Raising our eyes to Metallic Skies: Christina Battle’s environmental exhibition

Christina Battle, dearfield, colorado  (still), 2012 video installation, (single-channel digital video, sound recording, metal, photograph), Courtesy of the Artist (Installation View, Christina Battle: Under Metallic Skies, June 1 – November 3, 2024) Image © Alex Walker

Under Metallic Skies by Christina Battle

Museum London

June 1st – November 3rd, 2024

Curated by Cassandra Getty

By Étienne Lavallée

Museum London’s exhibition Under Metallic Skies features the work of Christina Battle and considers how our community will function as a biome and how that biome is threatened by climate change. The exhibition looks at how we can continue to connect with each other during mass extinction events. Battle is an Edmonton, Alberta-based artist who earned her Ph.D at Western University. Battle’s environmental art focuses on climate change, land dynamics, and destruction, begging the question of how relationality and resilience will affect our communities during cataclysmic change. Battle’s work focuses on the environment but views community as inextricable from the ecosystem.

Christina Battle, Notes To Self (still), 2014—ongoing, compilation of single channel videos with sound, Courtesy of the Artist

“Notes to self” is a video piece with a series of brief sentences and sentiments displayed on a burning piece of paper. The presented format mimics the fleeting nature of communication through microblogging social media platforms like Twitter and Meta Threads, utilizing one brief sentence to represent the intimate thoughts of a stranger. The messages are anonymous, and uncredited. They could be held by Battle or Battle’s friends and colleagues. Similar to microblogging platforms, the messages displayed in the video are also commonly held, stating feelings such as “These are some truly dark times,” reflecting on the overall absence of hope in our lives and futures. “I’m pissed. Basically, all of the time” connects to the rage and helplessness of our social conditions. “The blatant grift of it all” critiques the absence of authenticity in online communication. “The never-ending extraction” reminds the viewers of our extraction-based economy in North America. “Heavy times,” “#fearwins,” “nobody wins, it’s just about who loses more slowly.” all impart the profound pessimism that both Battle and many viewers share.

“The climate crisis is not equally distributed” is deeply impactful. As the paper burns down, we are reminded how our unstable climate will affect countries like Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya, which are at risk of desertification and food insecurity.[1] As we view museum exhibitions in the comfort of air conditioning, we must recall the responsibility we hold to others on our planet. This portion of the exhibition calls for us to consider how privilege insulates us in North America from the worst effects of climate change.

Christina Battle, dearfield, colorado  (still), 2012 video installation, (single-channel digital video, sound recording, metal, photograph), Courtesy of the Artist

“Dearfield, Colorado” (2010) is an elegy to an African American settlement founded by Oliver Toussaint Jackson. This is a part of Battle’s Mapping the Prairies Through Disaster series. Dearfield was a bid for African American Sovereignty in the hostile racial landscape of the United States after the Civil War and WWI. Black Americans pursued self-determination in a post-war country that sought new means to oppress and exploit Black workers. Dearfield offered Black Americans a chance to thrive, but this was shuttered with the dust bowl conditions of the Great Depression. At Dearfield’s 1910 founding, the population was 700, and by 1940, the population was reduced to 12. All that remains are a few skeletons of buildings and a memorial plaque, a photo of which accompanies the video. Battle’s video is paired with text from Larry O’Hanlon:

“The process starts with a little dry wind in a dusty, arid place that kicks up small dust grains so they collide with larger sand grains…the smaller grains steal electrons from the larger grains, giving the smaller grains a negative charge and the larger grains a positive charge…Next, the negatively charged smaller grains are lofted above the ground by breeze, creating a negatively charged region in the air above the positively charged ground. That separation of charges is an electrical field.” [2]

The loop of video opens on ramshackle buildings against a blue prairie sky. The frames are bright and sun-filled, the wild Black-eyed Susan flowers forming a bottom border in cheery yellow, in contrast to the quiet desolation of the abandoned buildings. The video is without music, and the backing sound is purely environmental, the rushing of air and gentle bird song. At 1:45 in the video, the sound of a passing vehicle or possible airplane backs the images of empty homes. The video loop ends on a semi-truck rapidly passing by the remains of Dearfield before beginning again. The absence of people is the greatest presence in this loop, and the brightness of the prairie sky keeps the footage from becoming overly mournful, and yet Battle’s imagery and accompanying text suggest this could be in the future for prairie residents, given predicted increases in heat waves, droughts, intensive agricultural practices, and soil degradation.

Christina Battle, THE COMMUNITY IS NOT A HAPHAZARD COLLECTION OF INDIVIDUALS (detail), 2021, digital print banner on organic cotton, participatory project (artist website, grass & wildflower seed, mycorrhizal fungi, instruction set, postcards), Courtesy of the Artist

“The Community is not a Haphazard Collection of Individuals” is Battle’s ongoing participatory work, utilizing community engagement to plant seeds. The seed functions as a stand-in for both the individual and the community, because the mechanism of a seed may be individual, but they function as communities. The seed actuates the participating individual as a member of the community, and planting becomes the means to integrate the community as an organic biome. 

Christina Battle, are we going to get blown off the planet (and what should we do about it), 2022, video installation (single-channel HD digital video, collaged fabric, wallpaper element designed by Anahì Gonzalez Teran and Shurui Wang), Collection of Museum London, Purchase, John H. and Elizabeth Moore Acquisition Fund, 2022 Image © Toni Hafkenscheid

Environmental dread has a powerful presence in all of Battle’s art, including in the piece “are we going to get blown off the planet [and what should we do about it]” (2022). Environmental destruction exists all around us and lives within us. Yet these harrowing years of death are treated with tenderness. In the background of florals, the small blooming plants, there is a remarkable tenderness with which Battle treats the inconsolable loss of biodiversity.

The community engagement aspect of Battle’s exhibition gently counteracts the accompanying dread by giving museum goers the opportunity to take small but significant action. The opportunity to plant native plants to mitigate biodiversity loss is meaningful in the face of an all-encompassing event like climate catastrophe. Planting a seed makes us feel just a little less powerless.

Under Metallic Skies was on view at Museum London in London Ontario from June 1st to November 3rd, 2024.

[1] “Horn of Africa Drought Emergency,” UNHCR,” last modified March, 2023, https://www.unhcr.org/emergencies/horn-africa-drought-emergency.

[2] Larry O’Hanlon, “Dust Storms Are Truly Electric,” ABC Science. August 18, 2006, https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2006/08/18/1717965.htm.

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Community and Softness: In Conversation with Soft Flirt

Alayna Hryclik of Soft Flirt. Photo by Saros Creative, courtesy of the artist.

By Étienne Lavallée

Soft Flirt is a project run by Alayna Hryclik out of London, Ontario. Alayna runs Soft Flirt, a printmaking, mural, and illustrative art practice built around concepts of softness, locality, body positivity, platonic relationships, and dark humor. She can be found on Instagram as @softflirt and her website at softflirt.ca.   

E: You just had a super successful Soft Fest. What does it mean to you to provide this creative space for Londoners right now?

A: I think that, for myself and my own artistic journey, community support has been essential for my own livelihood, for battling imposter syndrome, and for feeling supported and having a network of people who are not only working together but championing each other’s success. So, I think that entering my 8th year in business, Soft Fest has become important to me because I’ve had such success going to other people’s events and building community that way. I think it’s important for me now to start creating those spaces for other people, especially emerging artists, and to help continue to create community spaces in London. I’m deeply passionate about community and I feel it’s always the buzzword that I talk about a lot, but as anyone who shares in the beautiful community knows, you can become obsessed by it and it’s all you want to talk about.

E:  Absolutely! Very relatable on my part; I don’t have to explain to you, we’re surrounded by creative people, and I think that London has a special network of creatives.

A:  I also think, although costs are increasing everywhere, that it is slightly cheaper to do things here, so we have more ability to try something that might not be doable in Toronto, Montreal, or New York. For me, I feel I’ve passed a hurdle in my business—I’m established. I feel comfortable to try something new, and for me it’s this new self-assigned job: creating options for other people and creating what I want to see in the community. For me, the softer, the better.  

Soft Fest by Soft Flirt. Photo by Saros Creative, courtesy of the artist.


E: Absolutely, all of that! I think softness is a big deal right now because the world in many ways seems to get harder and nastier. So not only is your work creating a counter-narrative to that, but it’s also imagining a better world— I love that. Correct me if I’m wrong about that interpretation.

A: I think that’s a nice way of putting it! I don’t think in terms of what I’m doing in this specific decision—I’m making. Most of my work is inspired by either what I want to see, or a reaction to what I’m seeing. A lot of my local stuff is tongue-in-cheek; there’s a bit of hurt underneath. There’s some humor, but with my gravestone design, there’s a hurt for the city that’s lost all these treasured spaces. But there’s also a bit of confusion about it. Why does London lose everything? There are so many layers to that, but I think a lot of them can be seen as negative. I think the work has been an interesting way to put an artistic spin on not just being negative about the things that are hard, or the things that are frustrating or sad, but to try to see through it with softness.

The Lost Loves of London design. Photo by Saros Creative, courtesy of the artist.

E: I absolutely love the gravestone design; I got that shirt for my partner. When he wears that shirt out in public, everybody points out that they remember this place or that place.

A: I get the same responses from people when I have the shirt at markets or events. This year I made a big version of the design featuring 163 places. It’s become this fun local history project. I’ve never thought of myself as a local historian, but I feel I am now.

E: That comes with community engagement, doesn’t it?

A: It does! They’re inextricable from each other. When you’re looking into the deaths of these important community spaces, you have a community history. You become a local historian; you’re deeply thinking about these places that used to host house parties. When I was in my twenties, my favorite thing to do was go to a house show. There was something about seeing a show in somebody’s basement that had a certain layer of specialness. You have that deep community bonding where you’re dancing, and you’re in the pit with people, sweating together, screaming together—there’s something special there. Maybe you don’t know it at the time, but when that space is gone, you yearn for it. That gravestone design was creating a space for that grief. I didn’t realize what I was making at the time. I had the idea, brainstorming with some of my friends in our print shop, and I was like “This would be such a funny zine.”  And then it just spiraled out from there. My idea came first, but then the more research I did, the more I asked people about their favorite lost spaces, the more the work became a piece of old memory, with all the feelings alongside that. It’s been an amazing connector for me in the community.

I love to make niche London merch, but, beyond that, it is about the connection aspect. It’s not just about making a T-shirt for me, it’s about the message behind it. A T-shirt can’t be just for me—it would have five places on it, and it would be only my memories. It has to be for the community as shared memories. Shared memories–that’s part of what builds a community, it brings people together. You share in the good and the bad.

E: Your style, what I’ve been seeing from you, is connected to shared spaces, community experiences, and creating work out of it. What is this process for you and what does it mean to you?

A: I think it gives me something to have purpose for. I am an artist, and it’s great that I’m making art. I think having a community lens to a lot of the work that I do, or even who I work with, is important. I am somebody who doesn’t really expand beyond London. I have a support network here that aligns with the mission around everything else I’m doing. I’m getting a mural project and then my next mural is from word of mouth because this person saw the other job that I did. It just demonstrated to me that you can have a  strong supportive community and don’t have to strive for something else. This goes back to when I was in art school at Western. There was this idea that to be an artist, you had to move to a bigger city and be represented by a gallery. That was the way to do it, constantly marketing yourself, and trying to live in that super inauthentic fine art space supporting the bourgeoisie.

I think it’s been revolutionary to make a $3 sticker, a $30 T-shirt, or a larger project mural, and have it be for people in my local community. I don’t need that pat on the back recognition, that gallery stamp of approval, or being purchased by a collector to call it art. That’s been a powerful thing for me and driven a lot of my work. I shelved that frustration of not being able to achieve that ideal when I left university, and now it’s a joy to be able to say I didn’t need to do it that way. I was able to do it my own way. I am so supported here, so it’s in turn made me feel that this is a good place to be. It is a good place to put down roots, and I’m happy to be here. I have no plans to leave.

Pamela Scharbach (L) and Alayna Hryclik (R) of Mural Baby. Photo by Saros Creative, courtesy of the artist.

E: We have a unique environment here in London with a small-town feel but a lot of big-city amenities. That includes our cultural scene which has huge potential for growth. I don’t think we could see that growth if all of us were to give up, throw our hands in the air and say fuck it, I’m going to Toronto. Obviously, we talked a bit about it already, but are you able to reveal the locations of your upcoming mural projects in our city?

