Opening Reception: December 5, 7:30pm–9:30pm
Exhibition Dates: November 28, 2025–March 28, 2026
Gallery Gachet
9 W Hastings Street.

Act 3: As Visible as Blood, reimagines the historical archetype of the Black, or Sable, Venus through the works of Rebecca Bair, Silvana Mendes, Keisha Scarville, Kosisochukwu Nnebe, and Kariyana Calloway-Scott. Bridging the thought of Black feminist writers and diasporic histories, the exhibition confronts the visual grammars of empire, slavery, and cultural domination while reclaiming the sensual, domestic, and speculative possibilities of Black womanhood.

Curated by Olumoroti George

Friday March 27, 2026 — Saturday March 28, 2026
Gallery TPW (Toronto)
170 St Helens Ave, Toronto

_CODA: To Embrace the Break_ is a two-day symposium in partnership with Gallery TPW (Toronto), presenting on discourse, performance and workshops to reflect on the tenets presented in ___a lineage of transgression___.

What happens when we embrace fracture, discordance and friction as fertile sites for creative action? Aligned with elements of Gallery Gachet’s exhibition Act 3: As Visible As Blood, these projects and this program foregrounds the fugitive histories and traditions of Black feminist writers and the transference to the visual, underscored through Black femme bodies. 

Act 3 (Revisited): To Be Seen is a film series curated by the Akojo Film Collective that extends Act 3: As Visible as Blood through moving image. The series foregrounds Black femme life, labour, intimacy, and becoming across the diaspora, attending to the conditions under which Black femmes are rendered visible, asked to labour, and find ways of living otherwise.

Saturday, March 14, 2026 / 6:00 pm — SFU (School for The Contemporary Arts)

Saturday, March 21st, 5–8pm
Gallery Gachet
9 W Hastings Street.

As a closing gesture of As Visible as Blood, Gallery Gachet will host a catered dinner and private convening for Black femmes. This gathering, hosted at Gallery Gachet, is conceived as a space of nourishment, reflection, and togetherness, an evening held in care and shared presence.

This is an invitation-only event. Black femmes and BIPOC femmes interested in attending are welcome to express interest by contacting info@gachet.org.

Wednesday, February 11, 6–8 PM
Gallery Gachet
9 W Hastings Street.

Join us for our second reading group on Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book by Hortense Spillers.

This session will be led by Troy Johnson, Curator-in-Residence, alongside a very special co-facilitator, extending our collective engagement with Spillers’ foundational text on captivity, kinship, gender, and the violent grammars through which Black life has been rendered legible, usable, and expendable.

Spillers’ essay remains urgent for how it names the ways slavery reconfigured gender itself, positioning Black women’s bodies within regimes of availability, inheritance, and desire, while undoing the assumed stability of “motherhood,” “family,” and the human.

Saturday, February 28th, 12–3pm
Gallery Gachet
9 W Hastings Street.

Nail technicians will be present to offer false manicures, drawing inspiration from Kosisochukwu Nnebe’s The Seeds We Carry, currently on view in the gallery. Adornment is approached not as ornament alone, but as labour, ritual, and a site where pleasure, refusal, and self-possession converge.

Open to all. Priority will be given to BIPOC femmes and femme-presenting individuals. RSVP at info@gachet.org

Reception: October 22, 6-9pm
Engaged Journalism Panel: October 22, 5–6pm
Policing and Public Health Panel, November 14, 5–6:30pm
Exhibition open October 23–November 14th, 2025

Featuring James D. Baryluk, Emily R. Blyth, Sam Digges Hunter, Laura Holland, Mo Korchinski, Gwyneth Law, Tyler Lindgren, Makinak Kwe, J. Kevin Mitchell, Christina Sinopoli, Robb Thompson, and Syrus Marcus Ware.

Walk in Gratitude; Write in Empathy coalesces the voices of community members, activists, and researchers to imagine a world beyond police violence, while foregrounding the societal infrastructures that allow such violence to remain rampant.

