C Magazine Launches Issue C154 “Gossip” (Spring 2023)

C Magazine brings you “Gossip” with Issue 154 (Spring 2023). Gossip, as “unverified” information, has complex relations to power. As a historically maligned oral tradition with gendered roots, it asks that we question our sources—who we trust and why—as well as who has been afforded belief or legitimization over others. In this issue, gossip takes various forms, from a mode of subversion under settler-colonial states to speculative fiction; it is revealed in the archives, in silence, and in its failures to resist authoritarian imaginings or institutional exploitation. After all, why do we gossip?

C154 marks Editor Joy Xiang’s first full production cycle with the magazine. In her inaugural Editorial essay, Xiang reflects on the issue’s theme, offering not only an introduction to contributed engagements with “Gossip,” but also an invitation to consider the relevance of gossip—its curiosity, questioning, and critical judgment—to art criticism, a field where we aim to make more and more space for the formerly “unverified.” Read the Editorial.

Read select articles from C154 released for free online, including the curatorial text for this issue’s artist project: Chäshu̧ Kadini (Say That Again) by Cole Pauls. Curated by Whess Harman, Pauls’s comic illustrates a kind of oral storytelling in small Indigenous communities that becomes the stuff of folklore. Preview C154 features, and check out what’s available online below.

Jumana Manna, Foragers, 2022, video still.

C154 Features

Perpetual Scofflaws
– Jumana Manna Interviewed by ma ma

“Worlds appear from her big mouth”: The Mutiny of Online Open Letters
– by Steph Wong Ken

Gossipy Scraps, Gossip(ing) Archives
– by Emily Guerrero

We Should Talk: Obvious Truths About Working in the Arts
– by Marsya Maharani and Petrina Ng (Gendai)

Gossip After Dictatorship
– by Alex Quicho

The Injunction to Forget: documenta fifteen and the Test of Memory
– by Rouzbeh Shadpey

Plus, read Yasmina Price’s review of Maxime Jean-Baptiste’s short film Moune Ô (2022) and letters responding to our last issue, C153 “Chinatown,” both released online with the launch of C154, “Gossip.” For a full list of reviews and columns in this issue, check out the table of contents.

Subscribe to read all of C154 “Gossip” online today. All subscriptions include unlimited access to cmagazine.com. Print subscriptions include three issues per year, and start with the next issue. Not a subscriber? Print copies of C154 are available on newsstands; find a store near you, or purchase yours online to have it delivered. As a reader, your support is essential to ensuring C’s continued success as a platform for criticism, educational programming, and conversations on contemporary art in Canada.

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 the activities of contemporary art practitioners residing in Canada and Canadian practitioners living abroad—with an emphasis on those from Black, Indigenous, diasporic, and other equity-deserving communities—as well as on international practices and dialogues. We are committed to facilitating meaningful, pluralistic, interdisciplinary, historically-engaged, and imaginative conversations about art.

Donate:
C The Visual Arts Foundation – Canada Helps

Social Media:
Instagram
Facebook

Contact Us:
info@cmagazine.com
C Magazine
PO Box 5 Stn B
Toronto, ON
M5T 2T2