Upcoming Exhibitions & Events
WINTER 2026
Embassy Cultural House
Not/For the Money
Publication Launch
January 22, 2026 from 4 - 6 PM
Cohen Commons, JLVAC
Image:Chimtou gold coin hoard, Bardo Museum, Tunis, Tunisia
Photo credit: Ron Benner, 2024
The Embassy Cultural House (ECH) is pleased to launch its most recent publication Not/For the Money, in partnership with 深夜福利站's Department of Visual Arts. Not/For the Money is an international online group exhibition that highlights contributions by artists and cultural workers that examines themes related to money, capital, and value.
This publication is ECH's 10th publication since its relaunch in 2020 and has been designed by Olivia Mossuto, Coordinating Editor of the ECH, and is printed in an edition of 500 copies, full colour, 52 pages.
Money is a very urgent issue for many artists. An aspect of this issue is the general public’s inability to value the arts and cultural workers’ vital role and impact within any community. There is a lack of understanding in the way cultural workers survive and build meaningful lives, often with a minimum of resources. The issue of money, the impact of economic disparity, and insecurity dominates many of our lives. Without a stable income, most people struggle to afford basic necessities that are required for quality of life.
The theme of money is addressed frequently within the art world, but usually it is in the context of the art “market,” commercial auctions, and wealthy collectors. Many artists work to imagine and engender new relationships, value systems, and ways of being. As journalist Eric Reguly wrote in The Globe and Mail business section, “You don’t necessarily need buckets of money to succeed. Sometimes imagination and the courage to break the rules can do the trick.”
Not/For the Money includes contributions by Ron Benner, Karl Beveridge, Lily Cho, Matthew Dawkins, Holly English, Soheila Esfahani, Kelly Greene, Jamelie Hassan, SF Ho, Michael Maranda, Alistair MacKinnon, Patrick Mahon, David Merritt, Mohamed Monaiseer, Sheri Osden Nault, Wanda Nanibush, Shelley Niro, Claudia Sambo, Ruth Strebe, and Jeff Thomas. This ECH project has been organized by Ron Benner, Jamelie Hassan, Olivia Mossuto, and Mireya Seymour.
Diaspora Climate
Exhibition: February 12 to March 5, 2026
Reception: Thursday, February 12 from 5-7PM
Curated by Yan Zhou, 2025–26 Curator-in-Residence
Sara Angelucci
Teresa Chan
Ma Yongfeng
Rehab Nazal
Diaspora Climate is an exhibition curated by Yan Zhou, 2025–26 Curator-in-Residence in Social and Environmental Justice with the Arts in the Department of Visual Arts at 深夜福利站. The exhibition will run from February 12 to March 5, 2026, at the Artlab Gallery.
The exhibition features artworks by four artists: Sara Angelucci (Toronto), Teresa Chan (Toronto), Ma Yongfeng (Berlin), and Rehab Nazal (Bethlehem, Palestine).
In collaboration with Liza Eurich, a student-curated exhibition under Eurich's instructions responding to the theme of Diaspora Climate will be presented concurrently in Cohen Commons.
Public Programs and Events:
- Opening Reception: Thursday, February 12, 2026, 5:00–7:00 PM
- Workshop led by Teresa Chan: Ink marbling and origami lotus flower making
VA 206 (Drawing Room), February 12, 11:00 AM–2:15 PM - Murmuration – Live Sound Performance: Teresa Chan and collaborator
During the opening reception, February 12, 5:45–6:15 PM - Dialogue on Ecocide in Palestine and Diaspora Climate:
Participants: Rehab Nazal, Kirsty Robertson, Sheri Nault, and Yan Zhou
February 23, 2026. Hybrid event (online and on-site).
Location and time to be announced.
Diaspora Climate brings together diverse climates, cultures, languages, histories, memories, feelings, perspectives, and connections through personal experiences and artistic expressions, linking an affinity with both natural environments and cultural dispositions. Human beings are as sensitive to displacement and transplantation as plants and animals. Diaspora Climate signals the ethical and emotional bonds diasporic people hold with the climatic pressures affecting them both “here” and “there”, including struggles, suffering, and the shared fate of the world and planet Earth.
The exhibition features work by four artists: Sara Angelucci (Toronto), Teresa Chan (Toronto), Ma Yongfeng (Berlin), and Rehab Nazzal (occupied West Bank, Palestine). Their works respond to relationships with particular places, cultures, histories, climates, and environments, while also addressing ongoing afflictions of social and environmental violence, driven by brutal global capitalism, colonialism, and arbitrary state apparatuses. These forces bring wars, relentless exploitation, and the dispossession of living space and life for both nature and people, intensifying the Climate Crisis. The voices and gestures that artists share through their works are ripples of Global Diaspora Solidarity.