Reception: October 25, 12–6pm
Exhibition open October 25–November 14th, 2025

Cameron Carr, Rosa Chan, Grace Chan, Christin Cheung, Eva Cho, d. June Conley, Lily Huo, Jim Jarvis, Gladys Lee, Carol Larson, May Li, Li Ying Ng, Montana King, Lawrence Tung, Linda Song/Bao Qin Song, Linda Yang, Masha Tikhonova, Misha Sample, Immacula Renaud, John Patterson, Jin Wang, Nathan Wood, Meow, Neptune, Rosie, and Swallow Zhou

It has long been a tradition at Gallery Gachet to host the annual Oppenheimer Park Community Art Show. This exhibition series began in 2008, on the cusp of a city in fl ux, anticipating the changes, challenges, and losses of a pre-Olympic Vancouver. From the start, the project took shape through open-air, studio-style workshops hosted in one of the hearts of the Downtown Eastside: Oppenheimer Park. During these gatherings, the Gachet team tapped into the park’s communal nature and helped forge a space that encouraged creative exploration and collective expression amid times marked by uncertainty and precarity.

In parallel with the LaConference on Feminine Desire, 12 clinical psychoanalysts were each given one artwork to analyze without knowing who the artist was. Their written responses are the basis of the exhibition, Vulnerable Pleasures. Curated by Dan Starling.⁠
⁠
Artists + Analysts:⁠
Hana Amani + Hilda Fernandez / Tiffany Law + Erik Larson / Damla Tamer + Sharon Green / Jacob Dyrenforth + Dan Collins / Eknoor Matharoo + Mandana Mansouri / Mahsa Farsi + Marco Antonio Coutinho / Alejandra Morales + Mariana Hernández Urías / Megan Hepburn + Juan Luis de la Mora / Christine D’Onofrio + Cindy Zeiher / Saskia Jetten + Rolf Flor / Jonathan Alfaro + Manuel Outón / Rosamunde Bordo + Francine Danniau⁠
⁠
Reception with a special presentation by Carol Owens, Friday October 17, 8–10pm. Presentation at 8:30pm.⁠
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Gallery Hours: Friday October 17, 3 - 10pm and Saturday October 18, 12 - 6pm

In Picnic For a N(n)ervous System, Von Coffin and Warren Neidich estrange processes of attention, sense-making and cognition. Critically engaging with emerging theories of the embodied, embedded, enacted and extended mind, the artists use painting, neon and sculpture to activate uncommon neural pathways, modulating our world-making capacities towards the emergence of diverse neural architectures—and, correspondingly, a smorgasbord of modes of thought.

July 11–September 27, 2025

Mga Kwento - Many Stories:
Sunday September 7th from 5:00 - 8:00 PM at the K'emk'em'elay healing garden 117 E Hastings St

Join us for an evening of ‘kuwentuhan’ (sharing stories) at the Ke'kemkemelay Healing Garden at 117 E Hastings St. Kuwentuhan is an Indigenous Filipino storytelling method that invokes Kapwa (shared self) through sharing our individual stories and forming them into a collective that represents our history, cultural values and wisdoms. In the wake of the Lapu Lapu tragedy, we invite those affected to move through moments of darkness and into the light through an evening of multisensory play, poetry, storytelling & film. 

When: Every Wednesday from July 30th - Aug 27th, 2-4PM
Where: Oppenheimer Park
What: In anticipation for Gachet’s Annual Community Art Celebration, join us this summer for a series of free craft workshops in Oppenheimer Park. Each week is attuned to inviting multimedia curiosity & play, whether this is your first time interacting with the tools or not, our facilitators Alberta, Wendy & Sophia will welcome all types of creative exploration in a safe & supportive environment. Materials, snacks & refreshments provided. ⁠

May 8, 2025–June 21, 2025

Artist Talk: Saturday May 31st, 2025 4–6PM
Film Screening: June 5th: 6:00–8:30 PM

Through aesthetic techniques rooted in digital and surveillance media—including glitch, repetition, redaction, and the pervasiveness of the illegible image—exhibiting artists Chad Wong and Pegah Tabassinejad explore the dual function of surveillance imagery as both a tool of oppression and a means of bearing witness, documenting place, and reasserting one’s humanity.

Screening until June 21, 2025

Does Land Run Home traces the social geography of Pigeon Park through the whizzing of bikes, trees swaying in the wind, and the repeated return to the Survivors Totem Pole—around which people gather, orbit, and rest. In capturing the everyday motions of the park, the film gestures toward the layered civic, urban, and social justice movements embedded within its landscape.

