thumbnail_NanaimoArtGallery_April15_SizeB.jpg

NanaimoArtGallery_April15_SizeB.jpg

md_NanaimoArtGallery_April15_SizeA.jpg

sm_NanaimoArtGallery_April15_SizeA.jpg

thumbnail_NanaimoArtGallery_April15_SizeA.jpg

NanaimoArtGallery_April15_SizeA.jpg

Fortin

md_ICCA_Apr15_SizeB.jpg

sm_ICCA_Apr15_SizeB.jpg

thumbnail_ICCA_Apr15_SizeB.jpg

ICCA_Apr15_SizeB.jpg

lg_ICCA_Apr15_SizeA.jpg

md_ICCA_Apr15_SizeA.jpg

sm_ICCA_Apr15_SizeA.jpg

thumbnail_ICCA_Apr15_SizeA.jpg

ICCA_Apr15_SizeA.jpg

ICCA

thumbnail_KarenZalamea_Size B.png

KarenZalamea_Size B.png

md_KarenZalamea_Size A.png

sm_KarenZalamea_Size A.png

thumbnail_KarenZalamea_Size A.png

KarenZalamea_Size A.png

Evergreen 2

lg_c163 cover.jpg

md_c163 cover.jpg

sm_c163 cover.jpg

thumbnail_c163 cover.jpg

c163 cover.jpg

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

Sherry Chunqing Liu 刘纯青 (b. Xiamen, China) is a writer, artist, and curator whose work engages contemporary art and storytelling, often drawing on diasporic experience, cultural identity, and personal memory. Her writing has appeared in _C Magazine_, _esse arts + opinions_, _ESPACE art actuel_, Artoronto.ca, and _photoED_, while her curatorial projects have been featured by _Dezeen_, _e-flux_, the Art Museum at the University o-f Toronto, CONTACT Photography Festival, and DesignTO, among others. She holds a Master of Visual Studies in Curatorial Studies and an HBA in Architecture from the University of Toronto.



How do diasporic subjects remain in relation to their ancestors when rituals that once held those bonds are disrupted, translated, or misunderstood across continents? Annie Wong’s “to hear all the sounds in the world” at YYZ Artists' Outlet takes this question as its heartbeat, using joss paper, performance, and printed apparitions as a material vocabulary to map fragmented inheritances. Wong explores the limits of remembering and reclaiming ancestors, including countless distant and unknown ones, while suggesting that these bonds can be forged and brought into the present through attentive, tender, and partial gestures.

The gallery’s quiet registers first. A large sweeping arc of joss paper hangs horizontally from the ceiling, forming a rhythmic cadence of life and death, of preparation and anticipation. Hundreds of interconnected serene faces of the devotees of Guanyin, the Bodhisattva of compassion, float in a contemplative curve, their matte surfaces absorbing and diffusing the overhead light. Assembled from many sheets of 100 Ghosts (一百鬼) joss paper, which Wong encountered through her research beginning in 2020, the work reflects a process of careful repetition. Originally conceived as halo-like cutouts, the faces are folded to emerge from the surface and stand upright. Their stillness carries a sense of imminence, the moment before ritual, or the instant when breath is drawn but not yet released. Wong described the installation as something that “emerged on its own” as she assembled it, bending and rising naturally with fishing wire for support. What began in a flat plane evolved into a sculptural wave, invoking the ocean as a metaphor for migration, where physical distance, temporal dislocation, and the pull of return are held in constant motion. Below, a metal fire bucket stands ready. The absence of combustion positions the viewer at a threshold where offerings are prepared but not yet sent.

The suspended faces pulled me back to childhood afternoons in my father’s hometown of Putian, hiking with my family to visit ancestral graves. I was too young to understand the cosmology and reciprocity embedded in the burning of joss paper, which offers care to ancestors and deceased family in exchange for protection and continued connection between generations. I remember the smoke thinning among the trees, folding into the green of the forest, the scent of foliage mingling with paper. After moving overseas as a teenager, such memories became rare threads anchoring a home that had begun to feel distant. Entering Wong’s exhibition, those threads tugged again, softly but firmly.
This floating multiplicity evokes not only Guanyin but the countless unnamed women, devotees, and ancestral figures whose acts of care shaped Guanyin’s iconography. In her text “How to Burn Paper for the Dead” (_Mice Magazine_, 2017), Wong reflects on the “ghost” carried by the diasporic subject as the residue of ancestral rituals, practices that remain ordinary and domestic, woven into daily life yet rendered spectral or estranged within Westernized spaces. I thought of the small burning rituals for my grandfather that my family practiced during my childhood in Xiamen, gradually fading as the city grew more urban and attuned to new ideas of safety and order shaped by global influences. What remains with me is not a clear causal narrative but the sensation of change, of watching a practice thin out until only its echoes linger.

