Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2018 i C Magazine

Flowers for Africa, an exhibition by Kapwani Kiwanga and organized by Kathleen Ritter at the Or Gallery in Vancouver, showcases nine floral designs. Each design rests on its own plinth, representing the moment when an African country gained independence from colonial rule. Looking through photographs and film footage of the celebratory events that took place in each country, Kiwanga’s attention focused on the floral arrangements: on a speaker’s lapel, a bouquet or a wreath. These arrangements are taken out of their original contexts – groups of people, grinning faces, microphones and shaking hands. They represent an archive as a physical corpus, not of humans but of plants, animated by duration as they lose their vibrancy and wither throughout the course of the exhibition. As with the physical photograph, this living…

“Just then I found a strange refuge – ‘by chance,’ as they say – though I believe there is no such thing. If you need something desperately and find it, this is not an accident; your own craving and compulsion leads you to it.”—Hermann Hesse1 If a coincidence is in the eye of the beholder, then reading such chance events involves being attentive enough to notice as the fragments of our lives collide. In Moyra Davey’s work, chance propels her artistic impulses. And through these chance encounters, she comes to engage myriad writers, photographers and filmmakers in telling her personal histories. In the exhibition Portrait / Landscape at Galerie Buchholz in Berlin, the artist presented two of her films alongside a suite of photographic works, most of which are rooted…

The 2017 edition of Day With(out) Art was the 28th annual Visual AIDS event marking World AIDS Day. Over the course of the last three decades, the New York-based organization has used art to raise AIDS awareness. Initially, they marked the public crisis of HIV/AIDS with the temporary disappearance of meaningful works from museum collections. Day Without Art was meant to symbolize the death of many people in the New York community. But as the cultural community dealing with HIV/ AIDS changes and transforms, the understanding of Day Without Art has changed as well: in 1998, for its tenth anniversary, Day Without Art became Day With(out) Art, and the focus shifted from those lost to the enduring community of artists living and dealing with HIV/AIDS. The most recent showcase built…

Curated by Trevor Schoonmaker, The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp – the latest edition of the New Orleans Triennial – assembled works by 73 artists. While the works were presented in 17 venues around the city and across the Mississippi River in Algiers, the majority were concentrated in New Orleans’s three predominant art institutions. Such institutional dependency significantly impacts Prospect.4’s approach to display, with two strategies dominating: tightly confined solo presentations sequentially organized and easy juxtapositions relying on material resonance, formal play or thematic connections. The selection of artists, more diverse than prior editions of Prospect, was very promising yet the exhibition failed to mobilize the full meaning and potential of diversity. Too often, we are served up orthodoxies that arrest the potency of the works. This is all…

Opening its doors this fall with enthusiastic aplomb, the new Polygon Gallery marks an important moment in the history of Presentation House, the name by which this photo-focused gallery has been known for the past 40 years. After establishing itself as an international participant in the presentation and discussion of the discipline, the gallery has grown out of its historic home up the hill and has stepped into a new spacious, purpose-built site down on the energetic Lonsdale Quay. Perched at the edge of the harbour, the building’s new metal-clad surface reflects the land, water and people around it. It’s a suitable effect for a gallery that has been committed to focusing on the mirror of mediums, photography. N. Vancouver, the first exhibition here, has an appropriately conceptual sound to…

“Time is borrowed and it changes everything.”—Wu Tsang, Wildness (2012) I’m not sure when I became aware of Wu Tsang’s film Wildness, though it was likely through its wide exposure in 2012 as a work included in both the Whitney Biennial and the New Museum Triennial. I was enamoured by the descriptions of the film’s namesake – a weekly queer party at which performance artists, drag stars and experimental musicians were exalted. What drew my interest the most, however, was the unlikely main character, the Silver Platter, the long-standing Los Angeles gay bar where Tsang and a collective of young artist friends chose to host Wildness. Rather than narrating the story of the party, Tsang gives the bar its own voice, in Spanish. I didn’t get to see it at…

Lisa Myers’ latest curatorial project, Carry Forward, presents works by 11 artists, addressing themes of deeds and documents. Myers explains that the title references “passing or transferring something on to the next generation, yet also refers to taking account of gains and loss.” For me, it also suggests momentum; this show has lift under its wings, much like an owl or an airplane. Myers’ curatorial focus here is on how documents accrue and transmit forms of value “outside of the paradigm of things.” Writing about Mike MacDonald’s video installation, Electronic Totem, for example, she suggests that “Shots of berry picking, fishing, waterways, language, and song together create a document of relationships and bond to territory.” The didactic information in the show is excellent. Myers provides deeply researched context and gentle…

To speculate about the future is to imagine other possibilities of what the present holds and how it might progress. Such exercises of the imagination allow one’s narrative to stray from the ordinary to the unexpected, even while taking into consideration our current fears and fantasies. As they magnify and mutate, we become spectators of our own transformation, experiencing the electric thrill of contemplating what might likely never happen, while accepting that it just might. To speculate, then, is to play with the parameters of history before it comes into being. Artists operating in the speculative mode today are working perpendicular to widespread disagreements about what constitutes fact, and its deliberate manipulation for economic and political gain. In India, for two decades now, Hindu nationalist groups have attempted to rewrite…

At the tail end of a year characterized by personal and political anxiety, Logan MacDonald’s The Lay of the Land offers a surprisingly gentle investigation of the harsh realities of cultural erasure and assimilation. MacDonald self-identifies as a queer visual artist with settler/Mi’kmaq ancestry and the body of work in the exhibition reflects two years of recent travels to Indigenous communities across the country. In The Lay of the Land, curator Jason Penney supplemented MacDonald’s work with a selection of videos ranging from the sauciness of Kent Monkman to the poignancy of Erika MacPherson and Katherena Vermette (This River) to the DIY zeal of Thirza Cuthand and others. Taken together, the project accomplished its intent to tackle “the complex politics of how media characterization, Canadian history and institutional prejudice have…

“You can lose yourself in folds of time such as these.”—response to Les Levine “1/2 VHS Video Series” mock up, designed by Robert Flack, 1986 In the digital age, our embodied experiences with media are becoming increasingly homogeneous. The lack of variety in touch and texture offered by smooth screens has rearranged and limited our sensory relationship to the media with which we interact. These rapid technological shifts have resulted in a push back: a renewed interest in full-spectrum sensations and in-person relations, prompting a resurgence in analogue processes and tangible, hands-on media. This looking back to look forward presents the physical archive as a particularly significant site for exploring just what gets lost in the shift towards digitization. Using the archive as its focal point, “Feeled Recordings” explores these…