This dance film brings together two longtime collaborators Nancy Lee and Simran Sachar. These hands are still at work features wh/aacking infused with gestural elements performed by cyborg-like characters (portrayed by choreographer, dance artist, and actor Sachar, inspired by Corporate HR, Gen Z social media reels and early 2000s computer-generated characters), along with site-specific projection user interface design by media artist Lee. The resulting artwork portrays the power of movement, migration, and labour in a more-than-human world.

These hands are still at work was commissioned by FORM (Festival of Recorded Movement). FORM screens and commissions films that explore the limitless possibilities of the body in motion through film and provides a platform for youth and emerging artists. These hands are still at work is a part of the Kinesthesia fall exhibition and performance series.

Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art presents the world premiere of NDN Giver, from September 17, 2025 – January 25, 2026. Curated by the gallery’s Assistant Curator, member of the Tsiits Git’anee clan, and passionate Haida Nation scholar Amelia Rea in her solo curatorial debut, the exhibition examines reciprocity, identity, and the evolving practice of gift-giving within potlatch traditions. Bringing together contemporary potlatch gifts such as prints and mugs alongside archival records of historical potlatches, NDN Giver features select pieces from Amelia’s personal collection as well as works by artists from communities across the coast, including the Haida and Heiltsuk Nations. For admission information and complete event details, visit: billreidgallery.ca

Charles Atlas (b. 1949, St. Louis, MO) has lived and worked in New York City since the early 1970s. In 2024, the ICA Boston presented About Time, the first U.S. museum survey devoted to Atlas’ work. Other recent solo exhibitions include The Mathematics of Consciousness, a 100-foot long video installation commissioned by Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY (2022); Charles Atlas: Ominous, Glamorous, Momentous, Ridiculous, Fondazione ICA Milano, Italy (2021); and Charles Atlas: The past is here, the futures are coming and The Kitchen Follies, The Kitchen, New York (2018). Atlas’ work is included in the permanent collections of major institutions worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate Modern, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich; and De Hallen Haarlem, The Netherlands. In 2024, Atlas’ archive was acquired by The Getty Research Institute.

For more than ten years now, the paintings of Sojourner Truth Parsons have trafficked in the saturated and sensorial. Plumbing the space between abstraction and legibility, feeling and form, the language of Parsons’ work is an intuitive one. Building depth through accretion, collapsing interior and exterior realms, and traversing a shifting set of references — from the history of dance to the Gee’s Bend quilts of Alabama to her garden in the Catskill Mountains — her paintings give shape to intensities both atmospheric and embodied.

Louise brings together a selection of works produced by the Vancouver-born, New York-based artist over the past several years, surveying the dexterity of her movement between figuration and form and her canvases’ elemental approach to sensation, texture and tone. Titled after the work of poet Louise Glück — known for her decades-long meditation on the illusions and agonies of the self — the exhibition traces the enduring emotional registers, both individual and collective, that occupy Parsons’ time in the studio: desire, loss, isolation, redemption, resurgence.

One More Life Gallery presents Spooky Postcard Show 2! It’s time for all things spooky, creepy, crawly, and hauntingly to come out and play! 🌕🦇🐈‍⬛👻

Spooky Postcard Show 2 features 50 artists and their postcard-sized artworks of what’s been haunting them! Oh, wait, there are even Tiny Haunts, which are super small but spooky original artworks by our artists, all priced at $25. Show on display until November 15

🖤⚡🖤⚡🖤⚡🖤⚡🖤

Spooky Postcard Show 2 at One More Life Gallery
2111 Main St, Vancouver

Opening Weekend Information

Friday, October 24th – 7 pm – 11 pm
🎃 Opening reception, artists in attendance
🎃 Snack and beverage bar
🎃 Costumes welcome and encouraged

Saturday, October 25th – 12 pm – 5 pm
🎃 Artist market featuring artists from our show!
🎃 Free postcard workshop for kids from 1 pm to 4 pm. Drop in style. While supplies last. Activity hosted by the Post A Letter Social Activity Club

This exhibition highlights a vital current in contemporary artmaking today: the intersection between visual art and dance. Named for the process whereby a body comes into awareness of itself in space, Kinesthesia brings together an eclectic gathering of artists and groups whose respective practices acknowledge and celebrate the human body’s many ways of being in movement.

Kinesthesia includes visual artists, choreographers, dance collectives, and other performers from across the worlds of dance and art in Canada. Throughout their respective practices, visitors will experience extraordinary artworks that foreground the unique wisdom of bodily experience. The exhibition includes a vibrant variety of media, including sculpture, painting, textile, photography, film, and virtual reality. Combined, the array of work on display reflects ongoing conversations in the fields of dance and live artmaking, speaking to critical topics such as embodiment, choreography, healing, ritual, performance, and transcendence. Drawn from across the country, selected artists include All Bodies Dance, ĀNANDAM dance theatre, Justine A. Chambers, Fran Chudnoff, Brendan Fernandes, Ronald Li, Tanya Linklater, Lucy M. May, Dana Michel, Maisie O’Brien, Evann Siebens, and Sarah Nash Wong.

