quite a bit of discourse about how being Black is not a singular experience, but what if my own lived experience of being Black still didn’t fit within the agreed polylith of Blackness?

I also considered looking for signifiers of Blackness in the metadata itself, but even that approach felt speculative. I sort of had to admit defeat as the whole process took almost four months, and I struggled with the discomfort of possibly overlooking someone. I kept on thinking, “Sorry I missed you. I tried to find you.” But upon further reflection, perhaps what I really meant to say is “Sorry I missed you, I did try to locate and acknowledge you.”

>**YW-K: How did that fold together with your observational research for _Slipping Into Slipping Away_?**

**CC:** The observational research showed me that the archive doesn’t have to have a capital A—it can be in other spaces beyond a physical library, textbook, or computer screen. The archive can include encounters that take place in everyday life—it’s actually quite porous.

The question of where the movement vocabulary for this new performance would come from became really daunting. My mentors encouraged me to look at what was happening in Western Front’s foyer as a source of material. The interactions I was having as a gallery attendant sort of became a meditation on the visible and invisible labour that an art worker has to take on to serve the visiting public. That got me thinking about the archivist’s labour in serving the archived, and the performer’s labour in serving the audience.

Once I took note of what was at stake, composing the performance became really fun and exciting—what would it do to take the action of removing one’s coat, but carry that out with my back toward the audience? What would it do to take that movement of a patron pointing to their name on a guest list, and raise that pointing gesture toward various bodies
and objects in a space?

What was surreal was that when I performed the work three nights in a row, the work landed differently every time. The first night felt comedic, the second night felt emotionally charged, and the third night felt like a warm embrace.

>**YW-K: _Slipping Into Slipping Away_ was imbued with a fine attention to visible, semi-visible, and invisible gestures and labours, which lent itself to a kind of live archiving including those who have passed through Western Front. Since the initial performances and book launch, you’ve been travelling the works across Canada, and internationally this fall. Has the change of location affected the scores?**

**CC:** Yes, and no. Since the work was developed with Western Front in mind,
its entire sequence of gestures remains true to its original form. There are still 10 acts of the piece, but I have adapted them to the different realities of each location. For instance, the first act is an exploration of how the worker opens up that space, and so I have had conversations with each person about what their opening routines consist of. The second
act is a tracing of the common pathways taken in each location, and so that always changes.

>**YW-K: As we were going back and forth during this conversation, our mutual friend asked, if _My Mother, My Home_ and _Slipping Into Slipping Away_ offer a dialectic, what is the synthesis? I wonder if the synthesis comes from the re- work, the rewriting in the book and physical repetition, both during and of the performance in other places?**

**CC:** I actually think that the synthesis is to stop navel-gazing so much—haha! But in all seriousness, I did learn that there are so many relations waiting to be drawn upon around me. I don’t have to go looking very far. Even with the title, the word “slip” first clearly presented itself during a session with my psychoanalyst, and it stayed with me since. But yet slip means to “go quickly,” right, and that kind of movement feels familiar to my upbringing—I moved to a different country every couple of years, I quite literally slipped across the world.

If I, Chipo, am accustomed to being in slippage—never quite fixed in one place, always a bit slippery—then maybe the synthesis lies in learning how to be an observant visitor.

[^1]: Denise Ferreira da Silva, “1 (life) ÷ 0 (blackness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞ / ∞: On Matter Beyond the Equation of Value,” _e-flux Journal_, February 2017, https://www.e-flux.com/ journal/79/94686/1-life-0-blackness-or-on-matter-beyond-the-equation-of-value

[^2]: Jacques Derrida, _Archive Fever_ (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 91.

[^3]: Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Afterword,” in _My Mother, My Home_ (Berlin: Archive Books, 2024), 86.

[^4]: Chipo Chipaziwa, “Reconsidering, ‘Chipo Chipaziwa’s Artist Statement’ (2019),” in _My Mother, My Home_, 25–28.

[^5]: Chipo Chipaziwa, “Reliving ‘Notes on Beauty’ (2022),” in _My Mother, My Home_, 41–44.

[^6]: Chipo Chipaziwa, “Chipo Suthani Joanne Chipaziwa Is a Performance Artist,” in _My Mother, My Home_, 19.

