Innehållsförteckning för Spring 2022 från C Magazine

Images of people suffering have long been a topic of debate. Images of inflicted violence can distance, objectify, condemn, and dehumanize—or they can produce compassion and move masses to action. As cameras have become omnipresent, critics have increasingly questioned the role and effect of images of suffering, but their undeniable importance to change-making produces important tensions. As artists, how can we make work that invokes the value of life? How can we represent violence without replicating the relations of domination depicted? How can we express everything that cannot be recreated: the invisible, banal, physical, and psychological effects of loss, suffering, and violence? And are there moments when we should simply try to show things as they are? These are some of the questions I asked myself in spring 2021 as…

Congratulations to Lois Taylor Biggs on winning the inaugural Indigenous Art Writing Award, presented by C Magazine and the Indigenous Curatorial Collective / Collectif des commissaires autochtones. This initiative was created to support, compensate, and platform three standout individuals in the first decade of their writing practice who are advancing critical and creative thought about Indigenous contemporary art. We sincerely thank all those who applied, as well as the jurors of this year’s award: Jac Renée Bruneau, Camille Georgeson-Usher, and Adrienne Huard. Stay tuned for writing from the runners-up, Cheryl L’Hirondelle and Kelsey Borgford, in issues 152 and 153. The late Cree artist Kimowan Metchewais understood stories through the body. Former Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) curator Liz Park relayed his worldview in a 2014 blog post on the museum…

Throughout the ’50s, a hydroelectric dam and artificial lake were constructed in Cornwall, ON, as a part of the St. Lawrence Seaway project. “Radiant Temperature of Openings” documents this transformation of the land. Despite referencing archival material, the exhibition’s historiography is not didactic. Instead, the anxious suture between data and memory is privileged over any linear chronology. There is no monument to the icon of supposed progress here—the hydroelectric dam. Rather, in the dam’s shadow, the artists present an inquiry into the logic that supports such infrastructure projects. Upon entering the gallery space, three quaint oil paintings depict perspectives from a shoreline gazing out to bodies of water. According to the exhibition’s printed list of works, the undated oil paintings are titled Long Sault Rapids and painted by John Brownell,…

The Yukon Prize was formed specifically to address the territory’s artists’ relative lack of visibility in national art discourses. Competitions make me think about currency, not just because of the prize money, but also because of the circulation of work that is enabled through this format. Currency in the context of the Yukon invokes one of the most enduring narratives about the territory: resource extraction. Minerals such as copper, nickel, zinc, silver, and gold are mined, exported, and processed into refined forms, their values accumulating at a distance. So, I entered the Yukon Prize exhibition with value on my mind—how it gets assigned, who does the assigning, and the space there is to challenge it all. The complexity of commerce is addressed in Krystle Silverfox’s All that Glitters is Not…

“When I first encountered his work, I immediately thought that we must be thinking about some of the same things,” Michèle Pearson Clarke remarked of Lou Sheppard. “And I always found it interesting that his work was rarely contextualized as addressing grief (even by him), because to me it is so viscerally present in his practice.” Here, the two artists engage in a lively repartee about their works that sometimes, but often don’t, position grief as an immediately legible central subject—in either case, seeing grief as a kind of inextricable lens. Sheppard articulates a parallel to queerness, writing “I don’t really think of my work as ‘queer’ but I do see queerly.” They go on to discuss navigating the spectacle of queer pain, dispensing with vulnerability as a kind of…

“her cot a map of the world, her death the north folding in on itself.”—Dallas Hunt, Creeland, 2021 Dallas Hunt’s poem “Rueful” (2021) recounts the death of his grandmother amid stanzas that reference the state of the world, the news, tenderness, and violence. In describing the moment of her death, Hunt turns to land, the world, the cardinal direction; in so few words he expresses how scale can shift when you lose someone. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion wrote, “Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”1 Distance allows us to see others and be seen by them. Distance connects two points across a straight line. And so, it makes…

Entering the gallery-cum-consulate at Canada House is not unlike passing through airport security, the guard informs me. First, I’m required to book tickets online or by QR code, which involves several sweaty minutes on Eventbrite while standing in the vestibule. I’m next instructed to place my belongings in a plastic tub that will pass through a baggage scanner, then walk through the archway metal detector. The guard gives me a good-natured “Thank you” and opens the reinforced glass doors that lead to the satellite extension of “Artery,” a new exhibition by Montreal-born, London-based artist Allison Katz. Canada House represents something like the frontier garrison for “Artery,” which is more centrally anchored at Camden Art Centre. The four walls just beyond the security detail feature a selection of posters Katz has…

