2026 Art Residency - Blessing & a Curse & a Practice
Centre A is pleased to announce the three participating artists – Romi Kim, Ghinwa Yassine, and Xinwei Che selected for Blessing & a Curse & a Practice, our second biennial residency program supporting local emerging 2SLGBTQIA+ BIPOC artists.
Running from June 10 – July 25, 2026, this seven-week paid residency offers artists dedicated time, space, resources, and mentorship to develop new work in community. The residency will culminate in a group exhibition at Centre A from August 1 – September 5, 2026, featuring works created during the program.
Blessing & a Curse & a Practice emerges from the realities of making art amid ongoing ecological, political, and social instability. The residency affirms the necessity of sustained 2SLGBTQIA+ BIPOC artistic labour at a time when artists and cultural workers continue to navigate precarity, contradiction, visibility, and exhaustion.
The program takes its title from the tensions embedded within artistic practice itself: the ways creative labour can nourish and deplete, sustain and strain, protect and expose. Rather than framing these tensions as oppositional, the residency turns toward practice as repetition, ritual, and return — as something that shapes artists as much as artists shape their work.
Throughout the residency, participating artists will engage with Centre A’s curatorial team, connect with the public through programming, and build relationships with the cohort participating in Centre A’s 2026 Art Writing Mentorship. Through studio visits, gallery outings, and collaborative exchange, the program creates space for dialogue between artists and emerging writers working across contemporary art and critical discourse.
Stay tuned for upcoming open studio dates, where visitors will be invited to meet the artists and learn more about the works developed throughout the residency.
김새로미, Romi Kim or SKIM in drag, is an interdisciplinary based on the unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and Sel̓íl̓witulh Nations. Kim is a nonbinary trans-masc second-generation Korean lesbian. They identify themselves in using these words as verbs rather than nouns or adjectives—constantly in action, and in flux. Kim's practice is explored through an interdisciplinary approach in video, installation, performance and cultural objects. They often think about the labour of care, worldbuilding and rituals of their body.
Ghinwa Yassine is an anti-disciplinary artist from the south of Lebanon who’s based on stolen lands in so-called Vancouver, Canada. Her practice is informed by feminist and queer theory and spans film, installation, performance, sculpture, and text. She embraces humour, absurdity, and fiction, as a counter-narrative to oppression. She’s a shapeshifter whose practice is currently hovering in a gap between radical resistance and embracing an inner belly dancer.
Photo credit: Nabil Ismail
Xinwei Che is a Singapore-born, Vancouver-based interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores time, transformation, and the instability of form. She investigates clay as a porous, responsive material—one that changes through exposure to touch, moisture, and environmental conditions. Her works have been exhibited at Esplanade Singapore, Taipei Artist Village, Richmond Art Gallery, Gordon Smith Gallery, and other international art spaces. She recently returned from a fellowship at Medalta and is preparing for a solo show in Kyoto, Japan.