Artist

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Performance

Artists Books

Yasmine Whaley-Kalaora and Chipo Chipaziwa speak about Chipaziw’'s “conduits of citation” that document the artist's performance practice with/in the absence of her physical body, including through collaborators’ writing. They explore how the self is in tension with its own representation, and what it might mean to share the responsibility of witnessing.

 Recounting, Retracing, Recording: In Conversation With Chipo Chipaziwa

Column

kimi malka hanauer is an artist, writer, and publisher. They are a founding collective member of the publishing initiative Press Press, steward of nomadic education initiative Ungovernable Study, and an assistant professor at Pratt Institute.

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Language

Memory

Colonialism

kimi malka hanauer’s image-text moves through a pre-partition Jerusalem, Palestine, and al-Andalus, the Muslim-governed society that covered much of the Iberian Peninsula from 711-1492. hanauer writes from the unspoken relational and linguistic excess that seeps through empire's hold.  

Composition: on the edges of a mother tongue

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The city of Liverpool unfurls from its port, which was
central to the transatlantic slave trade in the 18th century and has grown to be a hub for container shipping.
Curated by Marie-Anne McQuay, the 2025 Liverpool Biennial takes the theme “BEDROCK,” which acknowledges these troubled histories as it takes a cue from the
city’s sandstone architecture, the distinctive red hue of
which can be seen in structures like the Liverpool Cathedral and early dock walls.

In geological context, bedrock is the lowest layer
and remains unchanged for long periods of time, even
though soil layers on top may erode or accumulate into
smaller or bigger particles. The metaphor prompts questions about change and foundations: is it possible to create change when bedrock is almost immutable? How can
layers of archaeology, history, story, sound, and image
shift this ground?

Three Canadian artists at the Biennial engage with
Canadian, colonial, and diasporic influences. Multimedia
installations by Karen Tam, Dawit L. Petros, and Nour
Bishouty all probe local histories in Canada and their
historical and international resonances.

Tam’s _Scent of Thunderbolts 雷霆之息_ (2024) is a
reproduction of a Cantonese opera stage. Inspired by
listening to opera with her grandmother as a child, the
work was initially created for the 2024 Toronto Biennial
of Art. In Liverpool, Tam’s installation is housed in
the Pine Court, established in 1986 to accommodate
Chinese and Southeast Asian communities who were
facing poverty. Moving through the room, I brushed
past hanging sheer fabric bamboo to glimpse what
seemed to be intimate interiors because of archival photos on the walls of Cantonese opera troupes in the diasporic community. While Tam reimagined spaces in
Montreal’s Chinatown where she grew up, I was acutely aware of the vitality of such an installation in Liverpool’s Chinatown, particularly in a city where East and South Asian sailors and seamen have historically experienced homelessness and a lack of community—from the 18th century when they were employed on ships and at
ports, to WWII and the post-war era when they faced deportation. Audio excerpts from opera are interspersed
with soundscapes of interior Chinatown in Montreal,
hearkening the creativity of the form itself, which merges song, dance, and martial arts. Soon after I saw Tam’s
work in Toronto, I happily ate dumplings on Spadina
Avenue (as I do at least twice a week), but seeing it in
Liverpool felt somber, since the site-specific context
evokes a shared history of displacement and loss.

_As the Nile Flows or the Camel Walks_ (2025), by Eritrean-born Canadian artist Petros, takes a deep dive to
unveil the entangled power dynamics of colonial legacies. Petros draws inspiration from a historical account
written in the late-19th century by Louis Jackson, a Mohawk man who participated in the British-led expedition
of the Nile River to reach Khartoum in order to save the
British governor general from Sudanese Mahdist forces.
Petros’s curiosity was piqued when he learned about
Jackson being on the Nile River in 1884: what was he
doing there? _As the Nile Flows_ is necessarily complex.
Installed in the historic Hornby Library, a small pile of
white plastic rifles behind glass evokes Eritrean askaris,
Indigenous troops that were recruited into European
colonial armies, like Italy’s—a history that emerges
around the same time as the expedition in which Jackson participated. Nearby, listening stations unearth
BBC archival footage celebrating the splendour of the
Nile River that Petros remixed with war chants from
Nubia. The sense of disorientation and cacophony is
also evident in Petros’s “disassembled travelogues”
where he juxtaposes historical photographs, books, and
documents, placing the viewer in the role of the researcher. Such an invitation may seem scholarly, but it makes visible the stakes of research: which narratives can be built
from what is available? Petros creates an immense challenge to narrative and history itself, since his work unmasks
complex dynamics of complicity without didacticism.

