Aideen Barry: Silent Songs

This fall, Oakville Galleries is pleased to present Silent Songs, Aideen Barry's inaugural solo exhibition in Canada, featuring the world premiere of her enigmatic and ethereal film Embroidering the Earth's Mantle. The exhibition unfolds across both of our gallery sites, featuring recent films, a new body of intricately embroidered drawings, and a series of richly printed film stills.

One of Barry's defining concerns is the recovery of voices and histories that have been silenced. Through phantasmagoric narratives that weave together folklore, oral histories, ecology, and archival research, Barry reveals the persistence of cultural memory despite histories of erasure and repression. Her hallucinatory and fantastical works foreground languages and other forms of cultural knowledge that have been suppressed, building new cinematic worlds for these voices to resurface.

Barry’s films, The Song of the Bleeding Tree (2023) and the acclaimed Seachmalltacht / Oblivion (2021) will be presented as a hypnotic video installation in our Centennial Square gallery. Created in collaboration with Inuit throat singer Riit 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 turns to the intertwined histories of landscape, ecology, and mythology, reflecting on the enduring impact of colonial violence while imagining possibilities for repair and renewal.

Throughout our historic gallery spaces in Gairloch Gardens, Barry presents a mythical world through film, animation, and drawing inspired by the life and work of the surrealist painter Remedios Varo, whose distinctive dreamlike works combine science, alchemy, mysticism, medieval imagery, engineering, and the occult into grand, fantastical narratives. Barry pulls on Varo’s themes of displacement, transformation, and survival, interpreting them into meditations on creation, labour, fate, and women's agency envisioning a collective rise from a dark world of constraint through the weaving of reality into existence.

Parallel programs
Common Ground: Aideen Barry Artist Talk
Wednesday, October 14, 2026, 1–2pm, Sheridan College

Common Ground is a new programming partnership co-presented by Oakville Galleries and Sheridan College. For our first edition, we present an artist talk by acclaimed animator, filmmaker and artist Aideen Barry.

Stop Motion Animation with Aideen Barry
Ages: 8–16, Sunday, October 18, 2026, 10am–1pm, Gairloch Gardens

Join us for an exciting, hands-on animation workshop inspired by the creative practice of artist Aideen Barry.

Bodies of Memory with Erica Stocking and Delphi
Saturday, November 21, 2026, 2–4pm, Gairloch Gardens

Erica Stocking and Delphi, her life-sized doll and longtime creative collaborator, will lead a hands-on workshop exploring storytelling, memory, and personal meaning through doll-making, inspired by the themes of Aideen Barry’s Silent Songs. Stay tuned for more details!

Silent Songs by Aideen Barry is curated by Séamus Kealy with the support of Jenifer Papararo and Natalie Stone. Related programs are curated and supported by Isabella Springett and Papararo. Barry’s exhibition is financially made possible with the support of Culture Ireland.

Aideen Barry is a conceptual artist based in Ireland with an international multifaceted practice spanning filmmaking, performance, experimental lens-based media, drawing, and sculpture. Her work employs visual trickery to create a heightened suspension of reality, with a central theme of exploring sinister systems. Her recent projects are intersectional and collaborative, working with artists such as Peter Gabriel, William Kentridge, and The Centre of the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg, as well as Inuit throat singer ᕇᑦ Riit, composers Irene Buckley, choreographers Junk Ensemble, fashion designer Richard Malone, Tropical Topical & Margaret O’Connor, composers Tshegofatso Moeng and Philip Miller. Barry engages with a diverse range of collaborators, including artists, pop singers, archives, archivists, historians, scientists and activists, transcending pop culture and visual culture to create massive interventionist artworks. Notably, she collaborated with nearly a thousand Lithuanian citizens to create the feature film Klostės, which is now part of the National Collection at IMMA and contributed to Kaunas receiving UNESCO World Heritage Status.

About Oakville Galleries
Oakville Galleries is a contemporary art museum housed across two locations—one in a mid-century Modernist civic building in downtown Oakville, and the other in a historic lakeside mansion and public garden. Oakville Galleries is one of Canada’s leading art institutions, presenting an international roster of contemporary artists in varying stages of their careers. The Galleries is supported by The Town of Oakville, Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council, and through the generosity of sponsors, patrons, and its membership.