Spring 2024
The new issue of C Magazine, C157 KINK (Spring 2024), undertakes a series of deviations, exploring political, erotic, social, and creative bends in the straight lines of convention. Through creative explorations in features, conversations, and experimental texts, C157 contributors confront the consequences and possibilities of our desires. This issue looks to queerness, disobedience, disruption, pleasure, consent, and play, imagining how we might reshape the ways we relate, engage, and coexist with each other.
“Since we began working on this issue,” reflects C Magazine Editor Joy Xiang, “I’ve come to associate ‘kink’ with a knot in my stomach and the perverse contrasts of living on a small slice of this earth amidst systems of dehumanization.” Across the texts that follow Xiang’s editorial, this issue excavates the simultaneously utopic and hellish realities embodied by “kink” as the grounded expressions of our world—its perversions, contradictions, hierarchies, and extremes. From indigenous-settler relations to eroticized debt, subspace and fetish aesthetics, the physicality of protest, and love amid brutality, artists and writers in this issue engage kink to consider how we could “fall in love (or lust) again…with this shivering world, in all its confrontations.”
C157 begins with proxy, an original artist project by Mo Glitch, guest curated by Liliona Quarmyne. In their messy, playful, and intimate entanglements, the Barbie-like dolls staged in Glitch’s photographs trouble our distinction between reality and its representation. As Quarmyne reflects, the dolls “inhabit and enact a world we have yet to see…and yet they are also part of the world in which we live. A world of constant negotiation.” eunice bélidor’s feature “What Is the Safe Word?” similarly crosses between worlds, entertaining BDSM practices like consent, boundaries, and communication as ways to safely navigate working relationships within art institutions.
In addition to Xiang’s C157 editorial, Quarmyne’s curatorial text and bélidor’s feature are available online. Read select additional texts at cmagazine.com and preview all the features in this issue below.
Letters:
Responses to C Magazine Issue 156 Craft.
—from Danielle Hogan, Mariana Muñoz Gomez, Kathleen Foran-Spragge, and Austin Henderson
Features:
What Is the Safe Word?
—eunice bélidor
Fetish Aesthetics and Fan Fiction in Dana Buzzee’s Philosophically Pornographic Practice
—Adrien Crossman
Sinister Pleasure: Interview with Ja’Tovia Gary
—Erica N. Cardwell
Our Third Sun
—Aman Sandhu and Sahar Te
Hard Limits, Soft Landing
—Raven Davis and Cara Tierney
A Good Animal on Wet Sheets: Disobedient Gasps in Subspace
—Alexa Bunnell
Gui B.B’s Performances and the Erotics of Debt
—Emma-Kate Guimond
Reviews:
“Foggy: Palestine Solidarity, Cinema & the Archive”
—Darian Razdar
All reviews and columns for this issue are listed in the table of contents.
Subscribe now to read all of C157 KINK online and access the full suite of images in proxy. 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.