Longform

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…

The nameless narrator of Lara Mimosa Montes’s new book, The Time of the Novel (Wendy’s Subway, 2025), makes a plain confession. “I was over being a person, one with a social security number, a natal chart, an undecided future, and a passport.” It’s an absurd thing to desire, and completely relatable. It should seem absurd that so much of what distinguishes a person as such is fundamentally impersonal: someone’s birth time and place, a set of randomized numbers, government-issued papers—stuff that’s all too easy to forget or misplace. Yet, the stakes of having or not having these materials couldn’t be higher as…

When I first encountered Camila Arroyo’s work through the short film Soldaderas nearly four years ago, I was immediately struck by her ability to command space and express unspoken language in her movements. The short film for the fashion brand Sabrina Ol captures Arroyo as she navigates Mexico City’s streets. The film feels less like a performance and more like an intimate conversation with the environment, where movement, for her, was a private language that spoke to everyone, a pulse threading the soul to the surface of the world. From the very start of our conversations, it became clear that Arroyo’s journey…

In the dim blue hue of an office light, we see a pair of eyes gloss over a floor strewn with dead, bloodied bodies. The eyes shudder and look out somewhere, into the middle distance; not at the walls of the conference room that enclose them, not directly at the glow of a computer screen. Below, a pair of hands continues to maniacally hit a keyboard. These furtive movements belong to Claire, played by the inimitable Kayije Kagame, the protagonist of filmmaker and artist Valentin Noujaïm’s chilling 2024 short film, To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion (2024), who we watch, sit alone, but…

As I leave artist Lorna Bauer’s house after my visit to her home studio, our third meeting, she gives me a hug and wishes me luck on an upcoming move. We make plans for a drink on her back porch, “once things start to bloom.” Walking away I make notes on my phone about the visit. Patricia’s garden upstate. Daffodils, hydrangea, magnolia. Grouse like a dirt bike. Adair’s drawings. Pollinators. States of transformation. Like glass in its molten state. Like the latent image on film as developer meets fixer meets water meets heat. Like a flowering tree in April in Montréal. …

The Canadian writer-director Naomi Jaye’s work frequently probes eccentric characters who pursue a peculiar agenda of routinized loneliness. Her first short, the madcap A Dozen for Lulu (2002), uses a stylized soundtrack (blaring alarm clocks, squeaky chairs) and an agile camera to depict two oddballs who share an enthusiasm for sprinkled donuts: a cheery, rollerblade-wearing ballerina who works at a hardware store, and a man in a fur cap who, with academic precision, nails the pastries to his workshop walls. Two of Jaye’s subsequent shorts, both starring the excellent Adrian Griffin, provide more subdued portraits of solitary souls. In The Raindrop Effect (2003), Griffin’s…