Bishouty’s _Nothing is lost except nothing at all except what is not had_ (2025) is an ekphrastic work that responds to Al-Wadi, an ’80s painting made by her late father, Ghassan Bishouty, which depicts a Bedouin tribe in the desert of Jordan. In this multimedia installation, Bishouty places large-scale wooden carvings of animals like bulls, cows, and camels across her father’s
work. In the catalogue from Gallery 44 in Toronto, where a first version of this work was shown in 2022, curators
Toleen Touq and Lillian O’Brien Davis note that “staffage” is a Western art-historical term that refers to the
placement of such animals in landscape paintings with
the sole purpose of drawing the viewer’s eye to the landscape, making the animals incidental. By creating and
adorning these sculptures with mother-of-pearl inlays and
fragments of sacred geometry, Bishouty centres the marginal, so that what is part of the land is finally acknowledged as such—even if the context of the gallery displaces original referents to land, the act of creation itself recognizes the weight of its meaning. Bishouty’s
work is immensely quiet and moving.

While biennials can often be showy parties of virtue signalling and censorship, Tam, Petros, and Bishouty ultimately present work that is unafraid to embrace positionality. Because of their deeply personal engagements and a willingness to embrace complexity that prevents
tokenization, they make it possible to see their art beyond national, international, and institutional frames of practice and looking.

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The 2025 Liverpool Biennial “BEDROCK” ran from 7 June to 14 September 2025. Curated by Marie-Anne McQuay.

“BEDROCK” — Nour Bishouty, Dawit L. Petros, Karen Tam 譚嘉文

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. Her work can be found in _Poetry Wales, MOLD Magazine, C Magazine, Protean Magazine, ArtReview Asia,_ and _Artforum_, among others.

One Thing: Kamala Ibrahim Ishag’s Zar Paintings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bhenji Ra Dances at the End of the Rainbow

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

Floor Drawing Series by Aubin Soonhwan K: Text

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

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

Our Third Sun

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

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

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

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

Hard Limits, Soft Landing

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

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

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

One Thing: Tracing Fragments of Queer Desire


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


Sinister Pleasure: Interview with Ja'Tovia Gary

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

A Good Animal on Wet Sheets: Disobedient Gasps in Subspace

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

Composition: give up your own

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

What is the Safe Word?

You’re invited to submit a letter in response to _C Magazine_ Issue 162 Tidal by February 25.

We want to know what you think—about the new issue, its themes, specific meaty content, relevance or irrelevance. Or tell us what matters to you in critical art publishing in Canada. What do you love, and what is there a lack of? What should publications like _C_ lean into? Send us your informal, critical, inquisitive, or irreverent responses in prose—creativity welcome. A $100 honorarium is paid to each contribution selected for print. 

Selected letters will be published in C163 Chorus (Spring 2026).

**Send letters to [pitch@cmagazine.com](mailto:pitch@cmagazine.com) with LETTERS in the subject line.**

Talk Back to Us! Call for Letters: Tidal

Call

The Letters column features a selection of 100-400 word letters to our editors, contributors and readers, and is printed at the front of every issue.

Talk Back to us! Call for Letters: TIDAL

We are delighted to announce Miyopin Cheechoo as the winner of the 4th annual Indigenous Art Writing Award! On behalf of all of us at _C_ and the [Indigenous Curatorial Collective/ Collectif des commissaires autochtones (ICCA)](https://icca.art/), congratulations!

Cheechoo’s text, “ai tried to code being indian,” stood out for its experiments in how poetic language might introduce generative glitches and interruptions into otherwise colonial algorithms. It was a pleasure to read, and we are excited to share it with our readers in an upcoming issue of _C_.

We would also like to congratulate Jamesie Fournier and Petala Ironcloud on being named runners-up. We look forward to reading their future pitches!

Thank you to everyone who participated, and to Napatsi Folger and Justine “Tini” Stilborn for adjudicating this year's award alongside _C Magazine_’s Associate Editor Maandeeq Mohamed.

miyo4.jpeg

ᐙᒡᐦᐊᔾ᙮  
ᒦᔮᐱᓐ   ᒌᒎ    ᓃᑎᔑᓈᑳᓱᐦᓐ᙮   
ᒨᓱᓀ    ᓂᑑᓐᒋ᙮

Wachay, my name is **Miyopin Cheechoo** and I am a member of Moose Cree First Nation. I grew up in Moosonee and Moose Factory, ON.