A: I can reveal both of my next projects! I’m very excited about them. The first, which hopefully is starting this coming week, might be an ongoing project over the fall depending on timing. My mural painting partner (Pamela Scharbach) and I painted a fun project at the Big Brothers Big Sisters location on Wharncliffe. We did this fun meandering line about the building, and it’s been one of my favorite projects. They have an amazing team, and they got a grant to upgrade their boardroom into a community room. They reached out to me again, and they want to bring us back for another mural project on the inside this time. I’m excited to work with them again—they were great people to work with. It’s nice to partner with people who are community-minded and who make such an impact in the community. We’re still in the brainstorming process but the ideas are flowing, and Pam and I are very excited about that project.

The second mural project I have coming up is for the Summit at the Western Fair. The Summit is an urban arts exploration event put on by Ken Galloway and his Risky Play with Paint Initiative project. Last year I was able to paint a peanut-harvesting wagon. This year I’m still waiting on some of the details, but I will again be painting live during the Western Fair. You have all kinds of people, including people from out of town, watching and talking to you.  I’m an introvert, but to be the spectacle, you must be kind and talk to strangers. There’s a lot of people who come over, and whatever you’re doing sparks a story in them. I’m talking to people, I’m making connections, and that’s part of the fun of it too.

Both of those projects I’m excited about, and both are for people that I worked with last year who have brought me back this year. Constantly building relationships and working together multiple times is always fun. I feel murals have this immersive experience working with this specific person in their location. It’s so nice and so fun, and then at the end of it we’ve developed some beautiful friendships.

Soft Flirt Mural from the Summit at the Western Fair, organized by Risky Play 519. Photo by Alayna Hryclik, courtesy of the artist.

E: I’m so glad we have these mural initiatives, because they bring a lot of brightness and cheer to our city during dark times, including the literal darkness of winter.

A: It’s all free, publicly accessible art, which is something I’m passionate about.

I love London but let’s not waste words. There are some serious downfalls, especially when it comes to certain City Council initiatives, and the things that get funding, and the things that don’t. At least we have public art if not other things. Living in London, I know that there are serious problems, pitfalls where we lack support for social services like SafeSpace and the work that they do. If I didn’t have a positive way through, I would be so mad at the world, and that’s not productive either. They’re trying to turn things around, and art helps us do that. I think having a platform in the community also helps me do that. Community is amazing. There are so many good things, but also, we have to put them in the context of giving support to the people who need it. Even if I can’t give someone money, because I’m still a working artist, I can share my platform with people or align my community event with something. These things give us a united front against the problems we face—like certain city counselors who antagonize social support organizations in our community.

“Everything is Fine in London Ontario…” T-shirt by Soft Flirt. Photo by Saros Creative, courtesy of the artist.

E: You have experience with local exhibitions, galleries, and arts events. You did Print Pop earlier this year at Palasad, and prior to that you were at TAP Centre for Creativity. Was there anything else this year that I missed?

A:  I had a small show at Variety Cafe. They’ve become great advocates for local shows and local artists, and they’ve been incredibly supportive of me. That was a nice little diversion from my typical artwork. It was a textile collection, but it’s something that I always want to come back to. They gave me the platform to do that, and they’re supportive and encouraging. That was lovely. Then I do a lot of work with Punk Rock Flea Market (PRFM), which is a market with live music as well. PRFM has been instrumental in keeping a DIY spirit alive in our community.

E: London has this dialogue where the harder and grittier our city gets; the more punk rock people seem to get about it and the more people try to create with each other. PRFM helped a lot of small punk bands and visual artists get exposure. I can see how strongly they’ve influenced you and how you’ve influenced them.

A: We’ve been aligned from the beginning. I launched Soft Flirt at the first PRFM. At that time, they were just community members, then we became friends in the process. I did a bunch of markets over the years, and then in 2022, I weaseled my way onto the team and now we work together. It’s been a beautiful reciprocal relationship. We have a shared anniversary and a shared history, which is a fun thing to have. We [had] our September market on the 28th, and it’s the anniversary of Soft Flirt and also the anniversary of PRFM.

E: Could you tell me a little bit about some of the challenges you’ve experienced and your triumphs too?

A: There have been times when I should have had a part-time job to help support myself financially, but I was digging my heels in and making it work with Soft Flirt alone. A lot of my challenges were times when I didn’t have a lot of jobs going on, when I didn’t have markets, or when I didn’t have a lot of places where I felt I could share my art. I work well when I’m busy all the time and I have lots of stuff going on, but then the well runs dry. I get to completion and then I just allow that to spiral. I don’t necessarily always pull myself back up in a timely manner.

My hardest ruts were self-imposed, and I think that’s important to learn from and learn through. There are things that I could have done to make things easier for myself, but I was stubbornly motivated to succeed alone. I’m somebody who struggles with rejection sensitivity. I’ve applied for a lot of public calls for murals, and applied for grants, and I get my hopes up. If something doesn’t come through, I’ve had to learn from my own feelings of rejection. I think that some of those experiences are unavoidable, and some of those are inevitable. It’s the growth of being an artist. You must keep trying. You must keep applying for things. You’re not going to get everything you want, and I see that as a struggle a lot of artists go through, and a lot of people in the community go through.  

There’s a lack of funding for artists, so the opportunities are further between. That’s something that I think I’ll always be challenged by. I get really excited about opportunities, and if I don’t get it, it’s always a hard pill to swallow. There have been some seriously difficult moments, just digging myself out of periods of funk without minimizing it. I’ve recently landed on what works well for me, and it is keeping busy and working together collaboratively with people that I’m excited about working with. Challenges and successes can be one and the same, and I think that the process of being an artist is finding your process.

“For a Good Time Call Anybody Else” T-Shirt by Soft Flirt. Photo by Saros Creative, courtesy of the artist.

E: It’s never easy finding the space to feel your feelings and get through it while becoming resilient and not bitter.

A: I had a bad bout of rejection this year, and it really hit me hard. I felt embarrassed by it. I had to work through those feelings which is why I took July off. I was so burnt out emotionally. I had three back-to-back months which were busy, high energy, and successful. Sometimes that pendulum sways too far in the opposite direction afterward, and I get hit with— I jokingly call it—Summer Time Sadness. It’s just burnout. If I’m not booking a mural for a couple of months, or I’m not booking a collaboration, then my spark, my fire, is a bit dim. Then it’s hard to self-start on my own ideas and projects. I work best when I keep myself busy because I have a constant level of inspiration happening. When the burnout hits, it’s hard to climb back out of that, because that’s the way that my brain works. It’s such a tough balance to learn to live with, to bounce back when you can’t even create. If I’m going to be told “no” by this thing I’m applying for, then why don’t I make my own thing? I think it can make you wallow sometimes, but the positive result of rejection is figuring out a way to make it happen yourself. It’s coming from my own pocket—that’s the reality of community projects sometimes. Funding is not so easy to attain, but the stubborn need to succeed is and it has to happen.

E: You have those projects coming up that you told me about, but, in the long term, what do you want to see for your practice? Do you want to do exhibitions, or do you want to do more festivals? What are your plans for your own art practice and for London as well?

A: Soft Fest is something that I plan to do once a year, every year until I’m done doing it. In the first two years, Soft Fest was a four-day event—something on each of those four days. That felt like the right formula, so I’m not necessarily dreaming too big. I would be happy if next year we do the same thing again. If I were to come into some community funding, I would just keep expanding. I would feel very accomplished if I kept it running for even five years.

On a personal level, I always love to try new things. I’m keeping it under wraps for now, but there’s a different art medium that I’m going to learn next year. I’m excited to open myself up to some new skills and it will expand my art practice. This sounds so sneaky, but it’s because it’s a secret until January.  I’ve always wanted to learn new artistic skills. When I started, I was sewing and screen printing. Now I’m screen printing, mural painting, designing, illustrating, and community planning. There are so many other layers to what I’m doing, and I want to be a jack-of-all-trades. I want to say “challenge accepted” to different directions and paths. Within Soft Flirt, I don’t know what my goals are necessarily, because I maybe don’t know about the opportunity yet. There are endless ways that I want to expand my art-making and develop new skills, but also hone the skills that I already have. I want to paint more murals, I want to screen more T-shirts, but I also want to learn new things and try new events.

I would love to do more work with galleries. It was just cool to work with TAP Centre for Creativity this year. I could see some Soft Flirt gallery shows in the future. The possibilities are endless. Maybe something huge will change and suddenly we’ll get loads of arts funding. Everything is up in the air right now. Everything is chaotic, but that means good things as well as bad things could happen. I am such a hopeful, optimistic person who has been beaten down over the last four years. I miss being delusionally optimistic all the time— it keeps your spirits high. You can’t just focus on all the bad. The bad is happening and we have to recognize it, but it doesn’t really do us any favors if we can’t be hopeful for a different reality. Otherwise, you are just going to wallow and, while there’s good art made in wallowing, there’s also good art made in hope. All the feelings are valid, but I think there’s more positive progress with the hopeful.

 I think it’s powerful to embrace softness—it’s the solution to things that are harder.

E: Circling back around to softness and how softness plays a huge role in your work–what does vulnerability mean to you as a radical act?

A: I’ve been a plus-sized person and see the plus-size body through a lens of softness. I’ve spent a lot of time struggling with my own identity, and my own image in the world, and I feel I’ve developed some beautiful things out of protecting myself. It’s taken me a long time to come to a place where I’ve been able to embrace my literal softness, and alongside that, I formed some beautiful friendships. I’ve been all about platonic love and platonic romance in my life, and I think that it was something that I had to learn through that lens. To be able to put that into my art and to create what I’ve created now, I’ve deprioritized traditional romantic relationships in my life in favor of nurturing beautiful platonic relationships—creating community before I knew that that’s what I was doing. Having these friendships in predominantly female spaces and queer spaces was everything. Societal expectations about pursuing a partner are shoved down our throats in general, and that’s just sort of what you’re supposed to do.


E: You lose something when you sink all your spirit and your heart into one single romantic relationship. You’re missing out on all those nuanced connections.

A: There’s just layers to it. I must honor that part of what makes me soft. It comes from unlearning internalized fatphobia and the trauma that went alongside that, and feeling grateful for what my body can do for me now. There’s a softness to that that I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to specifically, but that’s part of the core of what I’m doing. Then there’s this lens of platonic love. The harsh reality is that we’re always faced with the hardness of the world. We all have this inner softness, and why not make it more of a priority? Why not make it the focus of what you’re doing? It’s a literal thing, but it’s also a theoretical softness and being tender with yourself, your community, with your loved ones.

I try to infuse that message in my art. I have some designs that don’t necessarily feel that soft, but it’s all about what I want for myself and for my community. It is a gentle place to live. I think some people get hung up on visuals; they think soft means pink and floral. I have a lot of those aspects in my work and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s beautiful to explore the ways that softness can be an ideology and energy in pursuit of something more tender in the world, however you want to define that. I think that there are so many avenues to pursue softness in the abstract. Soft Flirt allows me to do this on a grander scale, and  highlight platonic relationships. I think that’s my new mission in life: to remind people that to have stronger romantic relationships you need to have the support of platonic relationships. I think it’s powerful to embrace softness—it’s the solution to things that are harder.

E: It’s also a revolutionary idea. We’re told from an early age not to be soft. We live in a heteropatriarchy that treats empathy as weakness. Kids grow up hearing messaging like “Stop crying or give I’ll you something to cry about.” We need to create a revolutionary space where it’s okay to feel these things together, where it’s okay to experience grief, softness, and tenderness. How else are we going to process these sentiments in our community unless we process them together?

A:  In my early days of Soft Flirt, before it became a business, it was a nickname. In the early days, it was my Tumblr identity. It must have been 2014-2015 that I stumbled on a piece by Lora Mathis about radical softness as a weapon. It was a while ago, but this idea that softness is the change, and softness is the medium has really stuck with me. Not everyone is going to get what this is all about, but the people who do are worth my time, my art, and my energy. That’s who I want to make things for.

I don’t always have the exact formula for the exact thing that’s expected, but nobody does. That’s not what’s being asked; what’s being asked is that we contribute positively and proactively and that we uplift and support our community.

To check out more of Alayna’s work through Soft Flirt, visit her Instagram @softflirt or her website.

ActiVisions: Trans Histories and Activism, 1950s-1990s

The ArQuives 

In partnership with the Museum of Toronto (formerly Myseum Toronto)

Curated by Tobaron Waxman

April 19 – May 19, 2023

Installation view of ActiVisions: Trans Histories and Activism, 1950s -1990s. Photo by Davina Hader, courtesy of The ArQuives.

