April 10 – May 31, 2025
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Co-Curated by Liz Ikiriko Jaclyn Quaresma
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Work by aka TAWLA, Dana Qaddah, Joyce Joumaa, Sharlene Bamboat, Roï Saade and Tamara Abdul Hadi.
Images Festival, Toronto in partnership with Gallery TPW, Art Metropole and Issues Magazine Shop
Photo documentation by Darren Rigo
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, Sharlene Bamboat, Roï Saade and Tamara Abdul Hadi. 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.
Public Programs
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!
Bound Narratives | Workshop, Saturday, April 19, 2025 2PM-4PM
Join hosts Roï Saade and Tamara Abdul Hadi for an engaging conversation on the role of photography and photobook making as forms of anti-colonial solidarity.
Registration required.
Artist Talk | Dana Qaddah & Joyce Joumaa
Moderated by Liz Ikiriko & Jaclyn Quaresma, Saturday, May 10, 2025 12PM-2PM
Join us at the gallery on Saturday, May 10 for an artist talk with Dana Qaddah & Joyce Joumaa, moderated by Liz Ikiriko and Jaclyn Quaresma.
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 organizer whose work centres themes of building from, and through, colonial legacies, environmental and economic deterioration, and the condition of being abstracted from the sense of self and place.
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.
Tamara Abdul Hadi
Tamara Abdul Hadi is an Iraqi photographer and educator investigating the links between photography and representations of culture.
Along with being a photographer, Tamara is an educator who has taught in Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, the UAE, Kuwait, Tunisia and Canada.
Her work has been published in the mainstream media extensively, though she now prefers to work for more independent entities. Her photographs have been exhibited worldwide. She often collaborates with Roï Saade, her partner in life and vision. Abdul Hadi’s debut monograph Picture an Arab Man was published in 2022.
Jaclyn Quaresma 