Rituals for Unstable Ground
Centre A is delighted to announce Rituals for Unstable Ground, the culminating exhibition of Centre A’s biennial artist residency, a Blessing & a Curse & a Practice featuring new works by Xinwei Che, Romi Kim, and Ghinwa Yassine.
Blessing & a Curse & a Practice is the second emerging artist residency at Centre A, following 2024’s SLOW Relations residency, which contemplated the condition of artistic production through themes of rest and slowness, a Bliessing & a Curse & a Practice turns towards contradiction. The residency asks what it means to make and sustain a life under conditions that can be both sustaining and extractive: where visibility can offer recognition while also producing exposure, and where artistic work is shaped by precarity, scarcity, and exploitation. Rather than resolving these contradictions, the residency considers practices that allow us to remain within them.
Rituals for Unstable Ground brings together three distinctive approaches to material, memory, and place. Across the exhibition, impressions become a way of understanding how bodies, histories, and places leave traces on one another. Fragments and absences become points of attention: what remains after something has been broken, displaced, concealed, or transformed.
At the centre of the exhibition is the act of returning and repetition. To return is not necessarily to recover what has been lost. It can mean returning to a fractured site, a story, a material, or a history that has not yet been laid to rest–to attend to it again, and to allow what has been overlooked to become present. Repetition becomes a form of labour—the labour of mourning and missing, of documenting what is easily overlooked, and of maintaining relationships to histories that have been fractured or obscured.
The language of blessings and curses offers a way into these questions, but the conditions explored here are not mystical but material. They are found in the works we are paid to do, the work we do for one another, in inherited rituals and newly invented ones; in the structures that sustain artistic practice and those that make it difficult to continue.
Rituals for Unstable Ground does not offer repair as a resolution, nor does it attempt to transform precarity into a blessing. Instead, it asks what practices can emerge from unstable ground. What can repetition hold? What can we return to? And how might continuing to make, remember, and attend become a way of staying with what has not yet been resolved.
Opening Reception: September 12, 2026, 5–8 PM, including a performance by SKIM at 6 PM
Exhibition Duration: September 12 – October 10, 2026
Location: #205-268 Keefer St. (2nd floor of the Sun Wah Centre)
Gallery Hours: Wed–Sat, 12–6 PM
Image Credit: Xinwei Che, Fault Lines
Image Credit: Romi Kim, 바리데기의 가능성 - Year 1
Other Public Programs:
Artist-led Tour: September 24, 2026, 6 – 8PM
Workshop: Tracing lines on unstable ground with Xinwei Che: October 3, 2026, 2 – 4PM
Artist Talk with Q&A with Ghinwa Yassine: October 8, 2026, 6 – 7:30PM
Find out more about the public programs here.
Image Credit: Ghinwa Yassine, Experiments in a Failed Repair–Like Carrying a Dead Body
Collaborators: Sound design by Joey Zaurrini and projection mapping support by Avideh Saadatpajouh
Artist Bio:
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.
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.
This project is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council and the Government of British Columbia.