Image: Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa
Developed with Omer’s family, the exhibition includes portraits, family archives and a site-specific textile installation.
'Threading Roots' considers how identity is continually made and remade through cultural practice, family histories and acts of remembrance. Moving between family archives and studio portraiture, it considers identity across memory, place and generations.
Omer uses photography and textiles to reflect on the enduring connections between family history, cultural inheritance and belonging. Through the textile installation and her attention to fabric and fashion, the exhibition explores how textiles carry cultural knowledge and enable everyday acts of self-expression through their movement across space, proximity to the body and role in economic survival.
Responding to her experience as a racialized individual, Omer creates portraits that challenge dominant representations of Somali identity while affirming the richness and complexity of diasporic life. Her portrait practice is informed by her work as a mental health counsellor, where listening, empathy and care shape her relationships with the people she photographs.
The exhibition celebrates the creativity, resilience and cultural continuity that sustain Somali Canadian communities while reflecting on how home can be carried across distance, generations and time.
