Between grain, dune, salt, and sky

September 18 - December 13, 2025

 

Featuring works by: 

Adji Dieye 

Wintana Hagos 

Jessica Karuhanga 

Mallory Lowe Mpoka 

Dawit L. Petros

Rolla Tahir​​

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Curated by Sarah Edo

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Between grain, dune, salt, and sky is a visual and sonic study of metaphor and materiality. This exhibition explores dominant and understated narratives of desert geographies, displacement, architecture, archives, sound, skin, and subversive technologies of image-making across landscapes from the Mediterranean, the Gulf, the Red Sea, and the Atlantic Ocean. A recurrent theme throughout the exhibition is a materialist approach to lens-based cultural production—where process is made visible through both the haptic and conceptual presentation of the work. Whether engaging with sand, saltwater, clay, silk, or fibre, the artists practice a material sensibility anchored in African and Black diasporic cultural and political genealogies.

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Thank you to the Ontario Arts Council and Spring Grant for their generous support in the development and production of Between grain, dune, salt, and sky.

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Artist Bios:

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Adji Dieye is a visual artist living and working between Dakar, Milan, and Zurich. Her practice interrogates notions of representation and identity to examine the socio-political structures shaping our globalized world. By exploring the role of culture in advertising, architecture, and national archives, she scrutinizes the forms of aesthetics of self-determination within neoliberal contexts. Photography is central to her work, serving both as a versatile medium and as a means to question representational “knowledge” and processes of othering across Western and Non-Western societies.

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Adji holds a BA degree in New Technologies of Art from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts (Milan) and an MFA from Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). Her work has been exhibited internationally, with recent exhibitions including Our Rivers Share a Mouth at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Torino, 2024), Aphasia at Fotomuseum Winterthur (2023), Cultura Persa e Imparata a Memoria at ar/ge Kunst (Bolzano, 2022), Culture Lost and Learned by Heart at C/O Berlin (2021), ...of bread, wine, cars, security and peace at Kunsthalle Wien (2020), A Matter of Time at the Cultural Summit (Abu Dhabi, 2024), and The Norval Sovereign African Art Prize at Norval Foundation (Cape Town, 2024). Her upcoming projects include a solo exhibition at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in 2026. She has taken part in several international biennales, including the 24th Biennale Arte Paiz (Guatemala, 2025), the 16th Lyon Biennale (2022), the 14th Dak’Art Biennale – Ĩ NDAFFA (2022), the 13th Bamako Biennale – Rencontres de Bamako (2022), and the Mediterranea Biennale – Schools of Water (San Marino, 2021).

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Wintana Hagos is a Toronto-based multisensory artist, soundscape composer, and cultural strategist focused on sound as a tool for structural, spatial, and public engagement. Her work involves cymatics, analog experimentation, and the reconstruction of sound systems using salvaged materials. She creates sculptural sound pieces that house archived East African recordings, treating sound as a physical and political material. These works explore how sonic systems can shift access and offer alternative modes of knowledge-sharing. As both an artist and an archivist, her approach is grounded in research, listening, and public-facing experimentation. She lead and co-run multiple artist-led initiatives including It’s Ok* Studios, a volunteer-run creative space supporting Black and racialized artists through access to equipment, mentorship, and production space. 

 

Wintana is also active in Estrelar Sound, a Toronto-based audio collective supporting experimental sound and performance practices. Certified in Sound Healing and Yoga Nidra, she incorporates somatic and wellness practices into her programming with young creatives, prioritizing rest, focus, and recovery as core elements of sustainable art-making.

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Jessica Karuhanga is a first-generation Canadian artist of British-Ugandan heritage who addresses politics of identity and Black diasporic concerns through lens-based technologies, sculpture, writing, drawing, and performance. Jessica's work has been presented at venues including Warehouse9 (Copenhagen, DK), Sarajevski Otvoreni Centar (Sarajevo, BA), Mitchell Art Gallery (Edmonton), Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa), Nuit Blanche (Toronto), Onsite Gallery (Toronto), Remai Modern (Saskatoon), Pallas Art Projects (Dublin, IE), WNDX Festival (Winnipeg), ROM (Toronto), and Goldsmiths University (London, UK). Her work is also in public collections (Museum London, Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery). She holds a BFA (Western University) and an MFA (University of Victoria) and is an Assistant Professor at Western University.