By Adi Berardini

Walking down Church Street in the Village, I turn my head from left to right to see rainbow flags, symbols of LGBTQ2S+ pride and acceptance. Making the trip to Toronto from the smaller, mid-size city of London, Ontario viewing the volume of flags and symbols of acceptance is powerful. As the LGBTQ2S+ specific spaces dwindle in the city I currently reside in, seeing ActiVisions: Trans Histories and Activism, 1950s -1990s curated by Tobaron Waxman for Museum of Toronto at The ArQuives, reassures me how the LGBTQ2S+ community, specifically trans communities, establish both public and private spaces through art, gatherings, and publishing, no matter the suffocations of a heteronormative society.

Curated by interdisciplinary artist Tobaron Waxman, ActiVisions: Trans History spotlights the ArQuives’ Trans Collections and focuses on the history in Toronto from the 1950s to 1990s, however, the reach extends beyond that across Canada through the letters, buttons, documents, music, art, video, photography and periodicals featured. The exhibition focuses on the legacy of activists Mirha-Soleil Ross and Rupert Raj, alongside many other transgender artists and advocates.  Waxman explains that their approach to the exhibition stems from “non-binary thought,” a term they coined. As they detail, “Rather than juxtaposing one person’s timeline against another, I’m hoping that people are encountering a developmental flow in their experience of the exhibition, as well as contexts where you could sit and relax and read.” On display is a breadth of ephemera covering essential Canadian transgender history.


Top Left: Transisters, Hans Schierl – Dandy Dust, L to R: Book by Candy Darling, My Face For The World To See, Mirha-Soleil Ross and Xanthra Phillippa MacKay original gendertrash original collage and buttons; sketches by Beth Tyler. Photo by Tobaron Waxman, courtesy of the ArQuives.

Based in Toronto and Montréal, Mirha-Soleil Ross is a trailblazer trans activist, artist, and sex worker, whose work develops intersections of prisoner justice, animal liberation, sex work advocacy, and more. She published the zine gendertrash from hell with her then-partner, Xanthra Phillippa MacKay.[1] Published for five volumes, the zine “[gave] a voice to gender queers, who’ve been discouraged from speaking out & communicating with each other,”[2] including art, poetry, writing, and information by transgender individuals, low-income queers, sex workers, and prisoners. Advocacy for incarcerated prisoners was deeply important to Ross, and a plinth in the far corner is dedicated to her correspondence with prisoners, including a cartoon drawing created for her and a folder with letters to and from prisoners.

Illustration, gift to Mirha-Soleil Ross from an incarcerated friend, Many thick folders, closed, a significant portion of prison correspondence. Photo by Davina Hader, courtesy of The ArQuives.

Ross also established a film, spoken word, and performance art festival, Counting Past 2, by and for transgender artists and filmmakers. As detailed in its mandate in the raw sienna-coloured pamphlet featured in ActiVisions, the festival aimed “to show audiences that transsexual people are creative and that it is through our own work they can best start to grasp what our lives, sexuality, and political struggles are all about.” Periodicals and newsletters by trans artists and writers by and for the community, with a focus on mutual aid, are a strong focus of the exhibition, with many available for visitors to read through.

Trans activist and community builder Rupert Raj is featured in a documentary titled Rupert Remembers, directed and produced by Xanthra Phillip MacKay, which documents Raj’s trans activism in Toronto from 1971 to 1990. Raj is shown quite earnestly in front of a plethora of locations that were essential to the activism that he did in the community. The locations also included safe private venues, such as Vicky’s apartment on the 9th floor where Rocky Horror Picture Show screenings occurred. Raj sparked healthcare activism and provided space for transgender people, providing social events and support for significant others.

L: Rupert Remembers, directed and produced by Xanthra Phillipa MacKay, documenting Rupert Raj’s trans activism in Toronto from 1971 to 1990. Rupert Raj Fonds, The Arquives.R: Kyle Scanlon (1971-2012). Black and white photograph by Laura Spaldin part of The Arquives National Portrait Collection. Photo by Davina Hader, courtesy of The ArQuives.
Advertisement from ‘Metamorphosis Newsletter’ (original 2” x 3”, enlarged and framed for this exhibition) and flowers. Photo by Davina Hader, courtesy of The ArQuives.

Raj created, edited, published, and distributed publications FACT and Metamorphosis Magazine, which specifically focus on access to clinical research, hormones and surgery, legal reform, and life-saving information on medical care for trans men,[3] are on display on the table in the center of the exhibition, along with letters to surgeons. The publications were often under different aliases he adopted for privacy and legal reasons. He helped establish the “Foundation for the Advancement of Canadian Transsexuals” (FACT) providing social support and exchange of information, medical, social and legal resources, counselling, and education.

L to R: ‘My Breasts, My Choice Mirha-Soleil Ross,  Photo of Willi Ninja and local Toronto friends, Toronto,
Table with iPad of the complete run of Metamorphosis, multiple books of theory, poetry, first-person nonfiction narrative on the table and windowsill.
Photo by Davina Hader, courtesy of The ArQuives.

Across the room from the film screenings, a vibrant pencil crayon portrait of Rupert Raj by Maya Suess adorns the wall composed of a prism of colours, which was commissioned by the ArQuives for their National Portrait Collection. Waxman explains how the portraits of activists are placed higher on the wall to reach the gaze of the other activist portraits featured, almost as if they are glancing at each other from across the exhibition, such as the striking colour portrait of Mirha-Soleil Ross on the adjacent wall by Julia Stringhetta, newly revealed to the public through the exhibition. On the window ledge was an award to Jackie Shane made of amber-coloured glass, with her album playing on the turntable, over a background soundtrack of Waxman’s curated playlist of trans musicians and trans anthems from the first half of the 20th century. The reading nook beside a stack of transgender literature near natural light creates a lovely space to absorb all the information while listening to the soundtrack.

Whore Culture Festival program, 1995. Photo courtesy of The ArQuives.

Displayed across the right side of the room are newspapers, posters, a t-shirt, and zines showing solidarity and coalition with trans individuals, sex workers, cabaret, and nightlife culture. Included are page excerpts from Maggie’s Zine: By Sex Workers for Sex Workers: 1993-1994 displayed in frames. In an article titled, “Sweeping Us Under the Rug: A Pro Talks About the ’89 Shriners’ Sweep,” the pages include an account by activist Anastasia Kuzyk, who was one of 350 women picked up over eight days during the Shriners’ Convention. The edited transcript explains in first person how her rights were violated after being arrested by an undercover cop. She details being kept in a holding cell, having her phone call withheld from her for thirty-three hours, and then having the right to plead guilty taken away as well. Although the charges were dismissed, Kuzyk ended up serving an eleven-day sentence and didn’t have the option to be let out on bail.[4] She had never had a previous conviction and explained how her friends were shocked. The framed zine pages demonstrate how transgender sex workers were criminalized, swept off the streets, and dehumanized. However, the exhibition displays how cis and trans sex workers used art and cultural production as a means of resistance and demonstration of solidarity.

Installation view of ActiVisions: Trans Histories and Activism, 1950s -1990s. Photo by Davina Hader, courtesy of The ArQuives.

In the LGBTQ+ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, interviews highlight figures who have advocated for equal rights for the trans community such as Rupert Raj, Susan Gapka, Greta Bauer, Martine Stonehouse, and Cheri DiNovo. The activists and researchers speak to the 1998 delisting and the 2008 relisting of gender affirmation surgery under the Ontario Health Insurance Program (OHIP). As a former MPP, Cheri DiNovo passed more LGBTQ+ bills than anyone in Canadian history, including Toby’s Act (named after Toby Dancer) which added trans rights to the Ontario Human Rights Code in 2012.[5] As DiNovo explains, it’s important to mention something when someone’s wrong. She says, “Step up and it has a chance of getting better. Never be afraid to tell the truth—Never be afraid to stand up to bullies.”

ActiVisions highlights essential activist work through art, zines, buttons, and cultural production, especially at a time when the transgender community is attacked for living their lives authentically, with lifesaving healthcare and resources currently being threatened due to hateful rhetoric. It’s important to learn these histories to prevent the injustices towards the transgender and queer community from simply occurring again in a loop ad infinitum. When it comes to advocating for the transgender community, it’s essential to demonstrate support beyond the bottom line and the month dedicated to pride. As ActiVisions: Trans Histories and Activism, 1950s -1990s demonstrates, art and the revisiting of the archive prove a powerful mode of doing so.

Check out the ActiVisions playlist by Tobaron Waxman:

[1] Xanthra Phillippa MacKay was an influential activist in her own right. The ArQuives is actively seeking donations of her materials.

[2] Mackay, Xanthra Phillippa; Ross, Mirha-Soleil (1993). gendertrash from hell, vol 1. Toronto, ON: genderpress.

[3] Raj, Rupert. Metamorphosis vol. 1, no 1. (February 1982), 1.

[4] Maggie’s Zine: By Sex Workers for Sex Workers: 1993-1994. Pg 17.

[5] Toby’s Act (Right to be Free from Discrimination and Harassment Because of Gender Identity or Gender Expression), 2012″. Legislative Assembly of Ontario.

Eternally Shadow-Banned

On Bodies Being Bodies and Confronting the Algorithm

Jada, Unraveling Series 2023.Photo series sponsored by Bonjibon.

By Taylor Neal

I have always been fascinated by bodies and the natural beauty of bodies being bodies interacting with the world.

I grew up as a dancer, which connected me intimately at an early age to the complexities and nuances of different bodies through all stages of life—the ways that youthful bodies move, how these movements change as we age, and the influence of one’s own lived experience on their relationship to their body.

As a student, I became fascinated by fashion and costume and how garments and manipulations of shape and silhouette can alter and interpret bodies—how one’s background, location, and lived experience can influence one’s relationship to their body.

This ongoing fascination led me to photography, to the capturing of bodies in stillness. I have worked in this medium now for over a decade.

Taylor Neal. Jolene (2), Unraveling Series, 2022. Photo series sponsored by Bonjibon.

On Bodies Being Bodies

Through photography, I strive to capture natural relationships between the human subject and the natural world and to emphasize that we are a part of nature, not apart from nature. I refer to my art as an exploration of free beauty, a concept derived from Kantian philosophy, specifically Kant’s Critique of Judgement. Kant defines free beauty as “the experience of beauty rests on what he calls a harmony, or a free play of the faculties of imagination and understanding, punctuated by pleasure. Notably, this free play is supposed to be without a concept.[1]

Kant’s notion of free beauty arrives when we notice a harmony between imagination and understanding, based in pleasure, without predisposition. In our world, we are so often influenced by what we are told is beautiful, what we are allowed to regard as beauty, that we’ve become disconnected from our natural noticing of beauty that resides in the human form. The body is beautiful in a way that we can instinctively perceive. My work seeks to remind us of the free beauty in all of our natural forms.

When we are only able to witness uncensored bodies in sexualized contexts, our detachment from free beauty is extended.

As a queer, femme photographer, I use photography to explore bodily beauty beyond the dominant narratives attached to bodies in media. My work aims to depict genders from a compassionate, intimate perspective, to capture the body in its most natural form in spaces that allow for consent and safety. As most of us working artists in 2024 must, I use social media—primarily, Instagram—to share my work and connect with like-minded communities. The problem, then, is striving to find a respectful balance between maintaining the integrity of my art and mission and satisfying the censorship algorithms that rule these platforms.

Taylor Neal. Strawberry Moon, 2021.

The Algorithm

There are many reasons why these platforms censor and silence bodies. Oversimplified arguments for online censorship are often predicated on maintaining a platform free of sexual content, purportedly to address concerns related to the age of consent. The problem with this practice is that to censor the nude body, especially the femme body, is to link the body inherently with sexuality.

By censoring only certain parts of the body, the genitals and female-coded nipples, the natural body is deemed an inherently sexual image. The body then, is deemed something to be hidden away and ashamed of, where only specific depictions of bodies are acceptable for the platform.

Female-coded nipples are permitted on the platform only within the context of breastfeeding; genitals only concerning birth or as depicted by sculpture or painting. Censors and algorithms decide whether or not, and in what ways, bodies are worthy of being seen. The nipples of femme people are only acceptable if in relation to motherhood, but not by their own autonomous choice.

When we are only able to witness uncensored bodies in sexualized contexts, our detachment from free beauty is extended. In a world that routinely links one’s worth as a human to their sexual desirability, to have our bodies policed in this manner is a constant reminder that our bodies are not our own. Furthermore, in the categorizing of certain bodies as exclusively sexual, and the deeming of the sexual as explicit and subject to censure, our sexuality is silenced. The free beauty inherent in our bodies is silenced.

