do you hear your eye vibrate? entends-tu ton œil vibrer ?
Nada El-Omari
May 9th - June 27 2026, Longueuil, Quebec, CA.
Plein sud, centre d’exposition en art actuel à Longueuil
Artist Nada El-Omari presents the exhibition do you hear your eye vibrate?, an immersive installation in which image, sound and text dialogue in disjunction. Bringing together moving image, sound composition and textual fragments, the work interrogates the acoustic imaginary of incarceration and the regimes of perception that shape our existences. Recipient of the Plein sud 2025 Grant, the artist unfolds a project that situates itself within current concerns around memory, diasporas, and visible and invisible systems of control.
Rooted in the idea that sound is both a tool of power and a space of resistance, El-Omari expands the notion of incarceration beyond the prison cell and prison complex, considering it instead as a diffuse condition. The prisons she evokes are material, political, affective, and systemic. They inhabit the soundscapes we forget to listen to, the technological hums, the imposed silences, the narratives that occupy our space without us realizing it. Through a 20-minute looped soundscape, the artist constructs a dense and immersive environment where domestic textures morph into more unsettling vibrations, revealing the porosity between comfort and constraint.
The exhibition space takes the form of a room. Within it, five “windows” of moving images, framed as such, open onto an outside world. Drawn from archives collected over the past two years in both analog and digital formats, these images reflect El-Omari’s process-driven approach to cinema. Rather than linear narration, she works through fragments, repetition, and disjunction. The eye is not invited to consume a sequence of images, but to witness, to inhabit duration. Urban movements, bodies traversing the city, and everyday gestures become charged with latent tension: that of a predefined freedom cœxisting with a parallel time-world marked by injustice and violence.
Scattered throughout the room—on the floor, on walls, hanging in space—are sheets of words: pœms, phrases, notations. These fragments invite an embodied and mobile reading. Writing becomes evidence, trace, and projection toward a future to be invented. Within this space, the image may get lost in the echo, the sound may numb or awaken, and language becomes a threshold between memory and becoming.
With do you hear your eye vibrate?, the artist proposes a space of reflection and resistance where the personal becomes inevitably political. The installation transforms the gallery into a site of resonance, inviting the audience to physically engage with the frictions between memory, territory, and power, and to become active witnesses rather than passive passengers.
Interview
Images courtesy of Mustafa Hacalaki
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.”
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.
Images courtesy of Maksym Chupov-Ryabtsev
P pour Palestine :
GROUP EXHIBIT: Bayan Abu Nahla, Amal Al Nakhal, Muhammad Nour ElKhairy,
Nada El-Omari, Yara El-Ghadban, Mona Hatoum, Rana Nazzal Hamadeh, Rehab Nazzal
September 24 - December 14 2024, Longueuil, Quebec, CA.
October 25 - December 14 2024 Quebec, Quebec, CA.
Curators : Ariane De Blois and Muhammad Nour ElKhairy
Plein sud, centre d’exposition en art actuel à Longueuil
P is for Palestine is a collective exhibition featuring conceptual, experimental, and poetic works by artists from within Palestine and the diaspora. Anchored in the belief that language is political, the exhibition delves into semantic and discursive issues specific to Palestinian reality, present and past. The selected works share a particular affinity with words—whether written, signed, or spoken—to evoke, narrate, or name various aspects of the Palestinian experience. What emerges are personal narratives that paint a picture of resistance and resilience against the multiple forms of colonial violence. In a context where Palestinian voices are often censored or struggle to be heard in both the media and the arts, the exhibition takes the form of an agora, a space for encounters that amplifies some of these voices and opens a space for Palestinian imaginaries.
P pour Palestine / P is for Palestine will also be presented from October 25 to December 15, 2024, at L’Œil de Poisson in Quebec City. The nature of the works gathered for the exhibition (video, print, and textual) allows for the simultaneous presentation of the project in two distinct locations in Quebec. This dual presentation reflects the shared desire of L’Œil de Poisson and Plein sud to increase the presence of artists from Palestine in the public space.
Images courtesy of Isabelle Darveau & Geneviève Philippon and Vincent Drouin
+1-home :
NADA EL-OMARI & SONYA MWAMBU
September 6th - November 18 2025, Sackville, NB, 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. Originally conceived at the start of a global pandemic, +1-home now continues its life as a digital installation from website to interactive experience.
