Archive

If Kevin Beasley’s sculptures from A view of a Landscape were largely concerned with countenancing historical narratives, reframing atavistic patterns from the 18th and 19th centuries to emphasize how they remain in place centuries on, Canadian sculptor Catherine Telford-Keogh’s work in the aspic genre reflects squarely on the perversities of contemporary, late-stage capitalism. And if the last essay explored Beasley’s symbolic suspension of exploitation, erasure, and decay, the works I’ll discuss here approach the crumbling worlds of contemporary capitalism by leaning into the encroachment of precarity or decay. Telford-Keogh’s work is largely defined by a flailing sculptural mode similar to those we’ve seen so…

Autumn 2019 in Beirut felt like summer. I had been in the city for one month already, staying as a resident at the cultural space Mansion where I was working on a curatorial research project. The formally abandoned villa sits on a hill in the city’s Zuqaq al-Blat district, the immense creativity within its walls unidentifiable from the street below. It was through the artistic community of Mansion that I first met the artist Mohamad Kanaan. I’d begun to establish a routine; each morning began with an attempt to make a pot of Arabic coffee, this led to a clean-up…

The first patent for gelatin production was issued in 1754, but gelatin’s industrial production began with the Napoleonic wars at the beginning of the 19th century. With their ports blocked by English fleets, unable to receive properly varied food shipments, French scientists experimented with gelatin as a protein substitute. As we’ll see, this predilection to compensate for austere material conditions repeats as a pattern throughout the aspic’s history. Gelatin plants at this time were a second-order industry, often reliant on the scraps from other factories and processors that worked with animal bones, as well as butchers. While elaborate, molded aspics and…

Francesca Mariano is an exemplar of balance in unbalanced times. Spanning media (and maybe even multiple dimensions), her creative practice carves out space for connection that encourages pause and pleasure, contrary to the Internet’s default setting of disembodied drift and information overload. To me, the most salient dimension of Francesca’s work is that it affords generous space for nuance and contradiction. She approaches online life with a rigorously critical gaze, yet the Web is a frequent subject in her work and her visual output drenched in digital aesthetics. From Instagram dance documentation to movement seminars in “Archaeo-Choreology” and “Water Info…

“Always historicize!” Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious Carrot, fish, walnuts, lettuce, pepper, shrimp, onion, egg, cucumber, celery, tomato, chicken, ginger, olive, gelatine. List of ingredients in aspic recipe Many no longer know them by name, but most of us are familiar with aspics in one way or another. Depending on the era of reference, you may have seen them skulking at dinner parties, or been fed them as a reluctant child; marvelled or puzzled at their gaudy appearance in films and magazines, or delighted or recoiled at their inscrutable ingredients listed in mid-century cookbooks. Their material form is perhaps the…

Casa d’Italia, an Italian community center in Montreal, was built in 1936 with funds from the local Italian immigrant community, the Canadian government, and the Mussolini administration. The building features Italian fascist aesthetic elements, such as a large, austere rotunda and the black star of Mussolini in the flooring. In an article about Montreal’s Little Italy neighbourhood in the Canadian Encyclopedia, Diane Sabourin and Maude-Emmanuelle Lambert refer to the building’s style as Art Deco, which is both incorrect and intellectually irresponsible. Generations later, how recognizable is the fascist context of these symbols to younger Canadians? Scratching the surface of the building’s symbolism and funding…

I still haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Mitra Fakhrashrafi in person. Amidst a global pandemic, our conversation took place on a quiet afternoon in late October, over a Zoom call from two separate cities I, from Toronto and she, from Montreal. I’ve known of Mitra’s work for a few years now, and we have a few mutual friends. Maybe that’s why despite the awkwardness I had anticipated by doing this interview online, we instead quickly settled into an intimate, and conversation about her curatorial practice. Although Mitra is temporarily located in Montreal, much of her curatorial work is rooted…

n another timeline, Nova Bhattacharya and Kevin A. Ormsby would have premiered the largest productions of their careers at the crest of fall. Works that invited participation from artists across the globe, filled 3000-seat theatres, and brought a chorus of Black and brown bodies in motion. Bhattacharya, the Artistic Director of Nova Dance, was preparing to debut Svāhā — a pageant of dance, chant, and ritual performed by women — at Meridian Hall. Ormsby, the Artistic Director of KasheDance, was set to debut a choreographic work with the National Ballet of Canada and the 10th-anniversary production of his company. When the pandemic hit Toronto, everything came…

Asa Mendelsohn and I come from very different worlds—Asa is from New York and spent several years in Chicago and in Vienna as a Fulbright fellow; I have lived in different parts of South India and moved to the US for graduate studies. We found each other through the visual arts MFA program at UC San Diego. E.R. Cho, a mentor to both of us, introduced us when Asa was still considering the move. Asa later told me that our initial conversations about the messy labor politics at UCSD and listening practices convinced him that we could be friends—and that…

In our increasingly digital world, discovering a physical box on an archive shelf, pulling out a folder from within, and carefully examining its tangible contents can feel particularly ceremonious. Research can be an opening to the inaccessible, the unknown, or the forgotten. Kapwani Kiwanga explores this fact in her work, perhaps due to her background in anthropology and comparative religion before becoming an artist. By materializing details and histories often pulled from documents, she brings us closer to things that, though, seemingly obscured by dominant narratives, are actually in plain sight. It was during a research project of my own investigating the…