During the opening, Wong and her sister Jennifer Vong performed _Waking Up the Girls_, folding several Guanyin faces upright while calling “Wake up” in Cantonese. Wong later told me that when she was taught how to pray for ancestors, her mother referred to the act as waking them up. Revived in Wong’s hands, the act became a recognition of the women whose stories were thinned by migration. The installation, once still, shifted into a subtle awakening.
Pinned along the wall, 一百鬼 / _100 Ghosts_ (2019–2020) extends this inquiry into spectral memory. Faces are screenprinted with varied clarity onto a field of gilded joss paper. Some are crisp, others blurred or slightly out of register, forming a delicate grammar of haunting. As a breeze passes, the gold shimmers, echoing Wong’s recollection of burning paper shoes, trousers, and shirts for distant ancestors across China and Vietnam with her mother. These prints recall acts of care eroded not by forgetting but by the slow pressure of assimilation and urban life. The emotional architecture remains in fleeting sparks of recognition.

In “How to Burn Paper,” Wong further describes the Chinese afterlife as a bureaucratic realm of ongoing errands and obligations, a world where the dead continue to eat, pay debts, and navigate daily life. This stands in contrast to Western narratives of heaven or transcendence. Standing before the shimmering sheets, I felt the uncanny tension familiar to many diasporic subjects: the sense of being both tethered to and estranged from familial pasts. Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology, referenced by Wong, helps illuminate this space, where the past returns not as settled inheritance but as partial, insistent echoes. Wong renders this oscillation visible, materializing the fragile traces through which care persists.

Wong situates her broader practice within hauntology in the East Asian diaspora, exploring how belief systems surrounding ghosts, spirits, and minor gods provide a lens for understanding remembrance and collective histories. She also references Stuart Hall’s idea that identities are shaped through past narratives, a concept that resonates throughout the installation. The work visualizes fragmented transmissions, revealing how diasporic subjects navigate overlapping and sometimes conflicting cultural timelines, carrying multiple inheritances that never fully align yet continue to shape lived experience.

Small details deepen these resonances. A single orange rests on a plate on a small red platform jutting out from the wall, recalling altars of New Year offerings for ancestors, like those from my own family home. The fire bucket beneath the central installation remained unlit until it was carried outside by the artist and her sister, where Sifu Julian Diego—fire arts practitioner and Wong’s kung fu teacher—performed a fire ceremony as a gift to the 100 spirit figures. The burning of the _100 Ghosts_ joss paper carried the ritual to completion, linking interior anticipation with outdoor release.

The exhibition’s red walls, the rhythmic wave of paper faces, the flicker of gilded prints, and the humble gestures of care create a trembling equilibrium between stillness and motion, inheritance and imagination. Wong cultivates a space where diasporic inheritance is not a narrative of loss. Through acts of folding, offering, and attentive looking, she suggests that connection endures even when lineage is fractured. Ancestry appears not as a resurrected whole, but as a series of fleeting, companionable presences that make themselves felt in the quietest of moments.

Writer

lg_C163_Liu.jpg

md_C163_Liu.jpg

sm_C163_Liu.jpg

thumbnail_C163_Liu.jpg

C163_Liu.jpg

C163_Liu.pdf

 “to hear all the sounds in the world” ran from 20 September to 6 December 2025 at YYZ Artists’ Outlet, Toronto.


md_C163_Liu_th.png

sm_C163_Liu_th.png

thumbnail_C163_Liu_th.png

C163_Liu_th.png

“to hear all the sounds in the world” — Annie Wong

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.


md_editorial.png

sm_editorial.png

thumbnail_editorial.png

editorial.png

Open Hearing: Dreaming in Dark Times, Dispatch III

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.

lg_Untitled design (1).jpg

md_Untitled design (1).jpg

sm_Untitled design (1).jpg

thumbnail_Untitled design (1).jpg

Untitled design (1).jpg

C163_Editorial.pdf

Sound

Social

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


Editorial: CHORUS

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

Print and Digital subscriptions are available for individuals and institutions

C Magazine

Subscribe to

Artist Project

##### _HUM_, which translates to “We” in Urdu, is a trilogy of multichannel sound installations composed of songs of resistance sung both on and off the streets—performed with lips sealed shut. Conceived in late 2019 and developed over years marked by mass uprisings, pandemic conditions, accelerating repression, and the normalization of state violence, the work responds to the present tense of authoritarianism.

