Innehållsförteckning för Autumn 2018 från C Magazine

How does trust wager into the negotiations required of artists and curators to complete a project? Considering that the artist-curator relationship has become almost required – even co-dependent – in the ways that art is made public, what role does trust play in establishing that relationship? How is the artist’s trust different from the curator’s trust? What does language have to do with it? How are boundaries maintained between artistic process and curatorial discourse? If the initiation of a project requires a leap of faith from both parties, how is trust built? What tools might one come up with to deal with situations where trust isn’t a given, or where established trust is broken? C Magazine posed these questions to more than a dozen artists and curators. This is what…

Portuguese artist Filipa César’s first feature film – the experimental documentary Spell Reel (2017) – is a poetic montage that explores the processes of recovery, archiving and display of a collection of abandoned film reels produced by Guinea-Bissau resistance fighters during and after their war of independence against Portugal (1963-1974). Numerous entities appear in this highly collaborative project, but two figures, neither of whom contributed directly to the film, have particular presence: Amílcar Cabral, the Bissau-Guineans’ anticolonialist leader and the French Marxist film-essayist Chris Marker. Across continents, these figures shared beliefs in revolutionary politics and the importance of both education and film in these struggles. Cabral sent four young Guineans to receive film training at the Cuban Film Institute; Marker provided instruction and film equipment to groups in France during…

To begin with, a coincidence. I went to a show at Café OTO in London because Mattea Perrotta recommended I go there when we met over coffee in LA. (Perrotta is an LA-based artist in that she was raised there and her studio is in LA; but she is, in essence, a woman of the world, with deep family ties in Italy and France, travelling frequently and gracefully everywhere from Central and South America to North Africa.) At Café OTO, I met a friend wellversed in etymology and showed her Perrotta’s work on my phone. She at once explained to me the origins of the word “grotesque”: from the ancient Roman artwork found in a grotta (cave), often sublimations of the female form in arabesque environs. Perrotta’s sensual, fleshy obelisks,…

“Listener begins: with a wanderer Listening. An Oglala woman, equipped with Listening devices, which are passed down from woman to woman. Alone, her devices work in ways she can’t quite understand, they seem to listen farther than technologically possible, beyond time and place. She has suspicion that she is receiving scrambled transmissions from a good place, but a Far Place. She feels they Listen back.” – Kite1 A police siren pierced the small dark room: a livestream from the local Ottawa police scanner frequency. Unseen, the artist spoke: “I heard my biometrics.” Two boots trudging a wet sidewalk appeared on a CRT monitor in the corner. The snowy grayscale image treaded the border of legibility. The artist’s voice transmitted a chopped up and delayed narrative over a two-way radio channel.…

Toujours la coquille de l’autre always the shell of another offers a subtle meditation on art history, the mysterious pull of beautiful objects and time itself. Known for her photographs of unexpected, esoteric groupings of found and made images and objects that play with conventions of collage and still life, Celia Perrin Sidarous’ practice has been expanding. Her installation Notte coralli (2016), in the most recent (and likely last) Montreal Biennale, saw her signature collage assemblages proliferate into film and three-dimensional works with armatures and sculptural features that echoed formal components of her photographs. In Toujours, the artist’s finely attuned sense of the associative power of layering, framing and art’s ability to collapse and complicate temporalities find an adept apogee. Toujours is a spare, almost austere exhibition, but one that…

The final sculpture in Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa’s colourful garden of feces was of a baby, whose position as the sole producer of shit was somehow annulled by his posture of indifference – as if the public process of ejecting such bodily fluids had not yet entered his register of shame and was, therefore, not worthy of consideration. In Shit-Baby and The Crumpled Giraffe, the titular shit-baby sat unbothered at the end of the exhibition’s circuit, which included a sexless stork in a pair of no-name hightops, a towering giraffe with her head inches from the ceiling, fecal droppings that had just missed their intended chamber pots and an airborne shit-serpent, hovering like a warning at the entrance. The exhibition, curated by Jenifer Papararo, had travelled from Kunsthalle Lissabon (who had originally…

