Innehållsförteckning för Autumn 2019 från C Magazine

“To speak of a veil is to speak of a barrier preventing the viewer from seeing what lies beyond it,” a scholar and translator of Sufi teachings wrote. The veil, in Sufi philosophy, he explains, is “any barrier that bars the intending seeker from what is intended and sought,” which is the divine. To reach it, one must pass through 70,000 veils of light and darkness, a process known as kashf—or “unveiling.” “Unveiling” is used as a verb in the Qur’an 14 times; I lost count of how many times Sameer Farooq used it in our discussions of this artist project. Within the collection, the veil can be: a banker’s box, a folder, a shroud, a plastic drape, a bag, a roll of masking tape, a sorting tool, a label,…

International Film Festival Rotterdam January 23–February 3, 2019 The cohesion of three particular films—Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Walled Unwalled (2018), Onyeka Igwe’s Specialised Technique (2018) and Gabi Dao’s The Protagonists (2018)—anchored the Inquiring Minds program in distinct considerations of sound and experimental inquiries. The more I thought about the program’s aims to highlight the complexities, tragedies and triumphs of recorded lived experiences, it became apparent that zealous objectivity has historically produced more than a few models of false authenticity. In Walled Unwalled, Abu Hamdan performs across three sound effects studios at Funkhaus, the former headquarters for the German Democratic Republic’s state radio. Today, this purpose-built facility is a highly sophisticated recording complex hosting a plethora of recording artists. In his description of the work, Abu Hamdan writes that worldwide, 49 border…

Projet Pangée, Montreal January 19–March 2, 2019 Textured glass pieces laid out like the remnants of a whale’s vertebrae summon the memory of a childhood trip to the museum. Moody figures painted in jewel tones recall a teenager decorating her binder and the incredible focus required to make Sharpie lines look thin. In Projet Pangée’s recent show Between Two Eternities, mid-size sculptural glassworks by Alexia Laferté-Coutu (Montreal) are put in dialogue with Day-Glo-dotted portraits and vignette paintings by Jessica Williams (Los Angeles). The result is an intermedia commentary on preserving—and actively recalling—personal histories. Laferté-Coutu’s and Williams’ works invoke two pasts, two distinct spaces of daydreaming and reflecting upon memories, real and invented. In large part, the artists sidestep canonical questions of historical representation. Instead, viewers are led to contemplate the…

The New Gallery, Calgary April 6–May 11, 2019 A large white flag is suspended from the gallery wall, embedded with LEDs connected to a motion sensor, which responds to the movement of visitors, layering the colours, shapes and designs of the flags of different countries on top of one another at random. Entitled Camaleón, the multimedia work is the centrepiece of Chameleon (2016) by Varvara & Mar at The New Gallery. By titling the show with the anglicized version of its central work, Varvara & Mar immediately begin by pointing at the themes of language, identity and belonging that underpin the show as a whole. The flag’s size and technicoloured light draw attention from the street and fill the space, cycling through the symbols we are so used to seeing…

In 2016 I was invited as the third and final curator of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative for the Middle East and North Africa. The project aimed to diversify the Guggenheim Museum’s holdings, with the previous two chapters involving curators and artists from South and Southeast Asia, and Latin America. Prior to the project, the Guggenheim’s American collection was lacking in global art, in particular from these three regions, so the project aimed to build a critical art historical aggregate about the global south that spoke to the museum’s principles of collecting. It resulted in over 125 new acquisitions from those regions underrepresented in the Guggenheim’s collection. Before I began to acquire works for the museum, I examined the works that already resided in its collection. I aimed…

Mercer Union, Toronto April 13–June 1, 2019 Halfway through Beatrice Gibson’s Deux Soeurs Qui Ne Sont Pas Soeurs (2019)—one of two films by the London, UK-based filmmaker installed at Mercer Union this spring—a woman reads a letter to her yet-to-be-born daughter: “You will be a girl, but not like me. You will be Black, but not like me.… You will create something else, and that reassures me.” This woman, Diocouda Diaoune, was one of two members of Gibson’s extended network of friends and artists to become pregnant as they worked together on Gibson’s film and its earlier sister work, I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead (2018). Diaoune’s and artist Basma Alsharif’s words to their unborn children became woven into the fabric of Deux Soeurs, and both speak to the…

