Archive

There, in the night—the quiet. Where the sea feels forever and exists independently of you. Your boat moves softly beneath you. It feels too small, and you feel too fragile against the enormous dark. In this moment, you are not someone’s anything.You are only the moment before the fall.Suspended, forever. Here, again.You, brushing the corners of distance. Your shape at the edge of a nerve.Nothing. It is Nothing but the Miraculous. —— This is the image that returns to me often. A body, a boat, the forever. A gesture toward the infinite that ends in disappearance. Long before I knew what it…

Matthew Rankin can hardly fit into a single cinematic genre or a tagged box—and that’s exactly the point. Rankin was born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and is currently based in Montreal. He was able to etch and carve a space of his own, first of all within the Canadian film scene, blending critical renditions of history and experimental collage with his personal idealistic ambitions that sometimes transcend to a poetic sphere. He started his artistic journey as a teenager, spending time drawing, with an interest in the inherent values and concepts of human communication beyond the constraints and absurdities…

Arabic, between Love and War is a book of Arabic poems side by side with their English translations that resists the pitfall of “humanization.” It is part of trace press’ process-based publication series, where each publication arises from a number of creative workshops. This collection in particular arose from workshops held between 2022 and 2023, facilitated by the editors Norah Alkharrashi and Yasmine Haj. Literary translation and “humanization” The publication series explores the challenges of writing and literary translation. Literary translation raises a number of troubling ethical questions in general, but such questions are especially salient when dealing with a language/people…

The first time I ever heard Dancing on My Own from Robyn was a month or so after it was officially released in 2010. I was 18, visiting my grandmother in bleak Galway, Ireland. I remember looping the song blasting from YouTube on my shitty Android phone back then, over and over again until I got over it the very same day. I had no clue that years later, I’d stumble upon a book borrowing the same eponymous title as Robyn’s song. “If gays don’t make babies when we have sex what do we make?… Just the idea of ourselves, over and…

I want to stop thinking about myself. In fact, I wish I could lose my “self” completely. Not for lack of will to live, though. Quite the opposite. I sense with greater frequency that my “self” gets in the way of living, or, is the focus of an inhospitable pressure. It was an unexpected realization, in part because, at present, the need for self-actualization—the pinnacle in Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs”—has become an effigy of Western pop-psychology. With a puzzling degree of certainty, we generally seem to believe in an “authentic self.” It’s this version of the self—not the one you…

Ghayath Almadhoun, a Palestinian-Syrian poet born in Damascus in 1979, is a singular voice in contemporary Arabic poetry, crafting works that navigate the intersections of exile, trauma, and resistance with unflinching clarity and surreal intensity. Born in the Yarmouk refugee camp, a historic center of Palestinian diaspora in Syria, Almadhoun fled the Syrian dictatorship in 2008, three years before the Syrian Revolution, eventually settling in Sweden and later dividing his time between Stockholm and Berlin. His statelessness—what he calls being “exiled from exile”—informs a poetic practice that defies conventional forms and national boundaries. Writing primarily in Arabic, often in collaboration…

Rarely is the camera used to protect. More often it serves to capture, expose, and surveil. Deborah-Joyce Holman’s Close-Up stands in defiance of this, offering an alternative to this use of the lens. Unburdened by distraction, the film is a quiet loop of carefully framed shots following actress Tia Bannon around an apartment. We focus solely on her face, shadowing the mundanity of her actions—filling a kettle, eating fruit, lying down—entranced by her preoccupation. There is no grand narrative, no sound beyond her movements, and yet, we are left wanting more. What is she doing? What happens next? The slow pacing and…

Rebecca Ackroyd’s sculptural and pictorial worlds feel at once familiar and estranged. Dreamlike yet grounded in physicality, her practice spans drawing, sculpture, installation, and photography—often weaving together cast body parts, found objects, and domestic remnants into unsettling tableaux. Her figures, neither wholly present nor absent, evoke a surreal sense of interiority, vulnerability, and transformation. In her work, the body becomes both a site and a memory device—glitching, fragmented, and imbued with narratives that resist resolution. Born in 1987 in Cheltenham, UK, and now based between London and Berlin, Ackroyd studied at the Byam Shaw School of Art and completed her…

Before officially meeting Séamus Gallagher, I knew who they were, and every now and then, I would pass them walking through downtown Winnipeg. On more than one occasion, they were wearing an excellent yellow suit. And each time, this dash of colour against the dull beige and brown facades of Portage Ave shifted the tenor of my day. A little jolt of visual pleasure, in a city whose harsh climes reduce most of us to down-filled neutrals, is always welcome. Over time, it also struck me as a bit irreverent or even challenging, like a little ripple in our staid…

David Garneau first came to my attention when someone shared his 2013 painting Not to Confuse Politeness with Agreement on Twitter. The painting depicts Stoney Nakoda Chief Ubi-thka Lyodage (1874 – 1970) facing and shaking hands with an unknown young RCMP officer. Above the officer’s head is a square. Above the chief is a circle. I thought it brilliantly represented the challenge of (re)conciliation. So when I was invited to review his book Dark Chapters: Reading The Still Lives of David Garneau, I leapt at the opportunity. Garneau is a painter, writer, curator, and professor who currently creates metaphorical still life paintings that express…