At Ignacio Gatica’s “Stones Above Diamonds,” a thin aluminum display shelf borders the gallery walls; on it rests a straight line of custom-printed smart cards bearing images of barricaded storefronts. The display is bifurcated by a pole-mounted monitor installed in the centre of the space. On the left side of the monitor, the smart cards are printed with photos of Chilean banks—their facades sheathed in plywood or metal hoardings—taken during the civil protests of late 2019. The cards to the right of the monitor are printed with photos of New York flagship retail stores equally fortified during the George Floyd protests of 2020. Gatica makes use of symmetry in his exhibition design: viewers attuned to pattern recognition might conclude that some things are different, and other things are the same.…

In October 2021, the British Museum announced that it has the earliest known image of a ghost. On this Babylonian clay tablet, a figure stands with feet on the ground and hands tied, being led into the afterlife by a female figure. We know this is a ghost because the accompanying cuneiform inscription describes that this man has come back from the dead, and includes instructions on how to exorcise his miserable spirit and untether him from this world. The ritual includes making small effigies, offering beer, and burning juniper incense at sunrise.1 Many funerary practices all over the world use smells, oils, and incenses. Our sense of smell is our most immediate sense, and most intimately tied to memory; it has the ability to tug or shove us in…

Muheb Esmat: It feels strangely appropriate to begin this conversation by asking if you have heard the song “Gham Daram Gham” by Taher Shubab? It came to mind immediately after I began thinking about “grief,” which is echoed in the song by the Urdu word gham (غم). Hangama Amiri: When this song was popular in 2008/2009, I lived in Halifax with my family. It was also when my father was reunited with our family. He was able to join us in Canada after spending almost eight years in refugee camps in Europe, so the song really takes me back to those memories. But besides the good memories, it also resonates deeply with feelings of displacement that were painful. ME: It’s incredible how such personal memories could be attached to a…

My parents were content being childless until the year that both of my mother’s parents passed away. I was the result of my mother’s grief transformed into a yearning to supplant her familial loss. Following my parents’ separation, my mother trailed after me to Toronto, where we sought to partake in a relationship predicated upon each other’s independence rather than one built on the blood-relation piety of mother and daughter. Once, I asked about her relationship with her own mother, who had died before we could meet. My mother admitted to her disaffected indignation that was in turn met by her mother’s upholding of authority. Their bond was so strained that it distressed my mother to think of repeating those same mistakes. She took it upon herself to volunteer at…

I am the only person in the Belkin Art Gallery on this particularly rainy weekday afternoon––a fact that I will become grateful for, because Laiwan’s work gives the most when you take your time. Specifically, the works on display are insistent in their demand that we refocus our attention onto the formal architectures that produce knowledge and transmit meaning. With equal attention given to print and lens-based media, her structural interventions both reveal and disrupt the way form sometimes recedes from view––concealing the force of its ideological frame, its forceful shaping of perception according to colonial, imperial, or otherwise hegemonic logics. But through aesthetic practices of overlay, translation, redaction, and juxtaposition, Laiwan slows down our encounter, renders seemingly known documents, images, or forms strange once more, brings occluded narratives or…

Last fall, Centre CLARK presented separate solo exhibitions by artists Joshua Schwebel and Sanaz Sohrabi. Employing the strategies of institutional critique and research-based installation, respectively, the two shows complemented each other in their polemical approach. Schwebel’s “The Tenant” was a hyperlocal investigation of the fraught politics of gentrification and artwashing while Sohrabi’s “Hiding in Plain Sight: Archives of Oil” offered a more free-associative curation of archival imagery relating to the geopolitics of oil in Iran and the Middle East. Schwebel’s “The Tenant” was presented as a single entity consisting of a dossier of evidence regarding the effects of real-estate speculation on artists in Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood. Specifically, the exhibition focused on the holdings and activities of Allied Properties Real Estate Investment Trust, a Toronto-based firm that owns the buildings…

Sona Safaei-Sooreh’s “Revolving: a family tale” (2021) tells the story of Iran’s unique semi-colonial history through caricatures and narrative. The term “semicolonial” is used by Safaei-Sooreh to refer to how Iran faced a period of policy influence and regime change, instead of direct colonization, by the West. Presented as a single installation composed of newspaper comic strips, video, and light boxes displaying cartoon figures, Safaei-Sooreh narrates Iran’s contentious relationship with the West, catalyzed by the nationalization of Iran’s oil industry in the ’50s. A monitor mounted onto the wall displays scenes from Disney’s Cinderella alongside contrasting footage of a British Petroleum (BP) executive speaking on Iran. The split-screen video satirizes BP’s relationship to Iran’s oil industry, with Britain represented as Cinderella’s extractive, evil stepmother. Safaei-Sooreh’s comic characters take direct inspiration…