##### The first volume, _HUM_ (2020), centres political prisoners as leaders of liberation struggles, tracing how collective voice persists under conditions of incarceration. _HUM II_ (2023) foregrounds the leadership of women and mothers, whose labour of transmission—singing, remembering, carrying struggle across generations—has sustained movements despite ongoing attempts at erasure. The final volume, _HUM III_, turns to labour movements, focusing on dock workers and coastal communities whose collective refusals interrupt the material flows that sustain apartheid regimes, imperial warfare, and extractive global capital. In tracing the material leverage of labour in confronting genocide and war, the work, involving almost three years of research and collaboration, aligns with a longer history of internationalist struggle that understands the port not only as a site of exchange, but as a point of intervention. Shaped by longstanding engagement with militarized and extractive geographies, and informed in part by over two decades of lived experience in the Persian Gulf region, Hajra Waheed’s practice approaches these systems as interlocking sites of power, extraction, and resistance.

##### Together, the trilogy insists that 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. _HUM_ emerges in a moment when organizing is reframed as extremism, solidarity is staged rather than practiced, and cultural institutions retreat into risk management as machineries of war and repression accelerate globally. Against this tightening horizon, the work asks what it might mean to practice collective voicing when speaking can get you arrested, and how sound might move through public space without permission.

##### This conversation between Waheed and _HUM_ collaborator (arranger and vocalist) Laurel Sprengelmeyer was recorded between February and early March 2026, at the start of the US-Israel war on Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and amidst Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine and invasion of Lebanon—interlocking crises that have killed hundreds of thousands, displaced millions, and deepened humanitarian catastrophe alongside rising authoritarianism and resurgent fascist logics globally. The conversation reflects on _HUM_’s genesis, its methods of making and listening, and the urgent need to build and sustain practices of collective voice that can move across borders, withstand repression, and remain materially connected to struggles for liberation now.

**LS:** I’m thinking back to that moment you shared Nûdem Durak’s story with me more than six years ago. The Kurdish musician has been imprisoned on a 19-year sentence in Turkey for singing in her native language. You’d received two recordings of her from her brother that had somehow escaped confiscation by officials. As we listened together in your studio in Montreal, you explained that she’d been thrown into solitary confinement for rallying inmates through song, and that even as she remained in deep isolation, others could hear her humming in defiance. I couldn’t help but cry. Her story informed the genesis of _HUM_ with these two songs bookending the first volume.

**HW:** Nûdem was arrested in 2015 at the age of 27 and charged with promoting propaganda for teaching Kurdish folk songs to youth groups. The project was conceived in response to her courage and is a tribute to her daily acts of refusal and resistance sustained under incarceration, with the first volume squarely centring the role of political prisoners as leaders in liberation struggles. All of the singers and songwriters featured in it, at some point, have been imprisoned—their work censored, they themselves tortured and/or forced into exile for mobilizing collective voice. It’s from this shared condition of silencing that the work turns to humming.

Created by the resonance of air in the passages of the head and throat, humming is a defiant utterance we’re all capable of making, even when our lips have been sealed shut, and it is known to heal our vocal cords when we’ve lost our voice altogether. We hum when we first try to memorize a song and, later, when we want to remember it. Often passed down maternally, it’s ancestral—prelinguistic yet deeply intentional. With no grammar, no syntax, and no formal address, it functions as a lexicon: an infra-language that precedes speech and survives its collapse. It rises from deep within the body and takes root beyond the systems and structures that govern, authorize, discipline, and police us. Its form endures, and through it the work persists—irrepressible—asserting itself even as language is denied, silenced, or weaponized.

