C Magazine Spring 2022

Dear C, Maps that confront me daily are deeply disappointing. Disappointing to the point of tears. To make them work, you and I are obliged to surrender not just our locations, but every bit of ambient data that is available when we activate phones, browsers, watches… Further to that point, Sophia Arnold quotes Vladan Joler’s New Extractivism in “Mapping the Black Box”: “Traditional colonial practices of control over critical assets, trade routes, natural resources and exploitation of human labor are still deeply embedded in the contemporary supply chains, logistics, and assembly lines of digital content, products and infrastructure.” I have unmapped rage for the way maps continue to create unregulated and exploitative worlds. So, I am writing to say thank you for countering that reality, and for supplanting it with…

“no thing has no end,” the artist Jenine Marsh writes in this issue’s Composition column. As we know, endings produce absences, and absences rouse new processes, new feelings, new layers of ourselves. It’s notoriously hard to talk about, write about, produce culture from this rousing; I tend to think that means it’s as vital as blood. I’m grateful to every contributor in this issue, for moving their hands toward this thing called grief, seeing what happens when contact is initiated. During our Curious Criticism symposium in autumn 2021, Harry Dodge said something like: poetics are chiefly a means with which not to obscure what’s inherently clear but rather to echo the obscurity inherent to so much of life, the world. In their lush conversation, Nadine Khalil asks the Saudi multimedia…

I met Sarah Brahim during a studio visit of another Saudi Arabian artist last year, when I was on a visit to Riyadh. I was familiar with the burgeoning art scene there but I had never encountered Sarah before, who had recently moved back from Portland, where she grew up. Her Swedish-German-American mother moved her there from Saudi Arabia, a place she had made her home at the age of 21 and raised a family, as Sarah was born during the Gulf War. At the time, Sarah and I connected over the deaths of our mothers in a charged conversation that seemed to prevent anyone else from entering the room. We marvelled at how the loss of a parent becomes protracted and abstract over time, like constant static in the…

Images of people suffering have long been a topic of debate. Images of inflicted violence can distance, objectify, condemn, and dehumanize—or they can produce compassion and move masses to action. As cameras have become omnipresent, critics have increasingly questioned the role and effect of images of suffering, but their undeniable importance to change-making produces important tensions. As artists, how can we make work that invokes the value of life? How can we represent violence without replicating the relations of domination depicted? How can we express everything that cannot be recreated: the invisible, banal, physical, and psychological effects of loss, suffering, and violence? And are there moments when we should simply try to show things as they are? These are some of the questions I asked myself in spring 2021 as…

“When I first encountered his work, I immediately thought that we must be thinking about some of the same things,” Michèle Pearson Clarke remarked of Lou Sheppard. “And I always found it interesting that his work was rarely contextualized as addressing grief (even by him), because to me it is so viscerally present in his practice.” Here, the two artists engage in a lively repartee about their works that sometimes, but often don’t, position grief as an immediately legible central subject—in either case, seeing grief as a kind of inextricable lens. Sheppard articulates a parallel to queerness, writing “I don’t really think of my work as ‘queer’ but I do see queerly.” They go on to discuss navigating the spectacle of queer pain, dispensing with vulnerability as a kind of…

In October 2021, the British Museum announced that it has the earliest known image of a ghost. On this Babylonian clay tablet, a figure stands with feet on the ground and hands tied, being led into the afterlife by a female figure. We know this is a ghost because the accompanying cuneiform inscription describes that this man has come back from the dead, and includes instructions on how to exorcise his miserable spirit and untether him from this world. The ritual includes making small effigies, offering beer, and burning juniper incense at sunrise.1 Many funerary practices all over the world use smells, oils, and incenses. Our sense of smell is our most immediate sense, and most intimately tied to memory; it has the ability to tug or shove us in…