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December 16, 2024, 11am
How can we access clarity, or recognize deception for what it is? The Winter 2025 Issue of C Magazine returns to the fundamental role of contemporary art as a mirror for our value systems and perceptions of each other. Contributors to C159 Mirror Mirror elaborate on a spectrum of revelatory and distortive perspectives in the stories we tell. They consider the stakes in a world gripped by state myths, empire, and colonial conventions that fix their subjects with a dehumanizing gaze. Through reflections on and in language, film, photography, and beyond, this issue explores the mirror’s insistent reminder that there are always possibilities to see otherwise, and that, as Editor Joy Xiang writes, “we are all polluted with each other.”
C159 looks through the mirror as a bleeding surface—a metaphor for acts of seeing, thinking, and creating that return your gaze. Artists and writers think through formal and symbolic fractures reflected in chimerical imagery, Hong Kong cinemas of resistance, Puerto-Rican space-time, physical and spiritual intertwining, and the search for a place for grief, unrecognized by colonial regimes. As broad as their interests are, “intimate coincidences run through many pieces in this issue,” writes Xiang, including “a persistent throughline of speech, mourning, and the impossibilities of language and nostalgia.”
In one of many dialogues in this issue, James Albers speaks to artist Bhenji Ra about her moving image commission Biraddali Dancing on the Horizon (2024). Inspired by the Biraddali, a non-gendered bird-human hybrid from Tausūg myth that sits at the end of a rainbow, but is also called the rainbow, Ra connects queer and trans liberation to their method of filming, in collaboration with spirit to honour the Biraddali’s refusal to be captured.
Read Albers and Ra’s conversation now, released at cmagazine.com with the launch of C159! Other select texts, including Xiang’s editorial and a preview of this issue’s artist project, are also available. Curated by Christian Vistan, Aubin Soonhwan K’s Floor Drawing Series opens the first five pages of C159 with a vibrant meditation on writing as a physical act and the distance between a mark and its meaning. Read Vistan’s curatorial text now.
Letters:
Responses to C Magazine Issue 158 Almanac.
—from Paula McLean and Samantha Lance
Features:
Bhenji Ra Dances at the End of the Rainbow
—James Albers
“““““““““`To Return
—Nasrin Himada and Yantong Li
In the Lacuna:
—with Lara Mimosa Montes and Sofía Gallisá Muriente
Black, Alive, and Looking Back at You: In Conversation With Karice Mitchell
—Furqan Mohamed
A Vampire Walks Into a Funhouse
—Christiana Myers
Cinema, Nostalgia, and the Excess That Remains: A Conversation With Tiffany Sia
—Joshua Segun-Lean
Reviews:
“Sun Moon Stars” by Rochelle Goldberg
—Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross
All reviews and columns for this issue are listed in the table of contents.
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Since 1984, C Magazine has served 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 Canadian practitioners living abroad—with an emphasis on those from equity-owed communities—as well as on international practices and dialogues.
