Lunatics & Invalids: Oakville Galleries in 2025
Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, The Ship of Tolerance in Kunsthaus Zug, 2016. Courtesy of the artists. Photo: Daniel Hegglin.
2025 Winter Exhibitions Opening
Saturday, February 22, 2025 | 2 – 5 pm
Join the 2025 ARTbus tour
Our 2025 programme speaks to endings and beginnings, despair and hope, as well the emergence of alternative visions. In our world mired with moral uncertainty and democratic backsliding, the role of artists and art has an even deeper significance. Contemporary art, being produced alongside geopolitical shifts and the swagger of global capitalism as it merges inelegantly with political structures, is profoundly implicated. Today, the number of countries autocratizing competes with those democratizing. Likewise there is a notable decline in foreign support for global democracy. Representatives of leading nations turn their backs on democracy, equality, human rights and humanitarianism in favour of dominant political power. Recent elections and the resulting robust, far-right ideologically-swayed political mandates are telling, as are the dire consequences for those in the periphery, often left voiceless. Parallel to this, as obscene wealth accumulates, social media platforms emit an increasingly hegemonic broadcast.
“The purpose of tyranny,” writes the Chinese poet Liao Yiwu, “is to turn us into a group of angry lunatics – a group of invalids dominated by our emotions. Lunatics and invalids cannot say anything of value about a system or period of history.” The world presented to us, which engages and provokes us, simultaneously swallows us up. And yet artists continue to produce their work, also facing the troubling realities and unrealities before them. Their artwork may indeed puncture collective perceptions. Art can produce visions of divergence from dominant narratives, suggesting possible collective futures out of an ethical morass.
Karen Kraven, Le Chiffonnier, 2022. Courtesy the artist. Photo: John Healey
Karen Kraven: Bloemenlust
February 22 – May 10, 2025
Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens
Notions of trauma, loss, personal histories and matters of identity and labour all collide in the sculptural work of Karen Kraven. Her work explores the vulnerability and potential of the body through exertion, work, and grief. Accessing her familial background in textiles, her work emerges from a collection of objects, associations and poetic meanderings. Her work also explores neurological impairment caused by brain disease or trauma, dementia or stroke. Kraven’s sculptures move us through a politics of pleasure and pain, strewn with illness, grief, and delusions of redemptive productivity.
Kristan Horton, None of This is in My Mind, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
Kristan Horton: None of This Is In My Mind
February 22 – May 10, 2025
Oakville Galleries at Centennial Square
Kristan Horton presents his endless drawing project as an exhibition. Perpetually extending, this singular work, rendered in black ink on craft paper, speaks to the primal, meditative, and ritualistic aspects of creation. At the heart of the artist’s practice is a philosophy of accumulation. The exhibition is thus not merely a presentation of a finished product; it is an invitation to witness an ongoing, open-ended process that resists closure. The work is a meditative reflection on labour, materiality, and the negotiation between human agency and external forces. As Frederick Kiesler explored “endless architecture” as the antithesis of modern architecture’s dominance, Horton’s endless drawing suggests alternative thinking to our spectacle-laced world.
Ilya & Emilia Kabakov: Between Heaven and Earth
May 31 – September 20, 2025
Opening Events: Saturday, May 31, 2025
Centennial Gallery, Gairloch Gallery and Gairloch Gardens
Ilya & Emilia Kabakov will mount two exhibitions in our galleries and two public sculptures in Gairloch Gardens, including the infamous Ship of Tolerance. This project involves over a thousand children involved in the production of the ship’s sails. Opening events will include concerts and performances, including those by children. While the Kabakovs’ work has been deeply rooted in the Soviet social and cultural context where the Kabakovs came of age, their work still attains a universal significance and speaks to our ideological and socio-political present. Their exhibition and public sculptures at Oakville Galleries go on to ask us to consider our collective future. Through the eyes and spirit of children and with a spirit of hope, The Ship of Tolerance asks us all how we can make the world a better place. Produced with support from the National Gallery of Canada, this is our most ambitious project to date.
Sunset Kino in Gairloch Gardens, 2024. Photo: SĂ©amus Kealy
Sunset Kino
Summer 2025
Gairloch Gardens
Founded by Séamus Kealy in 2017 in Austria, Sunset Kino continues in Canada as the country’s only outdoor, avant-garde cinema. Programmed artist films will be presented outdoors and lakeside adjacent to The Ship of Tolerance by the Kabakovs.
Autumn Preview:
Hugo Canoilas: Centennial Gallery
Andreia Santana: Gairloch Gallery
Artists in Residence 2025: Gairloch Gardens
Launched in 2024, our artist in residence programme continues with international guests, including a new residency programme sponsored by the SAGA Foundation.
About Oakville Galleries
Oakville Galleries is a contemporary art museum located 30 km west of Toronto. Housed in two spaces—one within the downtown Oakville library, and the other in a unique lakeside mansion and park—Oakville Galleries is one of Canada’s leading contemporary art institutions, presenting emerging and established artists from Canada and around the world. Since spring 2023, the Executive Director is Séamus Kealy.
Oakville Galleries receives support from The Town of Oakville, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and its patrons and members.
Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens
1306 Lakeshore Road East
Oakville, ON L6J 1L6
Oakville Galleries at Centennial Square
120 Navy Street
Oakville, ON L6J 2Z4
For more information:
oakvillegalleries.com
905.844.4402
info@oakvillegalleries.com
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