SUSTAINING APERTURE: DAYLIGHT
Project Type: Exhibition
Location: Or Gallery, Vancouver
Artists: Divine Ndemeye, Colin Mbugua
Curator: Jenn Jackson
Year: 2023-2024
Project description: Sustaining Apertures was the first exhibition by Divine Ndemeye and Colin Berg Mbugua—a collaboration rooted in shared questions around land, food security, and cultural sustenance. Presented at Or Gallery, the project explored how light, water, and plants can become materials for storytelling and healing, especially in communities shaped by displacement.
At the center of the exhibition was Daylight (2024), an immersive installation made of a timber-framed wall, full-spectrum grow lights, ceramic vessels, mirrors, and native edible plants. A continuous flow of water sustains the plants, evoking ancestral food systems and relationships of care across time.
The work offered a quiet space for reflection—on what it means to sustain ourselves in changing climates, and how we remember and honor the land beneath our cities.
In partnership with Urbanarium and the Capture Photography Festival, a public program series extended the conversation beyond the gallery walls into the surrounding community.
Together Ndemeye and Mbugua recognize that the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ people and territories are timeless. The artists’ social and architectural explorations pay honour and respect to how vast relations have shaped the many publics that have emerged out of the history of this place—specifically, the rich and culturally diverse local community in the area immediately surrounding the Or Gallery in Chinatown, Hogan’s Alley, Strathcona, the Downtown East Side, False Creek Flats, and adjacent neighbourhoods.
Acknowledgement: Xwalacktun Rick Harry for an inclusive celebratory welcome. Lauren Brevner and James Nexw’Kalus-Xwalacktun Harry for their collaboration and dialogue on Indigenous representation and land-based gestures in contemporary art
Publication designers: Kirsten May and Anthea Lee | Photographers: Dani Castello, Gloria Wong, Connor Davies | Exhibition documentation: Blaine Campbell | Ceramic fabrication and co-design: Nolan Talbot Kelly | Exhibition design and installation: Alixzandar Morle | Creative preparators: Agnes Fan and Vincent Isabel | Editorial support: Lucien Durey | Research support: Roger Collins at Rise Up Marketplace.