Through 3D-rendered black and white images, Moni Omubor creates a fictional museum where Yoruba artifacts exist beyond colonial possession. This artist project, titled “The Backroom” employs speculative fiction and Afro-Surrealism to interrogate Western museum practices and imagine new possibilities.
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In conversation with Lodoe Laura, artist Annie Macdonell discusses her recent exhibition “The Beyond Within,” which delves into the history of psychedelic therapy. She explores her collaborative films with Maïder Fortuné and the historical ripples that help us read our fractured moment, sustaining an uncynical belief in art even as its institutions falter.
Yaniya Lee advocates for a critical approach grounded in material practice. Drawing on her recent work with textile artists in Edmonton, Lee makes a case for criticism that attends to how black artists work, focusing on their materials, methods, and processes, while calling for more diverse voices to engage with these practices.
In a profile of Edmonton-born, Berlin-based artist Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw, writer Lauren Lavery examines how Shaw’s treatment of industrial materials lends insight into our evolving relationship with urban landscapes and technology.
Coming together for the first time in my tenure without a prompt, the following issue nonetheless feels as though it is circling something specific, even if that something is difficult to name.
The screenshot interrupts the flow, capturing a fleeting thought within the machinery of creation. It is a time stamp, a photograph, or an idea jotted down in a notebook. The act of capturing a thought gives a fleeting moment a platform to become something.
Each screenshot captures a moment of pause within the flow of making, a small act of noticing amid continuous motion.
How are our identities assembled, and what role do visual, historical, and ideological structures play in who we become? Diallo consistently raises questions that rebuff easy answers.
How do you work alongside a lover while still respecting their fundamental difference and ultimate opacity? How do you come together while also staying apart?
In his novel of the same name, science fiction author William Gibson once described pattern recognition as a “gift and a trap,” which is a generous way of saying we search for meaning even when it may or may not exist.
“Holes Holding Whole; IdleTime” is a collaborative project by Ella Dawn McGeough, Erica Stocking, and Amanda Boulos that takes a surreal approach to dreaming and idle time. Moving through a nonlinear, dreamlike spiral of text and image, the work reimagines sleep not as a void, but as a portal to “weird wanderings” and “strange affinities.”