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.
Opening Reception
Gairloch Gardens & Centennial Square
Saturday, October 24, 2026 | 2–5 PM
Aideen Barry is a conceptual artist based in Ireland with an international multifaceted practice spanning filmmaking, performance, experimental lens-based media, drawing, and sculpture. Her work employs visual trickery to create a heightened suspension of reality, with a central theme of exploring sinister systems. Her recent projects are intersectional and collaborative, working with artists such as Peter Gabriel, William Kentridge, and The Centre of the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg, as well as Inuit throat singer ᕇᑦ Riit, composers Irene Buckley, choreographers Junk Ensemble, fashion designer Richard Malone, Tropical Topical & Margaret O’Connor, composers Tshegofatso Moeng and Philip Miller. Barry engages with a diverse range of collaborators, including artists, pop singers, archives, archivists, historians, scientists and activists, transcending pop culture and visual culture to create massive interventionist artworks. Notably, she collaborated with nearly a thousand Lithuanian citizens to create the feature film Klostės, which is now part of the National Collection at IMMA and contributed to Kaunas receiving UNESCO World Heritage Status. Her works serve as a Brechtian hammer, while also democratising access to visual culture for various audiences and stakeholders, inviting them to co-author the creative process.
Significant projects include: projects and exhibitions at; The Bangkok Art Biennial curated by Dr. Apinan Poshyananda, FORMAT international festival of photography, UK, film screenings at the BFI and the IFI, solo at IMMA, solos at Salzburg Kunstverein, Oakville Galleries, Canada The Welt Museum, Vienna, Matucana 100; Chile,The Irish Museum of Modern Art PS; Ireland, CAC Malaga; Spain, The Headlands Center for the Arts; US, Centre for the Less Good Idea; South Africa, Art OMI; US, The Whitaker Museum;UK, NASA Kennedy Space Center; US, Skaftfell; Iceland, Banff Centre; Canada, Centre Cultural Irlandais; France. Selected Solo and international projects at: Galleri Image, Aarhus, Denmark, Zona Maco, Ch ACO; Chile, The Katzen Center at the American Museum; US, Wexner Center: US Elephant Gallery; UK, Moderna Musett; Sweden, Musée des Beaux Arts,Lyon; France, Louise T. Blouin Gallery; UK, Galeria Isabel Hurley; Spain, Artscene Shanghai;China and Project 304 Gallery; Thailand, BAC Geneva; Switzerland, Liste Art Fair; Switzerland, Catharine Clark Gallery; US, NYU DC; US, Crawford Municipal Gallery,Project Art Centre, Temple Bar Gallery, Limerick City Gallery, The RHA, Visual,Mothers Tankstation, The Butler Gallery; Ireland, an An Post EUROPA stamp commission.
Barry is a member of Aosdána and the Royal Hibernian Academy, and her work is held in private collections and public museum collections worldwide.
Tuesday – Saturday:
10:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Monday (by appointment)
Closed Sunday + statutory holidays
Free Admission
