Innehållsförteckning för Summer 2021 från C Magazine

Dear C, My mind’s been on one lately, layering and repeating thoughts like a polyphonic refrain of obsession. Thankfully good writing is a mitigator: countering the feverish chorus of opinions and observations, it can quiet down what’s inside me. Good writing gains my attention without raising its voice at all. It doesn’t prevaricate, is radical without toil and trenchant without pretense. The Greeks already have a word for what I’m trying to describe, by the way: parrhesia, which means to speak freely, frankly, and without fear. It’s also what characterizes Johanna Hedva’s potent “Soft Blues,” which is one of the best essays I’ve read in a while. Where other writers might withhold personal detail, or generalize enough to reach an abstract truth so everyone (men) can understand, Hedva splays themself…

Due to this apprehension around what affective ambiguities would make “better art” in the face of an invitation to participate in modes of action concerning public space, my collaborator Phát Lê and I deconstructed every motive after we received an email from The Bentway last autumn. In it, they presented an opportunity to participate in their “Safe in Public Space” (SIPC) initiative, which seeks to acknowledge the role that public space is playing in systemic injustices, and the fact that—although public space may feel important to our collective recovery—not everyone feels safe and comfortable therein. Of course there are many nuanced reasons for those experiences, which SIPC is mandated to explore. Turns out The Bentway had seen our YouTube video2 where we poured concrete on an uneven bench to flatten…

Creative practices that take place outside the gallery, that think their impact beyond the aesthetic, and that frame their participants as other than hapless dupes have increased in visibility in Canada over the past 30 years. While socially engaged art, really an umbrella term for an agglomeration of diverse forms of creative work, is not new, its designation as a distinct practice has opened up the space to foster a new canon, and a new set of theoretical concerns. Although these practices do receive a share of attention in courses dealing with contemporary art histories, it is fairly surprising that only one academic institution in the country has a dedicated program for social and community engagement in practice. In thinking through not just social practice, but also its pedagogy, I…

Ants infected by the spores of Ophiocordyceps unilateralis lose all control of their bodies and minds, wandering until the parasitic fungus living in their musculature splits their exoskeletons open with a bloom of fruiting bodies hungry for their next host. One can’t help but wonder if the ants know what’s happening. Do they try to fight against this exploitative physical and mental death, or do they feel contaminated bliss—a little less lonely with something else sharing their body? S F Ho’s debut novel George, the Parasite (2020), the first title from curator Danielle St-Amour’s pandemic-born publishing project SPEC/FIC, is one such psychic infection. An unnamed alien flees a planet so ravaged by pollution that its greatest commodity is the oxygen it squeezes out of the lungs of enslaved miners, through…

If you read it, you may or may not recall that The Argonauts (2015), Maggie Nelson’s wildly successful book credited with popularizing the term “autotheory,” was addressed to her partner, the multidisciplinary artist Harry Dodge. Nelson’s book primarily explored the themes of queer love (with Dodge) and becoming a parent (with Dodge). In My Meteorite: Or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing, Dodge finally speaks, and what he has to say is triple the length of Nelson’s book. I was rereading The Argonauts when I saw My Meteorite circulating in social media posts—a random coincidence, or as Dodge suggests throughout the book, perhaps not. However, a comparison between the two books is awkward because they are wildly divergent in their themes. They are similar in that they…

The generosity of individual and corporate sponsors, donors, and patrons enables us to continue fostering sustained discourse on Canadian and international contemporary art. We are especially grateful for the generosity and support of the artists who have donated their work in support of our fundraising, as well as the galleries that represent them. CHAMPION $10000+ La Fondation Emmanuelle Gattuso SUPPORTERS $5000 - $9999 Goring Family Foundation Matthew Meagher Superframe $1,000 - $4,999 EQ Bank Peter Goring Robert Graham Joyce and Alec Monro Julia and Gilles Ouellette Peter Estey Fine Art Waddington’s Auctioneers FRIENDS $250 - $499 Griffin Art Services Eric Hiebert Godfre Leung Duncan Monro $25 - $249 Anonymous (3) Cynthia Abols Alice Adelkind David Allison Reuven Ashtar Ken Aucoin Dean Baldwin Lew David Balzer Christina Battle Kaye Beeston Diane…

For visual artist Grace Law, the 2017 removal of Harbin Gate at the entrance of Edmonton’s Chinatown signified just how precarious things were for the community. The Chinatown Edmonton-Harbin Friendship Gate was erected in 1987 as a symbol of the close ties between Edmonton and sister city Harbin, China, who provided material and expertise for the construction of the gate. It’s a cultural landmark that has identified Edmonton’s Chinatown as a neighbourhood for over 30 years. Standing at the empty space where the gate once stood, Law was overwhelmed with a sense of loss, but felt unable to mourn the missing landmark or communicate just how important it felt that it had been removed. “In that moment, I felt it was very obvious who has the power to move the…