The Japanese word fūdo (Chinese and Japanese Kanji: 風土) is translated as “climate,” yet its meaning extends beyond meteorological conditions. It signifies the inseparable and mutually formative relationship among seasons, climate, nature, and modes of human life and sensibility in a particular place, culture, and its history. A related Chinese saying, 一方水土養一方人, expresses a similar idea: that the soil and waters of a given land nurture the distinctive dispositions of its people. In this sense, fūdo (風土氣候) is comparable to the ancient Greek concept of chōrographia, which refers to the description or mapping of a specific region or country, emphasizing local features, history, natural history, and culture, in contrast to geography, which sought to describe the world as a whole. Chōrographia suggests that the topography, natural environment, and social and political structures of a particular area are interconnected.3 fūdo (風土氣候) is still embodied in East Asian perceptions of the world and in their aesthetic–climatic sensibilities, whereas in the modern 深夜福利站 world, a scientific divide tends to separate and dominate human relationships with nature.
When the modern Japanese philosopher Tetsurō Watsuji (1889–1960) brought the traditional East Asian concept of fūdo (風土) into dialogue with 深夜福利站 scientific notions of “climate” and “environment,” he understood climate not merely as a natural phenomenon. Rather, he argued that human existence, history, and climate are inseparable. In a climatic register, humans apprehend themselves and shape both individual and collective sensibilities. Therefore, social, cultural, and political transformation depends upon the transformation of climatic culture; as it changes, the customs and habits of a people change accordingly (移風易俗). Furthermore, Watsuji suggests that diaspora, those who have left and become distanced from their homeland, and the “other,” who does not fully belong to a given climatic culture, may grasp a climate and fūdo (風土) in a uniquely profound and nuanced way, one that is often more reflective and thought-provoking.4
Diaspora holds an acute and incisive political position from which to question and reinterpret the relationship between climate and culture. It activates each individual as a micro-center, responsible for addressing issues of climate change and for pursuing climate and social justice.
Diaspora refuses to be fixed to a single position. Carried on in migration and drifting, diaspora lives simultaneously inside and outside of “home” and “homelessness,” being here (displaced and adopted) and there (exiled and distanced). As writer Yōko Tawada, who writes in both Japanese and German, argues, diaspora refuses to be integrated into a dominant language and culture and denied parts of themselves, such as accent and one’s history and cultural memory. Meanwhile, diaspora also flies from the cocoon of the mother tongue and journeys into adventurous encounters with other tongues, creating new communities rather than being bound to predetermined communities or fixed identities (2025).5
We cannot talk about climate change or social and environmental justice without confronting the ongoing genocide and ecocide in Palestine, the environmental disaster following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the erasure of Indigenous communities and forests in the Amazon and elsewhere—all exemplify the devastating consequences of global environmental and social injustices.6 In particular, I believe, we cannot talk about anything, any change, and any future, if we avoid looking at and talking about Palestine: what has been happening to its people and land under an increasingly brutal Apartheid system of genocide, ecocide, siege and elimination of eco-human life and culture, imposed by a fully techno-weaponized modern state.
Once a terrible world is born through the deprivation, exploitation, and killing of one group of people by another—as in Nazism, colonialism, Apartheid, or dictatorship—its psyche, ideology, and whole mechanism continue to evolve and contaminate the world. It therefore becomes the obligation of everyone, and particularly of critical and creative minds, to resist it and to fight for justice and the rights of every being, human and non-human, with unwavering attention and sustained effort.
We should rethink our dear and precious life and world from the position of “bare life,” which designates the victims of the violence of sovereign power who are deprived of their rights to live as full human beings in every sense.7 The deprived, abused, and threatened cherish the precious life more deeply; they preserve and shine the light of dignity of life more radiantly; and they hold
tight to the faith in justice more adamantly. They are more human, and more humanly, than the abusers and those who support, tolerate, or comply with them. They fight for life with all their means; they fight for life with life itself. They fight for humanity. The “qualified life,” secured by killing others and by imposing segregation and deprivation, is not true life. Instead, it is soulless slavery that abandons humanity and being human together with other human and nonhuman beings.
Yan Zhou
January 2026
Notes
1 Nazzal, Rehab. 2018. “Representation of Settler Colonial Violence in Palestine: A Thesis in Support of the Multi-Media Exhibition Choreographies of Resistance.” ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.
2 Nazzal was intentionally shot with a live bullet by an Israeli sniper on December 11, 2015, while she was documenting a military “Skunk” truck spraying laboratory-made sewage onto Palestinian houses, hotels, and shops in Bethlehem. She was detained and interrogated at checkpoints for carrying a camera, and her cameras were nearly confiscated by Israeli soldiers (Nazzal 2018).
