Current Residents

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Norway, Ethiopia

Current Resident: Sep 1, 2025–Aug 31, 2026

OCA - Office for Contemporary Art Norway

Studio #220

Artist

Wendimagegn Belete

Wendimagegn Belete is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the complex interplay of culture, memory, identity, heritage, spirituality, and epigenetic inheritance—a form of memory transferred across generations in unconventional ways. He works across diverse mediums, including installation, moving images, painting, photography, textiles, and found objects. By interweaving physical and digital archival materials, he creates richly layered works that craft dynamic narratives, traversing both temporal and spatial boundaries.
Wendimagegn Belete has exhibited work at  The National Museum in Olso, Norway; Gwangju Biennale, South Korea, and Pinchuk Art Centre, Ukraine, among others.
wendimagegnbelete.com

Events & Exhibitions

2025 Fall Open Studios
November 14–November 15, 2025
Wendimagegn Belete, Your Gaze Makes Me, 2021, mixed media installation, 2435/16 × 248 × 1113/16 in. (618.01 × 630 × 30 cm).
Wendimagegn Belete, Of water and the spirit., 2024, mixed media, dimensions variable.
Wendimagegn Belete, Unveil, 2020, video installation (loop), 987/16 × 472.44 in in. (250.01 × 472.44 in cm).
Wendimagegn Belete, MISS AND HIT, 2025, mixed media, dimensions variableThree Steps North.
Wendimagegn Belete, Three Steps North, 2024, mixed media, dimensions variable.

Residents from Norway

Abirami Logendran

Norway
OCA - Office for Contemporary Art Norway
Studio #221

Apichaya Wanthiang

Norway, Thailand
OCA - Office for Contemporary Art Norway
2025

Katrine Elise Agpalza Pedersen

Philippines, Norway
OCA - Office for Contemporary Art Norway
2024
Brazil

Current Resident: Oct 1, 2025–Dec 31, 2025

Associação dos Artistas e Produtores do Centro de São Paulo (ASP)

Studio #305

Artist

Rafaela Foz

Rafaela Foz works with conceptual contrasts, exploring boundaries between matter and image, weight and lightness, presence and impermanence. Her multimedia practice employs materials such as charcoal dust, real and false stones, minerals, and collected objects as vectors of time — geological, bodily, and historical. Moving between installation, drawing, projection, and collage, she weaves elements that evoke fragmented landscapes, dense atmospheres, and materiality — always in tension with aesthetic contemplation and the systems that shape perception.

Rafaela Foz has exhibited work at Paço das Artes; Brazilian Art Museum; and Espaço Delirium, all in Brazil, among others.

rafaelafoz.com

Events & Exhibitions

2025 Fall Open Studios
November 14–November 15, 2025
cardboard, paper towels and wall paint - The Wild, Rebounding is an installation that was created for the open studio event at the Cité Internationale des Arts, where the artist was in residence for a few months in 2025. The work - an avalanche of stones or the ruins of buildings that emerge from inside her studio - was exhibited during the period when her studio was supposed to be open to visitors.
Rafaela Foz, The Wild, Rebounding, 2025, installation.
Rafaela Foz, Sediments Series, 2025, mosaic, 44,5 × 29,5 in. (44,5 × 29,5 cm).
Rafaela Foz, Stay here, until the word 'dwell' makes sense., 2022, sculpture.
A site-specific work where the artist uses charcoal dust to create a drawing inspired by architectural elements of the exhibition space—in this case, an upper staircase corridor. The process begins by marking a perimeter on the wall based on historical perspective references. Charcoal dust is then blown onto the surface without fixative, forming a landscape that evokes the typical dirt of polluted cities.
Rafaela Foz, Perspective, 2024, site-specific drawing.
Rafaela Foz, Mineral, 2023, collage, 5913/16 × 6911/16 in. (151.89 × 177.04 cm).

Residents from Brazil

Adriane de Souza

Qatar, Brazil
Fire Station - Qatar Museums
2025

Felipe de Ávila Franco

Brazil, Finland
Uniarts Helsinki's Academy of Fine Arts and Saastamoinen Foundation
2023

Luiza Gottschalk

Brazil
2020
United Kingdom, Canada

Current Resident: Oct 1, 2025–Nov 30, 2025

Canada Council for the Arts

Studio #208

Artist

Ghazaleh Avarzamani

Ghazaleh Avarzamani’s research examines and disrupts hidden social hierarchies. Through her practice, she probes the fallacies and inequities embedded in inherited knowledge and cultural manuals. By crafting visual narratives that both deconstruct and reconstruct time and space, she reconfigures materials to expose dysfunction and failure, drawing on collective human memory and overlooked knowledge. Her work uncovers the extraordinary within the ordinary, offering new ways to represent what is too often taken for granted.

Ghazaleh Avarzamani has exhibited work at Hayward Gallery, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto; and Frieze Sculpture, London, among others.

