Spring/Summer 2025 Exhibitions Launch at Esker Foundation
Esker Foundation launches the spring/summer season with a trio of solo exhibitions by Oliver Beer, Babak Golkar, and Caroline Monnet (guest curated by Mona Filip).
Opening Reception
Friday, May 23, 2025, 6 – 9pm. All welcome.
Artist and Curator Talk and Tour with Caroline Monnet and Mona Filip
Saturday, May 24, 2025, 11am – 12pm
Artist Talk and Tour with Babak Golkar
Saturday, May 24, 2025, 1 – 2pm
Oliver Beer, Composition for Face and Hands (ASMR), 2023. 4K video, colour, sound. 15 mins 40 secs. © Oliver Beer. Courtesy of the artist and Almine Rech. Image by: Oliver Beer.
Oliver Beer: Compositions for Mouths, Face and Hands
May 24 – August 24, 2025
Compositions for Mouths, Face and Hands by Oliver Beer presents a deeply sensorial investigation into the body as a vessel for sound and exchange. Spanning two paired video works—Composition for Mouths (Songs My Mother Taught Me) I & II and Composition for Face and Hands (ASMR)—this exhibition draws together ideas of resonance and relationality, exploring how sound and touch can become forms of communion between individuals, temporalities, and spaces.
Babak Golkar, Scream Vessels from the outdoor exhibition Time To Let Go… organised by Vancouver Art Gallery, 2014. Photo by: Rachel Topham.
Babak Golkar: When Sound Becomes Unsound
May 24 – August 24, 2025
When Sound Becomes Unsound presents a series of interactive sculptural works that operate at the threshold of catharsis and containment. In this exhibition, Babak Golkar invites viewers into an ambiguous space that could be a conduit, a vessel, a surface, a platform, an excuse, a negotiation, or a framework, where emotional release—through sound, gesture, and participation—is both encouraged and questioned.
Caroline Monnet, The Future Itself Has a Future, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Blouin-Division Gallery. Installation view: Pizandawatc / The One Who Listens / Celui qui écoute, January 17 – March 23, 2024, University of Toronto Art Centre. Courtesy of the Art Museum at the University of Toronto. Photo by: Toni Hafkenscheid.
Caroline Monnet: Pizandawatc / The One Who Listens / Celui qui écoute
Curated by Mona Filip
May 24 – August 24, 2025
Presenting a survey of works by Anishinaabe/French artist Caroline Monnet, this exhibition centres on a recent series of sculptures that explore language reclamation and intergenerational transmission through an engagement with the idea of land as a carrier of ancestral memory.
Meaning “the one who listens” in Anishinaabemowin, the title, Pizandawatc, comes from the traditional name of Monnet’s maternal family before surnames were changed by the Oblate missionaries at Kitigan Zibi, in the Outaouais region of Quebec. The title honours the artist’s great-grandmother, Mani Pizandawatc, who was the first in her family to have her territory divided into reserves. At the same time, the title references a receptive way of being in the world, reflected throughout Monnet’s artistic practice.
This presentation is a modified version of an exhibition originally presented at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.
Touring support for the exhibition provided by the Canada Council for the Arts.
Megan Feniak: With All Our Vernal Suns
In the Project Space
Until June 8, 2025
Anna Semenoff: First Things First
Upcoming in the Project Space
June 16 – October 19, 2025
For Anna Semenoff, sculpture offers an arena to consider the reciprocal relationship between the built environment and our perception and experience thereof; or, how the world we make, makes us in turn. She is interested in the psychosocial impacts of technological structures, and how our built environment creates possible futures of which we are not yet aware.
First Things First, Semenoff’s new sculptural installation, is a spatial, material, and conceptual study of the arch; an architectural form that connects or delineates space, and whose geometry allows it to bear excessive weight and span large distances.
Explore and participate in Esker’s free public programming, discover the upcoming programs at: www.eskerfoundation.com/program/
About Esker Foundation
Founded in May 2012, Esker Foundation owes its vision to its founders, Calgary-based collectors and philanthropists, Jim and Susan Hill, who wanted to create an accessible and welcoming space for people to experience contemporary art exhibitions and programming. An important part of this vision is to ensure that barriers to access are as low as possible. To that end, Esker is proud to offer free admission and free programs.
Through exhibitions, public programs, publishing, and commissioning activities, the Foundation supports artists and audiences through a variety of learning, connecting, and collaborative models. The gallery reflects on current developments in local, regional, and international culture; creates opportunities for public dialogue; and supports the production of groundbreaking new work, ideas, and research.
Gallery Hours:
Wednesday to Friday: 11am – 6pm
Saturday & Sunday: 12 – 5pm
Accessibility:
The gallery is barrier-free.
Admission and Programs are free.
Press Contact:
Jill Henderson, Head of Communications & Marketing
Tel: 403 930 2499
jhenderson@eskerfoundation.com
Esker Foundation
4th Floor, 1011 9th Ave SE
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
@EskerFoundation
www.eskerfoundation.com
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