Issue 158: Almanac

In C Magazine’s 40th anniversary year, the new issue C158 Almanac (autumn 2024) embraces almanacs as projects of persistence between past, present, and future. Channeling the expansive temporality and methods of almanacs, artists and writers look to celestial time, past lives, the choreography of movement building, AI incantations, and more, to situate the present state of contemporary art and liberatory organizing. 

In their C158 feature, Alia Hijaab and Rana Nazzal Hamadeh offer a sober account of recent censorship within Canadian arts institutions, revealing efforts to silence Palestinian artists and supporters of Palestinian liberation as acts complicit in Israel’s physical destruction of cultural landmarks in Gaza. Hijaab and Nazzal Hamadeh stress the far reaching implications for creative and critical freedoms in Canada and beyond, recalling art’s role as a mirror, capable of exposing political realities to new light: “…as artists we ask ourselves: What is the future we are working toward? … And what legacies will we honour?” Their questions echo the careful hope and sense of responsibility shared by many of the features, creative projects, conversations, and experimental texts in this issue. Recognizing that history is long, we “become the narrators/historians of both our current moment and the future we want to seed,” C Magazine Editor Joy Xiang writes in the editorial. “We take the butterfly effect, where seemingly small acts evince large-scale consequences, as a call to action.” 

Like every issue of C Magazine, the first six pages of C158 Almanac are dedicated to an original artist project. In BITE//Celestial\BITE, Alexis Nanibush-Pamajewong revisits their performance of the ancestral Anishnaabeg art form of mazinibaganjigan (birch-bark biting), through a series of photographs. Under the light of the Ode’imini-giizis (Strawberry Moon), guest curator Alex Jacobs-Blum writes that the artist “honours art elders by celebrating the kinship between birch bark and the Anishinaabeg since time immemorial.” Lou Sheppard’s Composition column similarly expands beyond the magazine’s pages. Building on his ongoing project, Crepuscular Rhythms, which locates dawn and dusk as queer times of day, Sheppard’s contribution includes a special-edition run of unexposed cyanotypes, distributed as inserts in 500 copies of the magazine. Recipients are encouraged to expose their body part or an object to the light and share their prints on Instagram via @crepuscular_rhythms 

Find Xiang’s editorial and select additional texts at cmagazine.com and preview the full list of features in C158 below. Read Sheppard’s Composition entry and Jacobs-Blum’s curatorial text for BITE//Celestial\BITE online. 

Letters:
Responses to C Magazine Issue 157 Kink.
—from Jamin Pelkey, Ginger Scott, and Lex Barrie

Features: 
Art as a Mirror: How Canadian Institutions Are Complicit in Silencing Palestinian Voices
—Alia Hijaab and Rana Nazzal Hamadeh

The Seashells That Saved the World 
—Nyssa Komorowski

The Grace of It All: Movement Building as Durational Choreography
—Daniel Mack

Roundtable: Mind Pool, Memory Spring
—with Patrick Cruz, Fiona Nguyen, Kate Nugent, Bea Parsons, Danica Pinteric, and Cadence Planthara    

Green That Makes You Want to Crack Your Foot
—Chloë p.f. Lalonde               

AI Incantations for Sovereignty and Gender Expansiveness
—Kira Xonorika

Reviews: 
Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood by Jackie Wang
—Madeline Bogoch 

All reviews and columns for this issue are listed in the table of contents.

Subscribe now to read all of C158 ALMANAC online and access the full suite of images in BITE//Celestial\BITE. All subscriptions include unlimited access to the latest print and online-exclusive content at cmagazine.com. Want to read it in print? Find a store near you or order your copy online.

Readers and subscribers are essential to our work at C. Your support helps bring new voices, critical insight, and creative ideas to readers at a time when rigorous, challenging, inclusive art writing is more important than ever. 

C Magazine, established in 1984, is a contemporary art and criticism periodical that functions as a forum for significant ideas in art and its contexts. Each issue explores a theme that is singularly engaged with emerging and prevailing perspectives through original art writing, criticism, and artist projects. Our content focuses on contemporary art in Canada and the activities of Canadian practitioners living abroad—with an emphasis on those from equity-owed communities—as well as on international practices and dialogues. We are committed to facilitating meaningful, pluralistic, interdisciplinary, historically-engaged, and imaginative conversations about art.