Never One Thing Alone
Co-curated by Liz Ikiriko + Jaclyn Quaresma
Presented in partnership with Images Festival
April 9 - May 31, 2025
aka TAWLA
Dana Qaddah
Joyce Joumaa
Roï Saade
Sharlene Bamboat
Never One Thing Alone, co-curated by Liz Ikiriko and Jaclyn Quaresma, considers intricate networks of solidarity and connection, movements of resistance, and collective action alongside the work of aka TAWLA, Dana Qaddah, Joyce Joumaa, and Sharlene Bamboat. Never One Thing Alone charts the artists' intersecting networks, which serve to strengthen one another, sometimes across borders. Finding solidarity even in the most difficult circumstances, these artists—from Cairo, Beirut, Khartoum, Vancouver, Montreal, and Toronto—are forging their own shadow paths through and against systems of colonial and capitalist extraction.
Curating this exhibition collaboratively, Liz Ikiriko and Jaclyn Quaresma look to collectives, counter-schools, and alternative modes of working that sustain us through the labor of radical transformation. The invited artists utilize immersive and experimental film, sculpture, and photobook publishing to seek common ground with love and resilience.
Artist Bios
aka TAWLA
aka TAWLA is a collective of photobook makers from the SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) region, supporting photobook making and advocating for alternative narratives. The collective focuses on showcasing photobooks produced by and originating from SWANA, as well as publishing their own zines and photobooks. Expanding beyond the traditional documentary frameworks, overused misrepresentations, and flattened narratives that has othered our communities for decades, we aim to support visual storytellers from our region, make photography and visual storytelling accessible, and create connections between local and international visual storytellers and audiences.
Dana Qaddah
Dana Qaddah (b. Beirut, Lebanon) is an interdisciplinary artist and independent curator currently based on unceded Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish territory. Qaddah’s practice uses archives of personal and itinerant cultural knowledge to traverse themes of Arab futurism and storytelling, while reflecting on the condition of being abstracted from the destruction of one’s own sense of self and place. Qaddah completed a BFA at ECUAD in 2019.
Joyce Joumaa
Joyce Joumaa is a video artist based between Beirut and Montreal. After growing up in Lebanon, she pursued a BFA in Film Studies at Concordia University in Canada. Her work focuses on microhistories within Lebanon as a way to understand how past structures inform the present moment.
Roï Saade
Roï Saade is an interdisciplinary artist interested in the intersectionality between graphic design, photography, and the arts. Saade designs and curates photography exhibitions, film festivals, magazines and has developed Bound Narratives: A Photobook Library which brings together a curated selection of photobooks made from and about the Middle East and North African region by a wide variety of talented authors and artists.
Sharlene Bamboat
Sharlene Bamboat is a moving image and installation artist based in Tio’ta:ke/Montreal. Her practice often engages with translation, history, and music, uncovering sensory and fractured ways of knowing. Sharlene regularly collaborates with artists, musicians, and writers to animate historical, political, legal, and pop-culture materials. Sharlene has screened and exhibited internationally.
Untitled (still), Joyce Joumaa, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
Public Programming
Opening Night | Images Festival
Thursday, April 10, 2025
7:30PM - late
Join us on Thursday, April 10 at Gallery TPW for opening night of Images Festival, along with the opening of Never One Thing Alone, curated by Liz Ikiriko and Jaclyn Quaresma.
From 9pm till midnight, ESCOBUTT will be on the decks providing sounds through the night!