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.
Open Studio Dates (every Thursday from 2 – 6 PM):
- June 18
- June 25
- June 27 (Saturday)
- July 2
- July 9
- July 16
- July 23
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.
During the residency, Romi will develop Paridegi Possibilities, an experimental video work featuring their drag character, SKIM, moving through landscapes across so-called Vancouver. Combining greenscreen techniques, costumes, performance, ritual, and storytelling, the project retells the story of Paridegi, a figure from Korean mythology often understood as the first shaman.
Drawing on years of research into Korean mythology and shamanic traditions, Romi approaches Paridegi as a trans ancestor. In many versions of the story, Paridegi is abandoned at birth and later journeys between the worlds of the living and the dead, ultimately becoming a shaman. Through humour, play, and speculative storytelling, Paridegi Possibilities foregrounds the myth’s queer and trans resonances.
Image 1: 바리데기 이야기 알아요? He flew to guide them, 2025, lenticular print, 23" x 35"SKIM. Materials used - zipties, aluminum foil, plastic table cloths, scrap fabric. Collaboration between SHAPESHIFTERS @saintmaidenchina @contibreakfast. Documentation by the Alternator.
Image 2, 3, 4: 지전을 흔딜기, Film stills, 2025 video art. 1920 x 1080 10 mins
Image 5: The Warehouse, 2022. Video. Performed by @skimisking @contibreakfast18 mins 29 sec
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
During the residency, Ghinwa will develop Experiments in a Failed Repair, a multimedia installation exploring rubble, loss, and memory. The project began after a visit to her ancestral village in Lebanon, where she encountered the remains of her grandfather's war-damaged home and returned to Vancouver carrying fragments of debris from the house.
Through sculpture, sound, moving image, and writing, Ghinwa is exploring diasporic relationships to place and what it means to carry pieces of an ancestral place across continents. Drawing on theories of rubble, ruins, and anti-monuments, Experiments in a Failed Repair asks how we might remember without monumentalizing, and how artistic practice can resist erasure while remaining attentive to the complexities of grief and displacement. The project considers debris not only as evidence of destruction, but also as a trace that resists erasure and a tool in the "labour of mourning” and "labour of missing."
Image 1: Like Carrying a Dead Body – Digital Photo
Image 2: Experiment 1 – Clay Sculpture Close-Up
Image 3: Experiment 1 – Projection on Clay Sculpture
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.
During the residency, Xinwei will develop a body of drawings and research-based spatial maps that bring together urban crack networks, erosion patterns, and local plant root systems. Through photography, rubbings, drawing, and field research, the project traces how fractures emerge over time within both natural and built environments.
Drawing from her experiences living across Northeast China, Singapore, and Vancouver, Xinwei approaches cracks and ruptures not simply as signs of damage, but as records of accumulated strain and sites of transformation. Focusing on the root systems of local trees and the fractures they create in urban space, the project explores how forces move through bodies, materials, and landscapes, revealing the hidden structures that sustain, disrupt, and reshape the world around us.
The resulting installation will bring together drawings, rubbings, and material traces that invite viewers to reflect on precarity, resilience, and the forms of support that persist even under pressure.
Image 1: To Hold Myself, Gordon Smith Gallery
Image 4: To Hold Myself, Richmond Art Gallery
Image 2: Pressing into Cracks and Blooms
Image 3: Pressing into Cracks and Blooms, Kyoto Nutshouse
Image 5: Maintenance in Progress, Emily Carr University