Our collective voice is radically regenerative, and it can be produced in a multiplicity of ways—not only as expression, but as infrastructure. _HUM_ is meant to operate within this register: as a practice of collective voicing that trains attention, builds relational capacity, and rehearses forms of coordination under conditions where public speech is increasingly regulated, mediated, and criminalized. In this present moment of intensifying authoritarianism and resurgent fascist logics, the work isn’t meant to merely preserve voice but render collective voicing legible, repeatable, and capable of producing effects beyond borders.

**LS:** I remember you speaking about using the form as a tool for street action in places where singing lyrics can get you arrested—an act of collective voicing that could move through public space without permission. When you first approached Sam (Osama Shalabi) and I about creating hummed renditions of songs you’d chosen, you asked us to imagine 1,000 people walking shoulder to shoulder down the street and to consider what it would take to teach them how to hum a song, familiar or not, within the span of a couple minutes. From there, we worked to create arrangements of source material that vocalists could use as guides. It took some experimentation to find the right balance between fidelity to the original material and the simplification the form necessitates. The most successful arrangements seemed to marry the intuitive spontaneity of a remembered tune with the powerful intentionality of what we might imagine Nûdem’s humming in solitary to sound like.

**HW:** It would have been far simpler to record a choral arrangement collectively in a single session, but conceiving the work spatially, as a roving multichannel sound installation, carried the responsibility of preserving an acute sense of the individual within the collective. We’ve always recorded each vocalist separately in four-hour sessions, resulting in more than 1,000 tracks to mix per volume. Over the course of the trilogy, we have recorded nearly 50 anonymous vocalists from around the globe, sifting through and mixing thousands of sessions to weave together what has become a massive entanglement of comrade voices—a true labour of love.

**LS:** But your work doesn’t end here! Something that has become a defining distinction between your and other sound works is that this is not plug-and-play, and this is unmistakably felt upon entry into _HUM_.

**HW:** Also true. The final, granular sculpting takes place on-site each time the work is presented. After determining how the voices will move through my sound-chamber designs, Pietro Amato (creative technical director) and I always mix on-site. It is painstaking work, listening to the architecture of the spaces _HUM_ inhabits, intuiting placement, but the power of _HUM_ lies in the visceral feeling of being able to gather and be intimately held by unique sound-chamber environments, be they indoor or outdoor. Every inhale, every exhale, every moment of collective silence or individual vocalization is intentional and essential to the full, somatic, enveloping experience of listening in physical space.

**LS:** Often one of us with “musical” training would push an arrangement in a conventional tonal direction, but your instinct was to resist making _HUM_ “music.” You had a hairline trigger for anything that veered toward the conventionally pretty, which might have turned the work into forgettable sonic wallpaper. Instead, the volumes are disarmingly human.

There’s something inherently curative about the sonic experience of _HUM_: humming stimulates the vagal nerve, activating the parasympathetic nervous system, and within minutes can return the body to a soft, grounded state. I was recovering from a vocal injury when we recorded the first volume, and by the end of the session my vocal plasticity had returned—it was physiologically healing. But as we experienced in the recording sessions, the work’s power lies in the stories woven through the compositions. On-site, you provide educational booklets that offer deeper context on the historical and political significance of the songs. The somatic impact of the sonic material, coupled with the invitation to engage directly with these struggles, is what is most uniquely affecting. So, I haven’t been surprised to learn that visitors stay an average of about one and a half hours, listening to the works almost three times in a single sitting.

**HW:** _HUM_ is meant to function as a reading room as much as a listening experience. At its heart are two commitments: the desire for people to connect to and learn from important social movements that take on power directly, and the understanding that liberation struggles are not isolated but fundamentally interconnected. In recent years, large-scale collective mobilization for Palestinian liberation, secured in part through rigorous student-led organizing, has once again been recoded from civic participation into a threat to institutional stability. Being the state of exception Palestine has always been, this shift has sharpened as mobilizing moves beyond symbolic protest to materially consequential strategies: boycotts, labour actions, and coordinated refusals that intervene directly in circuits of global capital. When collective action exerts material leverage and interrupts flows of capital, labour, and legitimacy, institutions (including cultural) respond through containment, regulation, and withdrawal, while the state narrows the conditions of public life itself: restricting assembly, collapsing dissent into “extremism,” expanding surveillance regimes, and normalizing punitive control and state violence.