The western world has suffered for generations from sexual repression. We finally have tools such as social media to generate information, conversation, and education about our bodies, our pleasure, and sexuality, and yet we must use silly type tricks such as “seggs” and “m@sturbation” for these conversations not to be erased on social media— these conversations that have the power to save lives. These censures and erasures also have an outsized impact on sex workers striving to navigate the drastically changing ways of reaching clients and going about their work. Anything outside the lens of acceptability constructed by the platform authorities and algorithms is automatically deemed dirty.

I do the work that I do, to directly confront this silencing.

Taylor Neal. Bri, Unraveling Series, 2023. Photo series sponsored by Bonjibon.

The Silencing

In addition to the many barriers my work faces due to my position as a queer femme photographer, this policing of bodies makes it even more challenging to share my art, which strives to approach the widely experienced trauma of body-based censorship in the western world. My refusal to delete my art from Instagram to satisfy the algorithms means that I am eternally shadow-banned on the platform, which makes expanding my audience next to impossible on the app. Their message: surrender to our guidelines or get lost.

My profile on Instagram aims to be a space where people can come to feel seen, validated, and reminded of their inherent beauty, regardless of what barriers and limitations their body has faced. When I share my other work as a sex educator and writer on the platform, offering access to sex education and conversation on topics of the body, queerness, and sexuality, I face additional censure and silencing.

Even within the policing of bodies in general, there are bodies that face greater barriers than others. I am a white, thin, able-bodied femme living in Canada. Even though I am constantly censored, I still hold privilege in spaces such as Instagram. It is important to note that when I post photos of my own body, these photos are less likely to be flagged or removed than when I post photos of fat bodies, disabled bodies, bodies of colour, queer bodies, and aging bodies. I have learned these facts through experiments with my own social media.

Whenever I mention sex work, I am silenced.

When the sex worker happens to use substances, it is silenced even faster.

Whenever I show body hair, I am silenced.

When that body hair is on a body of colour, it is silenced even faster.

Whenever I show fatness, I am silenced.

When that fatness is showing signs of aging, it is silenced even faster.

Whenever I show intimacy between lovers, I am silenced.

If that intimacy is queer, it is silenced even faster.

Bodies existing outside of what is deemed palatable receive fewer likes, and significantly less views, based on what the algorithm allows to appear on Explore pages within the Instagram app, and often appear on my “restricted content” list. Videos of myself dancing also appear on my “restricted content” list if I dare to touch my body erotically, as though my body is not mine to touch and share how I please. 

The “restricted content list” is a relatively new feature on Instagram, where you can see  a list of which of your posts have been flagged as problematic and why. This list of posts is then used as evidence for “why a profile can’t be recommended,” which means that no matter what hashtags you use or how good your content is, your posts will never come up on anyone’s feed unless they search you specifically. This is harmful for people using this platform for business and for artists striving to share their work and build an audience, because gaining followers and having your content seen is difficult if the algorithm is blocking it from going anywhere. The only way to fix this so that your profile can be seen is to either contest the flagging (which usually doesn’t change anything) or remove the posts that are named “problematic” and wait for the algorithm to re-evaluate your profile.

Taylor Neal. Mosco, Unraveling Series, 2022. Photo series sponsored by Bonjibon.

F*ck The Algorithm

And yet, we simply cannot stop sharing.

We need to see ourselves, our bodies, in the spaces we have access to, not gate-kept behind entrance fees, in art galleries, or on porn websites, run by the same powers controlling our algorithms. In creating a space online dedicated to the expression of free beauty, my intention is to remain available and accessible as a means of safety and support in our collective journey toward reclaiming our bodies, regardless of how the shadow-bans minimize my audience.

I continue to find new and creative ways to share my work within the criteria, and yet I feel a little pang of frustration each time I airbrush the nipples from my photos. Free beauty is meant to refer to the lack of concept, or imposed standard of meaning, and yet to cover nipples is to implicate inherent meaning upon them. But, this platform is what we’ve got for now by way of accessible art dissemination, and so I find ways to share more authentic versions of my work elsewhere, and use Instagram to re-direct folks there. Because we cannot stop doing this work, creating this art, pushing back against the hegemonic standard of acceptable beauty with the bold realness of how it actually looks to be human.

We cannot stop finding beauty in the crevices of the rocks, the way the juice of the pomegranate mirrors the body, and the folds of our skin. Our connection to nature is where free beauty is found, and this unfiltered, raw, organic beauty is the essence of what makes us human. We cannot stop sharing the authentic experience of our bodies, their nuances, and their unique interpretations of life, because we cannot stop expressing our humanity. We cannot stop creating spaces for safety, recognition, and representation. We find ways to work together within the algorithm and to beat it at its own game by using type tricks and blurring our images, or we grind against it together.

So, uplift your favourite artists and share their work. Notice the patterns you see in the algorithms and work to confront them. Call it out when you sense wrongness, in the words of Sara Ahmed.[2]

We must not stop sharing, even if we are eternally shadow banned, because even when it feels hopeless, someone will stumble upon your page and feel seen by your art.

This feature can be found in our third print issue with the theme of Censorship. You can find a copy here.

[1] Kant, I. . The Critique Of Judgement. (1790).

[2] Ahmed, S. . Living A Feminist Life. (Duke University Press, 2017).

Sand after sand, the oyster will cry: Anatomy of an Oyster by Rita Puig-Serra

Rita Puig-Serra. Anatomy of an Oyster, 2023. Courtesy of PhMuseum and the artist.

By Irene Bernardi

“Mother-of-pearl” is one of the most precious and rare types of pearls.

The Italian writer and poet Franco Buffoni crafted a unique poem to tell the story of how a grain of sand becomes this incredible and luminous pearl:


[…]
If you photograph the sand and then magnify it

To three hundred times

Each grain reveals itself as unique:

One looks like Saturn without rings,

Another is Venus, then Mars with colors,

Jupiter that stays under the fingernail

And Uranus that falls

Into the right oyster

And makes it cry

Becomes in a hundred years

Mother’s pearl.[1]

Into the poetic and scientific imagination of the Italian writer, a small and insignificant grain of sand — after a long journey through the planets of our solar system — accidentally slips inside an oyster. This lucky encounter will produce a small but precious pearl that “[…] becomes, in a hundred years, Mother’s pearl.” Anatomy of an Oyster — the solo show by Catalan artist Rita Puig-Serra — is a journey inside the artist’s consciousness that, through the metaphor of analyzing an oyster, tells the story of her personal experience with family abuse.

Rita Puig-Serra. Installation view of the exhibition Anatomy of an Oyster, 2024, PhMuseum Lab, Bologna
Courtesy of PhMuseum and the artist.


Walking inside the small space of PhMuseum Lab in Bologna, are some of the photographs realized by the artist creating a sort of labyrinth, recreating an old installation made by the Italo-Brasilian architect Lina Bo Bardi for the Museum of Art in Sāo Paulo in 1970[2].

The artworks of Puig-Serra as the design of Bo Bardi are placed in clear glass panels, attached to concrete blocks: the exhibition’s layout fades, letting the visitor choose the order in which to see the works. The concrete blocks are as heavy as the words that the artist wants to tell to an absent mother during her childhood. That small insidious grain slowly takes shape and grows, pressing inside the oyster, much like the artist’s thoughts, words, and desires, which, as she grows, can no longer ignore the pearl of fears that have been with her since childhood.

Rita Puig-Serra. Installation view of the exhibition Anatomy of an Oyster, 2024, PhMuseum Lab, Bologna
Courtesy of PhMuseum and the artist.

Rita Puig-Serra. Installation view of the exhibition Anatomy of an Oyster, 2024, PhMuseum Lab, Bologna
Courtesy of PhMuseum and the artist.

Emerging from the labyrinth, a series of photographs are lined on the wall. Some depict the lengthy process of extracting mother-of-pearl, while others showcase the artist’s childhood from her archive, complete with phrases and memories. This is the journey of Puig-Serra inside the process to extract her deep memory of the abuses.

“The oyster will produce layers of nacre around the nucleus.”

This delicate narrative unfolds like a puzzle of memories: analog photographs from her childhood are interwoven with descriptions of the anatomy of an oyster and memories. The ghosts of her family are both visible and hidden within this narrative, such as old photos in which the artist shows some details of the person who abused her. Isolated on one side of the exhibition space is a letter recreated by the artist, written to her best friend, and then burned in a park. Injustices, abuses, and silences experienced are kept inside a small oyster on the sea floor for years when finally the mother-of-pearl sees the light of truth.

Rita Puig-Serra. Installation view of the exhibition Anatomy of an Oyster, 2024, PhMuseum Lab, Bologna
Courtesy of PhMuseum and the artist.


How small and insignificant can a grain of sand be compared to a planet? What are the chances that this grain can transform into mother-of-pearl? Anatomy of an Oyster gathers all these seemingly insignificant childhood events of Rita Puig-Serra to explore pain and abuse. It’s a self-analysis that takes shape in the anatomy of an oyster, which is studied, analyzed, photographed, and assimilated, only to be removed—just like the memories of the Catalan artist.

Rita Puig-Serra (Spain, 1985) is a photographer living in Barcelona. After a humanistic education and a Master’s degree in comparative literature, she studied graphic design and photography.


The project Anatomy of an Oyster was released by Witty Books in 2023. The exhibition is part of PhMuseum International Photo Festival place from 12 to 15 September 2024 in Bologna, Italy.

The PhMuseum Lab will be open 4pm-7pm during the Festival days in Via Paolo Fabbri 10/2a.


For more information about PhMuseum International Photo Festival, visit their website and Instagram.

For more information about Rita Puig-Serra and her exhibition, visit her website and Instagram.

[1] trad. from Franco Buffoni, Betelgeuse e altre poesie scientifiche, 2021, Mondadori, Milano

[2] Moffit E., How Lina Bo Bardi Built An Art World Without Walls, 14/04/2020, www.frieze.com

In Conversation with Laveen Gammie

Architectures of power, green-screen-green, and the politics of In/visibility

Laveen Gammie, Interface (Installation view). Photo Credit: Kyra Kordoski.

By Dani Neira

Last autumn, I began stealing loose breeze blocks, the cement building bricks with decorative designs carved out. You can find them stacked precariously outside of houses, creating partitions between the sidewalk and a parking lot, or perhaps as a stand-alone wall. There is a common design that resembles the geometric right angles of a camera’s viewfinder or increasingly ornamental and asymmetrical compositions. I am drawn to how the blocks shape my vision, how their negative spaces carve out slices of blue sky, and how I can catch someone’s eye through their moss-lined craters. 

Around this time, I listened to a podcast episode where Legacy Russell talks about the digital as an architecture, a space where massive corporations aim to control our “viewfinders.” Like the breeze block, algorithms frame what we see, simultaneously revealing and redacting information. Yet, both physical and digital structures can be torn down or defied. Perhaps my wayward collecting of breezeblocks was enacting some small form of rebellion. The mutability of these architectures offers possibilities and ways of slipping through systems that rely on legibility, classification, and censorship. We can understand censorship in this larger context as the suppression of information that is considered a threat to the hegemonic order. This censorship is sometimes literal, such as Canadians not being able to access news on social media platforms or the shadowbanning of pro-Palestinian voices. It is also insidiously embedded as racial and gender biases within technologies purported as neutral. 

While I was pondering breeze blocks, artist Laveen Gammie was looking at green-screen-green, and we were both reading Glitch Feminism by Legacy Russell. I first came across Laveen’s installation-based exploration of “green-screen-green” in The Meet Up earlier this year. I’ll note here that Laveen and I are good friends, having met through a virtual studio visit back in 2020. Laveen’s practice is critical, playful, and deliciously material, and I return to it often. Her inquiry into green screens appears in Interface as an immersive space through painting the walls and floor, while in The Meet Up, it takes form in the painted platforms that host ladders and balloons. Both bodies of work interrogate how worldviews are projected upon the green screen and within the process of chroma-keying; the post-production technique of removing a green or blue background and replacing it with a different image.

DN: Many of your recent works, including your installation Interface at Open Space and exhibition The Meet Up at Fortune Gallery, have incorporated “green-screen-green. What drew you to explore green-screen-green, particularly in these physical, material ways?

