Spring/Summer 2026 Exhibitions Launch at Esker Foundation

Presenting two major exhibitions by Shirley Moorhouse and Zadie Xa with Benito Mayor Vallejo, and Bomi Yook in the Project Space.

May 23 – August 23, 2026
Opening Reception: Friday, May 22, 6 – 9pm
In Conversation with Rose Bouthillier, Shirley Moorhouse and Zadie Xa: Saturday, May 23, 1 – 2:30pm

Shirley Moorhouse, Dancing to the Moon, 2020. Collection of the artist.

ᐃᔨ – Eyes – Shirley Moorhouse

Realized as a collaboration between the artist and Rose Bouthillier, Guest Curator.

This exhibition showcases 30 years of Shirley Moorhouse’s innovative art practice, from her earliest pieces to new and recently restored artworks. Moorhouse is renowned for her distinctive wall hangings, which incorporate embroidery, beading, and smoke-tanned caribou hide, along with unconventional materials and found objects.

Her vibrant imagery delves into complex themes, including environmental stewardship, resource extraction, geopolitics, spirituality, and cultural continuity. Through her work, Moorhouse also extends the invitation, “to reflect, to dream, and to celebrate the beauty and mysteries of life.

Circulated by The Rooms, St. John’s, NL

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Zadie Xa, The Expulsion of Evil (May you receive what you wish for others) 2, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Thaddaeus Ropac. Photo: Eva Herzog.

Zadie Xa with Benito Mayor Vallejo
Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything

Zadie Xa creates vivid, immersive installations that incorporate a wide range of materials and media, including painting, textiles, sculpture, light, and sound. Often, these installations offer a space for shared reflection on larger spiritual practices and intergenerational storytelling.

Informed by her Korean heritage and her upbringing on the West Coast, Xa’s work weaves together narratives of interspecies communication, mythology, shamanism, and folklore with diasporic identity and marine ecology.

The exhibition is a continuation of Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything (2025), which was exhibited in 2025 at Sharjah Biennial 16 and won the artist a nomination for the prestigious Turner Prize in 2025. This is the first major solo exhibition in Alberta of the Vancouver-born, London-based artist, made in collaboration with artist and long-term collaborator Benito Mayor Vallejo.

Organized and developed in partnership with The Power Plant, Toronto, from October 16, 2026, to March 21, 2027, and at PHI, Montréal, from April 21 to September 21, 2027.

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Bomi Yook, K-DIALECTIC (detail), 2026. Photo: Blaine Campbell.

Bomi Yook: K-DIALECTIC

Until June 21, 2026
In the Project Space

Artist Talk: Thursday, May 28, 6 – 7pm

K-DIALECTIC is part of a multidisciplinary project that traces the afterlives of Japanese colonialism in Korea. This exhibition is one component of a broader inquiry: a photographic installation that draws from archival materials centring histories of forced labour and wartime sexual violence. Gathered through collaborations with Korean archives, activist networks, and cultural institutions, these materials are approached as fragments of history that reveal something unsettled and marked by rupture, recurrence, and erasure, rather than as a stable or complete account.

At the centre of the installation is an experimental image-making process Bomi Yook calls “Split Photography.” Archival photographs are reproduced, cut, interlaced, partially obscured, and reconfigured into a field of images that refuses to cohere into a single, unified view. These disrupted compositions evoke the ways traumatic histories are experienced and remembered, not as complete narratives, but as gaps, absences, and dislocations.

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Esker Exhibition and Free Programs Brochure
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About Esker Foundation

Founded in May 2012, Esker Foundation owes its vision to its founders, Calgary-based collectors & 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 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 ground-breaking new work, ideas, and research.

Gallery Hours:
Wednesday to Friday: 11 – 6pm
Saturday & Sunday: 12 – 5pm

Accessibility:
The gallery is barrier-free.
Admission and Programs are free.

Press Contact:
Jill Henderson
Communications & Marketing Lead
jhenderson@eskerfoundation.com
Direct Tel: 403 930 2499

Esker Foundation
4th Floor, 1011 9th Avenue SE
Calgary, AB T2G 0H7, Canada
www.eskerfoundation.art
@eskerfoundation