Ali Cherri: To Fall, Patiently
Gairloch & Centennial Galleries, Gairloch Gardens
June 13–October 3, 2026
Influenced by the vibrant art scene of 1990s postwar Beirut, and exploring geographies of violence in the broader region, Ali Cherri’s practice spans across film, performance, sculpture, drawing, and installations. His work interrogates how political violence resonates through generations as well as physical and cultural landscapes. Ali Cherri will present films, sculptures and watercolour paintings in both our galleries and in Gairloch Gardens.
Gairloch & Centennial Galleries
October 24–February 6, 2027
This fall, Oakville Galleries is pleased to present Silent Songs, Aideen Barry's inaugural solo exhibition in Canada, featuring the world premiere of her enigmatic and ethereal film Embroidering the Earth's Mantle. The exhibition unfolds across both of our gallery sites, featuring recent films, a new body of intricately embroidered drawings, and a series of richly printed film stills.
One of Barry's defining concerns is the recovery of voices and histories that have been silenced. Through phantasmagoric narratives that weave together folklore, oral histories, ecology, and archival research, Barry reveals the persistence of cultural memory despite histories of erasure and repression. Her hallucinatory and fantastical works foreground languages and other forms of cultural knowledge that have been suppressed, building new cinematic worlds for these voices to resurface.
Barry’s films, The Song of the Bleeding Tree (2023) and the acclaimed ᖃᐅᔨᒪᔭᐅᔪᓐᓃᖅᑐᑦ / Seachmalltacht / Oblivion (2021) will be presented as a hypnotic video installation in our Centennial Square gallery. Created in collaboration with Inuit throat singer Riit ᕇᑦ and Irish harpist Aisling Lyons, Oblivion brings together two distinct musical traditions that were once suppressed under colonial rule, exploring the resilience of cultural memory through sound, performance, digital technology and moving image. In The Song of the Bleeding Tree, Barry turns to the intertwined histories of landscape, ecology, and mythology, reflecting on the enduring impact of colonial violence while imagining possibilities for repair and renewal.
Throughout our historic gallery spaces in Gairloch Gardens, Barry presents a mythical world through film, animation, and drawing inspired by the life and work of the surrealist painter Remedios Varo, whose distinctive dreamlike works combine science, alchemy, mysticism, medieval imagery, engineering, and the occult into grand, fantastical narratives. Barry pulls on Varo’s themes of displacement, transformation, and survival, interpreting them into meditations on creation, labour, fate, and women's agency envisioning a collective rise from a dark world of constraint through the weaving of reality into existence.
Other Programming
Founded by Séamus Kealy in 2017 in Austria, Sunset Kino continues as Canada’s only outdoor, avant-garde cinema. Our international Artist Residency hosts artists Nina Canell (SE), Aimée Zito Lemathat (NL), Ali Cherri (FR/LN), Aideen Barry (IE), Abhijit Pathak (IDN) as sponsored by the SAGA Foundation, and an artist awarded via Land Salzburg.