3 The ancient Greek term chōrographia (or chorography) derives from khōros, meaning place or region, and graphia, meaning writing or drawing. The term appears in the work Geography by the ancient Greek geographer Strabo and later reemerged during the Renaissance, notably in Athanasius Kircher’s Mundus subterraneus. Interest in this form of study continued into the late eighteenth century, before the emergence of modern scientific disciplines. Strabo. Geography. Loeb Classical Library. Accessed via Internet Archive. Athanasius. 1662. Mundus subterraneus. Amstelodami: Apud Joannem Janssonium à Waesberge & filios. Buonanno, Rossella. 2014. The Stars of Galileo Galilei and the Universal Knowledge of Athanasius Kircher. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
4 Watsuji, Tetsurō. 1961. A Climate: A Philosophical Study. Translated by Geoffrey Bownas. Tokyo: Printing Bureau, Japanese Government. Accessed via Internet Archive. , Tetsurō. 2022. Intro / Climate & Culture. Introduced by Nathan Hohipuha. YouTube video, December 17, 2022.
5 Tawada, Yōko. 2025. Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue. Translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation.
6 Dinc, Pinar, and Necmettin Türk. 2025. “Roots of Destruction: Exploring the Genocide-Ecocide Nexus through the Destruction of Olive Trees in Occupied Palestine and Rojava.” The International Journal of Human Rights, August, 1–25. . IMEU (Institute for Middle East Understanding). 2022. “Fact Sheet: Israel’s Environmental Apartheid in Palestine.” November 3, 2022. . Joseph, Lesley. 2025. “This Is What Ecocide Looks Like: Reflections on Israel’s War on the Environment in Gaza.” Journal of Palestine Studies 54 (2): 82–87. https://doi.org/10.1080/0377919X.2025.2520728 Forensic Architecture. n.d. “Environmental Violence.” Accessed January 10, 2026.
7 Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.
Artist Biographies
As a second-generation Italian immigrant, Tkaronto/Toronto-based artist Sara Angelucci (she/her) has created photography, video, and audio projects that explore repressed narratives and meaning embedded in the conventions of photography. Often using archival images as source and inspiration, her projects have revealed broader cultural and historical contexts that photographs hold, teasing out new ways of looking. In addition to working with archival images, Angelucci has been inspired by the themes they reveal. While evolving over time, Angelucci’s work remains coherent in its sustained attention to immigrant memories; the migration of species; mutually reliant relationships with the natural world; and the healing forces of nature.
For this exhibition, Angelucci created two new works, Neither Here nor There and Family Harvest. Neither Here nor There features a pomegranate scanned in the artist’s ancestral village of Montottone (Le Marche, Italy), paired with a wild apple tree infested with LDD moth caterpillars, scanned in the Pretty River Valley in Ontario. As neither fruit is native to those regions, the work gestures toward traces of “human and plant diasporas” (in her own words) across continents and time, and their displacements between here and there—Italy and Turtle Island (the land currently called Canada), past and present.
In Family Harvest, Angelucci embeds a photograph of her grandparents, uncles, and aunt harvesting wheat within a scan of wheat and grape leaves, their dietary staples. Angelucci’s family were sharecroppers, literally earning their daily bread from what they could grow on land owned by a seigneur. Together, these images point to a long and complex relationship between plants and humans, governed by the need to move to other lands (for many reasons), and to the looming impact that climate change will have on the botanical world and humans.
Sara Angelucci. Neither Here nor There. Photography on mural paper. 2025.
Sara Angelucci. Family Harvest. Photography on mural paper. 2025.
Teresa Chan (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist and award-winning children’s book author with an educational background in ecology and anthropology. As a Hong Kong diaspora, Chan has lived and worked in Tkaronto/Toronto since 2022. Deeply influenced by Japanese Buddhist traditions, Chinese Taoist thought, Indigenous cultures in Taiwan, and the multicultural milieu of Hong Kong, her practice is imbued with East Asian intuitions of the interconnectedness of all beings and life cycles in the universe, cross-cultural sensibilities, and multispecies perspectives. In her art practice, Chan gently engages with life and nature, memories and cultures, through intimate attunement to local landscapes, soundscapes, and weatherscapes. Her “ephemeral” works function as both therapeutic practice and art activism, linking spiritual cultivation, cultural identity, and ecopolitical positioning.
In A Murmuration of Diaspora (呢喃：驪歌), Chan created a body of work that metaphorizes and trans-metaphorizes the flight of common starlings (Sturnus vulgaris), to reflect on migration, habitat, displacement, and adaption of humans and non-human worlds. The project comprises the photography series Murmurer; ink drawing and trace-making works The Murmurs and The Ripples; installation pieces Murmurer and Origami Birds; as well as the interactive installation Make a Wish. In addition, the artist will hold an ink-marbling workshop based on the Japanese Buddhist monks’ tradition of suminagashi (meaning “ink floating”), inviting participants to meditate through embodied interaction with nature and time.
