Fall 2026 Opening Reception | Aideen Barry: Silent Songs

Oakville Galleries presents Silent Songs, Aideen Barry's inaugural solo exhibition in Canada. The exhibition unfolds across both gallery locations, featuring the world premiere of her film Embroidering the Earth's Mantle, recent films, intricately embroidered drawings, and richly printed film stills.

Barry's work recovers voices and histories that have been silenced. Through phantasmagoric narratives that weave together folklore, oral histories, ecology, and archival research, she reveals the persistence of cultural memory despite histories of erasure and repression. Her films foreground languages and other forms of cultural knowledge that have been suppressed, building new cinematic worlds for these voices to resurface.

At Centennial Square, Barry's films The Song of the Bleeding Tree (2023) and ᖃᐅᔨᒪᔭᐅᔪᓐᓃᖅᑐᑦ / Seachmalltacht / Oblivion (2021) are presented as a hypnotic video installation. Created in collaboration with Inuit throat singer Riit ᕇᑦ and Irish harpist Aisling Lyons, Oblivion brings together two distinct musical traditions that were once suppressed under colonial rule, exploring the resilience of cultural memory through sound, performance, digital technology, and moving image. In The Song of the Bleeding Tree, Barry reflects on the enduring impact of colonial violence while imagining possibilities for repair and renewal through the intertwined histories of landscape, ecology, and mythology.

Throughout Gairloch Gardens, Barry presents a mythical world through film, animation, and drawing inspired by surrealist painter Remedios Varo. Barry interprets Varo's themes of displacement, transformation, and survival into meditations on creation, labour, fate, and women's agency, envisioning a collective rise through the weaving of reality into existence.

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 24, 2026, 2:00–5:00 PM. Reception and remarks held in Gairloch Gardens; exhibition opening at Centennial Square. All are welcome. Admission is free.