Nuit Blanche, Toronto’s all-night celebration of contemporary art, returned in October 2022 for its biggest event ever. Led by inaugural Artistic Director Dr. Julie Nagam, Nuit Blanche’s curatorial theme, The Space Between Us, invited artists to transform the city by creatively sharing stories about their connection to place, while bridging cultures and connecting with communities and the environment.
Between a Rock and a Hard Place was a digital installation that evoked the immigrant’s struggle in the search for home and identity, post-migration. Presented as a projected animation and an augmented reality installation at Nuit Blanche Toronto 2022, Haneen Dalla-Ali's works transformed the lobby of the TIFF Bell Lightbox for the night. In this work, Dalla-Ali created Arabic letter fragments inspired by the traditional Kufic font, a prominent Arabic script, established in Kufa, Iraq. As she digitally arranged the fragments, she mapped out her experience of navigating the narrow limestone fissures at the Limehouse Conservation Area, a natural site near her current home in Ontario. The act of juxtaposing the Arabic script with a parcel of Southern Ontario’s landscape allowed her to visualize home. Through this work, she sought to create a virtual realm that most accurately expressed her hybrid domestic identity in the diaspora. In the process, her notion of home became an event that takes place within a specific timeframe – a temporal experience, rather than a static, physical dwelling
photographs by Leo Liu, and Wesley Chu
event montage video by Wesley Chu
augmented reality experience videos by Aisar Taha