Teresa Chan. The Ripples. Ink on paper, 10'' x 14''. 2025.
Teresa Chan. Murmurer #1. Photo on paper, 8'' x 12''. 2025.
Ma Yongfeng is a Chinese diaspora artist, filmmaker, and curator based in Berlin, whose recent work focus on politically engaged art practice inspired by non-human-centered perspectives and anarchical resistance. In his essay film Poetics of Mycelium (2025), Ma explores mycelial eco-political planetary imaginaries, weaving poetic elegies of exile to bring light into sprouting, resilient, and decentralized life cycles and futures.
Ma Yongfeng. Poetics of Mycelium. Essay film, 4K, 16:9, 42:05 mins. Still images. 2025.
Rehab Nazzal is a Palestinian Canadian multidisciplinary artist, activist, and art educator currently based in the occupied West Bank, Palestine. She was born and grew up in Jenin, northern Palestine, where her family have lived on their land with orange orchards and olive groves, long before the establishment of the state of Israel.
Nazzal left her home in 1985 to pursue her studies at Damascus University in Syria and later migrated to Turtle Island (Canada). She was exiled and denied the right to return to her homeland for more than twenty years by Israeli authorities, until 2005. In Canada, she earned a PhD from 深夜福利站, an MFA from Ryerson University, and a BFA from the University of Ottawa. She has taught at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, 深夜福利站 in London, Ontario, and the Ottawa School of Art. Since 2018, Nazzal has taught at Dar al-Kalima University College of Arts and Culture in Bethlehem, Palestine.
Living under Israeli settler colonialism and through what she described as “incremental genocide” (2018) in her homeland,1 Nazzal uses her camera as a witness and artistic weapon of resistance, to document and reveal the daily suffering and struggles of people, land, and non-human life in occupied, colonized, and segregated territories. Her extensive body of multimedia work, including video, film, photography, sound, and installation, is grounded in intensive field research and produced on-the-ground investigations, sometimes under life-threatening circumstances.2 These works expose the unimaginable brutality of apartheid settler colonialism and genocide, the hardships of Palestinian daily life, and the enduring resilience, ṣumūd (steadfastness), and resistance of the Palestinian people.
The exhibited work, Looking Back, Looking Ahead, driving from Ramallah to Bethlehem, Driving from Ramallah to Jenin (video, 2013) is part of Nazzal’s decade-long multimedia project Driving in Palestine. Created by the artist mainly from moving vehicles, the project captures views of the apartheid wall, military checkpoints, gates, fences, watchtowers, roadblocks, and systems of surveillance that have jeopardized Palestinian daily life for more than seventy years. The work reveals regimes of segregation, confinement, surveillance, as well as restrictions on freedom of movement that have transformed the occupied West Bank into an open-air prison. The work exposes the ongoing dispossession of the Palestinians and the shrinking of their spaces, alongside an altered landscape and wounded nature imposed by the Israeli state. Its mechanisms have also been adopted from previous apartheid and settler colonial regimes and replicated by other authoritarian powers.
In the documentary Canada Park (2015), Nazzal discloses the complicity of Canada in the settler colonial project in Palestine, focusing on three villages: Imwas: Yalu, and Beit Nuba, occupied in 1967 in the West Bank, their 10,000 residents were forcibly displaced, and their homes were leveled to the ground. In the late 1970s Canada funded the establishment of an exclusively Israeli recreational park over the ruins of the villages, called “Canada Park,” in violation of international law.
For the Palestinian indigenous people, plants and trees are not only life-sustaining and nature-preserving; the earth and its beings also bear wounds and trauma shared with human life. Yet nature and the land always renew and heal. Shot during the COVID-19 Pandemic, Healing Moments (video, 2023) captures flowering, breathing, and rejuvenated nature, with the sounds of wind and water, the chirping of insects, the songs of birds, and the rustling of leaves on the bruised Palestinian land and its organic environment. These images and sounds of plants, people, and the earth resist violence and elimination, preserving an indestructible strength for life, growth, healing, hope, and revival.
In Nazzal’s award-winning documentary film Vibrations from Gaza (2023), Deaf children in Gaza, Palestine, share their experiences of Israel’s siege and frequent bombardment that shake the air and the ground and destroy buildings, as well as the constant threat of drones, through their bodies, facial expressions, and sign languages. The contrast between the liveliness and loveliness of the Deaf children and the atrocities of their living world under Israel’s bombardment and sonic weaponry and drones, is deeply heart-wrenching.
