Summer 2025 Exhibitions at Dalhousie Art Gallery

Rex Tasker, Encounter at Kwacha House-Halifax, 1967. Single-channel video, 17:58 minutes. Courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada.

Broad/Cast: Reclaiming Representation

Curated by: Geoffrey Webster

Artists: Aquakultre, Karen Miranda Augustine, Buseje Bailey, Christina Battle, Wendell Bruno, Erika DeFreitas, Kourtney Jackson, Rhea Storr, Rex Tasker

July 18 – August 31, 2025
Opening Reception: Thursday, July 17 | 6 – 8pm

The Dalhousie Art Gallery is pleased to present Broad/Cast: Reclaiming Representation, a resonant group exhibition curated by Geoffrey Webster. Developed as the culmination of Webster’s curatorial internship, Broad/Cast brings together nine Canadian and international artists working in lens-based media who challenge dominant portrayals of race, gender, and class through film and video.

Responding to the long history of Black misrepresentation in popular culture and public media, Broad/Cast foregrounds the creative agency of artists reclaiming space, narrative control, and visual sovereignty. Featuring works by Buseje Bailey, Karen Miranda Augustine, Rhea Storr, Aquakultre, Erika DeFreitas, and others, the exhibition centres stories from African Nova Scotian, African Canadian, and wider diasporic communities. These artists engage media as both a subject and a tool, dissecting its biases while inventing new modes of representation rooted in lived experience.

Augustine, Bruno, and Storr embrace bold, experimental strategies to interrogate spectacle and sensationalism, remixing, recoding, and disrupting dominant visual narratives through performance, collage, and cinematic montage. While others, including Bailey, Jackson, DeFreitas, and Battle offer quieter, more introspective approaches, emphasizing familial memory and emotional labour, revealing a poetics of care and complexity.

Anchoring the exhibition in local history, Broad/Cast highlights the work of Rex Tasker and Aquakultre. Tasker’s seminal National Film Board documentary Encounter at Kwacha House-Halifax (1967) and Aquakultre’s music video Africvillean Funk (2022) create a rich intergenerational dialogue on Black cultural visibility in Nova Scotia. Through very different media, these works explore how Halifax’s Black communities have been portrayed and misrepresented by public institutions, raising critical questions about authorship, archival absence, and historical accountability.

The exhibition’s title, Broad/Cast, plays on dual meanings: the notion of transmission and the reclamation of the term “broad” as a symbol of defiance, voice, and unapologetic presence. In this spirit, the exhibition challenges viewers to consider who gets to speak, who is seen, and how representational power is taken back through creative practice.

To mark the exhibition’s launch, the public is invited to an opening reception on Thursday, July 17 from 6:00 to 8:00pm. The evening features a poetry reading by Dáminí Awóyígà, a multidisciplinary poet and performer whose work explores ancestral memory, Black femininity, and radical voice. A collaborative movement performance by Kay MacDonald and I’thandi Munro follows, offering a visceral and embodied response to themes of resistance, visibility, and survival. Their live presence extends the exhibition’s engagement with representation into the realm of feeling, gesture, and connection.

About the Curator

Geoffrey Webster is an artist, writer, and emerging curator and arts educator based in Halifax. His creative work explores Black cultural histories and critical media practices through research-driven, interdisciplinary projects. A graduate of NSCAD University and founder of the online platform A-Side, he has contributed to Visual Arts News and other regional publications. Geoffrey will begin graduate studies this fall at Queen’s University in the Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies program.

Kourtney Jackson, Wash Day, 2020. Single-channel video, 09:52 minutes. Courtesy of the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre.

Join us for additional programming in connection with Broad/Cast

Panel Discussion
Thursday, August 7, 2025 | 6 – 8pm
A conversation featuring Broad/Cast curator, selected artists and invited guests from the film and media arts community, reflecting on the intersections of sound, image, and identity in contemporary practice.

Film Screening with Sylvia D. Hamilton
Thursday, August 14, 2025 | 6 – 8pm
A special screening of Speak It! From the Heart of Black Nova Scotia, followed by conversation with the filmmaker. This landmark documentary explores the experiences of Black youth in Halifax, resonating deeply with the themes of voice, resilience, and cultural memory at the heart of Broad/Cast.

Location for both events:
MacAloney Room, Dalhousie Arts Centre (Room 406 – Level 4)
6101 University Avenue, Halifax, NS
Admission is free and open to the public.

Garry Neill Kennedy, Eczema, from the series Six Pink Paintings, 1994. Fluorescent Liquitex paint on chipboard, 78.7 × 78.9 cm. Collection of Dalhousie Art Gallery. Gift of the artist, 2010.

Wavelengths: Colour | Code | Concept
Selections from the Permanent Collection

Curated by: Pamela Edmonds

July 18 – August 31, 2025
Opening Reception: Thursday, July 17 | 6 – 8pm

Presented concurrently with Broad/Cast, this exhibition explores how artists use colour as a conceptual and communicative force. Drawn from the Gallery’s permanent collection, Wavelengths features works by Canadian artists including Rita Letendre, Claude Tousignant, Guido Molinari, Garry Neill Kennedy, Gerald Ferguson, Nancy Stevens, and Michael Fernandes spanning movements from the Plasticiens and Painters Eleven to NSCAD’s conceptual legacy. These pieces are presented in dialogue with international figures such as Gene Davis and Robert Motherwell, highlighting the transnational currents shaping postwar abstraction.

From immersive colour fields to minimalist compositions grounded in repetition and rhythm, Wavelengths reveals how colour functions not just as surface, but as code, signal, and sensorial experience. Together with Broad/Cast, the exhibition invites audiences to consider how visual language communicates across aesthetic, political, and historical registers.

About Dalhousie Art Gallery

Dalhousie Art Gallery, established in 1953, is the oldest public gallery in Nova Scotia and is located in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq people. As both a university-based and public-facing institution, the Gallery presents innovative exhibitions, public programs, and publications that foster visual literacy, critical engagement, and interdisciplinary exchange. With a permanent collection of over 1,400 works, the Gallery supports research, teaching, and public appreciation of historical and contemporary art, and aims to make art relevant and accessible to diverse audiences on campus and across the broader community.

For more information, please visit www.artgallery.dal.ca or @dalhousie_art_gallery on Instagram. Media inquiries can be directed to Director/Curator Pamela Edmonds at pamela.edmonds@dal.ca.

Land Acknowledgement
We would like to acknowledge that the Dalhousie Art Gallery is located in Kjipuktuk, on the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq People. This land is governed by the treaties of Peace and Friendship which Mi’kmaq, Wəlastəkwiyik (Maliseet), and Passamaquoddy Peoples first signed with the British Crown in 1725. The treaties did not deal with surrender of lands and resources but in fact recognized Mi’kmaq and Wəlastəkwiyik (Maliseet) title and established the rules for what was to be an ongoing relationship between nations.

We also recognize African Nova Scotians as a distinct people whose contributions have enriched that part of Mi’kma’ki known as Nova Scotia for over 400 years.

Admission to the Gallery and our programming is always free.

Dalhousie Art Gallery
6101 University Avenue, Level 1
Halifax, NS B3H 4R2
www.artgallery.dal.ca
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Accessibility:
Dalhousie Art Gallery is fully accessible. For more information, please visit our website.