Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2017 i C Magazine

Delfina Foundation, London, UK Sept. 29 - Nov. 12, 2016 by Amy Luo “It’s a difficult and a long show to commit to in many ways as a viewer,” admitted Jean-Paul Kelly in an interview about his recent solo show, That ends that matter, which premiered a new video work of the same name. One reason why the work might frustrate could be its nerdish deployment of multiple image sources and genres across its three-channel video-installation format, putting off viewers with its sheer heterogeneity. Kelly has used this combinatory strategy before: his 2013 video work Movement in Squares, for example, was composed variously of found video footage, an appropriated soundtrack and original video recordings produced in his studio. This new work, which was exhibited on hanging screens across the darkened…

Fahrenheit – FLAX Foundation, Los Angeles Sept. 16 – Dec. 10, 2016 by Simone Krug Hips jut and shoulders sway, bouncing in time to a blaring bedroom boom box. We Dance, We Smoke, We Kiss at Fahrenheit is a study in joyous movement and the mundane routines performed behind closed doors. With this mentality in mind, the show celebrates recent works that have emerged from and around the Middle East and Arab world, circumventing the tired narrative of political conflict and perpetual unrest en route to a realm of pop culture and global outlooks. Fahrenheit resident and curator Myriam Ben Salah presents a region prone to misrepresentation and stale tropes, feeling around for a new identity even as it clings to customs and traditions. The show straddles these two spaces,…

PLATFORM centre for photographic + digital arts, Winnipeg Nov. 4 – Dec. 17, 2016 by Kegan McFadden We are rarely told the story of a little boy who would make his own fun by cutting up newspapers and magazines only to collage them back together into a world that made sense only to him. What would that boy fantasize over? Lying on the living room floor or concentrating at the kitchen table, too-big scissors in his still-tiny hands, his imagination would conflate the allure of faraway places or experiences equally as foreign to his young eyes with the way men fit together when they aren’t engaged in war; or how he might become someone, anyone, different than who he was, if only the ads in those cut-up magazines showed his…

This idea of refusal has been writhing around in my head since the first time I was tricked into being curated into a show “about diaspora” – a reductive curatorial framework that has plagued South Asian artists since the birth of ’90s identity politics. I was uncomfortable with the lazy curation and exploitative artist fee but, being fresh out of undergrad, I felt compelled to “take an opportunity.” I largely regret the time, resources and energy I put into my participation in that show, but ultimately it was a nice line on my CV that helped legitimize my efforts to continue being an artist. A year later, in 2014, the collective HOWDOYOUSAY-YAMINAFRICAN? publicly withdrew their participation from the Whitney Biennial. The next year, the entire first-year MFA cohort at the…

“Property” is not a term commonly invoked in art, an odd rhetorical absence given the prevalence of appropriation, practices that exploit the fictive quality of authorship via the readymade and ephemeral strategies supplanting objects of art for administrative paperwork. Among artist activists, calls abound for greater control over their works once transferred or sold, yet these desires are rarely named property rights. Where the term “property” does appear, it is often with suspicion or antagonism, leaving the articulation of artists’ interests conflicted, and other desired forms of “ownership” underexplored. Property theory does little better in its account of art. In legal writing, artworks and artistic labour are referenced as examples of unresolvable paradoxes under common law. Art can be revered as a public good, and yet can also run wild…

Christi Belcourt, Maria Hupfield, Ursula Johnson, Tania Willard, Laakkuluk Williamson-Bathory and their guest respondents: Isaac Murdoch, Esther Neff, IV Castellanos, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Marcia Crosby, Tanya Tagaq grunt gallery, Vancouver Oct. 29 – Dec. 10, 2016 by Dory Nason As a scholar who focuses on Indigenous feminisms, I am drawn to visual and performance art by contemporary Indigenous women in Canada because of the potent challenge their art poses to colonial expectations of Indigenous women, our politics and our intellect. In viewing their work, I am often reminded of Leanne Simpson’s description of Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore as a person whose performances embody sovereignty and remind us as Indigenous peoples about our power to do the same. Simpson describes Belmore’s art as “ the very best of Indigenous storytelling grounded in…

Western Gallery, Western Washington University, Bellingham June 25 – Aug. 30, 2016 by Jesse McKee Bellingham is a sought-after destination for Vancouver-ites looking for cheap flights to destinations within the US. This modest town, with fewer than 100,000 citizens, is just an hour and a half south of Western Canada’s largest city, lying in the shadow of Mount Baker and resting on the edge of the Pacific. Rather than paying for the convenience of taking a flight from YVR, you can take a shuttle bus from downtown Vancouver to the Bellingham Airport and often save hundreds of dollars. As Fran Lebowitz has said, her generation wasted their time on drugs and promiscuity, while my generation is content to waste our time trying to find cheap cellphone plans and plane tickets.…

CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, CA Dec. 13, 2016 – Feb. 25, 2017 by Jesse Birch I hold that the formation of recollection is never posterior to the formation of perception; it is contemporaneous with it . . . —Henri Bergson I first encountered Yuki Kimura’s work in 2005 at her solo exhibition, untitled puzzle, at Kodama Gallery in Osaka. By this time, Kimura had been working with photography as her primary medium for more than 10 years. Her first solo exhibition with Taka Ishii Gallery (by whom she is still represented) was in 1995. During the 1990s and early 2000s, when the documentary point-and-shoot aesthetic of the so-called onnanoko shashinka, or “girl photographer,” movement was at its peak in Japan, Kimura was instead employing a conceptual…

Presented by La Biennale de Montréal, with the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and local partners, Montreal Oct. 19, 2016 – Jan. 15, 2017 by Xenia Benivolski From the balcony of Europe in North America – Montreal – the fabric of European Socialism looks to be fraying at the edges, as the city sees the notion of the Marxist revolution, with Germany at the helm,1 turning its ship and heading squarely back into the realm of nostalgia, survived by a strong urge to do nothing. In Anne Imhof’s Angst III, a group of bored-looking teens nonchalantly scours the surfaces of a large white room filled with artificial vapour. Edging towards the runway, they encounter stuffed hawks, cigarettes, pop cans and other accessories while performing the slow-motion feat of mounting one…

Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London June 2 – Sept. 11, 2016 by Georgia Phillips-Amos If the earth were square we would curl up in its corners but the earth is round so we must face it. —Dunya Mikhail In London’s Hyde Park, in the bend of the Serpentine Lake, the late architect Zaha Hadid built the Serpen-tine Sackler Gallery in 2013 from two separate elements: a repurposed brick gunpowder store from 1805, and a woven, glass-fibre tensile structure. In her eulogy celebrating Hadid, Lebanese-American artist, essayist and poet Etel Adnan praised the architect’s curved constructions, writing that each of her buildings “has a poetry, a spirituality such that in sheltering us, it makes us dream.” Two months after Hadid’s death in March 2016, the Serpentine opened The Weight of the World,…

1 A wall in the gallery is crying.1 The wall’s colour is initially confronting, painted a deep, rich green. One of three works that comprise Divya Mehra’s 2016 exhibition, It’s Gonna Rain, the wall is constructed to conceal a pump system that releases water into the wall itself. The water steadily accumulates in the plaster, forming large, droplet-like shapes that pool beneath the surface of the paint. Slowly, these oversized beads slide down, still contained within the stretched exterior layer. After a time in stasis, the weight of the water becomes more than the stretching paint can bear. At this point, the spherical forms give way, producing discreet ruptures in the paint’s surface that expose the damp plaster under-neath. These small wet wounds become the source of delicate streams of…