Images from our group exhibition “Earth, Body, Thread” featuring @omar.t.zayed , @spencerginn and me. As friends and artists who inspire each other, we had wanted to do a show together for a while and it finally happened this spring thanks to @everything_gallery_toronto 🤎
Big love to Zeina @_______fragments for her thoughtful and supportive curatorial work:
“Here, clay, textile, and form do not simply cite Mesopotamian, North African, or Greco-Roman sources; they also blur timelines and mingle as ritual objects put together from an otherworldly archeological dig. Alsalman’s clay forms, Zayed’s hand-dyed textiles, and Ginn’s ceramic vessels each approach matter as a carrier of memory and belief, but also as an active, almost sentient presence in the room.”
📷 by @kinlonma - thank you!
A new iteration of my work “Remember the Future: Oneiric Artifacts from Mesopotamia” is currently showing at @artwindsoressex with three other artists under curator Cassandra Lesage Fongué’s vision for “L’air est lourd” - a meditation on our current sense of suspension and angst, the heaviness of knowing that painful but necessary change is upon us. Fongué asks: Quels sont ces points de rupture invisibles entre le présent et l’avenir imprévu ? What are the invisible points of rupture between the present and the unforeseen future?
Je suis ravie d’avoir été choisie en tant qu’artiste participante par @bravo.artsvisuels avec le soutien de @ontarioartscouncil . Mon travail est entouré par les oeuvres sublimes de Laura Demers, Lisa Hirmer et Katherine Takpannie. The exhibit is up until June 28th.
Photos: AWE / Frank Piccolo
EARTH BODY THREAD
March 27th - May 5th
Hala Alsalman @halalsalman
Omar Tarek zayed @omar.t.zayed
Spencer Ginn @spencerginn
Art direction: Zeina Nahas @_______fragments
This exhibition gathers the work of Hala Alsalman, Omar Tarek Zayed, and Spencer Ginn around forms that feel older than any single history: vessels, fragments of bodies, patterned cloth, repeated marks. These recurring images gesture toward the sublime,
where the familiar slips into something vaster and harder to name. Here, clay, textile, and form do not simply cite Mesopotamian, North African, or Greco-Roman sources; they also blur timelines and mingle as ritual objects put together from an otherworldly archeological dig.
Alsalman’s clay forms, Zayed’s hand-dyed textiles, and Ginn’s ceramic vessels each approach matter as a carrier of memory and belief, but also as an active, almost sentient presence in the room. Taken together, the works suggest that what we call “the past” is
not fixed behind us; it moves through symbols, gestures, and materials that return again and again,
pressing against the limits of what can be contained or understood. The gallery becomes less an archive
than a quiet sanctuary, where viewers can encounter these works not as spectacle, but as a slow, inward recognition—a sense that these archetypal forms also inhabit their own inner worlds.
#artgallerytoronto #contemporaryart #cafeandarttoronto #torontomustvisit #torontohighlights
Free City Radio 290, Artist Hala Alsalman @halalsalman on The Rod and The Ring and ancient Mesopotamian wisdom
/freecityradio/290-artist-hala-alsalman-on
This interview is about Hala’s recent film, the images and artwork shared features in different ways in the film project, THE ROD AND THE RING, which is described this way:
“Dream recall and archeology share many parallels: Both are memory practices that require speculation, interpretation and re-membering disconnected elements to form a coherent narrative. Both also require a negotiation, sometimes even confrontation, with our perception of time. With this in mind, this exhibit proposes a speculative form of archeology that uses dreaming as a methodology to excavate possible futures.”
Learning to Be Here: a collective endurance for decentralization exhibits five looping films by Anika Iyer, Dee Dee Decay, Hala Alsalman, Wang Zi, and Xinyi Tian.
🗓️ Updated Exhibition Dates: January 18–February 28
📍 Critical Distance, 401 Richmond St W, Suite 122
Hala Alsalman bio:
Hala Alsalman is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker with a background in journalism. Through video, collage, and ceramics, her work investigates political power, history-making, and gender relations within the context of the Middle East. Being of Iraqi ancestry, she often draws inspiration from ancient Mesopotamian scholarship and aesthetics. @halalsalman
Artist Statement:
Shot across Iraq, 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙍𝙤𝙙 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙍𝙞𝙣𝙜 engages with the language of dreams and clay to explore the mysterious symbolism of the Mesopotamian rod and ring in a distant future that's recovered lost wisdom from the ancient past.
