Indholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2020 i C Magazine

When Lee-Ann Martin and I met to discuss how we would address this issue’s “Déjà Vu” thematic, we were on my balcony in Ottawa’s Centretown for a long overdue visit. I can’t remember exactly how I met Lee-Ann,1 but I do know when I was first influenced by her critical writing on Indigenous art and curatorial practice. I was in my third or fourth year of undergrad at Western University in London, Ont., at least 20 years ago; since then, her work has been a sort of compass, informing my academic and curatorial journey. Lee-Ann is one of the few curators who did not have an artistic practice in the 1980s and 1990s, which is when she first started working and when she was one of only a few Indigenous…

Performed by k.g. Guttman, Ahlam Hassan, Johanna Householder, Kelly Keenan, Mikiki, Shahir Omar-Qrishnaswamy and Bee Pallomina, with contributions by lo bil, Seika Boye, Francisco- Fernando Granados, Jessica Karuhanga, Matthew- Robin Nye and Joshua Vettivelu Gallery TPW, Toronto June 29 – August 3, 2019 Many performers wore gloves—textural beige, with satiny red palms and extra-long, tubular fingers—at the opening reception of k.g. Guttman’s Visiting Hours. In one moment, Guttman stood behind a simple chair, caressing its back with spindly, softly probing digits. Another afternoon at Gallery TPW, Johanna Householder wordlessly prompted me to don a pair myself, before indicating an envelope to open. Householder, one of seven artists who performed Visiting Hours during the exhibition’s run, was leading me through an interaction with dance artist and scholar Seika Boye’s an image…

Centre Vox, Montreal June 15 – July 13, 2019 Jean-Paul Kelly is known for harnessing the malleability of what he’s called “documentary substance,” in terms of its implicit, suggested and potential narratives. His most recent solo exhibition’s central work, a three-channel video titled That ends that matter (2016–2019), places in proximity: a montage of mostly photojournalistic documents manipulated by Kelly’s hands, a synced animation of patterns and shapes echoing each of his gestures and a dramatized re-enactment of a court hearing witnessed by the artist. In the darkened main room of Centre Vox, a succession of challenging photographs unravels on a small screen: snapshots of violent altercations between police and protesters, wounded civilians and silhouettes of criminally accused individuals concealing their faces during trials. More than once, I unwittingly averted…

SBC Gallery, Montreal May 25 – August 2, 2019 Western ideology fetishizes originality. We slaver after the figure of the genius; we relish the ego of the Artist made manifest in the proper name. The Artist is trailed by their original works, works that orbit the Artist as the Artist’s canon. More often than not, exhibitions revolve around individuals who are given title credit for their work, as if each piece were Athena sprung from the skull of a virtuosic Zeus. But what lies between individualistic original creation (which turns the artist into a derivative of God) and the blatant, appropriative rip-off (which we rightfully decry)? In his concise, reductive, yet compelling booklet Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese (2017), Byung-Chul Han outlines the primacy of the copy over the original in…

Our bus drove us through the active construction site for the Southwest Calgary Ring Road before it pulled into the remains of a movie set simulating a bombed Belgian city. The set is located on a former military training site, which the Department of National Defence leased from the Tsuut’ina First Nation for military training from 1901 to 1996.1 Part of this land was used for the production of the film Passchendaele (2008), about a white Canadian soldier in World War I. While the rest of the 380-acre plot is still embedded with unexploded landmines left behind by the military, this small section was cleaned up for the film shoot. The ruins lured me in, and I could see the exposed core material of these buildings—weathered Styrofoam—underneath the dilapidated layers…

Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles May 18 – August 11, 2019 David Hammons’ first exhibition in his native Los Angeles after 45 years was deeply contradictory. On one hand, it lamely gestured at the unequal distribution of power and resources of the neighbourhood in which the massive Hauser & Wirth gallery and its encompassing cultural complex is located. On the other, the exhibition’s decision to let the work speak for itself—that is, to display very few titles or wall captions and no didactic material of any kind—worked surprisingly well, opening up the sprawling retrospective for unexpected encounters and interpretations to spring forth. Arriving at the afternoon opening, myself and hordes of enthusiastic attendees were met on the sidewalk outside the gallery by the sight of a white stone carver on…

Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, Toronto May 3 – June 1, 2019 Developing Historical Negatives is an exhibition that materializes the undercurrent narratives of belonging, rather than romanticizing an idealistic sense of it. Expressing concern over the one-sided nature of official records, the participating artists reclaim ownership of their respective cultural heritages from a range of subject positions by reimagining and re-appropriating various image-based materials. Working with and through archives, and organically united by intergenerational transfers of resilience and cultural memory, the artists give shape to familial or communal histories in parallel to their official counterparts, which are largely calculated and misleading. As its title suggests, the exhibition plays with the notion of “negatives”—as in photographic negatives, as well as in the various connotations of the word as the…

“The art and the culture of emergent groups who choose to find their affiliation through issues of race or gender or sexuality or AIDS, those groups and their art is labelled in the negative, belated sense, as some kind of medieval […] culture of complaint. And this easy attribution of victimage is deeply troubling to me because it isn’t aware of the new […] social sense of community as it emerges. It isn’t aware [of how] those kinds of communities are creating very particular notions of themselves.” Homi K. Bhabha, speaking to Jamelie Hassan and Monika Kin Gagnon at the AGO, as part of a public program series titled Locating Communities, on May 4, 1995. In the middle of a protracted period of depression, and suffering from a sense of…

In 2014, Andrea Fatona initiated The State of Blackness conference to congregate artists, curators, academics and students around the conditions of the production, presentation and dissemination of Black art in Canada. Using the conference as a catalyst to continue a public discourse and to create an archive of Black artistic production, The State of Blackness has continued in various forms. Fatona remains a guiding voice and devoted advocate for practising care through considered critique, while she supports her students and mentees in producing the in-depth scholarship and criticism that was significantly lacking in Canada. Fatona heads the Criticism and Curatorial Practice program at OCAD University, with decades of scholarship on the contemporary art of the Black diaspora. When I joined the program in 2016, I was certain there was no…

June 10 – September 29, 2019 by D’Arcy Blake Virgil Abloh is primarily known for his work as a fashion designer. He ascended to major prominence after founding the luxury streetwear brand Off-White in 2012, and was appointed artistic director of menswear at Louis Vuitton in 2018. In addition to surveying Abloh’s work in fashion, graphic design, furniture design and music, his retrospective at the MCA Chicago introduces us to Virgil Abloh the Contemporary Artist. Barring the entrance to Abloh’s show are the sort of retractable-belt stanchions used by airports and movie theatres to control crowds. Visitors must pass between the orange and white striped belts, which resemble construction zone caution tape bearing the exhibition’s title: “Figures of Speech.” By combining motifs of working-class labour with the limited-access exclusivity of…

Plug In ICA, Winnipeg April 27 – June 30, 2019 To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance. —Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal (1949) Karen Asher’s Blanket (2015), a photo from her 2016 exhibition The Full Catastrophe at Ace Art artist-run centre in Winnipeg, features a topless model whose entire head is obscured by a duvet, which they hold in place with their arms stretched overhead. The image is at once raw and composed, private and performative, concealed and exposed, and it is in Asher’s ability to navigate the tension between such contradictions that her style as an artist emerges. Having established her practice as a photographer, Asher’s recent exhibition Class represents the artist’s first foray into video and installation. The gallery space has been drastically altered…