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Mallory Lowe Mpoka is a Cameroonian-Belgian artist living and working in Montreal. Her work enfolds photography into an expanded sensual experience to address notions of place, home and memorialization. Positioned by the violence of colonization that inflicts historical and cultural rupture on identity, the artist engages in a multi-faceted and fluid practice to explore the often elusive connections between real and imagined histories. Supplementing the materiality of the photograph with weaving, ceramics, dyeing and sculptural augmentation, Mpoka reanimates and resituates her family archives. Her work expresses a nomadic state of constant in-betweenness through her incorporation of multiple time periods and spatial connections, inspired by her journeys between different continents – Africa, Europe and North America.

Mpoka was nominated for the Malick Sidibé Prize (2022) and the New Generation Photography Award from the National Gallery of Canada (2024). She has exhibited internationally at Villa Romana (Italy), the Art Gallery of Ontario (Canada), 1-54 NYC (USA), and Savvy Contemporary (Germany), among others. In November 2024, she released her debut artist book “Architecture of the Self: What Lives Within Us”. She  will be presenting her debut solo show at Fonderie Darling for Momenta Biennale this fall 2025.

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Dawit L. Petros is a visual artist and educator whose work is informed by the intertwined and multiple narratives of African and European colonialism and modernity. He draws from his study of history to examine displaced or forgotten histories. Petros conducts extensive research and travels to inform production across materials and media, including photography, sculpture, screen prints, video, sound, performance, and sound. A sensitivity to political and historical engagement is fused with aesthetic language that pays keen attention to color and abstraction, reflecting Petros’ long-standing preoccupation with traditions of minimalist sculpture and conceptual artmaking.

 

Dawit L. Petros received an MFA in Visual Art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University, a BFA in Photography from Concordia University, a BFA in History from the University of Saskatchewan and completed the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. Recent exhibition venues include the Liverpool Biennial, Haus der Kunst, Munich; Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort; Wereld Museum, Rotterdam; Tate Modern, London; Oslo Kunstforening, Oslo; Huis Marseille Museum of Photography, Amsterdam; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NYC; and the Bamako Biennale in Mali. Dawit L. Petros is a co-founder with Heba Y. Amin of Black Athena Collective. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Studio Art at Dartmouth College. 

 

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Rolla Tahir is an independent filmmaker and film weaver whose work drifts between narrative and experimental. Her films—shot on Super 8, 16mm, and 35mm—have screened across Canada and beyond. Her first film Sira was a 2018 TIFF Wavelengths selection. In 2023, Rollabegan film weaving and mounted her first solo exhibition I’ve Heard the Bedouins Singing at Gallery Centre[3] in summer 2023. Drawn to the fragility and durability of celluloid film, she continuously explores how to expand and rethink medium, process and their possibilities. At the heart of her weaving practice is reverence for tradition and sustainability. She graduated from the University of Toronto with a Cinema Studies Specialist degree. 

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Rolla has been the Co-Founder and Artistic Director of the Toronto Arab Film Festival since 2017.

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Curator Bio:

 

Sarah Edo is a curator and writer based in Toronto. Her curatorial work has been featured as exhibitions and public programs with institutions and artist-run centres including the Toronto Biennial of Art, Gardiner Museum, Art Gallery of Burlington, BAND Gallery, Images Festival, and Whippersnapper Gallery. She has held curatorial support roles at MOCA Toronto and the MacKenzie Art Gallery and is currently the TD Curatorial Fellow at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery. Sarah’s art criticism and writing has been published in Studio Magazine, Gallery 44, Topical Cream, BlackFlash Magazine, and CMagazine. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Cinema Studies and Gender Studies and a Master’s degree in Gender Studies from the University of Toronto.​​

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