University of Waterloo Art Gallery

January 8 – March 7, 2026
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 8, 5 – 8pm

Jude Abu Zaineh
i look to the skies

In i look to the skies, Jude Abu Zaineh creates a sanctuary rooted in the specificity of Palestinian cultural traditions and open to the infinite expanses above. At its center is Maqlouba, a traditional dish that is always shared, an emblem of hospitality and community of great cultural and historical significance. Maqlouba anchors the work as a layered metaphor for diasporic life, where food becomes ritual, soft power, and cultural preservation, its ceremonial nature binding intimacy to sovereignty. Here, Maqlouba becomes an archive, a vessel for memory, and a catalyst for transformation. Abu Zaineh works across disciplines including bioart, video, sculpture, and textiles, layering methods and materials into an evolving constellation of meaning.

The gallery unfolds like a contemplative space, where patterns repeat across engraved architectural forms, textiles, glass, and wallpaper, enveloping the visitor in a language of visual rhythm and embrace. Archival videos thread through the installation, carrying gestures, voices, and memories forward as acts of preservation within a landscape of erasure. Some of these patterns are cultivated in petri dishes from the remnants of Maqlouba, from foraged plants, soil, and other fragments of everyday life. In these contained microcosms, transformation, migration, and decay occur in parallel, creating a living metaphor for the shifting nature of culture and identity. The petri dish becomes both container and containment, a quiet stage for cycles of preservation and loss.

To look to the skies is to enact a gesture both intimate and universal: in prayer, in grief, screaming, in disbelief, in wonder. This pseudo-sanctuary invites contemplation while also confronting the realities of exile, migration, and displacement, holding space for both refuge and unravelling. The works here are steeped in the tensions between comfort and disquiet, belonging and estrangement, sanctity and the secular. They carry the emotional weight of Palestinian life under colonial violence while offering a horizon, reminding us that wherever we are, we stand beneath the same celestial canopy. Abu Zaineh invites an encounter where the culturally personal and the planetary, the grounded and the infinite, exist in fragile contradictions.

i look to the skies is presented in partnership with Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery and was developed through an artist residency with Jude Abu Zaineh, organized by MSVU Art Gallery and curated by Melanie Colosimo. MSVU Art Gallery acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Arts Nova Scotia, and Halifax Regional Municipality.

Jude Abu Zaineh is a Palestinian-Canadian interdisciplinary artist-curator working across art, food, science, and technology studies. Her work develops counter-archive practices and investigates themes of culture, displacement, storytelling, diaspora and belonging, through de-colonial and feminist perspectives. She examines ideals of home and community influenced by her childhood and upbringing in Southwest Asia. She is the recipient of several awards, including the 2020 William and Meredith Saunderson Prizes for Emerging Artists. She has presented her works at Ireland Glass Biennale; Malta; Cultivamos Cultura, São Luis, Portugal; Museu de Arte, Arquitetura e Tecnologia, Lisbon, Portugal; Centro de Cultura Digital, Mexico City, Mexico; SVA, NYC; Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco; Art Gallery of Windsor; Centre Culturel Canadien, Paris, France; Museum of Glass, Washington, and more. Her work has been featured in VICE Arabia, PBS, NPR, CBC, Canadian Art, NEUES GLAS-NEW GLASS: art & architecture magazines, and fuse: the Museum of Glass Magazine. Abu Zaineh’s works can be found in the permanent collections of The Museum of Glass, Art Windsor-Essex, as well as private collections internationally. She received a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she was an RPI Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences Fellow and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellow, and an MFA from the University of Windsor. She maintains an active studio practice between upstate New York and southern Ontario.

The artist acknowledges the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

Admit Everyone
University of Waterloo Art Gallery
East Campus Hall, Room 1239
519.888.4567 ext. 33575
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Contact
Ivan Jurakic, Director/Curator
ijurakic@uwaterloo.ca

Hours
Wednesday to Saturday 12 – 5pm
Or by appointment

Mobility
Ground floor entry
Automated doors available at west entrance to Fine Arts (ECH)
Wide pathways
Accessible washrooms on ground level

Driving
263 Phillip Street, Waterloo
East Campus Hall (ECH) is located adjacent to Engineering 6 (E6)
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Parking
Visitor Parking available in B Lot (E6) or Q Lot (EC1)
Pay via AMP mobile app, $7.25 Flat Rate
Search “AMP Park” in app store or scan QR code on parking signs
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Mailing
University of Waterloo Art Gallery
200 University Avenue West
Waterloo, ON, Canada N2L 3G1

Image credit: Jude Abu Zaineh, i look to the skies (MSVU Gallery installation detail), 2025, neon and mixed media. Photo: Michael Valiquette. Image Description: A ribbon of blue neon accentuates the peak of an Arabesque architectural form perforated with Islamic ornamental patterns.