Archive

Photographs are a small act of sentimental preservation. Photo albums, scrapbooks, and videos are sites of revisitation and display, and as such contribute to the legacy of the museum as a cultural archive. As an institution, the museum has always been a conservative stronghold—a constant from its privatized roots to its marked transition to a public locale. A portrait of preservation, its artefacts are protected by extensive security measures and object handling rules that safeguard these relics of history. But the rules of safeguarding have changed, and the evolution of archiving means connecting with history in an advanced technological era….

I was aimlessly scrolling through my Instagram feed when my screen was engulfed by a blue light. I was taken aback by a video of an underwater Times Square; along with the images, the sound of a submarine ecosystem soothed me, making me stop and take a few minutes to fully grasp what I was seeing. Before me was Mulan, a video by Montreal-based artist––from Chinese descent––Chun Hua Catherine Dong, projected on 95 digital billboards. The first time I watched the video was in a virtual reality headset but the effect was similar as I was transported into an aquatic environment full of color…

In his introduction to Permanent Red, first published in 1960, John Berger offers an approach to art criticism that begins with a simple question: “What can art serve here and now?” Berger was a fervent Marxist, and his style of criticism reflected the social and political concerns that dominated his work. He believed, among other things, that the 20th century was “pre-eminently the century of men throughout the world claiming their right to equality.” When he looked at a work of art he asked if it helped or encouraged people to know and claim their social rights. He didn’t mean this literally—such an…

John Kameel Farah has something to say. In a recent video posted to his social media accounts, he can be seen playing a harpsichord ahead of a concert in Amsterdam. “Many Europeans would probably deny the connection, but to me it seems obvious that the harpsichord/cembalo is a musical descendant of the kanoun, an instrument used in Arabic/West Asian music,” he wrote in the caption of the post. “In addition to playing masterworks by Bach, Byrd and others, I love to stylistically invoke the kanoun through the harpsichord, firstly because I love the sound, and also because it illustrates a historical point…

“一方水土养一方人 (Yi Fang Shui Tu Yang Yi Fang Ren)” is a Chinese idiom that has long been associated with regional ecology. The many ways nature nurtures our communities resonated with me on a personal level as I began to pull apart the phrase in order to grasp its literal meaning: What we are is shaped by the water and soil (水土, Shui Tu) surrounding us. “Water and soil” is supposed to be a figure of speech describing natural conditions. A similar term would be “river city,” a concept brought to my attention thanks to the trans-disciplinary scholarship dedicated to waterfronts (for…

As Brubey Hu and I are friends, collaborators, painters, and alumni of Zalucky Contemporary (a gallery in Toronto), I’m privy to the symbols, scenes, and impulses that permeated through her recent exhibition, Islands of Departure 离别之屿. Hosted by Zalucky in the spring of this year, Hu’s colourful diptychs sprawled characters and objects (both familiar and unfamiliar) across the canvas and onto the walls of the gallery. The space between each pair of paintings pulsed with a bright fluorescence; its glow reminiscent of how the winter snow outside looked before it began to melt. The uncanny nature of the work led me to seek more…

1. I first encountered John Baldessari’s unrealized proposal for Information in Elena Filipovic’s book The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp while researching Étant donnés. Known for his transformation from painter to proto-conceptual artist, before eventually appearing to abandon artmaking all together, Duchamp spent the last twenty years of his life secretly crafting Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau / 2° le gaz d’éclairage (1946-1966), a life-size diorama, inside an apartment accessible through the bathroom of his Greenwich Village studio. The work consists of two peepholes in an old wooden door ––one for each eye––which reveal a woman lying naked in a thicket of branches, legs splayed,…

Public Parking Publication is delighted to announce the participants involved in our editorial residency for 2025. For this program, we aim to work with thinkers who are adjacent to or outside the realm of the arts as part of Public Parking’s ongoing efforts to broaden the scope of ideas we feature and the communities we reach. This project invites guest editors to be residents with the publication over an extended 12-month period. Throughout this time they will work with our team to publish a series of either self-written or programmed texts. Previously we’ve hosted eunice bélidor, Tammer El-Sheikh, and Amy…

The following short story is a companion piece to my short film DATUM. The film examines salt, the mineral on which the human body runs and upon which human trade and civilization is built. Interestingly, the main export of salt mines is road de-icing salt, which would render the mine obsolete if climate warms to the point that we no longer need road salt. The salt mine is an underground space of extraction entangled with predicting the conditions of the above ground. Set in an ambiguous future past, I imagine the retired salt mine overtaken by servers of a climate archive…

After spending time with Natalie Baird and Toby Gillies, your attention starts to shift. Suddenly, you’re attuned to small moments and encounters. What might seem mundane – a conversation with a stranger, a discarded offering on the boulevard, the warm afternoon light – takes on an unassuming beauty. You start to suspect that everyone around you is secretly a delight, and they’d tell you a good story if only you’d ask. As artists and arts facilitators, Baird and Gillies bring a generosity to their work that’s infectious. In their world, ideas abound in everyday life, and anyone can make art,…