Exhibition | +1-home | Nada El-Omari & Sonya Mwambu

September 6 - November 18, 2025

Opening: Saturday September 6, 5-7pm

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.

“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.”

Sonya Mwambu is an experimental filmmaker and editor based in Toronto. Born in Kampala,

they grew up in Canada and their work centres on the intersections of their identities through the

exploration of race, gender, language and the connections they find through the experimentations

of analogue film and digital technologies. Their works have shown at Nuit Blanche Toronto, Art

Gallery of Ontario, the8fest, InterAccess, McMaster Museum of Art, (S8) Mostra Internacional

de Cinema Periférico, and the Mono No Aware Cinema Arts Festival. Their work has also been

published in qumra journal and The Archive of Forgetfulness supported by the Goethe-Institut

Johannesburg. Their last project, ‘mountains never meet, but people do’, was an interactive

digital and analog installation exploring personal archives of Uganda’s intertwined histories

within the diaspora, completed as part of a residency at Charles Street Video. Mwambu holds a

BFA in Film Production from York University and is pursuing an MFA in Film.

Nada El-Omari is a filmmaker and writer of Palestinian and Egyptian origin based in Montreal,

Quebec. Her practice and research interests centre on the intergenerational transmissions of

memories, displacement, and the stories of belonging and identity which she explores through a

poetic, hybrid lens. Focusing on process and fragments in text, sound, and image, Nada explores

new ways to self-narrate, and speak hybridity and self. Her films have been shown at several

festivals, on Shasha and Tenk, and in various galleries. Her work has also been published in

Montreal Serai, qumra journal, on Pavillons and in Tantôt magazine. Her last digital project was

commissioned by the Art Gallery of Ontario in collaboration with Sonya Mwambu and shown as

a digital installation in gallery, custom-made to InterAccess’s immersive projection environment

as a two-player interactive experience. El-Omari holds a BFA in Film Production and an MFA in

Film from York University.