ghazalehavarzamani.com

Events & Exhibitions

2025 Fall Open Studios
November 14–November 15, 2025
A mashrabiya is an architectural element characteristic of traditional Islamic architecture. It is a type of projecting, oriel window enclosed with wooden latticework, and they are typically located on the upper floors of a building. These structures capture and passively cool the air by streaming it into the building. Sometimes mashrabiyas are used as screens, separating rooms inside the house, or to adorn windows, allowing for a partial view outward, but restricting the view inward. This function was often used to provide privacy for women while still allowing them to see outside. At MOCA Toronto, the intervention on the museum’s exterior wall consists of three wooden lattices that form an enclave extending into the projecting oriel window on the facade of the building. The work recalls an observation deck, one that visitors are invited to enter. As an enclosed space, it projects through the museum’s first-floor windows and becomes both a space from which to look out and a space from which to take a pause, to reflect inward. As viewers engage with the installation from either outside or inside the museum’s walls, some will become the observers, some the observed, but they cannot be both at once. The public becomes integral to the play of visibility and obscurity, and the dynamics of power associated with viewing especially within the space of the museum.
Ghazaleh Avarzamani, Mashrabiya, 2021, painted aluminum, 78 × 233 × 97 in. (198.12 × 591.82 × 246.38 cm).
Scratch Me and l’ll Scratch You is a sculpture made of butter based on the Stork and Fox fable: A fox invites a stork to eat with him and provides soup in a bowl, which the fox can lap up easily; however, the stork cannot drink it with its beak. The stork then invites the fox to a meal, which is served in a narrow-necked vessel. It is easy for the stork to access but impossible for the fox. The moral drawn is that the trickster must expect trickery in return and that the golden rule of conduct is for one to do to others what one would wish for oneself. The work is questioning the relation of governing politics with ephemerality of knowledge and education. My affinity for fat as an artistic material is because fat is a stand-in for art itself: Butter is talismanic substance, a symbol of survival and comfort, the most religious food and decorative for centuries; a transformative agent, rendering the surrounding situation pliant and changeable, unsettling fixed structures. Reacting to weather, architecture and the number of people surrounding it.
Ghazaleh Avarzamani, Scratch Me, And I’ll Scratch You, 2023, butter and wood, 98 × 118 × 98 in. (248.92 × 299.72 × 248.92 cm).
That the lover's discourse is today of an extreme solitude. This discourse is spoken, perhaps, by thousands of subjects (who knows?), but warranted by no one; it is completely forsaken by the surrounding languages: ignored, disparaged, or derided by them, severed not only from authority but also from the mechanisms of authority (sciences, techniques, arts). Once a discourse is thus driven by its own momentum into the backwater of the "unreal." exiled from all gregarity, it has no recourse but to become the site, however exiguous, of an affirmation.” Roland Barthes Happy Together - a title borrowed from the Wong Kar Wai movie(1997) - takes the form of two ceiling fans joined together by their blades. It’s forms rendered inoperable/non-functioning via their union. Immobilized and sedentary, the work is a meditation on dysfunction. Open to interpretation, the piece speaks about the turbulent cycle of infatuation and destructive love, break up, make up, and falling apart again and again. Happy Together explores love as a space that can be both inviting and potentially paralyzing; as a way to explore how games and play can be understood as tools that deconstruct, replicate, or transform the physical/metaphysical space. How it can become a war of an extreme solitude. One in which the eeriness of the everyday and the slowing of time becomes apparent.
Ghazaleh Avarzamani, Happy Together, 2022, wood and aluminum, 104 × 61 in. (264.16 × 154.94 cm).
Strange Temporalities is a reassemblage of a deconstructed plastic slide, the kind common to children’s playgrounds, that takes the components of a spiral slide and spreads them out into discrete parts. The slide becomes useless and also somewhat dangerous if one were to attempt to use it, embodying a failed assurance of safe enjoyment. As a space dedicated for use by children, playgrounds are sites of exploration. They exist to encourage play, exploration, exercise, and growth. The work deploys these obvious connections to childhood, but also explores notions of learning and forgetting, growth and erasure, accomplishment and failure. It aims to expose the paradoxical realities behind educational methodologies, personal aspirations and cultural manuals, by foregrounding play as an important mode of thinking while questioning what might constitute a “safe space.” Strange Temporalities manifests a psychological state that reorients the understanding of the playground as an unlikely monument, one which, through the aesthetic means of colour and shape, sheds light on the playground as an encoded cultural form.
Ghazaleh Avarzamani, Straneg Temporalities, 2019, segmented slide on metal armature.
Forced Afloat is a public artwork consisting of thousands of square feet of blue rubber mulch, the kind commonly used in children’s playgrounds to slow movement, limit cuts and bruises, and cushion falls. When installed, the mulch’s azure-blue colour creates the illusion of a pool—a fake body of water—an association that is reinforced by the title. The mulch is made from recycled tires and is designed to invite play whilst also limiting movement to protect against injury. Rubber tires are sixty-percent synthetic and made from petroleum-derived hydrocarbons, which makes the mulch a contradiction in construction. Although it is framed as safe and environmentally sensitive, the material is packed with highly toxic chemical compounds and presents an insidious and underlying threat. Forced Afloat dispels the illusion of safety created by playgrounds and public spaces to reveal the invisible social contracts by which people accept limitations on their collective and individual freedoms—and sometimes ignore threats to the same. Forced Afloat was researched and developed while the artist was in residence at the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto; the residency was organized in partnership with the Delfina Foundation, London. At the Aga Khan, the mulch filled five large, reflective pools in front of the museum’s entrance and, although installed outdoors, the public was not allowed to touch or walk on it. When installed at the 2022 Toronto Biennial, the work was fully interactive, allowing members of the public to engage with it through touch and play. Depending upon where it is installed, and the different requirements of the museum hosting it, the work comes to symbolize either the projection of ideals of freedom and play or the challenges of institutional constraints and the rules that bind us from desired actions.
Ghazaleh Avarzamani, Straneg Temporalities, 2022, rubber mulch, 60 ft.

Residents from Canada

Ella Gonzales

Canada
Canada Council for the Arts
Studio #306

Swapnaa Tamhane

Canada, India
Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec
Studio #222

Manjot Kaur

India, Canada
Canada Council for the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council
Studio #211

Past Residents

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