LG: I was thinking about the invisibility of world-making. In my current work, I’m continuing to look at the idea of reification, or how we impose socially-created meaning on objects. As I was considering how worlds were built, a lot of that came down to film, the images, and the technology we consume. That’s how I came to the green screen, but going deeper, I wanted to ask,  why or how are we chroma-keying? This interest is built on it being something we use because it’s “unlike us,” it’s Other, and we use that colour to then project our own worlds. In that way, the green screen as Other is the sort of labour that never gets recognized. I became interested in the physicality of green-screen-green as a physical object. I wanted to give it recognition for its ability to create worlds and be projected onto. And I just love the colour. I love chroma key green. 

DN: When I first saw your green screen platforms, I was immediately drawn to the colour. Then it got me thinking about the physical object that is the green screen and how we don’t usually see it in a pre-production state.

LG: Exactly. We had to assign each other readings for class, and my classmate picked this reading that was a complete game changer. It’s called “Speech, Writing, Code, Three Worldviews,” by Katherine Hayles. It talks about the use of language as a form of power and how, in the past, restricting who has access to knowing how to utilize language has been a form of power dynamics (withholding power, obtaining power, and perpetuating power). Code has become a form of language that perpetuates power. Who has access to understand that language? Code is an approximation of so many things in our everyday life, meaning you can’t encapsulate everything. And I was like, holy shit, green-screen-greening is also an approximation of a worldview, and the power is held in the person that can project their fantasy or their ideas into the world they’re building. 

DN:  I feel like that also really ties into the idea of censorship or the suppression of information as a power dynamic. Going back to the invisibility of the green screen, I feel like it’s often forgotten that there are humans behind code and algorithms and that there’s no neutrality to technological tools.

LG: I feel like that, too, becomes a redaction. What has been left out of this seemingly finalized world that we are seeing?

DN: Yeah. I was thinking a lot about Legacy Russell’s text Glitch Feminism, where she states that the separation between the digital and the “real world” no longer exists. It made me consider how your work makes the green screen visible, what it means to make the production stage visible, and how that could be considered an “error.” How are you thinking about the conditions of in/visibility in your practice?

LG: The aspect of making the seemingly invisible, made visible, is something I’m still considering. I think green-screen-green is representative of a collaborative process. You need people, you need labour to build worlds, you need this green-screen-green backdrop, you need this sense of Other to create worlds. So bringing that into the context of the gallery and showcasing this form of world-making in its production stages, for me at least, showcases an aspect of labour, what it took to make the context for the objects that then sit on these platforms. Another thing that came up this week for me is what constitutes labour and making. Helen Molesworth brought this up in their recent talk, and it’s been lingering for me.

Laveen Gammie, Social Ladder, wood, green-screen-green paint, acrylic paint, disco ball, 2023. Courtesy of artist.

DN: Your exhibition, The Meet Up, is all about labour and who might have a place in the white-collar meeting or at the top of a corporate ladder…I’m reminded of Legacy’s thoughts on digital architectures. We have these big corporations like Instagram or TikTok which, through their algorithms, are attempting to be invisible in many ways while directly shaping our worldviews and what we consume. I’m also thinking about the relationship of that stage [The Meet Up] to the objects that you placed on top of them and the materials used, the painted ladders, yarn, balloons, and the associations these objects have.

LG: It brings me back to the text “Speech, Writing, Code,” because they approximate everything, they control everything. We just don’t see it. And what we do see is only the tip of the iceberg. In Canada, we can’t see the news, we know that. But there are so many things that are being coded, deleted, hidden, and controlled. The stages and performance bring me back to Legacy’s work, with this idea of gender performance and prescribed roles. Her book has been a game changer for me because I think about the prescribed role of everything. 

The Meet Up is about placing something as simple as a ladder in conversation with green-screen-green. The ladder has truck nuts at the top, and the title is Corporate Ladder. I’d like to think that it challenges the performance of climbing a corporate ladder. I’m commenting on it being a male-dominated industry, but the actual act of climbing a ladder we can all understand. Ladder climbing, in conversation with the idea of labour, brings up questions of who is at the top of the ladder. Who’s climbing or striving to climb the ladder?  What does that performance look like? What does it mean to be at the top? What does it mean to be at the bottom? And balloons as objects are interesting because they’re fleeting, they’re always dying, changing, floating…they’re never going to be the same. I think using balloons became a humorous way of commenting on darker things. Also bringing in the concept of necropolitics by Achille Mbembe, I’m thinking about who has the power to prescribe roles and to stage context. Balloons have a life and death, like us. So it’s also about who has the power to be/hold life or hold people in a place of death. I was thinking, how do I deal with social contexts and labour, while also dealing with this aspect of death and control?

Laveen Gammie, The Meeting, wood, metal, monks cloth, balloons, latex, plastic, yarn, 2023. 
Courtesy of artist.

DN: I love how your work utilizes everyday objects people can connect to. I’m sure everyone has memories and feelings attached to balloons whether through celebrations or get-well balloons. One of my favourite parts of that work was witnessing the balloons at any given time; some had deflated to the floor, while others were still fully inflated or hanging mid-way. In relation to my own body, some of them moved when I did, and others didn’t at all. 

LG: Yeah… there’s an immediacy to them. I move, they move. I come back, they’re not the same. I’m not the same. What does that mean? I very much could have kept pumping them up. But no, you have one life, and you will live out your life in the exhibition space. The balloons being disco balls were also a direct commentary on who gets to enjoy leisure and who has the waged labour of upkeeping leisure for others. 

Laveen Gammie, Interface (Installation view). Photo Credit: Kyra Kordoski.

DN: I also wanted to talk about technological biases because that’s very tied to the technique of chroma-keying, which has historically used whiteness as a universal template. There are so many biases embedded in tools like AI, facial recognition, or cameras that are designed to properly expose white skin tones. Chroma-keying has this history where green and blue were decided to be the most “different” from white skin tones specifically. It’s interesting to see how artists are appropriating its language to question the cultural values imposed in their creation. When I started looking into chroma-keying, I re-watched Hito Steyerl’s How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational . MOV File, where she proposes blending into these green screens as a way of countering hyper-visibility…Who were you looking at when you were researching green screens? 

LG: I think I was taking a film course at the time. We had just watched Get Out by Jordan Peele, and I was looking at the way they used film to comment on the racist tropes that have existed in film and technology. I then came to green-screen-green because a student at UVic, Rebecca Fux, had made this hyper-realistic painting of their friends where the background is all green screen. It has this glitch moment where not all moments of the painting are complete. I was also exposed to Sondra Perry’s work, Lineage for a Multiple-Monitor Work-station: Number One; their family is doing something completely nuclear family, just having dinner, but they’re all wearing [green] balaclavas. So, I was thinking about this prescription of violence that’s imposed on the Other, and it was a rabbit hole from there considering the connotations of green-screen-green and technology as a whole. What are the biases already embedded into the code itself, and who is the power holder in this language? 

DN: OK, to wrap this up… what are you working on or looking into right now?

LG: I’m thinking about unquestioned ritual and museums’ roles in slicing through and reducing ideas of ritual through an aestheticization of objects. That’s where I’m at right now. And…Bling Era. [Both laugh] Preciousness, adornment, what gets dismissed.

You can find more of Laveen Gammie’s work on her website.

This feature can be found in our third print issue with the theme of Censorship. You can find a copy here.

Farewell Likely General: An Interview with Brooke Manning

Brooke Manning hanging the GenderFail shirt in the announcement post on social media. Photo by Tanja Tiziana, originally for Now Magazine.

By Ashley Culver

On August 13, 2023, Brooke Manning posted to Likely General’s Instagram account a closing announcement. It included a photo of her hanging a GenderFail t-shirt with the text ‘Radical Softness as a Boundless Form of Resistance’ in the storefront window along with five slides of a letter Manning penned sharing her decision rationale, gratitude, reminiscing about the beginning, and outlining her vision for the final two months. “Nothing lasts forever,” she writes, “and that’s what makes everything we touch in life so very remarkable.”

For a decade, Manning tended to Likely General, the independent “artist-focused shop and gallery primarily supporting the expressions of 300+ queer and marginalized artists.” She opened the small business, located at 389 Roncesvalles Avenue in Toronto, in 2013. Later, she began programming a gallery space in the back of the rectangular shop. Likely General grew into a hub of activity with workshops, events, book launches, lectures, and gallery openings unique to the space and the people it attracted, such as poly-potlucks, annual kids art show, iridology, and tarot readings. In a move counter to the capitalist nature of running a business, Likely General donated to numerous local non-profits and activist groups, proving Manning was guided by her own goals and dreams, eager to root into the community.

I met Manning along with her dog, Jane, who often joined her in Likely General, months after she had emptied the shop space. We sat at a picnic table in Trinity Bellwoods Park and chatted as Jane eyed the squirrels. We spent the afternoon talking, until the sun was too low, about growing into ourselves, the grief of closing, running a business with chronic illness, and embedding rituals into life.

Brooke Manning. Headshot by Andrew Blake McGill. Photo courtesy of Brooke Manning.

AC: It’s been awhile since Likely General closed. How are things with you these days?

BM: There’s a bit of dissonance for me, [Likely General] ended, and now, me as a person, I’m moving on to the next thing, and yet, there is the grief. I still receive messages that people miss it. I’m feeling that in waves too. But I’m also feeling the lessening of having to be that space.

AC: What does it mean to receive those messages?

BM: I’m touched. Before there was a little bit of a veil so I couldn’t sink too much into it. I didn’t want the ego of it. But I see that it’s not about me at all. You make something and it becomes bigger than you.

Before I would cry and wonder ‘I am letting you down?’ Now I can hold those things. I see that they see I need to do what I need to do. And also, these are gifts from them to say, ‘Thank you for doing that, you provided this for me,’ which is lovely.

AC: On the website, Likely General is described as “an independent community-minded small business.” What does community mean to you?

BM: I grew up in a small town. I feel like small towns are communities in the way that I went to kindergarten with the people that I went to high school with. It was ingrained in the fabric of my being. Coming here [to Toronto] I see community can be as big as the world. It’s the quality of vibrancy, of connection, and wanting to do something effective not just for yourself but for all that surrounds yourself. There’s a danger in the definition of community, also, because it creates separateness.

Likely General departure show. Photo by Ness Devos. Photo courtesy of Brooke Manning.

AC: How did you bring the queer community into Likely General?

BM: I’ve always been queer. I’ve always known that about myself since I was a little kid. I wasn’t open in the world about it until maybe my early- to mid-twenties. And I’m 39 now. When I opened the shop, in 2013, I had been living with my girlfriend at the time. We got [our dog] Jane together, and we still share her back and forth; it’s a beautiful extended Jane family — she’s 10 now. But even our relationship was so closeted. We had separate rooms, which was important to us for our autonomy, but many people didn’t know we were together.

I was looking at myself and realizing what that meant to me as a queer pansexual femme—being with many other queer people behind doors and then being with cishet men out in the world. And having people make assumptions about heterosexuality or all these things that aren’t on the surface. There was part of me that wanted to claim that for myself in an open space. I came to this conclusion in 2014 or 2015 and I kept thinking I have this space; I want to use it. I want to highlight people in a way that feels important to me. It wasn’t altruistic; I knew it would give me something, too. So, I opened the gallery section of the store to honor artists who are queer, or marginalized, or women. And then I very quickly [realized] the whole store has to be like this.

It’s remarkable and helped me come out in this way. I want to be seen for exactly who I am. There’s a seed inside all of us that desires that so badly—we all want to be watered.

Photo by Ness Devos. Photo courtesy of Brooke Manning.

AC: The experience of coming out is a universal one for so many of us who are queer. Would you share your story?

BM: It surprised people. I came out to my mom at the same time as opening Likely General. I remember we were in Zellers and my mom said “You keep talking about this person all the time. But you don’t say their name… Is it a woman? It’s okay if it is.” It was powerful. She very openly accepted me. In that moment, it was scary, but once it happened, it felt like no big deal, which taught me that I could do this in other ways, in bigger ways. And maybe it might be a big deal. Now I’m in this space where I don’t care what people think about me, which is very cool. It allows you to keep going and keep doing all of these things that you want to do. Like I would change the store all the time, just on a whim.

I realized the quality of asking for help and being honest, not just with myself, but with the community and others.

AC: What surprised you in the 10 years you ran Likely General?

BM: This is personal and it’s very simple: I surprised myself and the people who know me best when I came out of my shell. When the store opened, I was coming out of one of the most depressive episodes of my life. I couldn’t see myself. I was 28, and if you believe in this stuff, you’re entering your Saturn Return, it’s a tumultuous time. And holy crap, mine was tumultuous. Then 10 years later, I look at how I’ve been able to blossom, but also believe in myself, and create a self-belief that wasn’t there before. And with that, help other people find their own and shine on them a little bit, in a way that people shone on me so that I could get there. I didn’t expect that would come from opening a store.