I am a biracial Torontonian who grew up in a small town as the only person of colour, and returned to Toronto to study. Toronto has been the subject of my work ever since. My curatorial work for the past two decades can be simply summed up as a practice of negotiating the complexities of how to belong with a place over time. It has questioned the social and civic role of art and its public institutions, conceiving of the curatorial as a means and methodology with which to engage and participate in the civic sphere by bringing artists, non-artists, and city structures into relation, and in doing so, giving shape to future visual culture grounded in multiplicity. I have approached this through: the adoption of artistic methodologies that stem…

“Community” is at once the word used to quickly refer to a group of living beings who have something in common, and something that’s way more effortful, hard-won. Many of us have been clumped into “communities” we may not identify with, or with whom we have a more complex relationship than the word suggests. The word is also commonly used to refer to museums’ publics, and might be considered a shorthand for work being done in isolation from, or even in contradiction to, those long-standing pillars of the field. This issue of C brushes against all these varying definitions and usages of the word “community,” dwelling longer on some than others. From rounding up resources for those living on the street to organizing petitions to boycott arts organizations that accept…

In 2016, during a dinner at the Aichi Triennale in Nagoya, Japan, Emelie Chhangur met Leonhard Bartolomeus (Barto) of the Indonesian art collective ruangrupa. “That’s how most projects begin—by having some sort of social interaction that leaves questions unanswered to investigate later,” she tells me. The collective’s project for the triennial was an early iteration of the then-unknown pedagogical platform Gudskul, comprising a “collective of collectives” which included ruangrupa, Grafis Huru Hara, and Serrum. The following year, Chhangur, then curator and assistant director at the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU), invited ruangrupa to put the institution itself into residency with Gudskul. Over a series of email exchanges, it evolved into, in Chhangur’s words, “a longer-term engagement not beholden to institutional programming cycles and deadlines,” an “imagination tool for institutional…

From her home studio, visual artist and fellow Natalie Wood clearly recalls the palpable tone of the Wildseed Black Arts Fellowship’s first virtual gathering. “We looked at all the little squares,” she says, noting the now-ubiquitous gallery view of Zoom meetings. “Everyone was Black. It was a visceral moment. I felt that. I know a number of the other artists felt the same way. It [is] absolutely rare where you’re seeing yourself reflected.” While the desire for community—a sense of collective belonging—involves the universal need to feel and be seen, meaningful connection is often rooted in the simplistic beauty of seeing one’s own likeness. The fellowship fulfils this complex yearning with tremendous intent. Following its inaugural 2019 installment, which saw artists Kara Springer, Kosisochukwu Nnebe, and Kim Ninkuru working together…

Stepping into the exhibition “The Neighbour’s Plate” feels like stepping into a sensory still-life painting of 2020. Masked and sanitized on entry, you are greeted by the scent of cured meat: cloves, allspice, black pepper, and paprika on duck. Alone in the space, you feel the presence of others in the central display—a low circular wooden table dressed with food, mementos, and the vessels of consumer packaging. Derya Akay, Amna Elnour, and Dana Qaddah have set their table with traces that are both personal and mass-produced—Akay’s hand-painted silk pillow and Qaddah’s wooden inlay box, with contents shut out of view, are accompanied by impersonal items like a yoga block and an industrial meat slicer. Even reading these objects can be misleading. The meat slicer and takeaway containers are not newly…

Nour Bishouty’s artist book 1—130 (2020) documents her engagements with 130 paintings and sculptures created in Lebanon and Jordan by her father Ghassan. Published by Toronto’s Art Metropole, the book brings together the perspectives of designers Laura Pappa and Lotte Lara Schröder as well as of editor and curator Jacob Korczynski to bear on this collection of Ghassan’s work. The objects that Nour reflects on include not only tangible ones (such as physical paintings, sculptures, images, and notes) but also abstract thoughts, feelings, and memories related to her father’s life. Collected and assembled in 1—130, her reflections are also the result of ongoing research, as well as two years of conversations with Korczynski. Nour’s dialogue with her father’s practice occurs in plural formats that include storytelling, descriptive writing, and digital…

I remember my first time on the dunes very well. In Grade 5, my class slept over at the nature school on the Toronto Islands, deep in the woods on the inland ocean. Beside myself with freedom, I learned to cross-country ski and heard the coyotes at night. Years later, I would sometimes—after kicking the bonfire out with sand—curl up on the couches and floors of friends’ studios in the same school, now emptied of children save for those of us who had become artists. I began to make an annual ritual of it, hoping to spend the Septembers of my life in a studio there. With the closest fridge to the beach, I would make rent slinging cold drinks with a wink to the tipsy queens. It was 50…

The ongoing pandemic has highlighted the way that our sense of togetherness can be interrupted, taken away, and challenged on a global scale. Yet, Victoria Redsun’s work as an artist, poet, and land defender shows us that when we hold our relationships close, expressions of community that might not be easy to see can reveal themselves in times of grief and distress. In this collage series, they engage with personal relationships and expand them into connections that stretch across time and space. Redsun positions themselves in relation to their family and simultaneously positions their family within broader communities—the Dënësųłinë́, cross-cultural networks, nonhuman kin, known ancestors, ancestors who lived long before the artist was born, and a community of Indigenous artists and activists. As Redsun began making this work while grieving…