Exhibition at PARTICLE+WAVE 2026

TTES: The ROM Collection by Teresa Tam

“TTES: The ROM Collection” is the first iteration of a newly developing project, “TTES”, that utilizes DIY and hacker tools to repurpose current and retro technology to explore bootlegging and counterfeiting as a form of cultural transference and memory preservation. For “The ROM Collection”, I will be using Gameboy (DMG/Color/Advance) hardware and open-source development tools to create cartridges that thematically explore “read-only memories”, specifically in relation to ancestral memories that I can only access but never fully understand. Just as bootleg DVDs gave me access to foreign films, these films were contextually incomplete due to questionable translations and a lack of cultural understanding of the themes being explored. Despite this, I treasured these DVDs as they gave me insight into people and places that I wouldn’t have been able to, even if it meant only by looking. While it’s easier to access all kinds of media around the world today compared to 20 years ago, much of what we can get here is still filtered based on global appeal. Torrented, pirated, and bootlegged media is still the primary way to reach what is hidden behind censorship, lack of large corporate investment, and the perceived sense that it’s meant only for local consumption.

While video game technology is being used for this project, the contents in each cartridge might not be considered games in a traditional sense, in that no inherent goals or points are being tallied. Instead, the technology is being used as a container and sets of limitations to develop the main theme. The Gameboy uses 8-bit images and audio, which necessitates emphasizing essential qualities of implied and suggested shapes rather than showing outright what it’s supposed to be. In “The ROM Collection”, each cartridge would function more like a storage unit, like a playable hard drive or music player.

S4M4R3S by aenl (Anna Eyler and Nicolas Lapointe)

S4M4R3S is an installation composed of two distinct objects, hinting at an evolution of space over time. A horizontal screen, like a rearview mirror, is placed against a blue-painted wall. On this screen, a pixelated landscape created with Blender unfolds over a precise duration of 12 hours, showing plains from sunrise to sunset. This extended cycle invites prolonged contemplation, where the nuances of light and the subtle transformations of the landscape are revealed pixel by pixel, transforming the screen into a window onto stretched time.

But the central element of the exhibition is, without question, the thermal printer suspended from the ceiling. Once a day, at a random moment between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m., it activates to release a print: a stylized maple seed in BMP format. Commonly called a “helicopter” because of its shape and graceful spiral descent, this white-paper samara unveils to the ground, creating a weighty sense of anticipation, since the instant of printing cannot be predicted or influenced—only its consequences can be observed. It invites a patience rarely solicited in our daily interactions with technology.

Day after day, these prints accumulate on the floor, forming an increasingly dense cascade of paper, evoking the progressive materialization of time. Meanwhile, the digital landscape repeats tirelessly, marking the passage of days. As observers, we realize that the work distances itself from any pursuit of spectacle, instead favoring a discreet poetics of temporality. Slow, cyclical, and patient, it operates at the margins of usual exhibition frameworks, prompting a reevaluation of our perception of rhythm and artistic evolution.

Through S4M4R3S, aenl offers a reflection on our complex relationships with time, the imperceptible, and the often illusory promises of technological progress. The installation thus engages a fascinating dialogue between the potential of a repeated gesture and its material manifestation, deferred into the present, inviting us to a personal introspection in the face of the silent dance of time.

(written by Candice Dan)

Twenty Twenty-Five by Ghazal Majidi

Twenty Twenty-Five is an interactive digital mirror that materializes the photographic residues of aerial violence while rendering the body as an index of harm. The installation pairs a vertical LED wall with a webcam and a curated archive of 1,000 photographs documenting airstrikes in Gaza, Iran, Ukraine, Yemen, Syria, and Sudan from the first eight months of 2025. Incoming video feed is analyzed in real-time by pixel color and algorithmically mapped to corresponding pixels drawn from the photo archive. As the viewer approaches the mirror, individual pixels expand and the arranged airstrike images resolve into legible, often disquieting scenes; as the viewer recedes, the images shrink into small color-fields that reflect their silhouette.

This proximity-based choreography of perception stages a tension between recognition and abstraction, intimacy and distance, witness and spectacle. By making visible the compositional logic that translates human bodies into images and images into data, the work interrogates how mediated violences are consumed, archived and aestheticized. Still evolving (sound design will be finished soon), Twenty Twenty-Five seeks to provoke ethical seeing: to refigure spectatorship into a somatic, accountable encounter with contemporary conflict. It invites sustained, embodied attention and asks viewers to consider responsibility, memory, and the politics of distant suffering.

Firefly by Audrey Burch & Ileana Park

The fireflies are small wearable devices that contain electrical components designed to sense and respond to the other fireflies in proximity. Each device is grouped into a different type or “species” that define how it interacts with the other devices, such as the color of LED light they emit and the pulse frequency of the lighting.

Using infrared frequencies for communication much like how a remote control works, unique fireflies worn by participants can “greet” others in their proximity and communicate with each other through infrared light. When each device reads a new firefly, it will display light patterns based on the species, and the other fireflies' relationship to their species type. As artists, we are most excited to observe what kind of playful behaviours emerge as visitors interact with how these light patterns change and evolve.

*Please note this artwork will only be available for viewing during the Opening Reception and Performance and Screening Night.

Meter & Light: Night by Zain Alam

Zain Alam’s audiovisual installation reproduces the interlocking rhythms of time in nocturnal Muslim life. The video takes place and was filmed entirely at night and uncovers the mystical movements and rituals of religious practice that happen after sundown. Through sounds and close-up shots of hand and body movements, Alam uses contemporary artistic forms to illuminate and recover forgotten, embodied understandings of ritual and religion, particularly in the Islamic diaspora. 

The work investigates the rhythmic foundations of a nonlinear sense of time as lived by Muslims. Drawing on Alam’s academic training in Islamic studies and his practice as a composer, the project conveys musically the cyclical measures that mark the passage of light, the seasons, and spiritual revelation. 

Light that emanates from the screens is generally muted, as in the bluish glow of the stars and the moon, punctuated by occasional bright reflections from other sources. The first few minutes of the videos begin simultaneously in black and white before shifting into colors that are dark and rich–the deep blue of the sky, purple ink, crimson and gold patterns of prayer rugs.
The images on screen are often framed in close-up, with careful concentration: portraits of intimate whispers in the ear, prayerful hands counting off the 99 tasbih beads, a believer seated in muraqaba meditation. In line with certain constraints of Islamic art, there are no representations of the human face; only the body, its parts, and silhouettes appear on screen. 

At certain moments, the videos in all three channels connect in time—a moth flutters across all three screens; a seated believer sits in prayer in the center screen while his hands are shown counting beads to the left and right; an eye on each side screen watches as lights illuminate and grow in number in the center video. 

In the audio track, two voices—one feminine, one masculine—sing songs of praise, recite prayers offered collectively at the tombs of saints, and repeat names for the Divine. In some sections, the two voices pitch up or down to sound almost like bells or rumbling bass, shatter into fragments to resemble something like a beat, or reverberate into shimmering, sustained tones.
The work, rooted in the artist’s personal experiences and work in the field of Islamic studies, depicts the journey of a believer who rises from sleep in the middle of the night, awakened by the whispers of an angel before making the devotional night meditation, joined by beings of light for communal ceremonies in a shrine housing the tombs of saints. The believer emerges with a book that they lower into a well before departing into a valley at the break of dawn.