Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2022 i C Magazine

Aamna Muzaffar: Golden Jubilee is the most recent in a set of three films you’ve made since 2019; to start off, can you tell me about the way these works are situated within your practice and, thinking about the arc of this triad, what brought these stories together for you? Suneil Sanzgiri: This series of works really began with one image, or rather screenbased experience, which actually opens up the first film in the trilogy called At Home But Not At Home (2019). I had grown quite homesick for a place I had never even been to yet—Goa—but with which I have an ancestral connection. My uncles, aunties, and cousins who live there would often say to me, “You belong to Goa”—the first time I had heard those words, “you…

I was struck by a scene in the new HBO series Tokyo Vice (2022) when Samantha, the blonde American woman who is living and working in Tokyo, confrontationally asks Jake Adelstein, the Jewish male protagonist and real-life author of the memoir on which this show is based: “Do I look like a prostitute to you?” The subtext is whether she is the “kind of person” who would be a prostitute—who has the “look,” whatever that “look” might be. After all, the work she does exists inblurryproximitytosexwork: she is a “hostess” at a club where men pay for women to sit with them and talk. Men pay “by the bottle” for the woman’s time. In her introductory scene, she croons Japanese karaoke songs in a glamorous halter dress, men at tables…

“Should I translate?” asks the figure on the bed, lying at the feet of the camera operator, in reference to the Hindi song playing on her phone. In this opening scene from Sharlene Bamboat’s If From Every Tongue it Drips, this innocuous question serves as a road map of what is to come: a film whose documentary medium is intimacy itself and whose axis of rotation is so often a lover’s translation. Traversing an epic ambit of themes—from the 1857 rebellion in India, to the erasure of queer desire in Urdu poetry, to quantum physics—it is notable that for all its reflections on politics, history, and identity, this is also a deeply amorous film. This is partly a result of its production. Set in Batticaloa in eastern Sri Lanka, Bamboat’s…

In many Indigenous cultures of Turtle Island, the Medicine Wheel is a symbol of abundance and healing that weaves the spiritual and physical worlds together. The four colours depicted on the wheel—black, red, yellow, white—symbolize the four directions, seasons, or stages of life, serving as a reminder that our lives, too, are governed by cycles. Depending on the Nation, the Medicine Wheel can take various forms: an artwork or a physical structure on the land. For me, the Wheel is a representation of the connective values of my people, the Tāłtān Nation of Northwest British Columbia. Despite my participation in this newfound colonized society, I am nonetheless surrounded by my Ancestors, wherever I go. They whisper to me in the wind, they envelop me in their calm waters, and they…

In just over two decades of art-making, Portuguese artist João Onofre has taken great stock of grand themes such as failure, irony, endurance, performance, connection, and love. The artist’s first solo exhibition in Canada, at Daniel Faria Gallery in Toronto, consists of only three pieces, but still encapsulates Onofre’s thematic oeuvre and multimedia practice in photography, sculptural objects, performance, and video works. Shown together, Untitled (1997), two conjoined stethoscopes arranged on a plinth, to be used by a pair of listeners to hear one another’s heartbeats; Your closed hand makes the size of your heart and together they make the minimum distance that it could be from another one (2001), a chromogenic print of two fists referencing the relative size and proximity of two human hearts; and the video work Untitled…

I learned then that dowsing, also known as water witching or radiesthesia, is an embodied practice of divination long used to detect entities underfoot: water sources, mineral ores, oil, and even lost objects. Using an instrument—such as a forked branch, a pendulum, or alternatives—the practitioner locates the desired entity by being attentive to the chosen tool’s movements in response to asking yes and no questions while hovering it above the ground. Bartol descends from a long line of water witches on her mother’s side, adept at detecting sources of groundwater. After learning of this matrilineal history in 2013, the artist began incorporating the divination form into her art practice as a method with which to navigate her relationship to place and read sites of extraction, activating her body as a…

The Eramosa River was carved out as a glacial spillway over 20,000 years ago. It flows through the treaty lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit and the ancestral territory of the Chonnonton (known to some as Attawandaron). Fed by underground springs, it flows along the course of a bedrock moraine south-west into the city of Guelph where it meets the Speed River. Together they flow into the Grand River and the Haldimand Tract treaty lands, the territory of the Haudenosaunee.1 The impacts of colonization, industrialization, and capitalist growth are evident along the riverbanks. In the first 100 years of settler colonization in the area, dams, levees, and ponds were constructed along the Eramosa to contain its flow, and many of the surrounding wetlands were drained for farming. Before this,…

