Sustaining Apertures

Opening Reception:
Thursday, March 7, 6:30 pm

Sustaining Apertures marks the first exhibition by Lys Divine Ndemeye and Colin Kaguru Berg Mbugua. The discursive project explores the artists’ collaborative practice and builds upon their significant contributions – through place-based installation and design in contemporary art, architecture, and community planning – to intersectional conversations around social and environmental justice.

The newly commissioned sculptural works presented within Sustaining Apertures engage community-based knowledge and support, including cultural practices as they relate to ancestral food cultivation, community organizing, and storytelling. From light-based interventions to alternative architectural and archival practices, the lessons nurtured through Sustaining Apertures invite opportunities to experience diverse cultural teachings, traditions, and values.
Sustaining Apertures will be the first public viewing of Daylight (2024), an immersive pavilion composed of a central aperture that beams light onto a constellation of 200 photosensitive plantings amidst a system of sustenance. The continual flow of water within the pavilion references the transformative power of Skwachàys, where Or Gallery is currently located in the Chinatown neighbourhood, as a place where salt marshes and underground springs once abundantly flowed. Daylight honours ancestral relations to sustenance alongside the protocols necessary to support healthy ecosystems and powerful connections for many generations to come.

Together Ndemeye and Mbugua recognize that the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Peoples and territories are timeless. Their social and architectural explorations pay honour and respect to how these vast relations have shaped the many publics that have emerged out of the history of this place.