Fall 2026 Exhibitions at A Space Gallery

Join us Friday, September 18, 7–9pm for the public launch of A Space Gallery’s Fall 2026 season, featuring two new solo exhibitions. Artists and curator will be in attendance. All are welcome. Refreshments will be served.

Alexandra Gelis with fibre works on the Río El Vacilón, Costa Rica, 2025. Photograph by Jorge Lozano.

BROMELIAS: Inhabiting Water
Alexandra Gelis

A Space Main Gallery
September 12 – October 24, 2026
Reception: Friday, September 18, 7–9pm
Artist Talk: Thursday, October 8, 7–9pm

Curated by Vicky Moufawad-Paul
Essays by Fabienne Liptay and alessia prati

Bromelias: Inhabiting Water is a new iteration of Alexandra Gelis’s long-term project AGUA, developed through living and working alongside the Río El Vacilón, near Carara National Park and surrounding protected forest, Costa Rica. High in the tropical canopy, bromeliads grow upon trees and gather rainwater within the folds of their leaves. Water remains there, suspended above the river, forming small reservoirs where frogs, insects, and microorganisms live among sediment and decomposing matter. Each plant holds a body of water. Each body of water holds other bodies. Bromeliads are often mistaken for parasites and removed from trees. But what happens when we approach them as ecological infrastructures, as water keepers, habitats, and teachers? What forms of attention become possible when a plant is no longer reduced to scenery, symbol, or raw material, but encountered as a living participant in the work? Bromelias: Inhabiting Water brings these encounters into the gallery as a sensory and multidimensional environment. Moving between riverbed and canopy, between water flowing below and water held above, visitors enter a field of relations already inhabited by many other bodies and forms of life.

Alexandra Gelis is a Colombian, Venezuelan, and Canadian media artist, researcher, and educator based in Toronto. Her practice grows through inquiry and process, spanning film and video, photography, drawing, sound, performance, and immersive installations incorporating interactive electronics and kinetic elements. She holds a PhD in Environmental Studies and an MFA in Visual Arts from York University. Her concept Migrant Plants traces how flora move, adapt, and act within migratory, racial, and territorial regimes. Working with botanists, ethnobotanists, anthropologists, other scientists, and sabedoras (keepers of traditional knowledge), she brings scientific, ancestral, and sensory ways of knowing into relation. Her work has been presented in exhibitions and festivals across the Americas, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, including Walker Art Center, Nuit Blanche Toronto, Noor Riyadh, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, Images Festival, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Montevideo, and Kunst Merano Arte. Gelis directs conSECUENCIAS Collective, helps direct Earth to Tables Legacies, and co-founded converSalón.

Hana Hozhabr Pour, Anticipation for the Sunrise, 2024, found canvases, acrylic sheets, sewn canvas, acrylic and oil paint.

The Mountains as Archive
Hana Hozhabr Pour

A Space Windows
September 18 – November 14, 2026

Curated by Vicky Moufawad-Paul

Four windows open onto fragmented horizons—covered, displaced, and blurred—openings toward the mountains of Kurdistan, where “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî”—Woman, Life, Freedom—was forged through Kurdish women’s resistance and carried through bodies, generations, and landscapes. Each painting is formed through repeated layers of canvas placed over one another. Gestures accumulate, overlap, become covered, and reappear. Abstract and figurative forms move across the surfaces, creating a tension between visibility and disappearance. What lies beneath the surface is invisible, but not necessarily absent. The mountains become repositories for songs, voices, and histories that were never recorded—or were purged from the written archives. They hold traces of witnesses, movements, perceptions, and memories passed through generations. Trees and mountains become places where memory can persist beyond the written record.

Hana Hozhabr Pour earned a BFA in Drawing and Painting from OCAD University. Her multidisciplinary practice investigates how histories survive through bodies, landscapes, materials, and memory when they have been erased or excluded from dominant archives. Rooted in her experience of Kurdistan and the diasporic condition, her practice considers the body as a living archive and the landscape as a site where memory can persist beyond the written record.

A Space Gallery
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 110
Toronto, ON M5V 3A8
info@aspacegallery.org
www.aspacegallery.org

Public Hours:
Tuesday to Friday | 11am to 5pm
Saturday | Noon to 5pm

Admission: Free

Accessibility:
The 401 Richmond Street West building is accessible, featuring ramps and automatic door openers at the entrance. Accessible washrooms are also available.