Memories We Carry, Stories We Heal
City Hall Gallery, Ottawa | June 12 to September 7, 2025
In this exhibition, Sarah-Mecca Abdourahman explores the complexities of memory and nostalgia in her everlasting search for a connection to her parent’s homelands, Somalia and India. A longing for home that can bring grief and joy. Delving into these contrasting emotions, Abdourahman’s work moves between themes of haunting and healing, evoking the bittersweet. Her yearning is woven into the fabric of multimedia-painted blankets and installations which allude to both nightmares and childhood innocence.
Abdourahman’s paintings examine the ancestral trauma that can be activated in the process of connecting to one’s history. She refers to this sentiment as the ‘second chase’–a diasporic longing for home inspired by Warsan Shire’s poem ‘Home.’ Shire’s line, ‘No one would leave home unless home chased you,’ speaks to the Somali migrant experience of forcibly fleeing a native country. Similarly, Abdourahman underscores ‘home’ in Canada as committing a violent and psychological “chasing” of diasporic communities.
By illustrating moments of joy, humour, and empathetic care for her younger self, Abdourahman searches for inter-generational healing for herself and for displaced communities. Throughout the exhibition, blue ancestral figures are painted in moments of rest. In the context of haunting histories of violence, Abdourahman identifies their lingering presence as a source of protection. Inviting ancestors, family members, and herself to reconnect with the innocence of childhood, her paintings and installations offer space for remembering, mourning, and imagining alternative futures.
Shire, Warsan, ‘Home,’ Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head: Poems, Random House, 2022, p.18-19.
Photo credit: David Barbour