Innehållsförteckning för Autumn 2017 från C Magazine

Discussions of voice in contemporary art can reflect anything from the shape and form of sound and orality; the many manifestations of the spoken word in performance, video or artists’ talks; language as material in art works; to the broader ways in which voice is entangled with power and influence. Here the issue takes voice simply, as the act of speaking to one another and to the world. But the thread throughout this issue is voice as it is tied to agency and self-determination – who can speak, who is heard; when is it advisable – or political – to stay silent and when to scream; and when staying silent can betray those around us or ourselves. As voice comes with being heard, it is always tied to listening. This…

Raven Davis does the hard work of making futurity and community through their art. Their performance, installation and visual art acts as protest and reverence, asking what we have to honour and to offer, in an ethic of responsibility. They subvert the norm, refusing colonial society’s reverence and memorialization of war, genocide, Indigenous erasure and womxn as commodifiable and disposable. Raven speaks about making work from the now, from a place/space/time of humility – acknowledging our ancestors and our voices as echoes of theirs. We spoke about voice as being so much more than speech, if not sometimes its antithesis. Raven reflects, in their work and in this conversation, on silence as inherent in voice. What is not said speaks as loudly, if not louder than, what is spoken. We’re…

Steffanie Ling is the author of two books, Nascar (Blank Cheque, 2016) and Cuts of Thin Meat, (Spare Room, 2015). She writes criticism and essays on subjects that range from contemporary art and cinema to professional wrestling, microwaves and the K-pop awards. Her latest work, Uber Everywhere, is a short play commissioned by the 2nd Kamias Triennial in the Philippines. Ling has worked as a curator at CSA Space and as an editor of Bartleby Review. She writes a monthly Vancouver arts column for Akimbo, organizes a reading series with Emma Metcalfe Hurst (LIT LIT LIT LIT), and co-edits a new journal (Charcuterie), which she founded with Bopha Chhay. I spoke with Steff about her most recent book, Nascar, sometime in December. It is now June and Blank Cheque has…

THE PRESENT It’s the morning of the James Comey hearings in America and hordes of people, young and old, are passively anticipating the change they have been so desperately seeking. Even though I’m living in the land we call Canada, I am by all free trade agreements a byproduct of American imperialist media. This will be important later when we think about Deanna Bowen’s representation of Blackness in Canada. Also keep this note in mind the next time white Canadians cry afoul, but are unwilling to make any changes themselves. I’m half listening to the Comey live stream on my phone and half trying to get out the door to meet Deanna for this “interview.” In all honesty, I don’t really know how to interview anybody anymore given that I…

It only makes sense to claim that there are “too many artists” if artists rely on existing institutional structures to exhibit and legitimize their work. Throughout history, artists have demonstrated that creativity in the studio can be matched in developing new models for exhibiting their work. In Canada, artists have played an important role in developing independent artist-run spaces, ranging from publicly funded, anti-commercial ones like Vancouver’s Western Front in the ’70s to the likes of Cold City Gallery in Toronto in the ’80s, which strove to fully engage with the art market. Today, the expansion of graduate programs in both studio art and curatorial practice, and the overhaul of former art colleges into universities, has created more degree-holding artists and curators than ever before – an increase not necessarily…

Katherine McKittrick and Rinaldo Walcott re-visit Black Like Who? (1997), Walcott’s seminal examination of Black culture in Canada, at a time when it continues to resonate loudly. This issue of C Magazine focuses on voice, so I would like to begin there. As you know, the question of voice is central to Black Studies and practices of liberation: the longstanding histories of racial capitalism and racial violence have generated different kinds and types of Black voice; the question of being unheard or illegible is underpinned by different modes of speakability. In Black Like Who?, you analyze a range of Black voice – enunciated through film, poetry, fiction and more. In many ways, the book theoretically voices Black Canada. Can you talk about your work in relation to Black voice, Black…

Prathna: Our dialogue opens with a poem thatserves as the epigraph to Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. I suppose I chose this poem because I wanted to think about Orientalism and ornamentation, about race and desire, about body and gesture and how such things commingle at the level of ethics and aesthetics. Fan and I met at school and our styles of friendship are immensely divergent – I mean, you could say that about a lot of people, but it’s these styles which, I think, come out in this “dialogue.” I say that with some stubborn reticence because it might not look like we’re actually talking to one another. Our conversation quickly spirals out and, if anything, it’s a demonstration of how – and not what – one desires. According…

Aliya Pabani hosts The Imposter, a podcast affiliated with the news site and podcast network Canadaland, where she follows her curiosity to conduct memorable interviews with everyone from music producer and storyteller Jarrett Martineau, to the sister of dead Vancouver novelist Betty Lambert, to art psychic Cindy Mochizuki, alongside visual artists like Rajni Perera and Kiera Boult. On air and off she pulls stories out of people with warmth, sensitivity and keen interest. I wanted to adapt Aliya’s strategies to Aliya herself as I learned about them. Lena Suksi: I listen to The Imposter at my part-time job. In that time, I tend to avoid podcasts, which reinforce my passivity, as opposed to other media on the web, but The Imposter is different because it’s grounded in a local cultural…

we are covered in a veil of experiences masked in the tapestry of our hair woven into the world we will never be found empty handed as our fingers wrap around ideas and our hands carry creation we stand on past, present and future it is never still beneath our feet as they move us forward we are made of beads of experience strung by the threads of our hair woven into the world we are made of the traditions of our ancestors stitched deep into the tapestry of skin reminding us of our strength we are the vibrant colours of our memories painted into the skies of our existence creating our futures we are the movements of our being choreographed history dancing with life we are made of the…

As a young child Camille Seaman’s grandfather once said to her, “Look, do you see that? That’s part of you up there. That’s your water that helps to make the cloud that becomes the rain that feeds the plants that feeds the animals.” In her recent project We Are Still Here Seaman extends this logic. Seaman was initially drawn to Standing Rock and the controversy around the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016 both because of her career-long fascination with the many lives of water – a calling which has brought her from the polar ice caps of the Canadian North to the back end of superstorms – and because of her identification as Shinnecock First Nations. In the process of photographing the Standing Rock water protectors at the Oceti Sakowin…