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).

This two-part installation will be a live exhibition where the artist will update the contents weekly during the exhibition period.

Part One: Rehoming Objects of Significance – These objects will be catalogued with their stories and dreams of future homes. They are available for people to bring home and revive them again.

Part Two: Rehoming Journal – A visual arts journal where Helen will create small entries to process the emotions throughout this journey (from small paintings/drawings, to weaving samples, to vessels) to rehome and process their overwhelming feelings, as they go through this necessary process of letting go and finding homes for objects that are sentimental, yet currently lifeless.

All the items will be documented in an Instagram account where people can read and listen to stories, details, and/or the history of each piece. DM on the account for inquiries and to request adopting items.

Helen Kong is a tea practitioner, ceramic artist specializing in making tea wares for Japanese and Chinese tea, and the owner and facilitator of Secret Teatime; a clay space hidden in Scarborough where people sip tea and play with clay. Aside from making, she is also a ceramics teacher and a facilitator/organizer of multi-sensory events focused on tea and food where she shares her knowledge about the Way of Tea, its philosophies and how it relates to her daily life. After more than a decade of being a primary caregiver and working as an entrepreneur artist, her studies in ritualized tea have been a source of grounding and coping. Especially in times of life and creative burnout, depression, anxiety, and her own chronic illness. Her studies in tea is also a connection with her East Asian animist roots that allows her to maintain a deep relationship to the materials, tools, and objects she collaborates with in her practice and daily life. Helen is slowly moving from the rollercoaster mindset between over-consumption and scarcity -which manifests in hoarding tendencies- to having true connective appreciation with the objects that she chooses to have in her life. This is a continuous work in progress. 

Some of her recent projects include the “Ichigo-Ichie Tea Project” during Nuit Blanche Toronto 2022 which was documented in the C Magazine (Issue 156) article by Jasmine Gui “Different Things in Different Scenes: Encountering Ichi-go Ichi-e in Tea”, “Meeting for Teas” visual arts residency at the Banff Centre (2023), “The Looms We Resemble” group exhibition with Workman Arts (2024), and “In One Chawan: Seasonal Food Labs” co-facilitated with Anson Ng.

The Artist in Residence program is part of Workman Arts’ Rendezvous with Madness Festival and is in collaboration with Tangled Art + Disability. By providing time and resources, we believe this can support the development of a body of work to become exhibition ready for a solo show at the Tangled Art + Disability gallery vitrine space. We offer this opportunity to a Workman Arts member who has not or has minimally exhibited their artwork, and would benefit from a solo exhibition. 

Helen Kong is our Artist in Residence for the 2024/25 year. 

Helen Kong is a second generation Chinese Canadian living and working in Tkaronto (Toronto). She studied her first ritualized tea while living in Japan. Chado (the Way of Tea) is a meditative life journey through tea and hospitality. It is the gateway into art, culture, and philosophy. After returning to Canada, she studied ceramics as a way to better understand tea vessels. She established Secret Teatime, a clay studio where people play with clay and sip tea. She has expanded from making tea wares for Japanese teas to also studying and making wares for her own heritage of Chinese tea.