AC: How did your chronic illness shape running the shop?

BM: I realized that I can’t do things alone. And I was the kind of person that has since I was born, done things alone. I’m an only child to a single mother. I realized the quality of asking for help and being honest, not just with myself, but with the community and others.

Something shifted, the pandemic started a conversation about people who are immunocompromised or have an autoimmune disease, [I thought] I’m going to be honest. When I can’t show up for work, I’m not just going to pretend that I’m fine when I’m in so much pain. Instead, I’m going to say, ‘I’m closing today.’

I started to hire employees, which helped greatly. I realized that I couldn’t let people into the parts of me that I kept hidden. But the staff texts, the way that we communicated with each other [ended that]. It was beautiful, like a team. Someone would say, ‘I got my period today and I don’t want to be in public, can anyone work?’ And sometimes nobody could, and I said well, we’re just going to close today. Sometimes I couldn’t walk down the stairs and [I thought] ‘If I can’t walk down the stairs, I can’t be in public.’

It’s the people that hold us, it isn’t the money.

Emblem for Likely General by Alicia Nauta. Photo courtesy of Brooke Manning.

AC: You describe a ritual in which you painted boobs when repainting the gallery space in an Instagram post. Can you tell me more about this?

BM: In the early days, I was constantly wearing all-black and nice shoes. I never changed out of my clothes to paint the gallery white — it was funny to me, the dance of it, the fragility. I wasn’t necessarily careful.

I kept thinking about how many layers of paint were on the wall before I got here. I wanted to write something funny [on the wall] and then I thought I’m going to paint a set of boobs every time. Different every time. Because they are all different every time. I would paint these big things, and then laugh to myself, and then paint over them. I did this 100 times before I told a person. Later, I revealed [this ritual on Instagram] and it made people smile. They would come into the gallery and tell their friends, ‘There are 200 pairs of boobs [under the paint].’

AC: Were there other rituals?

BM: I’m pagan and [that informs] my culture and who I want to be in the world and how I want to honour my life. So, I do things, such as candle work and nature stuff, daily. It was really important to ingrain aspects of that into the store to mark time. Time is important to me because I see it as non-linear.

Another ritual I had was around closing the store at the end of the day. I love metal music and Doom. I find it so happy. I grew up with metal and the metal heads that I hung out with in high school were some of the softest people I’ve ever met. So I would blast metal music after I close the store and do my close-out procedures.

Also, I charged a rod of selenite with a particular person and put it above the door so that when people entered the space, they passed under it—whether it’s a placebo or not, that’s magic, and people would walk into the store and be like, ‘I feel different.’

AC: Now that it’s closed, what legacy do you want for Likely General?

BM: That’s a good question. It’s the question I ask people that I work with at the end of life [as a death doula]. I want people to feel like it gave them something that they didn’t have otherwise, couldn’t see otherwise, or couldn’t find in themselves otherwise, but it was always there. It, you know, shone, something on it. I hope it allows people to see that they can do the thing, too. They can open a store that’s a bit against the grain. It doesn’t have to be about making a million dollars, it can be about making a life for yourself that’s joyful, peaceful, and calm.

Despite the Odds: Ordinary Grief by Parisa Azadi

Iranian men stand along a canal running through a farmland in the district of Haji Abad on the outskirts of Borujerd, Iran on February 7, 2018.

By Adi Berardini

Parisa Azadi is an Iranian-Canadian visual storyteller and photojournalist based between Dubai, UAE, and Tehran, Iran. Her series Ordinary Grief stems from a journey that involved Azadi returning to Iran after 25 years of “self-exile and embarking on a personal and political reclamation of her identity and history.” With images spanning 2017-2022, Ordinary Grief aims to, as Azadi describes, “reconcile despair and joy, exhaustion and hope. It’s about ordinary Iranians actively trying to create new futures for themselves despite the odds.” The images explore what it means to attempt to remember after experiencing cultural amnesia, longing, and belonging. The series is a love letter to Iran, the place she was born in, but has felt estranged from. Although Iran and Palestine are two distinctly different places with different histories, the narratives of displacement, war, and grief can be felt in parallel. The following article discusses the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza alongside Azadi’s series Ordinary Grief.

Parisa Azadi. Installation of the current group show at Eyes on Main Street festival in Wilson, NC on display until September 8, 2024. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Recently, I have been corresponding on video chat with Ahmed, a humanitarian aid organizer, in Gaza, Palestine. He’s in the dark (it’s 1 am with the time difference) and attempts to use his phone camera flashlight to illuminate. He shows me where he’s staying—a dark tent with a few buckets and a generator. Although we talk through WhatsApp with the help of translation, we don’t speak much verbally because of the language difference. But we share a mutual understanding in this moment through the silence. His house has been left in ruins due to the bombing; his friends and family members have been killed. He has been repeatedly displaced. When he explains the terror that he has faced I start to feel numb, like being submerged in an ice bath. The image is stamped in my mind, and although witnessing is heavy, it feels crucial. My heart breaks for him and his family.

Among the grief, life steadily keeps going, however much we might want to pause the world like the bad horror movie it can be.

The next day, he tells me that even though there’s genocidal aggression by Israeli forces, the kids are playing football (soccer for the Canadians) in the street. He flips to video chat and shows me the kids playing joyfully in the sandy terrain. A few days later, I see kids playing soccer in their front yard and the sidewalk as I go on my neighborhood walk. I think about the kids in Palestine and their resilience of spirit despite the immense trauma and losses they’ve experienced.

These circumstances demonstrate that even among great strife, life does not stop. Among the grief, life steadily keeps going, however much we might want to pause the world like the bad horror movie it can be. Although we can continue to urge for an immediate ceasefire, we cannot briefly pause life and resume. And in times of struggle, the feelings of anxiety and grief can be overwhelming. But with every story of oppression, there’s a counternarrative of resilience and resistance.

In Parisa Azadi’s ‘Ordinary Grief,’ the title a reference to Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s A Journal of Ordinary Grief, Azadi returns to Iran after 25 years of what she describes as ‘self-imposed’ exile. Azadi was born in Iran during the Iran-Iraq war and spent her formative years before she immigrated to Canada when she was eight. As she describes, “Throughout my travels and journey as a photographer, I realized that I was living in this emotional displacement, and I didn’t have a good sense of who I was and where I belonged.  I felt like I needed to go back and to confront that sense of displacement that I felt about my identity and try to come to terms with Iran as my home, as a place where I can exist.”

Nesa and her friend Yasaman look out the window in Tehran amid the coronavirus pandemic in Tehran, Iran on June 9, 2020. Like many young Iranians, they are worried about their future. Currency collapse, unemployment, and inflation make it harder for young Iranians to make ends meet, with many of them seeking a better life abroad.

I was first drawn to Azadi’s photographs for how they spotlight tender moments despite the layers of grief felt in Iran. In one photograph, two women, Nesa and her friend Yasaman, gaze out the window longingly, one lying down, and the other standing, illuminated by the outside lighting. The photo was taken during COVID-19, in a time of economic uncertainty and financial difficulty. Although the women both stare out into the void, the intimacy between them in the photograph is tangible. As Azadi explains, “In Iran, there was always this feeling of grief that was floating in the background, and you can tell by people’s body language and way they would stare off into space or out the window. And this has a lot to do with the fact that they feel like they lack a sense of agency of their own destiny.” Azadi is interested in the sense of disassociation that this provokes, exploring what it’s like to live experiencing isolation and the feeling of imprisonment.

This is a portrait of two sisters on the beach of Bandar Abbas, a port city in the south of Iran. It’s a tender and honest moment. I was struck by their innocence, by what they were wearing, and how free they felt. The portrait reminds me of how much Iran has changed since my childhood. In those days, rules were non-negotiable. I remember being shamed by a stranger for wearing a short dress at the age of six on the streets of Tehran. The growing religious conservatism and culture of fear and resentment taught people to constantly police each other. Iran has changed gradually over the years, but some of those changes have been enormous and the wall that divided us before is gradually crumbling. I’m finding more moments of lightness, moments where life feels a bit more relaxed, normal, and unencumbered.

However, as Azadi emphasizes, she hopes to show Iranians living their normal lives. “I think despite all the tragedies, I didn’t want to paint Iran as this dark and bleak place. Despite the darkness and I [see] constantly in my travels, I would see these moments of joy, lightness, and desire for social change.” And throughout the series, Iran has been experiencing a pivotal societal change in the last seven years.

A photograph features two young sisters on the beach at dusk in their bright Hello Kitty swimsuits, the youngest looking tentative and holding onto her sister’s arm. Azadi explains how she couldn’t go to the beach and play as freely in a bathing suit in the same way as these sisters, even as a child. As she recalls, “Back then, we learned to seek freedom in private. It was a way for us to just protect ourselves from outside dangers and oppressive rules. However, as she further states, “Iran is gradually changing. I am witnessing many Iranians pushing the boundaries of what is traditionally acceptable, actively trying to create a new future for themselves, despite the odds, despite the dangers.”

Children play in the river along Chalus Road on a hot summer day in Mazandaran Province, Iran on July 24, 2018.

Another thread in Ordinary Grief is relationships with animals and connection to the natural landscape. Children hang over the water on a branch in a turquoise inlet with their backs towards the camera on a hot summer day in Mazandaran Province; tourists are pictured in front of a vast natural background, taking photographs, and looking over the terrain. A Kurdish man, Reza, is pictured tending to his horse and gazing thoughtfully but solemnly against a dark lavender sky. The photograph was taken after teaching horse riding lessons in Ilam, Iran.

Reza Alaeinezhad embraces his horse after teaching horse riding lessons in the city of Ilam, Iran on October 28, 2018.

A man named Akbar is pictured on top of a mountain with a walking stick. He takes a break while hiking in the mountainous area of Kilan, once known by locals as a “lost heaven.” However, the village has faced environmental challenges such as severe drought due to climate change and poor urban planning. The image holds a sense of both empowerment and contemplative sadness. A long journey has been made, but he looks out into the landscape as if he’s searching for more.

Akbar Golmohammadi takes a break while hiking in the mountainous area of Kilan, Iran on February 20, 2018. Locals used to call Kilan the lost heaven. But over the years, due to rising temperatures, climate change and poor urban planning, the village is experiencing severe drought and high unemployment rate.

When I speak with Ahmed, he mourns his cat that died in the bombing of his home. He tells me how each morning before the war he would collect the neighbourhood cats and feed them breakfast. Another one of his favourite past times from beforehand is planting trees. When you give to the land, it gives back to you—a mutual relationship. Caring for animals is healing when they also lend care in return, in a world that can seem so gravely uncaring. The connection to the land creates a grounding in tough times but proves difficult when it’s being stripped away from you.  Especially in a world so saturated with unchecked violence that justice remains a hope on the horizon.

Ahmed is a humanitarian aid worker, raising money to feed displaced families and children in Gaza. He and his volunteer team (@Palestinians_11) purchase food in bulk and then cook it in large metal pots for community members. Although he is facing great hardship, his work demonstrates the power of community and solidarity through these difficult times. It’s a narrative that the mainstream media often omits—the narrative of resilience. But he and his family shouldn’t have to be resilient. They deserve a peaceful life just like anyone else does. Heartbreakingly, it’s evident that Ahmed and his family are proud to be Palestinian but are only seeking to leave Gaza due to being forced out by violence, land theft, and occupation.

As Azadi’s Ordinary Grief explores through displaying the tender moments among the hurting of grief and loss, dreaming and desire can hold up a powerful mirror to the ugliness of death and destruction under tyrannical forces, genocide, and war. After all, one of the first things corrupt powers hope to steal is one’s dreams. It takes courage to dream after everything has been stolen away, to return home after years of self-exile, or to connect to the culture you attempted to suppress. A form of resistance to oppression can be living life with pride, despite the ever-present grief and dehumanization, and pushing for social change, despite the odds.

Check out Parisa Azadi’s Ordinary Grief on view at the Eyes On Main Street Photo Festival from June 1st until September 8th in Wilson, NC. 

If you’re interested in supporting Ahmed’s family, please consider sharing or donating to the campaign to help his family evacuate Gaza safely.

Forming Information: IT IS MEANT TO BE READ by Aileen Bahmanipour

Aileen Bahmanipour. IT IS MEANT TO BE READ. Installation shot. Burrard Arts Foundation. Photo courtesy of Dennis Ha. 2023.