In all of their work, these artists, dancers, and performers present powerful models for the ways that a human body can present itself in space, whether as the grieving embodiment of inherited trauma, or the wisdom of healing; as an expression of the ways a body can query the paradigms of public space, and unpack their unspoken logics; as sites for both the enactment and subversion of choreographed movement; or as the presentation of alternative modes of identity. Dance relentlessly proposes and then enacts its own possibilities, in movement.

Along with objects and installations, Kinesthesia features a series of live performance works. These include an excerpt from Montreal-based choreographer Lucy M. May’s The Conditions; a dance battle with Funk’N’Sole Street Dance Society; an interpretation of Toronto-based ĀNANDAM dance theatre’s Ephemeral Artifacts sculptural installation; a staging of Vancouver and Surrey-based Justine A. Chambers’ and Simran Sachar’s Today is the evening to strike lightning / Aaj To Bijiliyan Girane Ki Shaam Hai; and a rendition of Montreal-based live artist Dana Michel’s durational work MIKE. For more details about these performances, visit our Events section.

For twenty-two years, the Heart of the City Festival has been grounded in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and focused on listening and learning from the community’s cultural practices. The Festival works with, for, and about the Downtown Eastside community to carry forward our community’s stories, ancestral memory, cultural traditions, lived experiences, and artistic processes to illuminate pathways of resilience.

This year’s Festival invites artists, neighbours, and audiences to reflect on what it means to live with dignity – on unceded land and with each other. Dignity in Community honours the everyday and extraordinary ways people care for each other, resist displacement, and make space to belong. We celebrate the strength and creativity found in our connections and imagine what is possible when dignity is a shared foundation for us all.

The 2025 Festival features over 100 events at over 40 local venues, including music, stories, poetry, theatre, ceremony, films, dance, readings, forums, workshops, discussions, gallery exhibits, art talks, history walks, and more!

We who have known tides begins from a poetic inquiry that seeks to understand what it means to exist at the edges of the Pacific Ocean. We who have known tides is an examination that unveils the ways in which the ocean and living in proximity to it has shaped the work of Indigenous artists, as well as their relation to territories across land and water, and their connections to communities that have witnessed the tides change for thousands of years. Drawn predominantly from the Vancouver Art Gallery’s permanent collection, this exhibition asks us to consider where we are on a deeper level, looking to the ocean as a way of understanding how this place is ever changing.

The internationally celebrated Modulus Festival returns this November, inviting audiences to experience bold ideas, powerful stories, and genre-defying performances that go beyond traditional concerts. Recognized as one of Canada’s most important new music events, this year’s biennial festival embraces an interdisciplinary approach, combining music, visual arts, immersive installations, and participatory experiences that highlight the vibrancy of Vancouver’s creative community.

From November 7–10, 2025, the festival offers four days of transformative performances, interactive textile crafting sessions, and collaborative projects that encourage audiences to imagine and build the future together. This year, the festival emphasizes connection, co-creation, and reflection, providing both intimate and large-scale experiences for audience members.

Within The Mould, Against the Grain establishes itself as a case study on the genealogies and emergence of Black culture from within the Continent ( Africa) and across the diaspora.

Utilizing Deforrest Brown Jr’s seminal text (Assembling A Black Counter-Culture) and Stuart Halls’s assertions on Black popular culture and identity as conceptual points of departure, this exhibition investigates the similarities, differences and connections that exist between instances of Black cultural production that have emerged from the Western Black diaspora as well as the Continent. Though united under the shared identity marker of “Black”, each one holds nuance based on separate histories, traditions, material conditions and varying stakes.

Through an intimate coalescing of lens-based works, schematics and sonic installations works, exhibiting artists Tati Au Miel, Odartey Aryee, Deforrest Brown jr, and Isabel Okoro expand on existing theoretical and conceptual frameworks that consider Black artists as knowledge keepers and producers, insisting that Black cultural identity, like Black cultural production, is a robust and complex process of both becoming and being that is ongoing.

Exploring themes like traditional spirituality, embodied knowledge, the limits of representation, global Black identity, and the tensions between appropriation, commercialization, and Black cultural production, this exhibition exemplifies the politics of style and oppositionality that position Black cultural production as existing against the grain, despite the hegemonic forces that attempt to dilute and subvert its potential.