Artexte, Montreal February 6–April 13, 2019 C Magazine would like to congratulate Samuel Bernier-Cormier on winning the 2019 C New Critics Award. The award is designed to help develop and promote the work of emerging art critics. Now in its 10th consecutive year, this program gives C Magazine the opportunity to identify and support promising new writers, who often become regular contributors. C would like to sincerely thank all those who applied, as well as the generous jurors of this year’s award: Jaclyn Bruneau, Amy Lam and Denise Ryner. Measures were taken to ensure that the identity of entrants remained unknown to adjudicators. How will we reconcile the many ways in which we relate to the land around us? I did not leave Karla Mc-Manus’ latest exhibition Inside/Outside with specific…

Co-presented by Trinity Square Video and South Asian Visual Arts Centre as part of Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival, Toronto May 3–June 8, 2019 The four works that compose Manar Moursi’s The Loudspeaker and the Tower exhibition at Trinity Square Video offer varied simulations of Cairene public space. Like a felucca on the Nile, the neon blue, green and red lights of the sculptural work that is The Tower (2019) project their shadows onto the polished wooden floor. The distorted call to prayer emanating from the documentary Stairway to Heaven (2019) and crackling mechanical sounds of a zoetrope entitled Ring Road Zoetrope Night Drive (2019) recreate a Cairene cacophony of relentless, clashing sounds. In the exhibition as in real life, the low-income towns along Ring Road in Cairo are a site…

In 2012, during my tenure as chief curator at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MACM), I initiated the acquisition of a work by the artist Tino Sehgal that brought about a discussion within the museum itself on the issue of the permanence of the collection. For the museum, founded on preservation and inalienability, what are the implications of acquiring a living artwork whose radical immateriality resists its own conservation? Sehgal’s work problematizes the idea of permanence, and in that sense, it undermines the modern and Western conception of the museum: to preserve the past in order to build the future. This Situation (2007) is a “constructed situation,” as Sehgal calls most of his works, and it brings together six intellectuals to engage in a philosophical discussion. It is composed…

Edited by Jens Hoffmann Despacio and Dent-De-Leone, 2019 The bilingual publication Twenty Years of Despacio 2008–2028 marks the beginning, the end and a speculative decade ahead in the life of an art space in Central America. Despacio was started by Costa Rican artist Federico Herrero to give artists in the region an opportunity to think and act autonomously. Despacio is also the Spanish word for “slow” and for “slowness,” and although nothing at this venue was ever fast or too concerned with artistic careerism, this gallery helped shape an entire generation of practitioners—myself included. The idea to start an art space came to Herrero in 2008, a few years after he had won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2001, at the young age of 22. Herrero’s work…

Unit 17, Vancouver March 30–May 26, 2019 The history of the tobacco trade is riddled with discord: expropriation of lands, environmental destruction, colonial state regulations and the monopoly on its importation. Before contact, tobacco was widely used as a means to measure price and value in Indigenous economies, but it’s not simply economic. With sacred significance, it has passed between hands for personal, social, political and spiritual uses. In Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill’s exhibition Money, at Unit 17, the gallery is infused with the rich, balmy scent of tobacco released from its many forms: as resin, dried leaves, seed pods and grounds. By focusing on the Indigenous and colonial economic histories of tobacco, Money extends Hill’s interest in alternative economies, questioning systems of exchange and the valuation of labour. Hill espouses…

58th International Venice Biennale May 11–November 24, 2019 In the Canadian pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, the self-titled Isuma exhibition navigates from Igloolik to Baffin Island to Venice, although distance manifests as more than geographical coordinates. Featured most prominently is the collective’s new, 112-minute feature film One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk (2019), which recreates the day in 1961 when the last Inuit family on Baffin Island was coerced by the state to leave their camp to settle in Igloolik. At a number of intervals throughout the exhibition’s run, the screens showing One Day are taken over by a series of live webcasts called Silakut Live from the Floe Edge (2019), which collapse spatial distance by transmitting video and sound from Baffin Island. There—at a location within…

“The villager’s concern is not only with what substances enter the ür (town/village) and affect its inhabitants but with the effect of these alien substances on the substance of the ür itself. Concern with the effect on the quality of the soil substance of the ür is understandable given Tamil beliefs that the soil substance is ultimately mixed with the bodily substance of the ür’s inhabitants.”1 Waves crash and pull away on screen while spectral figures play a game of catch with the sea, casting out objects that may or may not return. This shot is supplanted by clips of Google Translate rebounding words and phrases—from a simple noun, “flower,” to evocative phrases like “conceiving of longing as the outcome of a wish”—back and forth between English and Tamil, changing…