Collective Audience Activated Reading of the
Glossary of Cognitive Activism by Warren Neidich 

People's Co-Op Books
1391 Commercial Drive, Vancouver, BC
April 24, 7–9pm

Featuring Guest Readers:
Fiona Bowie, Emily Butler, Sai Di, Jesse McKee, Eldritch Priest

The Glossary of Cognitive Activism is an iterative activist dictionary composed of 330 words that together describe and navigate the technological, ecological, sociogenic, artistic and philosophical landscape of our planet today. It provides readers with the intellectual tools to guide them through and dissent against our difficult and precarious moment.

Berlin-based Warren Neidich and invited readers ignite the audience into a conversation by reading a definition or part of a definition from the book, briefly contextualizing it within their own practice and interests. Neidich is the director of the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art, and he will be exhibiting artwork at Gachet in July.

Prelude……Venus Lives! is a public art project that serves as a precursor to the upcoming exhibition and symposium, Emblematic Elusions: Facets of the Black Venus, set to take place at Gallery Gachet’s physical space in the fall of 2025.

Like its sister exhibition, Prelude……Venus Lives! foregrounds themes of Black female and queer sexuality, eroticism, and identity through interventions and remediations of the historical archetype of the Black Venus.

Using diverse artistic methods—including critical explorations of African cinema, investigations into the assemblage of Afro-Diasporic  cultural identity and heritage in the southern United States, and surrealist meditations on Afro-futuristic and historical visual languages—artists Afi Venessa Appiah, Kariyana Calloway-Scott, and Praise Etiosa Godswill visualize the registers of Black feminist subjectivity and explore the uses of the erotic as a visual language and an emancipatory praxis.

Prelude.....Venus Lives! is supported by the Hastings Crossings Business Association and presented in partnership with Artspeak Gallery.

On view starting February 10th, 2025, outside 118 and 130 W Hastings Street, 320 and 428 Carrall Street

Intimate Encounters is an inquiry into the works of Jinian Raine Harwig, Gladys Lou, and Vicente Ortiz Cortez whose films will be screened on Gallery Gachet’s community screen. The films were selected from the Penticton Art Gallery’s Gifts of Madness 2024 exhibition and are curated together into a micro-shorts programme that meditates on the surveillance of bodies in queer, mad and altered states. The artists explore shifting consciousness through multiple mediums such as 16mm analogue cinema, video performance and gif art.

November 14th, 2024, to January 24th, 2025
Outside 9 W Hastings St on our community screen

September 26–October 18, 2024

The Oppenheimer Park Community Art Show features artwork and insight of artists and community leaders connected to or displaced from Oppenheimer Park, the green space known as Lek'lekí, the Powell Street Grounds, Paureu gai, the backyard of the Downtown Eastside; the unceded land of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. For some artists, participating in the show is an annual tradition, while others are contributing for the first time.⁠

Project Running July 27 to August 31, 2024 / Wed–Sat / 12–6⁠

As Gallery Gachet anticipates its upcoming renovation, we invite you to a project drawing from our archives. The works presented range from mediums including photography, silk screen printing, painting, and drawing. Each work exemplifies the creative agency, risk and seamless integration of personal narratives with the political matters of the times that have remained paramount to Gachet’s programming and operational praxis since its inception.

Programming: ⁠

Special Writers Group Featuring Cecily Nicholson
August 16, 2–4pm followed by a mixer from 4–5pm

Echoes & Encounters: A Gachet Reunion 
Public Reception and Reunion for Past Members, Staff, and Exhibited Artists
August 30, 4–6pm

Activating Pigeon Park is a community curation project that is rooted in the composite history of Pigeon Park. A month of art workshops will invite the community to interact with Pigeon Park’s history and foster imaginings of new stories through mixed media pathways. Workshops will be engaged with the park’s history of restraining access to green spaces, hostile architecture, and the perennial colonial powers of the CPR Railway tracks which cut through the heart of Pigeon Park. The project questions urban planning: How can citizens interrogate who the city is for through taking up space with our bodies and manipulating environments?