Comprised of a mosaic of calling cards in which textures become spaces and narratives become multiplicities, we turn to the shadows and each of us can navigate, observe, remember, relate, listen, learn, feel, reconvene, reconnect, and give ourselves environments in which we can reflect on what really brings us together, on our own time, in our own way, and in the in-betweens.
Each calling card attempts to convey space through our senses because that is where we feel we most belong and are given the space to archive. Within each room, a conversation takes place. Repetitions, patterns, connections, and weavings occur, one to the next, in whichever order arises. Time is your choice, space your companion, you, the walking archive. As our stories live in physically different places, a simple calling card unites our bodies once more.”
+1-home was commissioned by and originally premiered at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2021
Images courtesy of Lucas Morneau
Regarding Land :
GROUP EXHIBIT: Jumana Emil Abboud, Mohamed Abdelkarim, Marwa Arsanios,
Ali Cherri, Nada El-Omari, Batoul Faour, Rana Nazzal Hamadeh, Hiwa K, Monira Al Qadiri,
Nour Ouayda, Reman Sadani, Younes Ben Slimane, Nadia Shihab, and Huda Takriti.
September 19 - November 23 2025, Halifax, NS, CA.
Curator : Amin Alsaden
Dalhousie Art Gallery
Regarding Land is a compelling group exhibition of video works that explores land as memory, witness, and relation. Featuring Canadian and international artists cultivating new representations of Southwest Asia and North Africa, the exhibition offers layered perspectives that move beyond conventional portrayals, considering how contemporary art engages the bonds that connect people to place.
Grounded in personal and collective experiences of local inhabitants and diasporic communities alike, the artists employ poetic visual language to reflect on how histories of migration, resistance, and survival shapes belonging. They also gesture toward responsibility and care for the land itself, as well as for one another. Through these works, Regarding Land opens a space to reflect on how we inhabit the ground beneath us, and the histories and futures it carries.
Images courtesy of Steve Farmer and Dalhousie Art Gallery.
Tidal Paths :
GROUP EXHIBIT: Mehwish Abid Abaidullah, Farida Batool, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto,
Nada El-Omari, Naiza Khan, Sepideh Raaha, Elham Rahmati, Masooma Syed.
February 6 - March 4 2026, Lahore, Pakistan.
Curator : Abdullah Qureshi
an[other]space
Tidal Paths explores ways of remembering, unmaking, and processing the onslaught of violent and oppressive structures that continuously seek to divide and exclude bodies and communities of difference. Bringing together the works of eight Pakistani and International artists, the exhibition understands the history and the past not as static remains but as a living, breathing matter that continually informs the present and future, permeating and rippling across the bodies, land, and ecologies we inhabit. In the presented works, engagement with memories, archives, and afterlives becomes both a practice and a methodology for re-tracing what has been fragmented, erased, or rendered unspeakable, while thinking toward acts of repair and refusal from positions of coalition-making and imperfect solidarities.
Images courtesy of an[other]space, Syed Salman Haider and Abdullah Qureshi.
On a human scale :
GROUP EXHIBIT:Fili Gibbons, Hailey Guzik, Nada El-Omari, Lee Wilkins
May 6 - 30 2026, Montreal, Québec
Curator : Dounia Bouzidi
https://htmlles.net/en/
The exhibition On a Human Scale brings together four artistic proposals that explore interstitial zones – meeting points where memory, technology, ecology, and the body intersect. The works shift the focus of the gaze to defuse the supposed neutrality of technology. Attentive to non-hegemonic narratives, the artists reject any abstract universality and affirm situated and vulnerable practices. By subverting the promises of AI, de-hierarchising forms of intelligence and placing sensory experiences at the centre of the discourse, the project questions the regimes of perception, transmission and accessibility that structure our present. These orientations run through the entire project and form a methodology, originating from and passing through bodies and experiences historically excluded from regimes of visibility, legitimacy, and power.
Resolutely feminist and socially engaged, this exhibition gives space to experimental practices that are dear to Ada X’s mission. On a Human Scale invites us to take a stand: to slow down in the face of the pressure to be productive. To inhabit the cracks rather than ready-made solutions, to imagine ways of perceiving and transmitting that are relational rather than extractivist, and plural rather than normative. The exhibition is thus conceived as a device of resistance, where art becomes a critical tool for thinking about and practising other forms of coexistence in the era of algorithmic capitalism.
Images courtesy of Sarah Abdallah
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.
Images courtesy of Sarah Boo