Spanning more than five decades worth of material, “The Children Have to Hear Another Story” (2022) is a comprehensive retrospective celebrating the cinematic voice of Alanis Obomsawin and the blurry lines between artist, activist, musician, and filmmaker that have defined her career. Starting in the ’70s, Obomsawin developed a process of recording conversations on tape long before the arrival of any camera—part of a careful method of relationship-building that would come to lie at the core of her film works. Removed from the cinema and installed in the thoughtfully designed, elliptical exhibition space of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Obomsawin’s work takes on an affecting physicality, turning the patient duration of her films into objects of great scale. The result is a generous, cumulative experience echoing Obomsawin’s approach…

For some of us, home cannot be understood as a specific place. In “Letters for Occasions,” Farah Al Qasimi’s photo-based installation, the artist looks at home in less spatial terms: home is joy, rest, family. Time collapses and expands through photographs that collage a global landscape of domestic interiors. In Kimball Hotel, Springfield (2021), a photograph depicts shrimp and strawberries scattered across a thick, pale turquoise fabric, with a pink canopy bordering the bottom of the image. On the right side of the image is a postcard and a menu from the Kimball Hotel. Shrimp and strawberries may be inviting, luscious foods, but the wall text reveals that Al Qasimi’s grandmother discovered she was allergic to both shrimp and strawberries while working as a cook at the Kimball Hotel. In…

Upon entering “The Meaning of Life” (2022), the viewer encounters a plywood panel marked with laser-cut holes resembling those in broken glass. A wall-sized video of young people speaking about their participation in the June 2020 SoHo protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder is projected through the holemarked panel. The wooden pane also recalls the boards business owners placed over their property to prevent looting during the protests. Combining the dynamism of formal, perceptual exploration with a charged social field, an image of a wooden circle projected over the protesters’ faces conceals their identity as they describe the rush and thrill of crossing the legal line from street protest to breaking glass shopfronts. Because their faces are covered, the cacophonous sound of young voices erupting through these holes…

Terracotta—literally “cooked earth” from the Latin terra cocta—is a clay-based earthenware ceramic, porous and often unglazed. From the Terracotta Warriors, the approximately 7,000 individually crafted, life-sized ceramic warriors discovered in the mausoleum complex of Qin Shihuang, the First Emperor of China who ascended to the throne in 247 BCE,1 to the façade of the London Natural History Museum, terracotta has a venerated place in art and architecture history. Simultaneously, it is a fundamentally commonplace and domestic material, as many cultures’ ongoing traditions of culinary and other household vessels demonstrate.2 Today, in Canada, terracotta is primarily synonymous with building materials, with the majority of clay production in the manufacturing of brick, block, and tile.3 Although most clay is mined by openpit methods, artists working with terracotta in artisanal, land-based, site-responsive, and…

A quick reading of this work might induce scorn toward certain entities. But mining, oil, and gas companies work within the system offered to them by the government of Canada. And when companies are caught stepping out of bounds of the law, the resulting fines pale in comparison to their profits. In other words, every piece of bad news in this work is enabled by this nation’s legal and regulatory environment. With this in mind, how do the choices made by Canadian museums, galleries, and art festivals to partner with extractive industries shape culture in Canada? How do the relationships between cultural institutions, extractive industries, Indigenous communities, workers, and ecosystems contribute to belief systems that influence economic choices, political will, and legislation? Corporate sponsorships are mutually beneficial agreements between non-profits…

“What are we tethered to when everything seems to collapse/shatter/erupt simultaneously?” This is the question posed by Tanya Lukin Linklater in the text accompanying a recent exhibition at Catriona Jeffries, which brings together Lukin Linklater’s multimedia installations with paintings by Brenda Draney. The exhibition is a multilayered response to this question, a meditation on storytelling as that which binds us to place, family, and memory, both cultural and personal. Lukin Linklater’s two-channel video …you are judged to be going against the flow because you are insistent., Parts 1 & 2 (2017) is presented across a corner of the gallery. As I allow my attention to swing between the videos, several young women perform sections of various dance routines, as if in rehearsal, while in voiceover they conversationally describe their experiences…