BEING SCENE CURATED EXHIBITION 2025

Manar Abo Touk (she/her) is a Syrian-born Canadian independent curator and PhD candidate in Art History at Concordia University in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal.

Her doctoral research explores contemporary Syrian art in the diaspora, with a focus on memory, displacement, and anti-violent image-making. With over a decade of experience in the international arts sector, she has curated more than thirty exhibitions and collaborated with artists across the SWANA region, Europe, and Turtle Island.

Her practice is grounded in cross-cultural storytelling and political aesthetics, and is shaped by methodologies of slowness and attentive listening. She has held positions as the Arts Manager and Curator at Al Riwaq Art Space in the Kingdom of Bahrain and Curator of Exhibitions and Collections at the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie, Treaty 8, Alberta.

Khadija Baker is a Montreal-based, multidisciplinary artist of Kurdish-Syrian descent. Baker immigrated to Canada from Syria in 2001; she completed her MFA studies at Concordia University in 2012. She is a core member of the Centre for Oral History & Digital Storytelling (COHDS) at Concordia University. Her installations investigate social and political themes centred on the uncertainty of home as it relates to persecution, identity, displacement, and memory. As a witness to traumatic events, unsettled feelings of home are a part of her experience. Her multidisciplinary installations often combine textiles, sculpture, performance, sound and video, and involve participative storytelling and performance to create active spaces for greater understanding. In 2023, Baker finished her HUMA PhD research-creation at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture (CISSC) at Concordia University.

Baker has had solo exhibitions at galleries and institutions across Canada and has exhibited internationally at many cultural capitals. She was also awarded several research, concept-to-realization, and travel grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des letters du Québec. She was a winner of the 2020 Cultural Diversity in Visual Arts, and Rewilding Arts Prize awarded by David Suzuki Foundation and Rewilding Magazine. Most recently she was awarded the Miriam Aaron Roland Family Scholarship for her research creation at Concordia University.

Anna Williams, Originally from Ottawa, ON., after studying sculpture and printmaking at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, I returned home, where I continue to work and garden with my wife, children, dogs and an excessive number of house plants.  

For the natural world and for myself, physical and psychological borders define our reality. The borders between feminine and unfeminine, human and animal, tameness and wildness, savage and civilized—rules about what is natural and what isn’t—have governed my life. I have struggled and failed to fit traditional definitions of femininity—too male to be female and too female to be male. In my practice, I engage with what is considered appropriate female behavior as I explore the physicality of making art, the construction and manipulation of female identity, and power relationships in contemporary society.

I feel a critical need for alternative definitions to be introduced to the binary expectations of womanhood, definitions into which I, a queer female artist and mother,  might fit without having to sacrifice parts of myself deemed unacceptable and incongruous. As my domestic roles take over more of my identity, it is becoming increasingly impossible to integrate myself and my family into society’s assumed heteronormative definitions of those identities. Through an exploration of family history and myth via drawing, print, sculpture and installation, I consider what we have lost in our passage from nature to culture—our skewed experience of the natural world and female identity, and reflect on how this dissociation has impacted my mental health, identity and sense of belonging.

Jawa El Khash is an artist, researcher and technologist. She artistically adopts the mediums of holography, web based simulation, 3D modelling, and virtual reality to archive, re-imagine and resurrect cultural artifacts, art history and botanical life. Her work is inspired by the celebration of intercivilizational exchange of ideas, craft, and cultural heritage, while looking into the future of museology, digital archaeology and 3D heritage. Her work has been part of several exhibitions, festivals, workshops, publications and artist talks nationally and internationally. She was long listed for the Sobey Art Award presented by the National Gallery of Canada (2021) and a finalist for the Art Jameel Prize presented by The Victoria & Albert Museum and Art Jameel (2024).

Shannon Taylor-Jones is an interdisciplinary artist who works with fibre, painting, and the earth to explore the entangled biological and creative processes of life and death. Submerged into the underworld of plant and fungal embodiment, she looks to the more-than-human world in consideration of non-linear practices of growth, decay, and grief. Embodying the self as a symbiont, her work exists as an exploration of detritus in ecosystems of collaboration and interdependency.

Shannon has a BFA from OCAD University and is based in Toronto/Tkaronto.

Nadine Hajjaj is a Palestinian artist working in printmaking, handmade paper, and book arts. Her practice examines how material can carry memory, political, cultural, and personal, across time and space. Treating paper as both object and site, she creates works that function as living archives, merging traditional craft with contemporary forms. 

An aspiring publisher, Hajjaj is drawn to books as collaborative and participatory platforms for social and cultural commentary. Her interest lies in creating publications that expand beyond the page and objects that invite engagement, hold histories, and sustain dialogue.

Hajjaj’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at The Art Academy of Cincinnati (Ohio), Pique Gallery (Kentucky), The BasketShop Gallery (Cincinnati, Ohio), Gazala Projects (Gettysburg, Ohio), Open Studio (Toronto), and The Spilled Milk Gallery (Amman, Jordan).