For Syrians on the run escaping civil war, the mundane act of sending a text message proves to be a crucial line of connection with those left behind, a missive that confirms the survival or death of their loved ones.

In Texting Syria, photographer Liam Maloney examines how, along the journey refugees make from Syria to Lebanon and then Canada, mobile technology supports their struggles, transmitting strength and resistance. Gathered here are portraits, excerpts from text message conversations and images from popular culture that highlight intimate parallel narratives beyond the images disseminated in the media.

In Performing an Archive, Suzy Lake, an essential figure in Canadian contemporary art with an international reputation, continues her exploration of questions around identity and social issues. Drawing on history and her own family history, Lake bears witness to the urban, demographic and social development of Detroit, a city marked throughout the twentieth century by economic decline, racial tension and a startling crime rate. In a performative process, she visits the scene of various locations where her ancestors lived.

Verburg’s work in photography, video, print, installation, and text subtly mines the complexities of romantic and familial relationships. Often working with minimal or abstract shapes and images to create an emotional topography, revealing the intricate layers that constitute intimacy, the harmonies and dissonances inherent in an interpersonal dynamic. Taking shape as a poetic puzzle – where many individual pieces offer divergent perspectives and sit in tension with one another in a shared space, suggesting how differences in visual perception parallel the often disparate points-of-view held by individuals navigating relationships. In this publication, Verburg focuses specifically on the circle and line in his practice, both as an aesthetic celebration of the form, as well as the possibility of form to represent ideas of the whole or self. Moving between image, object and idea – exploring personal and interpersonal negotiations of thought, emotion, intention and meaning.

Seafaring and Disenchanted Matters is a five-part series of images taken in Mauritania along the coastline of Nouadhibou. Here, where the desert and the ocean meet, the hulks of rusting ships lie strewn on the shore. This cemetery of abandoned vessels is a departure point for illegal migration to Europe. Nearby this decrepit industrial wasteland lies a natural habitat where migrating birds can be observed as well as ruins of a fort and houses, sign of the crumbling of French colonial power in the 1960s.

In Nouadhibou hope, exile, migration, decline and death co-exist; Zineb Sedira’s ambivalent images show a city in a state of complete stagnation. They reveal the politics of power, the difficult socio-economic and environmental conditions and the frontiers of commerce and international economy, where demand, supply and working conditions are constantly changing outside Africa.

In her work Sedira subtly recounts an oppressive history, but one in which the Atlantic opens up to every possibility.

Between 1939 and 1946, under the Emergency Powers Act, Ireland found itself immersed in fog. In order to demonstrate its neutrality during World War II, the Irish government censored, along with a host of other things, all meteorological information. Naturally, this measure was intended to avoid the inopportune arrival of military aircraft or ships on Irish soil, but it was also a way of avoiding to commit, an acceptable way of not choosing sides.

Drawing from the archives of the National Library of Ireland and from various Irish newspapers, Ulrika Ferm attempts to recreate a statistical register of the meteorological conditions of the time. Magnificent misty landscapes and snatches of news items come together in a way that discloses a number of factual elements without explaining them in any specific way. Born of an enquiry into the nature and role of censorship, Ferm’s research raises a crucial issue for our hyper-informed era, that of the suppression and subsequent disappearance of information.

Ferm’s work, underpinned by a subtle narrative and particularly interested in forgotten, neglected or unexplained historical phenomena, slips between what these documents reveal and what they recount. Emergency Weather takes on a hybrid quality, existing as both document and fiction.

Risk Colour Book is the result of an encounter between two bodies of work, both involved with the concept of risk. Whether we are dealing with an inventory of toxic pigments and their possible secondary effects or with a performance recreating the moment when a pedestrian is struck by a car, Gustavo Artigas explores the various possible kinds of risk, disasters and accidents. Through recording, repetition and the staging of action, Artigas exposes the fragility of the body, subjected to a cunningly latent violence.

Renowned for her video and installation work, multidisciplinary artist Manon Labrecque explores the very medium of the book with this new title from Les portables collection. The artist re-thinks the image through a conceptual appropriation of the format of the book, its space and various components.

In 9 ½ x 6 ¾, Labrecque literally embodies the book by means of her own body. It is as though the artist has chosen to create a performance within the conceptual space of the book with the intention to challenge or divert the very boundaries of the medium.

With noteworthy ingenuity, Labrecque uses the materiality of the publication in order to develop its content. The pages, the binding, the sewing, the folding, and the covers contribute much more than simply carrying the book’s iconography: they are transformed into significant elements, which impact our reading and understanding of the images. Labrecque subverts and plays with the formal and physical boundaries of the book to lead us toward an unexpected elsewhere, to an opening where an underlying story is being created, under the metaphorical cover of the gap, the fissure and the fold.

In this universe where the book is hardly capable of containing and revealing everything, the images run from one page to the next, the flight of the white pages needs to be restrained, the images slide beyond their space while the folding, like a suture, tries to keep a hold of it all when it doesn’t swallow it whole.