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A few nights ago, I went to a screening of Letter to Jane, the 1972 essay film by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin. Speaking with the audience over Zoom after the film, Gorin said, “There used to be critics.” He recalled how, in the 60s and 70s, filmmakers could actually be in dialogue with others about their work. “Today, the only critic I can think of is A.S. Hamrah.” For several decades, the writer A.S. Hamrah has contributed to publications like n+1 and Bookforum. His criticism is laser-focused, unfazed by the soft language used all the time by corporately owned entertainment outlets. Hamrah has the unique…

From Zero Dark Thirty to Homeland and news reports, Afghanistan is frequently depicted through a familiar visual and auditory vocabulary: fast-paced shaky camera footage, violence and chaos, torture, and the markers of breaking news. In the Room, a documentary that premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival in October, pierces through with a gentler approach, subverting expectations. Early in the festival, director Brishkay Ahmed and I met over Zoom for a 40-minute conversation about using sensory memory and reenactment to tell this story, her profoundly moving on-screen conversations, and how the struggle of Afghan women is intertwined with the rest of the globe. One thing…

Hundreds of phones, tablets, and video projections flash in dissonance. Water cascades over touchscreens, tapping, swiping, and scrolling through websites and apps. This endless flow of information animates the hypnotic whiplash of Yehwan Song’s multimedia installations. A Korean-born, New York-based web artist with a background in UX/UI design, Song stages dystopian fantasies of the digital world that subvert the notion of “user-friendly.” Saturating screens with fragmented images of her own body, Song leans into glitch aesthetics (or glitches), seeking out the loopholes and flaws that most interfaces work to conceal. Through immersive installation and interactive performances, Song hacks the design…

If there’s anything I have gleaned over the course of my engagement with the work of lens-based artist, Nabil Azab, it is that there is a liberatory quality in the act of denial. Azab’s approach to photography rejects the long-canonized idea that the photograph is a neutral documentation of truth, or of the world “as it really is.” Azab’s approach is an eschewment of the idea that the photograph has to of anything recognizable—a refusal of the notion that the poetic quality of the photograph has to emerge out of an imagined naturalism, which operates as a stage for the interplay of…

When the biologist Charles S. Elton coined the term “invasive species” in his 1958 book The Ecology of Invasion by Animals and Plants did he know his language would change the imagination about the dangers introduced species could bring? Right at the introduction he eagerly elucidates a nightmarish vision: “It is not just nuclear bombs and wars that threaten us, though these rank very high on the list at the moment: there are other sorts of explosions, and this book is about ecological explosions.” And he goes on to describe the horrors of plant invasions (along with bacterial, viral, and animal). And…

In my experience, small film festivals geographically far-removed from the US often offer the most thoughtful curation of its cinema. With little, or even zero, pressure to cater to American studios and distributors, their programs function as a more adventurous barometer of the state of the nation than whatever Hollywood deems important enough to share with the public. I approached covering this year’s edition of the Paris-based documentary festival, Cinéma du Réel, with this in mind, excited for and open to unknown gems within its lineup of daring nonfiction cinema. My greatest personal discovery was the feature debut of Armand…

Camille Turner’s multi-modal solo exhibition Otherworld occupied the entire expanse of University of Toronto’s Art Museum, transforming architectures of space and time into labyrinthine configurations suggestive of both the brutal lived reality of transatlantic slavery and its afterlife, as well as its fabulated futures. This liquid-like exhibition, curated by Barbara Fisher, mobilizes oceanic poetics, and calls for a poetic response, as prosaic prose falls short translating its fluid permutations. Beyond breaking this essay into three parts to aid contextual submersion, I will lace my response to this exhibition employing an errant method of building synapses of thought, attempting to correspond to the artist’s…

Urine is to be flushed and forgotten, concealed through elaborate infrastructures that buttress modernist fantasies of the human body as a sealed-off and self-contained vessel untainted by waste. And yet in the disavowal of the messy by-products of embodiment, these very systems attest to the transgressive threat of bodily fluids, which expose the ultimate limitations of control. Urination—like defecation, perspiration, regurgitation, ejaculation, and lactation among other subtle and less subtle mechanisms of release—constitutes a mundane performance of corporeal porosity. Breaching the illusory boundary of the skin, urine evokes the necessarily dynamic constituency of ecologically enmeshed bodies. The slippery ontological status…

Frantz Patrick Henry and I met in the Spring of 2019. I co-curated the exhibition “Over My Black Body” at Galerie de l’UQAM with my friend Anaïs Castro. Stanley Février, one of the artists in the show, had a team of assistants supporting him, of which Patrick Henry was a part. I had to engage in numerous back-and-forth discussions at the gallery regarding exhibition design, setup, lighting, and the artists’ well-being. His attention to detail and calm demeanour were more than welcome as the opening date was approaching. I followed his career since, noticing every time that there was something distinctly Haitian…

Over the last decade, I’ve had many conversations with peers about why artists’ publishing seems to remain so niche, especially in the landscape of Canadian contemporary art. It’s rare to see artists’ books in gallery settings and rarer still to get access to museum libraries. It’s almost unthinkable that an institution might offer a free book as part of its programming. These are by no means impossibilities, but they remain isolated experiences amid the overwhelming majority of exhibitions which tend toward more traditional art objects, performance, and video. Throughout my practice, questions of ontology in art-making have emerged and receded,…