The exhibition brings together artists Mike McNeeley, Chuck Melnychuk, and Sandrine Umuhoza in collaboration with WePress Community Arts Space. Their works reflect on lived experiences and social conditions of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and South—narratives that also hold relevance with communities in Surrey.

Aligned with WePress’ commitment to working with those most impacted by systemic injustice, Practices of Care grew from community workshops centering immunocompromised and disabled participants. These workshops focused on expressions of collective care, with McNeeley, Melnychuk, and Umuhoza contributing as peer workers. In these roles, they offered guidance, shared knowledge, and helped cultivate a supportive space grounded in accessibility.

Developed alongside the exhibition, descriptive and extend labels will provide visual details of the artworks, creating an inclusive experience that supports deeper engagement and understanding. Altogether, Practices of Care reflects a collaborative and creative process, highlighting how art can serve as a tool for community connection and transformative dialogue.

Impetus is an interdisciplinary installation that explores identity, digital existence and cultural preservation through the meeting points of classical Thai dance, Voguing, w*acking and new media. At the heart of the work are two 16 x 16 x16 LED matrix cubes: one manufactured, embodying a digital record of movement, the other hand soldered, symbolizing presence beyond what is seen and the hidden labour behind technology. Together, they aim to reveal and explore how cultural and human experiences are fragmented, mediated, and constrained within digital and non digital systems.

Visitors are welcome to drop in at any time and stay as long as they wish. The installation runs on a 10-minute loop. Capacity in the space is limited. Depending on attendance, there may be a short wait.

Each November—for 29 years and counting—the Eastside Arts Society [EAS] has produced the Eastside Culture Crawl Visual Arts, Design & Craft Festival, in which artists in Vancouver’s Eastside open their studios to the public. The event is focused on the area bounded by Columbia St., 2nd Ave., Victoria Dr., and the Waterfront, and involves painters, jewellers, sculptors, furniture makers, weavers, potters, printmakers, photographers, glassblowers— ranging from emerging artists to those internationally established.

This open artist studio event, along with workshops, demonstrations exhibits and artist talks, increases understanding and appreciation of the many varied visual art practices in our cities Eastside. The Crawl, as it is affectionately known, is an accessible and fun experience for art lovers and first time visitors alike. The Eastside Arts Society is a registered charity that develops and produces some of Vancouver’s most innovative and cherished programming for contemporary visual arts. Now in its 29th year, the EAS is embarking on a number of new initiatives to ensure that Art Happens Here, on Vancouver’s Eastside, for decades to come.

The Museum of Anthropology (MOA) at UBC presents the world premiere of Entangled Territories: Tibet Through Images, on display from November 20, 2025 to March 29, 2026. Curated by Dr. Fuyubi Nakamura, in collaboration with Tibetan-Canadian community members and artists, the bilingual exhibition explores Tibet’s rich cultural heritage alongside its current political context, through the lenses and voices of the Tibetan diasporic community. The exhibition features photography, letters, objects, and belongings from MOA’s archives alongside contemporary contributions from Tibetan-Canadian artists: Lodoe Laura will have several works on display, alongside the screenings of two short films from filmmaker Kunsang Kyirong, whose work was recently screened at the Toronto and Vancouver International Film Festivals. MOA will celebrate the opening of Entangled Territories on November 20, 6–9pm, with free museum admission for all. To learn more about the exhibition, as well as ancillary events, visit moa.ubc.ca

Ancestral Echoes celebrates the dynamic wisdom of dance traditions. The afternoon begins with an activation of the sculptural installation Ephemeral Artifacts, choreographed by Toronto-based artist Brandy Leary in the Gallery space, examining the dancing body as a vessel of inherited knowledge. Then, Justine A. Chambers and Simran Sachar’s Today is the evening to strike lightning / Aaj To Bijiliyan Girane Ki Shaam, a powerful invocation of dancing mothers and bodily reclamation, will be performed in the Studio Theatre. The symposium concludes with a group conversation about dance, memory, scoring, and the intersection between museum spaces and performance.

Step into the world of the Salish Wool Dog, a small, long-haired dog known by Coast Salish peoples for its wool, an essential part of weaving and cultural traditions. This event highlights Indigenous knowledge through research, storytelling and film.

The event will have the first Canadian public screening of the new short film on the history and legacy of the woolly dog—Threads that Bind: The Story of the Coast Salish Woolly Dog, by Kirk French—as well as a talk with Liz Hammond-Kaarremaa, co-author of the book The Teachings of Mutton: A Coast Salish Woolly Dog.

A panel discussion of Indigenous knowledge keepers and weavers will delve into the cultural role of the woolly dog, the impacts of colonization, and current efforts to share this history.

The Teachings of Mutton: A Coast Salish Woolly Dog books and related items will be available for purchase with a signing to follow.