Sustainability was the central theme of the final iteration of Open Engagement. From humble beginnings in Regina, Saskatchewan, the social practice conference steadfastly grew over the past decade, hosting over 2,000 presenters and 6,000 attendees during its tenure in the field. The announcement that this would be the last of the artist-led project came from organizers Jen Delos Reyes, Crystal Baxley and Latham Zearfoss with mixed sentiments of relief and regret. Fittingly, a question that weighed heavily on the conference was: what do you do when you don’t have the resources to continue? A loaded term, sustainability underpinned panels and conversations on economic, environmental, cultural and institutional longevity. Topics such as food justice, urban ecology, migration and refugees, homelessness, nuclear power, rural gentrification, Indigenous sovereignty, incarceration and carbon sequester were…

Essayist Geoff Martin describes the landscape along the Grand River as a “circuitous route that ties together disparate communities of people who live by the water’s edge.” 1 He confronts the area’s history by way of the Haldimand Tract, land granted in 1784 to the Haudenosaunee for their alliance with the British Crown during the American Revolution, the land his Mennonite ancestors settled on. Each place-name, along the way, evokes a distinct history, a pattern of settlement, a raison d’etre. These place-names stock the river with human value and make the waters flow with social, political, economic, and environmental importance. In this respect, the Grand River channels a sort of liquid lineage, an archive we can trace backwards; it’s a watery inheritance that belts together large expanses of time and…

“Creative expression supports everyday practices of resistance, healing, and commemoration at individual, community, regional, and national levels.… The arts help to restore human dignity and identity in the face of injustice.”— Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, vol. 6, Canada's Residential Schools: Reconciliation These words, found in volume six of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) final report, recognizes reconciliation achieved through the arts as a method integral to healing. Through its inquiry, the commission identified core problems within Canadian societal and government structures and released a subsequent 94 Calls to Action to implement systemic changes to policies and practices that discriminate against and harm Indigenous people. The Calls to Action are laid out with the intention to be implemented through…

Upon entering Éclair’s storefront gallery, the space’s former life as a succession of functioning bars is immediately evident. The right wall of the front room is decorated in small bronze-coloured glass tiles, lending to the exhibition, on a sunny afternoon, the warm shimmer of a newly minted penny. The remaining walls are a combination of cracking and peeling plaster and paint, architectural remnants that give way to speculation about a series of hastily completed renos and even quicker exits. Galleries such as Éclair, which opt to leave the spaces they inhabit intact rather than rolling everything over in white, are an increasingly common and needed break from the conventions of the white-cube’s socalled neutral display strategies. As well as acknowledging that this supposed “neutrality” was always a myth, they also…

Late capitalism has worked meticulously to alienate the modern subject; the hyper-mediation and circulation of images, cultural knowledge and information has been one manner by which this alienation has occurred. All of this is done under the guise of accessibility, connectivity and the formation of networks. It is precisely in its responsiveness to this context that makes the slowness of Angela Grauerholz’s large-scale photographs feel radical. Her quiet, pro-vocative new untitled series, which showed at the 2018 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, captures the vacant, emptiedout, closed-for-renovations spaces of the Musée Carnavalet in Paris. It’s no coincidence that her subject matter consists of the empty nooks and crannies, long, shadowy passageways and silent corridors of the vacant museum. It would seem that she wants us to linger alongside these images as…

What follows is an investigation into how individuals practice being together. This series of activities and pedagogical tools is informed by research, my own performance art practice, teaching performance art and working with these activities in academic classes as a way of generating group synergy. Starting an encounter with physical exercise releases tension and cultivates a sense of radical openness, bringing people into the present. The purpose here is to connect each individual to the group and build, if not social cohesion, then a temporary container of trust and conviviality. Through humour and experimentation, participants enact new ways of sharing time and space, hosting each other as a means to facilitate an emergent experience. I personally leave these encounters slightly giddy from how much people are willing to accept and…