Congratulations to our DARC Expanded Practice Residency recipients for Summer 2026! 🎉
Digital Arts Resource Centre (DARC) is proud to present artists Kwende Kefentse and Rachel Kalpana JAMES as DARC’s Expanded Practice artists in residence for Summer 2026! The Expanded Practice Residency is a three-week intensive artist residency, offered to Extended Access members of DARC who are seeking to develop their current practice, experiment with a new medium, or continue an existing project.
Kwende Kefentse
Kwende Kefentse, also known as DJ Memetic / Memetic, is an Ottawa-based artist, DJ, producer, researcher, and cultural organizer working across sound, performance, media art, nightlife, and urban space. Since 2005, he has helped shape Ottawa’s underground music culture through TIMEKODE, while building a prolific practice as a DJ, performer, producer, curator, and collaborator. His recent projects — including MPLX.VZN, and Black Light Reflection — extend his work into digital media and live audiovisual performance, exploring the relationship between sound, image, architecture, projection, sampling, and embodied presence.
His performance and production history includes major residencies, performances and curatorial assignments with the National Gallery of Canada, the National Arts Centre, Pique, Artengine, Canada Day celebrations at Major’s Hill Park, the National Portrait Gallery in London, and other international contexts.
His releases such as RIDEAU2RICHMOND, TIMEKODE EP: 001, the TIMEKODE X remix series, and the TIMEKODE TAPES have received acclaim from international outlets like Vice Thump, Radio Nova and Wax Poetics to name a few.
Recent support includes the City of Ottawa Creation and Production Fund, the Artengine collective residency, and the DARC Extended Practice Residency.
Rachel Kalpana JAMES
A Canadian of South Asian heritage, I explore identity and belonging in contemporary society. By re-imagining and re-presenting personal, historical, and fictional narratives, I critique systems of power, as well as memory through site-specific performance and video installations.
Over the last 30 years, I have exhibited in Canada at artist-run centres including Gallery 101, SAW Centre, Gallery 44 and museums: the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Ottawa Art Gallery as well as internationally in the USA, UK, Europe, India and Pakistan.
I am a founding member and former Director of the South Asian Visual Arts Collective (SAVAC), and was Curator of Education at the Ottawa Art Gallery.
What is the Expanded Practice Residency?
The Expanded Practice Residency provides recipients with access to DARC’s facilities, including the DARC Microcinema, SOUNDSTAGE, Digital Edit Suite, and Recording Studio, an optional artist talk or presentation of their work for an added fee, and access to an array of audio-visual equipment for the duration of their residency. Artists will find creative ways to experiment with video and moving images, the distribution of sound, and other tactics for presentation and audience engagement.
DARC is proud to have Kwende and Rachel as our 2026 Expanded Practice Residency recipients, and we continue to be excited to support the work of independent artists through our resources, programming and education!
