Have you ever felt something so specific that English simply didn’t have a word for it? That’s the question the Ottawa Art Gallery (OAG) opens with for ሀሌታ | Haleta: The Threshold of Being, on view in the Galerie Annexe from August 8 to November 8, 2026. The show takes its title from an Amharic word rooted in Ge’ez, an ancient Ethiopian language. Haleta describes the state just before a first step is taken, a threshold where possibility, memory, and change all sit together, not quite a beginning yet, but no longer nothing.
Fourteen artists were each asked to select a single word that was drawn from their own heritage, or from a culture that resonated with them. Each chose a word from another language that carries a feeling English can’t fully translate. Painting, photography, sculpture, and mixed media all appear in the show, with each piece attempting to say visually what a single word could not convey on its own.
That premise of the exhibition speaks directly to two United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: Reduced Inequalities and Sustainable Cities and Communities. Haleta was developed through the OAG’s Curatorial Fellowship Program, a partnership with the Ottawa Black Art Kollective and the National Gallery of Canada, built specifically to support the career growth of emerging Black Canadian curators, in this case, Danayit Ephrem Zeru.
By giving a Black curator institutional resources and a public gallery to organize a show around her own cultural framework, this show breaks down the gatekeeping that the first goal addresses. And by filling a free, publicly accessible gallery with words from Korean, German, Arabic, Amharic, and Haitian Creole side by side, the show turns downtown Ottawa into a place where different communities can recognize pieces of themselves in each other’s languages. This is exactly the kind of inclusive civic space the second goal describes.
The words themselves span a wide emotional range. Meraf’s Ayzosh, an Amharic word of comfort roughly meaning “be strong” or “take heart,” is offered to someone in pain, rendered in acrylic on canvas. Aurelie S. Kadjo’s Fernweh draws on a German word for an ache of being somewhere far away, the inverse of homesickness, worked out in ink on paper. Maria Abebe’s Ta’Burni, from an Arabic term of endearment that translates to “you bury me,” a way of saying someone’s love runs so deep you’d rather die first than live without them, appears in acrylic on canvas. Kouka’s nou bouke, Haitian Creole for “we are tired,” a phrase with real weight in Haiti’s own history of protest and endurance, is rendered in oil.
Jayda Murray’s So-won, based on the Korean word for a wish or hope, fits into a wider practice she’s described in her own words. In a statement posted on Art Battle Ottawa’s Instagram, Murray, a self-taught Canadian artist, said her work “lives at the intersection of the personal and the political,” blending abstract and figurative styles to explore identity, memory, and resilience. She pays particular attention to Black communities whose stories she feels deserve to be seen. “I paint to honour strength, reflect struggle, and amplify voices that are often overlooked,” she said. That same instinct runs through the rest of Haleta: each artist selects a word that acts as a container for unspoken histories, using visual art to bring lived experiences and complex emotions into clear public view.
None of the works in Haleta need translating to land with viewers. Standing in a gallery surrounded by fourteen words from fourteen different backgrounds, the specific language each artist chose starts to matter less. What takes centre stage is the fact that they all reached for a word in the first place, seeking a form for something a single sentence could never quite hold.
ሀሌታ | Haleta: The Threshold of Being is on view at the Ottawa Art Gallery, 50 Mackenzie King Bridge, through November 8, 2026. Admission is free.