Join us for an intimate conversation with multidisciplinary artist and 2025 Guggenheim Fellow Azza El Siddique, whose work explores themes of mourning, transcendence, and the materiality of remembrance. In this artist talk, El Siddique will discuss the conceptual and material underpinnings of her practice, from cast ceramics and steel structures to the ephemeral nature of grief and longing.

El Siddique's exhibition, Echoes to Omega, opened at Mattress Factory in August in the Lower Level Gallery. Her latest project, The Edifice of Tirhaga Pt. I, transforms her late brother’s beloved pickup truck into a living monument—the project blends funeral rites, material decay, and speculative technological futures of death traditions.

Don’t miss this thought-provoking discussion on memorialization and the evolving relationship between past and future death practices.

Free for members. $10 for non-members. 

About the Artist:

Azza El Siddique (b. Khartoum, Sudan) received an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2019 and a BFA from Ontario College of Art and Design University in 2014. She has participated in residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, Amant Foundation, NY, John Michael Kohler Arts/Industry Residency, Wisconsin and Harbourfront Center, Ontario. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, Artforum, Artpapers, CanadianArt, and Border Crossings. Past exhibitions include In the place of annihilation, MIT List Center, Cambridge MA, Dampen the flame; Extinguish the fire, Helena Anrather, NY, that which trembles wavers, Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal, Material Tells, Oakville Galleries, Ontario, RAW, The Gardiner Museum, Toronto, and GTA 2021, The Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto. In 2025, El Siddique was named a Guggenheim Fellow.

About the Exhibition:

Echoes to Omega, installed in Mattress Factory's lower level gallery, draws inspiration from the ancient statue of Lady Sennuwy, an Egyptian noblewoman carved nearly 4,000 years ago. Unearthed from the sands of Kerma, this life sized one ton statue was originally carved in Egypt then transported over 1,000 miles south, almost 300 years later. This migration mirrors El Siddique’s journey as an immigrant from Sudan to Canada, where she grew up within the Sudanese diasporic community, and her eventual move to the United States as an adult. Echoes to Omega resembles an Egyptian burial vault and serves as a contemplative space for quiet reflection, meditation, and observation. The installation features six ceramic reproductions of Lady Sennuwy, symbolizing a silent homage to migrant women and mothers who have journeyed across the globe for millennia. These busts sit lower than the platform on which viewers stand, echoing the original statue’s discovery, chest-deep in sand. Placed in steel basins and surrounded by a steel architecture, the busts are continuously dripped on by water, which collects in the basins below. Over time, this process rusts the steel, degrading the basins and discoloring the bisque fired busts. This process represents the eternal forces of water, oxidation, erosion, and entropy—forces that both ancient and modern empires succumb to.