AGO X RBC ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE:

NADA EL-OMARI & SONYA MWAMBU
+1-home, 2021, Tkaronto (Toronto), CA.

Calling cards always sat in a bowl at the entrance of our childhood homes, from Uganda to Egypt and Palestine, through various lands and onto Turtle Island. For separated families, calling cards were a way to witness a connection across generations and displacements, from here to wherever home is. With a global pandemic restructuring the world, communications have not only been a window into the past but have also woven a canvas of growing modes of future connections and new ways to share, speak, and recall places. +1-home is a digital platform on which our practices as experimental filmmakers amalgamate with a digital installation of non-linear space, time, and storytelling.

"We’ve often looked at landscapes and immortalized them into the designs you’ve neatly organized around our home. May they grow and change, and may each square become a reminder of where the needle is and where the thread is from.”

a touch of before, now and then. :

CURATED BY FRANCI DURAN & NADA EL-OMARI,

June 22-27 2023, CFMDC, Tkaronto (Toronto), CA.

“A touch of before, now and then.” is the moment when briefly you glimpse a smell, a touch, a sound and an image which all together remind you of the taste of a memory. Is it an empty place, a lonesome one? Is it a crowded gathering or an abandoned village? Or maybe it’s the dunes that have taken over a myth? Exhibited in dialogue, three works by artists Mivan Makia, Qiuli Wu and soJin Chun exchange with one another to the sound of a breeze, of a process, of a cleanse and a reviving.

Presented as CFMDC’s first installation, “A touch of before, now and then.” invites you to come, sit, breathe, and listen; at your own pace, on your own time and somewhere between all of us, between the diasporas, the here and the there, the knowing and not knowing, you can create your own sense of process and of the ways in which landscapes are traces.

Presented works:
Abandoned by soJin Chun
Red Tunnel by Qiuli Wu
Processing…Cleaning…Refreshing… by Mivan Makia

Curated by Franci Duran & Nada El-Omari

Installation ran between June 22nd and 27th (in person and online at cfmdc.tv).

Zine available here.

Part of Reciprocal Relations

Images courtesy of Sarah Boo

IA 360º ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE:

NADA EL-OMARI & SONYA MWAMBU
+1-home, Apr 24 - May 11 2024, Tkaronto (Toronto), CA.

“Calling cards always sat in a bowl at the entrance of Nada El-Omari and Sonya Mwambu’s childhood homes, from Uganda to Egypt and Palestine, through various lands and onto Turtle Island. For separated families, calling cards were a way to witness a connection across generations and displacements, from here to wherever home is. Originally conceived at the start of a global pandemic as a website, +1-home now continues its life as a digital installation in a gallery, custom-made to InterAccess’s immersive projection environment as a two-player interactive experience.

There is a card that I carry in my wallet, it used to bend around the curves of a golden metallic bowl placed on the outer left corner of a square wooden table by the front door of our apartment. In it, nails, batteries, pens, keys, a small notebook, cigarettes, matches, coins, and a lighter would flop in and out, depending on who was home. Always, without fault, if you swept your small hand along the valley of the curved brass, your fingertips would hit a thin little card with a different design than the last one. Bodies shift, they grow, change, recover, hurt, and leave, but I’ve carried the calling card you had left at the bottom of that bowl for years. On my way out, when the bowl ended up in a box and you left it in a storage unit, I remember the moment I placed it in my wallet and I thought, do you think it’ll still work and I could call you? I have my own bowl now, and in it I lose all the things I would rummage through as a child.
Thank you, for being our archives, and showing us how to create our own. Here is our calling card. Talk to you soon.
Love,
Sonya & Nada.

+1-home was developed with the support of InterAccess’s inaugural IA 360º Artists-in-Residence program, with technical lead support by Terry Anastasiadis and Kyle Duffield.

+1-home was commissioned by and originally premiered at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2021

Developed with Unreal Engine.