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If ever there’s such a thing as the cultural character of an epoch—that is, a quality or cultural attitude that distinguishes a historical time from another across spaces and places—the contemporary epoch, at least in the West and perhaps in Africa, will be best characterized by that complicated concept called trauma. Trauma has become the “cultural script” of our time, writes Parul Seghal in a New Yorker essay titled “The Case against the Trauma Plot,” “a concept that bites into the [cultural] flesh so deeply it is difficult to see its historical contingency.” The cultural fascination with trauma, while best…

In Gregg Bordowitz’s Fast Trip Long Drop (1993), the artist poses as a talk show guest. Bags under his eyes. Sweaty. Full, dark hair. Sits in a dim blue polo cutting at his biceps. In front of a rich blue curtain.  Talk show host palms his hands together: “How long since you received your diagnosis of AIDS?” Bordowitz begins: “I’m sick and I don’t want a cure. I like my illness. It’s just as much a part of me as any other of my characteristics. I identify…-” Host: “Ok.” Bordowitz: “…with my illness.” Another afternoon spent chatting with the hospital’s hold track…

For the Toronto Biennial of Art’s second iteration in 2022, “What Water Knows, the Land Remembers,” multidisciplinary artist Nadia Belerique was commissioned for a new version of her installation HOLDINGS (2020–ongoing). In this series, plastic barrels used for shipping cargo were situated within the context of the artist’s familial practice of shipping items to relatives in the Azores. Installed in large stacks, each drum contained a tableau of objects viewed through different stained glass portals. Belerique’s choice of materials, including stained glass, is a means of expanding the tactics of photography, such as framing, depth, and the distance between objects. Through her…

“The best place I can imagine my work is at a party,” says Lan “Florence” Yee in a video introducing their recently exhibited textile series, Tangerine, After Grapefruit. Borrowing from Yoko Ono’s 1964 artist book, Grapefruit, Yee’s large format rendition takes nine 5×5 linen sheets in which hand-embroidered instructions ask the viewer to perform several curious prompts like “Sigh in at least seven different tones” and “Go somewhere you’ve wanted to visit for a long time. Don’t come back.” Tangerine, After Grapefruit was also photographed, made into book form (a collaboration with Toronto-based micropress San Press), and distributed to the public during Yee’s first Toronto solo exhibition, Just Short…

Everything is what it is because of its relationship to everything else. — So & Pinar Sinopoulos-Lloyd (Queer Nature) Paper folds, creases, tears, and crinkles. It holds the vestige of notes passed to one another or journal entries of dreams and nightmares. It facilitates exchanges of currency, and other types of social contracts that become real when written down, and perhaps, letters to a lover. In many ways, paper is an empath; impressionable, and observant. It’s a vessel that lives, dies, and becomes reborn through decomposition. Paper “bridges the material and immaterial” as Hong Hong describes. Papermaking, since the Han Dynasty in 206-220…

Elizabeth M. Webb is an artist and filmmaker whose material practice is entwined with experimental research. These two aspects of her work are inlaid, as it is nearly impossible to speak about one without the other. Originally from Charlottesville, Virginia, Elizabeth’s family history is embedded in her work, in particular its oscillating histories of racial passing throughout the United States. The artist often considers her own experience, and that of her family’s, as a way of examining broader social structures, and how those structures are at odds with lived realities. Her research process acknowledges these limits, her questions leading her…

Black Diamond is a small town located forty-five minutes south of Calgary. In a mutual decision by local councils to prioritize “cost savings,” it was recently merged with the nearby town of Turner Valley, Alberta, and the area comprising the two has, as of January 1, 2023, gone by the name Diamond Valley (clever!). We must not forget that these are all colonizer names—although youthful, punkish me had a fantasy that Black Diamond was named for the KISS/Replacements song, and not for the prevalence of coal in the area. The actual, earthy land of Diamond Valley ripples off to the east, shaking…

Late one early-autumn night, I crawled through the narrow tunnel of a plastic Klein bottle constructed on my college campus. The 3D equivalent of a Möbius Strip, the bottle was a skeleton of flexible PVC pipes and a skin of clear plastic stitched to it with white twine. To guard against mild winds, the bottle was staked to the ground and pulled taut, tied to the bare branches of the trees above. My crush crawled through first, and I followed into the wide arched belly of the bottle. We lay side by side talking for hours, shielded from the light…

“What art might offer is always modest on its own, and, from one angle, art has never looked smaller. But from another angle, in the right conditions, it might offer something close to an actual survival skill.” — Ben Davis, Art in the After-Culture: Capitalist Crisis & Cultural Strategy I. Critic Ben Davis offered this concluding thought in his new collection of essays, Art in the After-Culture. His was the final book I would read in 2022, and these words seem an appropriate summation for a time in which writing about art feels both absolutely urgent and entirely inconsequential. Art’s “smallness” becomes…

Three years after its Golden Lion win at the 2019 Venice Biennale, Sun & Sea arrived in London. The Lithuanian performance on climate change was brought to the British capital as a collaboration between We Are Lewisham Borough of Culture 2022, London’s International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) 2022, and the Serpentine Gallery’s Back to Earth programme on the climate emergency.  This multitude of producers from all corners of the London cultural sphere begged the question: “what exactly is it?”, as many people enquired when I mentioned my summer evening outing. In each context, it became a different art form. Was it a public community event for Lewisham…