**LS:** I understood the first volume as emerging from a backdrop of student-led movements in late 2019 on either side of the Line of Control separating India and Pakistan. Though not in direct communication, students on both sides took to the streets reciting the same poetry and songs by revolutionary poets and political prisoners from a previous generation, in Urdu, your mother tongue—a language highly politicized and subject to political erasure in India. With the second volume, what became legible to me was how consistently women and mothers not only appear as carriers but leaders on the forefront of these histories of struggle.
You have always been insistent that solidarity is not enough, and that _HUM_ must be coupled with a focus on practices of direct action. _HUM III_ does this in such a powerfully human way, connecting us across oceans and between shorelines with the political, emotional, and even spiritual desire to enact positive change for the global majority.

**HW:** The third and final volume shifts its focus to dock workers and coastal communities and their central role in liberation struggles. By refusing to load or unload goods tied to apartheid regimes, colonial powers, and imperialist military operations, dock workers have disrupted the flow of resources that sustain these systems of power and increased pressure on governments and corporations to acquiesce to the demands of movements. Over the years, the importance of major ports as choke points of global capitalism has only grown, and today, dock workers and coastal communities perhaps hold more potential than ever to challenge entrenched systems of power and fuel international movements for justice.

Most recently, on February 6th, dock workers shut down 21 major ports across Europe and the Mediterranean in a coordinated day of action, blocking arms shipments and demanding a full trade and arms embargo on Israel. This represents a significant escalation of organized labour’s direct intervention against imperialism and genocide. In a statement issued by the World Federation of Trade Unions on January 30 as part of this international call, the demands outlined include bringing Israel’s genocide in Palestine, backed by the U.S., NATO, and the EU, to an immediate end; stopping weapons transfers from their ports to Palestine and other war zones; securing a sustained humanitarian corridor; rejecting the EU’s ReArm initiative; and abandoning efforts to further militarize ports and strategic infrastructure. As the unions have stated, their ultimate goal is “ensuring that European and Mediterranean ports remain places of peace, free from any involvement in war.” [^1] History offers powerful examples of coordinated and sustained dock-worker actions, supported by mass public solidarity, that have shifted the course of political struggles. _HUM III_ sheds light on eight ports and eight such transformative interventions.

What continues to unfold in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran, and across strategic port cities in the region, alongside the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, brings into sharp focus the urgency of a collective anti-war struggle that involves sustained support for dock workers’ actions. Elsewhere, dock workers and coastal communities are already taking extraordinary measures: refusing military shipments, halting arms transfers, and asserting control over the material flows that sustain imperial and extractive violence. These interventions are not symbolic—they materially disrupt the machinery of war and reveal the power of organized labour and collective refusal.

Arundhati Roy once wrote that fighting fascism begins by putting your ear to the ground and listening for the whispers of the truly powerless, the majority. What we’re living through now is not accidental. The attacks on universities, on minorities, on citizenship itself; the militarization of police; the hollowing out of public life under the banners of “national pride” and “national security”—this is coordinated. Corporate media has helped normalize a lynch-mob politics, laundering violence into common sense. And the most dangerous part is that it no longer feels new. It feels ordinary. Meanwhile, the left fractures itself.

No one survives this alone. We have to learn to make room for one another, to accept imperfect allies, to practice standing up for each other even when it’s uncomfortable. The right understands culture as infrastructure; they are producing it relentlessly. If we abandon that terrain, we abandon the future.

**LS:** Solidarity, as you’ve insisted, is imperfect, and if it remains only symbolic, it fails. But imperfect solidarity is still the only ground we have to stand on. The real battleground is the popular imagination: once cruelty becomes normal, once repression becomes “reasonable,” it is brutally hard to undo.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how courage and cowardice are both contagious. We’re witnessing a wave of institutional cowardice right now. But we’re also seeing its opposite, in people and in institutions willing to make space for works like _HUM_. Your insistence on bringing this work into the world, in this climate of fear, is not just brave—it’s contagious. And that, to me, is the quiet, stubborn force that keeps open the possibility of another future.

[^1]: World Federation of Trade Unions, “WFTU solidarity message with the International Day of Action for Ports,” WFTU Central, January 30, 2026, accessed February 6, 2026, www.wftucentral.org/wftu-solidarity-message-with-the-international-day-of-action-for-ports


C163_WAHEED.jpg

163_Waheed_Sprengelmeyer.pdf

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

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.

Header

HUM: FROM PRISON TO PORT by Hajra Waheed

C Mag