Lunatics & Invalids: Oakville Galleries in 2025

Our 2025 programme speaks to endings and beginnings, despair and hope, as well the emergence of alternative visions. In our world mired with moral uncertainty and democratic backsliding, the role of artists and art has an even deeper significance. Contemporary art, being produced alongside geopolitical shifts and the swagger of global capitalism merging inelegantly with political structures, is profoundly implicated. Today, the number of countries autocratizing competes with those democratizing. Representatives of leading nations turn their backs on democracy, equality, human rights and humanitarianism in favour of dominant powers, wealth and tribalism. Recent elections and the resulting robust, ideologically-swayed political mandates are telling, as are the dire consequences for those - often voiceless - in the periphery. Parallel to this, as obscene wealth accumulates, social media platforms emit an increasingly hegemonic broadcast. 

 

“The purpose of tyranny,” writes the Chinese poet Liao Yiwu, who was long incarcerated and censured, “is to turn us into a group of angry lunatics - a group of invalids dominated by our emotions. Lunatics and invalids cannot say anything of value about a system or period of history.”  Yiwu’s words have inspired our programme. The world presented to us, which engages and provokes us, simultaneously swallows us up. And yet artists continue to produce their work, also facing the troubling realities and unrealities before them. Their artwork may indeed puncture collective perceptions. Art can produce visions of divergence from dominant narratives, suggesting alternative collective futures out of an ethical morass. 

 

Sunset Kino

Summer 2025

Gairloch Gardens

 

Founded by Séamus Kealy in 2017 in Austria, Sunset Kino continues in its ninth year now as Canada’s only outdoor, avant-garde cinema. Programmed artist films will be presented lakeside adjacent to the Kabakov’s Ship of Tolerance. 

 

Autumn Preview: 

Hugo Canoilas and Andreia Santana

 

Artists in Residence 2025: Gairloch Gardens

Launched in 2024, our artist in residence programme continues with international guests, including a new residency programme sponsored by the SAGA Foundation