I am in my second year of my doctorate at the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education, where I work on conceptualizing Indigenous feminist visions of curriculum and pedagogy in an on-reserve context. In addition to being a full-time student, I am also a Research Fellow within the Indigenous Literatures Lab, where I am mentored by Dr. Jennifer Brant. 

A core tenant of my lab is taking an Indigenous feminist approach, meaning we intentionally guide our research into education to be aligned with the Calls to Justice for MMIW2S. This way of seeing guides my own creative writing, where I draw upon narrative from my lived experiences to create pieces intended to spark dialogue around critical facets of Indigenous life and future. Miikwec.

Ironcloud_headshot

**Petala Ironcloud** is a Lakota/Dakota writer from California. He writes for _The New York Times_, _Business of Fashion_, _Architectural Digest_, _T Magazine_, _Hyperallergic_, _PAPER_, and others. He lives in New York.

Fournier_headshot

Born and raised in Denendeh, mixed Inuk writer and poet **Jamesie Taligvat Evaluardjuk Fournier**’s debut horror book, _The Other Ones_ (2022), won silver at the 2022 Independent Publisher Book Awards and is currently being made into a stop-motion film. His poetry collection, _Elements_ (2023), was shortlisted for the 2024 Indigenous Voices Award and won the 2024 NorthWords Book Award. His premiere children’s book, _Lemming’s First Christmas_ (2024) was animated to English and Inuktitut. His latest children's book, _Umingmak & Fox: Why Is It Dark?_ was published in 2025. Jamesie divides his time writing across Nunavut, Ontario, and the NWT.

Indigenous Art Writing Award Winner 2025

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

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

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

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

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

Submission

Partners

Indigenous Art Writing Award

Program

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

Indigenous Art Writing Award Winner 2025: Miyopin Cheechoo

##### Call for Pitches for FILTH

##### C164—Autumn 2026

##### Accepted until: March 6, 2026

We invite you to engage with filth and all that it might entail, artistically and politically. We are especially interested in submissions that explore the value (or, alternatively, lack thereof) accorded to “filth” as an aesthetic quality. For instance, what does what a given social milieu label as “filth” teach us about that society? Can we conceive of “filth” without its racialized foil: “purity,” “cleanliness,” etc? Alternatively, other concepts filth might be tied to include: fecundity, transformations of matter that (re)fuel cycles of life, biologically rich spaces like bogs, resilient ancient beings, or overturning codes of morality. What needs to be excreted to release the entire system? Can filth embody a different sense of a productive space? Think: vulgarity, “dirty” materials, contamination, waste, overconsumption, transmutation, mud, compost, and practices honouring filth and its sacredness.

We are seeking pitches for thematic Features of all kinds and creative ideas for our Composition column, which encourages artists’ visuals alongside experimental thought/text conceived for a print format. Bring us your wild ideas! We also welcome Reviews pitches, not required to be on theme. 
 
Send pitches to [pitch@cmagazine.com](mailto:pitch@cmagazine.com) by **March 6, 2026**, with a subject line that starts with the word PITCH and indicates the submission type (review, essay, interview, composition, e.g.). 

**What to include:**<br>
*~150 words about your subject and how you’ll approach it, including hyperlinks if relevant 
*An estimated word count (except for Reviews, which run 800-1000 words)
*If you have not written for us recently, please include a link to your website or a copy of CV for us to learn more about you, and one or two writing samples (ideally ones in a style similar to your pitched piece). We do not publish reprints or previously written pieces unless with prior discussion. See our [writer’s guidelines](https://cmagazine.com/opportunities/write) for more information.
 
Please understand that due to capacity, we are unable to reply to all pitches, and welcome you to pitch elsewhere if you do not hear back within 4 weeks after the call closes.

Note about conflicts of interest: we do not accept pitches from platforms regarding their own programming.



Call for Pitches for FILTH

Pitches for C162 accepted until March 6, 2026.

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“BEDROCK” — Nour Bishouty, Dawit L. Petros, Karen Tam 譚嘉文

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