March 31 to June 3, 2023

BAF Gallery, Vancouver, BC

By Kiran Dhaliwal

Aileen Bahmanipour’s uncanny installation and works with paper question the regulation of and access to information through its destruction. IT IS MEANT TO BE READ features revisited and new works by the Iranian-Canadian visual artist from her winter residency at the Burrard Arts Foundation. Bahmanipour’s practice is informed by her lived experience with censorship in Iran. Her work also centers the exploration of contemporary forms of Iconoclasm which she defines as “not to reject or negate the image but to redefine it.” 

The gallery is transformed into a quasi-bureaucratic space with diagrammatic imagery, paper hanging on the walls, and a filing cabinet in the center. Instead of answers and information, Bahmanipour’s manipulation of each piece reveals tensions and misgivings in the supposed transparency of constitutional law and archival systems. In turn, this prompts viewers to remedy their curiosities beyond the gallery space and, like the title suggests, encourages active interpretation.

When clarity is lacking, this creates a level of opacity obfuscating the connection between a body and language.

When it comes to information meant to be accessible and understood by the public, things like government documents and constitutions often feel like they’re written in a different language. When clarity is lacking, this creates a level of opacity obfuscating the connection between a body and language. IT IS MEANT TO BE READ (2022) is a manifestation of this connection where Bahmanipour reimagines language through the exploration of her own body in the process of engaging with an English translation of The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran. This vaguely worded document contains articles regulating and restricting the circulation of information to the Iranian people. For those trying to navigate what’s legal or not (especially when the consequences are severe), the ambiguity plays in favour of the state as the public reaction to such dubiety can present itself as self-censorship. These conditions create cautious, fearful citizens who do not want to test the law, afraid that acting outside of the status quo may land them in prison or worse.

IT IS MEANT TO BE READ by Aileen Bahmanipour installation shot, Burrard Arts Foundation. Photo courtesy of the artist.

This series occupies three of the four walls and takes on two approaches. In the first approach, handmade letter-size sheets of paper are embedded on both sides with single lines cut from the document. The lights of the gallery glow through the sheets that extend outwards making both sides visible to the viewer. Bahmanipour’s deconstruction and reconstruction of the Iranian Constitution is her method of finding new ways to connect to the language and attempt to understand it. The single lines are folded into a knot and then arranged onto the paper like concrete poetry, creating a new method of connection and meaning to the language. 

IT IS MEANT TO BE READ by Aileen Bahmanipour installation shot, Burrard Arts Foundation. Photo courtesy of the artist.

The other two walls are mounted with fifty-five pages of handmade paper that, while still wet, Bahmanipour placed over her keyboard as she typed the constitution. The organic, delicate quality of the paper creates a sense of softness, making the depressions and punctures left by her typing fingertips on the lower half of the sheet somewhat violent. The sheets are affixed side by side to the wall with a single nail against a painted strip of pale umber that runs along the two walls. Described as “cryptic” in the exhibition write-up, this series is arguably the clearest embodiment of Bahmanipour’s efforts to understand and reimagine the text and language. The perforations made in the paper can be seen as indices of her body as she converts dysfunctional language into material form. 

Iconoclasm doesn’t just refer to the destruction of religious icons, images, and monuments, but symbols of a political or ideological cause as well. Bahmanipour’s interest and exploration of contemporary forms of Iconoclasm is displayed in this work. She also gives the ground of the image—which historically has been suppressed and regarded as merely a surface that holds the image—a new language, making it more visible and a part of the image. She uses the iconoclastic gesture of an image-breaker or, as she describes in her statement, “the person who doesn’t have a language of her own but by deconstructing the already established language tries to create new meanings to make sense of reality and create meaning from apparently disparate elements.”

Aileen Bahmanipour. IT IS MEANT TO BE READ. Installation shot. Burrard Arts Foundation. Photo courtesy of Dennis Ha. 2023.

The sculptural installation, Filing Cabinet (2017-2023) is a transparent, self-destructive archive system. Again, Bahmanipour interrogates the supposed transparency of archival systems by removing the sides of the filing cabinet to make the insides visible. Viewers are encouraged to open and look through the drawers. Three of which contain clear folders with printed and layered diagrammatic imagery. As if the cabinet was dreaming about the folders that sit inside of it, a dream bubble in the form of a large painted roll of acetate reaches up and wraps itself around the duct above. 

On the floor between the two is plastic tubing that is connected to a dosing engine in the bottom cabinet drawer. The engine administers a permanent, acidic ink that travels through the tubes and pools onto the painted pile of acetate and given its nature, will ruin the intricate illustrations. When an archival system is meant to preserve and accumulate information, Bahmanipour gives us an anti-archival, self-destructive system that eats away at itself. No matter how clear the folders and acetate are or how many panels are taken off the filing cabinet, what stands between me and this installation is a curious space worth questioning.

At a time when we are constantly bombarded by information and falling into algorithmic feedback loops on social media, IT IS MEANT TO BE READ left me feeling slightly disoriented and walking away wanting to know more. Bahmanipour’s manipulation of the selected source materials raises questions about the systems and flow of information meant for the public. By deconstructing and reconstructing the image, her work interrogates archaic, systematic constructions of representation and presumed objectivity with an alternate visual form. Despite the opacity of their façade, viewers are invited to interact with the materials that promise transparency and are meant to explain how systems function. Instead of searching for answers in documents that falsely promise this transparency, the exhibition encourages using our confusion or restriction of information as a catalyst to create alternative methods of understanding.

This review is featured in our third print issue themed on Censorship found here.

Complexifying this notion of truth: in conversation with Anna Karima Wane

Anna Karima Wane. Installation view of a rememory that belongs to somebody else at Museum of Impossible Forms (Helsinki, FI). Photo by Rong-Ci Zhang. Photos courtesy of the artist.

By Juliane Foronda

I vividly remember when I first met Anna Karima. It was in Dakar, around a table full of food, under the shade of a mango tree. Now looking back over two years later, and reconnecting in one of the most unexpected places, I can’t imagine a more fitting first encounter. 

a rememory that belongs to somebody else was recently on view from May 4 – 12 at the Museum of Impossible Forms. This solo exhibition by Helsinki-based Senegalese artist Anna Karima Wane was filled with gestures, questions, (hi)stories, rehearsals, and radical acts of hospitality that echo far beyond the formal parameters of the work. In the space, I first noticed the CRT television screens scattered across the floor playing a four-channel video titled, How to Eat a Mango, with a large rug and a seating pouf in front of the screens, inviting guests to take their time and get comfortable.

Along the wall were photographs of archival material that documented her research trip in the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, coupled with hand-written journal entries ripped straight from her notebook, with their hands being present both literally in the photographs, as well as through the vulnerability of teared pages. On one wall were two longer texts that share the stories of two women in her family, Aye Touré, and her grandmother. These stories fill the space with a mix of authority and tenderness.

Finally, there was her dining table that was transported from her home in East Helsinki. On the table rests a few more journal entries, trivets with images of colonial Jamaica from her grandmother’s home, and laser engraved napkins with digitally altered images of colonial Kindia. There were also chairs around the table that gently offered themselves to host the guests, giving everyone a place to sit, consider, and rest.

Anna Karima immediately offered me a cup of mint, jasmine, and orange blossom tea upon arriving at this conversation, and told me that this is the tea that her mother makes for her back in Senegal. My hands naturally wrapped around the mug to take advantage of the warmth.

Anna Karima Wane. Installation view of a rememory that belongs to somebody else at Museum of Impossible Forms (Helsinki, FI). Photo by Rong-Ci Zhang. Photos courtesy of the artist.

Juliane Foronda: We’re sitting here now in the middle of your exhibition at the Museum of Impossible Forms in Helsinki. How did this work come to be?

Anna Karima Wane: The first thing was The Story of Aye Touré, which I wrote in 2020 when I was first starting to look into this story. I was very inspired by Saidiya Hartman’s Venus in Two Acts and thinking about the importance that is given to the archives and how we find our place within this record that has tried to erase our histories. Then going to France and going through the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer in 2022, and having that experience was a little bit surreal in many ways. I remember writing in my notes that I didn’t know what I was looking for. I was taking these images of files and documents, but also wanted to show myself within it and think about my own position in this. I wanted to also bring back this idea of the gaze into it and talk about why we are doing this. This is a document. It has been kept, sure. But then, why am I looking for it? And how does me being here change the relationship to whatever this notion of truth is? The archive erases a lot of lived experiences and a lot of lived realities. I had to keep reminding myself that this is not everything. It’s interesting and you can keep going back to it, but you cannot give it too much weight.

JF: It’s interesting to hear you talk about the gaze, and maybe stretching that into ideas of performance. In the show, the video work is perhaps the most obvious performance or performative piece. But then I also see your hands being very present in the archive photographs showing that it’s your perspective, your gaze. It’s not just any generic gaze from online archive documentation, but a person’s hand is holding the documents. It’s a Black person’s hands holding them, a family member’s hands holding these things. It’s quite powerful to document yourself in these photos.

AKW: I think that at some point I was hesitant about including these images in the show, and I think I still have a lot of work to do with them and about the conversation that I want to have with my grandmother about these things that I found. I really wanted to think about this exhibition as a book in a way while thinking about how I tell these stories. Writing is also an important part for me throughout this whole experience and for my practice in general. I really wanted to write about these experiences and write about the process of going through the archive.

This idea of the exhibition as a book was a constant thought, but the first thing I considered when thinking about how the show would look was that I want it to be like a living room. And even more so, capturing the idea of my grandmother’s living room, even knowing that there’s no way I can recreate that, but I was thinking about how I can make myself comfortable within the space so that I can better host people within it. That was an important question for me because I feel like I have some concerns with exhibition-making, so I just had to think through how I would be able to create that space for myself. Up until the last minute, I was thinking if I should bring in the table, because it’s my actual dining table from my apartment, and I was just thinking about what kind of table I want to have in the space. For me, it was very important that it was the kind of table that you feel like you can gather around as opposed to a desk or work table. Once I wrote the journal entry about the tables, it was clear that I had to bring it in.

JF: You opened your exhibition text with a quote from Toni Morrison’s Beloved. I just want to expand a bit on the term “rememory” and slightly step away from Morrison’s telling of it and talk a bit about your perception or knowing of the term.

AKW: The term rememory kept coming back up, and it was something that I was really thinking about because Beloved is one of my favorite books. I thought back to the beginning of this project in 2020, when I was stuck inside like everyone else, and I was thinking a lot about motherhood and about parenthood in many ways. I read Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and then Are You My Mother? in close succession, and was thinking a lot about the “good enough mother” idea from Winnicott. I was reflecting a lot about that, and these ideas of anger at the mother. I started describing it almost as an anger at the mother for not being able to protect herself.

That was also something that I found in the story of Aye Touré. Just hearing it from my grandmother and the way that she was almost erased from her own story and trying to feel these “zone d’ombres,” and thinking about how to tell this story. Beloved is also in that context of thinking about this character of the mother and the choices that she has to make to protect herself and to protect her children. This idea of rememory really stuck with me for a long time – that it is a memory, but also thinking about the action. Even in the quote that I use, she talks about the moments when you walk through a memory that belongs to somebody else, and this active participation in the act of remembering and memorialising. That’s something that resonated with me.

Anna Karima Wane. Trivet from the artist’s grandmother’s home. Photo by Rong-Ci Zhang. Photos courtesy of the artist.

JF: You touched a bit on the role of the archive in this work. The two of us share a deep affinity for archives and have spoken many times about all the curious things you can find in these spaces, but also the heavy bias that comes with an archive. How was your experience working in the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer?

AKW: The first things I looked up before I even found these documents was “Guinea 1895 to 1910” and having this wide range of this time period that Aye Touré was there to try to get an idea of what that would have been like. I was reading all these documents and I remember writing in my notes about how the fact that this is so boring is a failure of the archive to capture real life. It was just these dry letters back and forth, they felt so sterile and divorced from reality because in these letters, it’s not like they’re organizing a picnic or something, they’re actually committing acts of violence against people and yet they managed to be completely detached from that. That was the first thing that kind of struck me throughout reading these documents. As I kept going, I just kept thinking, what if I miss something just because I got bored? I wasn’t so much interested in the documents themselves as I’m interested in what is not there, and what is in between the lines, and the things that are there are omitted a lot of the time.

JF: One thing I’ve always found quite interesting with archives is that sometimes the need to preserve kind of stops things in the archive from living or continuing to live. Maybe that’s their paradox.