According to their own historical accounts, Mesopotamian people would encounter ruins and clay artifacts from previous eras, which they perceived as divine interventions from the past. The future would also intercede with the present through their practice of oneiromancy, since dreams were seen as sacred guidance to what could lie ahead. Time travel, in this sense, was real for the ancients and it's what inspired this film and my MFA thesis proposal of dreaming as a methodology for excavating possible futures.
✦ New Toronto Works 2025 — Tonight! Thursday, September 25, Doors at 6:30pm/Event at 7pm✦
✨As part of our countdown, we’re spotlighting some of the artists whose works will premiere this evening, Thursday, September 25, at Innis Town Hall.✨
🌀 The Rod and the Ring by Iraqi-Canadian artist Hala Alsalman 🌀
The conjoined rod and ring—an ancient Mesopotamian symbol held by divine beings—appears across millennia of cylinder seals and wall reliefs. Scholars still debate its meaning; one recent theory suggests it embodies the dual nature of time: the finite and the eternal.
Filmed across Iraq, this dreamlike film explores the rod and ring’s potent symbolism and how it could manifest in the future.
Hala Alsalman is an Iraqi-Canadian multidisciplinary artist with a strong background in both journalism and filmmaking. Her art practice is grounded in questioning gender relations, political power and history-making through collage, cinema and ceramics. As an MFA candidate at OCAD U, her thesis proposed dreaming as an archeological method for excavating possible futures were lost ancient wisdom resurfaces. Her films include Bêtes Humaines (2011), funded by TV5 Québec and selected at Newport Beach and Rendez-Vous du Cinéma Québecois, and Haifa Street (2017), co-written and co-produced with Mohanad Hayal, winner of awards at Doha, Cairo, Busan, and Carthage.
Join us tonight (Thursday, September 25) at Innis Town Hall for The Rod and the Ring and other new works by Toronto’s moving-image artists.
📍 Innis Town Hall
📅 Thursday, Sept 25 — Doors 6:30pm, Screening 7:00pm
🎟️ Free admission, non-ticketed
#NewTorontoWorks2025 #ExperimentalFilm #TorontoArtists #IraqiArtists
My work was recently featured in Carnation Zine, Vol. 3. I’m grateful to have been included among such thought-provoking artists and writers like the fearless indigenous curator and educator Wanda Nanibush.
The theme for this volume is “fire” with selected artworks and writing that address destruction, passion, ritual, resistance, and transformation. The zine’s design layout also happens to be 🔥 (by Osman Bari). Most moving are the candid letters between the editors who are devastated by the genocide in Gaza.
Pick up a copy @maktaba.bookshop in Montreal or @issuesmagshop in Toronto. You can also order online via @carnationzine - support independent zines and don’t stop talking about Palestine ❤️
The mere mention of Palestine shut down our art show. Please share widely.
I was recently invited by @carousel.collective to show a new iteration of “They Stole Our Eyes (but We Still See)” at the Aurora Cultural Centre in Ontario. Featuring 5 other artists, the group exhibition explores various global socio-political topics. My installation investigates the antiquities black market of Iraq’s looted artifacts during America’s imperialist wars.
Part of a $53 million renovation project, the Centre’s reopening drew in some 900 people on Sep 21. Just a day later, our exhibit was shut down due to accusations of ‘antisemitism’ in my and @haz.bin ‘s works: Hers explored the collective unconscious via participatory paintings from various settings - among them the People’s Circle for Palestine. Mine included a Middle East map with the word ‘Israel’ in parentheses with the word ‘Palestine’ under it, in the same way we write Tkaronto (Toronto) as a decolonial gesture in Canada.
For 2 weeks we were in limbo while the Centre was ‘investigating’. The complainants defamed us in the media (see screen grabs). Our emails went unanswered. The Centre never defended us. In fact they validated their slanderous claims in a second article on Oct 7, announcing that the exhibition would be permanently shut down to safeguard “the wellbeing of the community” (as if us artists were malevolent foreign entities). At a time when we are all witnessing Israel’s relentless, high-tech genocidal massacres in Gaza on our phones every day, how could we as artists not acknowledge Palestine and the occupation?
Silencing artists on ideological grounds sets a dangerous precedent. The exhibition was called “Expressions of Critical Thought” and in an Orwellian twist, it was shut down for that very reason. Our works now hang in the dark, censored and sealed off from the public, denying them thought-provoking art by Alberto Castillo, @vridhhi , @em_thepainter and street artist Renaissance. If you feel compelled, email John De Faveri [email protected]
And don’t stop talking about Palestine. Because Never Again means NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE 💜🌍
