Exhibition programme 2024

Oakville Galleries is currently embarking upon a new chapter that places artists at the center of its vision. Our exhibition programme from February to September 2024 includes award-winning artists Tarik Kiswanson, Sung Tieu and Hedda Roman, all of whom produce highly charged and politically informed artwork. Notions of displacement, flight, identity in flux, border control, surveillance, imprisonment, historical forms of propaganda and contemporary forms of disinformation, and military and administrative violence upon individuals and nations are referenced by these artists.

Winter exhibitions

Tarik Kiswanson: Prelude
Gairloch Gallery

The 2023 winner of the Marcel Duchamp Prize Tarik Kiswanson produces sculpture, writing, performance, drawing, sound, and video works. Notions of rootlessness, regeneration, and renewal are central themes in his oeuvre. Always operating at the intersection of different cultural contexts, his various abstract works examine subjects related to memory, heritage, birth, loss and belonging. His oeuvre can be understood as a cosmology of related conceptual families, each exploring variations on themes such as refraction, multiplication, disintegration, levitation, hybridity, and polyphony through their own distinct language.

A legacy of displacement and transformation permeates his works. The artist’s Palestinian family fled Jerusalem to eventually settle in Sweden, where he was born. Over the years, Kiswanson’s artistic inquiry has simultaneously investigated personal and universal concerns relative to the human condition and to social and collective histories of rupture, loss, and regeneration.

For Oakville Galleries, Tarik Kiswanson’s exhibition, entitled Prelude, is the first part of a multi-year project in collaboration with Executive Director Séamus Kealy.

Sung Tieu: Civic Floor
Centennial Gallery

Berlin-based artist Sung Tieu explores questions of governance, civic responsibility and justice, and analyzes mechanisms of state control. Her research ventures into the quiet violence of bureaucratic systems and how these systems impact people. In previous artwork she has reconstructed the acoustic attacks associated with Havana syndrome, and then captured her own exposure to the sound via brain scans. She has also employed the audio recordings by the US military psychological operations (PSYOP) that were used to destabilize the Vietnamese National Liberation Front.

Civic Floor includes a new body of sculpture and wall-based works, which are accompanied by sound and video. A series of steel sculptures makes reference to prison architecture from the 1840s to newer forms produced since the 1990s. 

Civic Floor was produced with Luxembourg - Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, MIT List Visual Arts Center, and Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin (SAAG).

Summer preview

Hedda Roman: Rogue Planet
Gairloch & Centennial Galleries
Opening reception: Saturday, June 22, 2–5pm, followed by Summer Party

German artist duo Hedda Roman have been employing and collaborating with AI technologies for some time. The exhibition Rogue Planet prompts a reflection on how machine learning and digital technologies shape, distort, and reconstruct our perceptions of identity and reality.

Sunset Kino: Summer 2024 in Gairloch Gardens

Originally founded by Séamus Kealy in 2016, this summer film festival has its first Canadian permutation this summer. Programmed avant-garde artist films will be presented outdoors and lakeside under the theme “Everything is a Lie.”


About Oakville Galleries
Oakville Galleries is a contemporary art museum located 30 km west of Toronto. Housed in two spaces—one alongside downtown Oakville’s library, and the other in a lakeside mansion and park—Oakville Galleries is one of Canada’s leading art institutions, presenting the work of emerging and established artists from across Canada and around the world.

Oakville Galleries receives support from The Town of Oakville, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Trillium Foundation, and the Ontario Arts Council.