AKW: I definitely agree with that. I think a lot about when you and I went to the Hotel and Restaurant Museum archives last year and I just remember that photograph of the woman making sausage. In the description, it says something like “hostess making sausage”, and in parentheses are the ingredients. That has really stayed with me because it’s not just telling you that this person is making sausage, but it’s in a way giving life to this archive by giving the recipe to follow. It made me think a lot about how you give life to the archive. I think the handwritten notes were also my way of giving life to these things.

JF: It’s also important to think of the responsibility of the archivist and those who work in collections to give them life. These conscious or unconscious decisions to omit or include certain things, or to decide what’s considered important, factual, or necessary information to include or exclude is a lot of power and responsibility.

AKW: That’s something that I think about a lot for sure. One of the first people who came to see the work spoke to me about the gap – about the fact that you’re telling a story, but you’re not telling the whole story. You’re kind of leaving these gaps and being able to kind of sit in between the gaps and not having to say “everything” because you can’t do that. I think that’s one complication of my relationship with archives, which is the fact that it’s often seen or considered as the truth, but for me, it’s more about complexifying this notion of truth. Like, what does that mean? I go back to this idea of walking through a memory that belongs to somebody else, and not taking for granted everything that is written down, but also finding these connections and relying a little bit more on things that you cannot explain.

Anna Karima Wane. Handwritten note. Photo by Rong-Ci Zhang. Photos courtesy of the artist.

JF: That makes me think about the unfair assumption that written language is more powerful or more important than other forms of language or communication. I’m also curious about your use of language in the show because I find your use of language very intentional here. It’s present in various ways throughout the show whether that’s in hearing your voice talk about mangoes, seeing your handwriting, or reading the texts that you wrote. How did you navigate using language in the show? 

AKW: It was a bit instinctual and not very planned out, but from the beginning I had the idea that I was going to make a book. I think in words a lot of the time, it’s just one of my preferred forms of expression in a way. It helps me process and create connections between the things I’m thinking about. I feel very attached to writing as a practice. 

JF: There’s also the multilingual reality of your work. The entire show is in English other than the text on the archival documents, which is in French. Then thinking of maybe even communicating what you’re researching to your family, that would likely be in Wolof. And we’re in Finland, where Finnish is the primary language. For me, it’s quite curious to think of language in relation to translation. And not just translation between different languages but thinking about how we translate what we see into words, or how we translate an experience into a conversation, or something like that.

AKW: I’ve been thinking about how I’ll share this work with my family, and how the translation would have to be in that direction, strangely enough. I would have to consciously move things towards French or Wolof. There was one text that didn’t make it in, which was about Malinké, my grandmother’s language, and thinking about generational shifts, how things are being transmitted, and how we’re kind of losing a little bit as we go along. It’s also interesting that there’s so much text here, but people are still asking me what the archives are saying. I don’t know… you don’t need to know everything that is being said.

JF: It’s also interesting to think of how language and translation can be an assertion of power because you’re framing things in a certain way. The translator is the one in control of how things will be presented and how perspectives can be shifted. For example, we’ve had this conversation before about when it’s convenient to use “foreign” versus “international” when talking about people, specifically in an arts or academic context. Maybe this example is quite relevant not just to the show here, but to your lived experience in Finland so far.

AKW: Exactly. Showing this work here made me have to think through these questions in Finland, which is a white environment. So, thinking about how this work is related to my family and very personal things, it’s strange in many ways for me right now, because I do feel like I’m in a way sharing myself with people who don’t have a lot of context.

This past year I’ve been thinking a lot about my time in the USA making my bachelor thesis, which was about representation and different ways of representing and talking about Black women, and how much of that was a response to the environment and how much of that was coming out of a need to justify my presence or my existence in this space. So, when working on this, I had to think to myself, what do you want to do? and not just, how can I make everyone understand where I’m coming from? That’s been a really big question for me to try and navigate.

I’ve been reading and rereading this article called Traces, Signs, and Symptoms of the Untranslatable by María Iñigo Clavo and they talk about artists from the Global South or from marginalized communities feeling like they need to translate that context in their work. The text was more specifically talking about Native American practices and how people are kind of shifting certain things to a Western context in a way that will make the Western audience feel like they understand, what really needs to happen for them to understand is a complete shift in their mindset.

JF: Or understand that they don’t know yet and that maybe it’s a learning opportunity for them.

AKW: Yeah exactly, it’s completely different. That’s a question that I have a lot of the time and trying to also find a certain balance. I understand that I’m here. I’m in Finland. I’m at this white institution, and this is the institution that’s going to give me a degree. But then, how do I still make things happen on my own terms without feeling like I have to completely contort myself to fit in? Because I was thinking, too, what does it mean to show this work in Finland? Do people get it?

There are so many memories in the house, so many different people who have passed through it. It’s a very charged place for me in many ways.

JF: Exactly. This show talks about Blackness, Black Ancestry, and womanhood, but it also talks about hospitality and hosting traditions in general, which are widely different in Senegal than in Nordic countries, like Finland. The way you’ve translated all of that in a way that’s understandable by the local audience, but also unwaveringly true to yourself is impressive.

It’s also interesting you say that a priority of yours during the exhibition is making connections because to me, this show is all about relationships. You said in the exhibition text that the work roots itself in the relationship you have to the women in your family, but also their relationship to the men they love and raised. Aside from that, I can also see the work itself as evidence to your relationship to place and your relationship to culture.

I think about my grandmother’s house a lot. I grew up there also, so it has been my home for many years. I think a lot about how much life there is in that house and how I’ve lived there from the beginning of it when we moved there in 2000. I feel very attached to that place specifically, and to how there are the spaces in that home that have their own choreography that have been developed over many, many years. It’s like a language that has developed over time and a comfort that has developed over time. When I go back home, I always like spending so much time in that house as well. There are so many memories in the house, so many different people who have passed through it. It’s a very charged place for me in many ways. It’s also very connected of course, to Senegalese culture in many ways in these ideas of hospitality or teranga, as we would say. I won’t say it’s unconscious, but it’s just part of the fabric of the place and of the culture I come from. Obviously, I’m always going to offer food, it’s not even a question.

JF: Exactly. I’ve experienced living and working in Nordic places for a while, so I’m familiar with the reality of what’s hospitable to some is overbearing to others, or what’s hospitality to some is vacant to others. There’s a lot of learning that there’s not one version of hospitality. There’s not one way to host.  Even if you’re practicing hospitality, that doesn’t mean that the people receiving it are necessarily feeling hosted. It’s curious how drastically hospitality can differ. What is hospitality to you, especially now being here in Finland?

I think a lot about my studio at school, where I’m sharing the biggest corner space with two of my friends and there was a lot of discussion about what that space could be. Early on, I had this talk with my studio mates, Joel and Romance, about us being able to kind of carve the space that’s open to everyone. If you have it, why not share it?

I think it really relates a lot to the text I wrote for the show about my grandmother always hosting people because as soon as I left home, I became that person. I didn’t even know. When I went to boarding school in South Africa, suddenly my room was where everyone was hanging out. In college in the US, where I lived was just like always open for people to come in and that continued to happen when I moved off campus and my mom came to visit, and she asked me: why do people always come here when they have a problem? Now there’s more intentionality behind it for sure. Now I’m trying to find my boundaries, but I think there’s a big part of me that knows that if someone needs something, I’m just going to be there.

Anna Karima Wane. Installation view of How to eat a Mango (2023). Photo by Rong-Ci Zhang. Photos courtesy of the artist.

JF: Sometimes some people don’t realise that something exists until they experience it. Like Senegalese level of hospitality, for example. These things that are just common practice to you are suddenly extraordinary to some, and probably confusing to a lot of people as well. So, if we’re talking about what hospitality is to you, I think it’s simply you. It’s how we were raised. It’s how you live and navigate the world. It’s knowing that your ancestors are firmly watching you to make sure you offer people something.

AKW: I guess sometimes these things are just ingrained. It’s not something that is always conscious in these cases.

JF: In thinking of that and talking about school and your studio, I think it’s also important in the context of this show to talk about how this is your MFA show. Final MFA work is typically shown in a group show on campus at Uni Arts Helsinki, and you are the only person out of over fifty students to make the conscious decision to pull away from exhibiting not just in the group show, but outside of the institution completely. You instead are exhibiting your work at the Museum of Impossible Forms. Can you tell me a bit about that decision to step away from exhibiting with your class and what led you here?

AKW: Yeah, in my acknowledgements I thanked the bus driver that left me in London.  That was shitty, but it was a moment where I was just stuck in that bus station with my phone dying or dead most of the night and I just went through these cycles of thinking like, what is art? What am I doing with my life? What’s the point of all this? And then in the next five minutes, I was writing all these ideas for new work. I was also thinking about what it means for me to show my work in this white institution, and how I want my work to be seen. At that point, I already had questions, but I hadn’t even had my biggest problems with the school yet, to be honest. It was just starting. 

Finland is very specific. This is not the first time I moved countries, yet I feel completely lost because their system has so many rules, and there’s no support or guidance for international students. I also don’t feel heard in many ways. Especially on issues like racism, there’s a lot of ignorance. I remember this class that I took my first semester, which was about documentary in contemporary art and the teacher talked about the history of documentary. After a few days of class, I realised that I was going to have to be the one to bring up colonialism because the teacher had still not brought it up at all. I studied documentary in college so I couldn’t understand how you can speak about the history of documentary and not talk about that, and not talk about how documentary in many ways was started to capture the other. I eventually spoke up and said that I feel like the history of documentary is very much rooted in the oppression of marginalized people, and then the teacher just goes, “okay,” and that was it. It made me think a lot about why it is often the labour of the person of color to bring up racism, racial injustice, or racial ignorance.

JF: Yeah, we know that institutions are rarely safe spaces for those in the global margins, but I’m curious about what your Finnish peers are doing when they hear about your experiences. Are they standing with you? Are they the ones speaking up and calling this stuff out?

Yeah, I do feel like I found some people who do. I mean, Finland is really white and ignorant overall, but I’ve never met allies like I’ve met here. Of course, the people who are in charge still are not listening or don’t care and that’s unfortunate. 

JF: I do want to speak a bit more about not only the active choice to not have this show affiliated with the institution, but more so the choice to step out on your own.

AKW: The first thing I wrote during that sleepless night at the London bus station was, “You want to put them on shaky ground.” What I meant by that line was the impression I got from my school was that: you are invited, but this is not yours, this is not for you. So, we come in with the feeling of being an unwanted guest in a way. I knew that I couldn’t exhibit at the school because it’s so much about consumption, and I did not want my work to be there. And I don’t want to be tokenized. This work is extremely important to me and is extremely personal, and I don’t want it to be consumed in that way. I’m also concerned with the intentionality of people who will come. Not everyone is going to come here and that’s okay.

The Museum of Impossible Forms (MIF) is one of the spaces that hosts exhibitions without charging artists, which is rare in Helsinki. Their mission statement is very much involved in practices that deal with archives, and that deal with BIPOC, and are centered around people whose voices are not always heard in the mainstream Helsinki art scene. For me, it was kind of obvious at a certain point. I had a studio visit with Chris Wessels, one of the co-founders of MIF who I had connected with at one of their events. We had a lot of conversations around the work so I reached out to him about if MIF would host my MFA exhibition. Maybe it was also the right time because they had just moved here a month and a half ago and this is the first exhibition in this new space. It’s been a good space for this work and allowed for it to stretch out, which I wouldn’t have had at school for sure.

JF: Yeah, it’s easy to say as we’re currently sitting in the exhibition itself, but this is a complete show. It’s not a one-off project to fulfill something in class. This is work that in many ways, you started well before your MFA, before you knew that you would be showing in Finland. It’s a solo exhibition in its own right and it being your MFA work is (at least to me) very secondary to it.

AKW: I feel I was lucky, and I am incredibly grateful. Not just to MIF for hosting, but to the many people who have supported me through this process. Many of my friends are also working on their own thesis and still found time to help and support me in various ways. It all leads back to community… I had a whole part in my thesis about “What is community?”. 

JF: Well, what is community?

AKW: What is community? I don’t have the answer. 

JF: You have a whole section in your thesis.

AKW: I do have a whole section. It was mostly questions, let me tell you. I feel like working on this project and making this exhibition, I’ve been held up and supported by many people, and by a community of people. I think I didn’t expect it either. I’ve been running around talking about community building and doing all this stuff to try and make it happen. I quickly realized that the school and the institution were not interested, but that it was resonating with other people. I just feel like in making this show, I’ve also felt like the energy that I was putting out, I was kind of experiencing firsthand.

To check out more of Anna Karima Wane’s work visit her website or Instagram.