Beyond the Commons: From Stardust to Everlasting Sun

Eve Tagny, mosquito girlfriend (Gabi Dao & Lou Lou Sainsbury)

A Space Main Gallery

April 12 – May 24, 2025

Opening Reception April 12, 2025, 6:00 pm–8:00 pm

Curated by: Noor Alé

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Beyond the Commons: From Stardust to Everlasting Sun is an exhibition by artists Eve Tagny and mosquito girlfriend (Gabi Dao & Lou Lou Sainsbury) that repositions the social practice of the commons. This aspirational framework envisions natural resources—land, water, and biodiversity—as stewarded communally rather than subjected to privatization. Here, commoning is reimagined as a path to emancipation. Bringing together installations, ceramics, photographs, and newly commissioned videos, the exhibition examines instances of commoning where mutual aid, reciprocity, and relationality emerge as everlasting suns. Their works unravel the entanglements between humans, nature, and colonial imperatives to control both, challenging the asymmetrical power structures that determine their worth. 

Tracing the erosion of communal sustenance through land privatization, we sought the vestiges of the commons—remnants of subsistence rights. Reflecting on these histories, Tagny and mosquito girlfriend turn to overlapping realms of the personal and the political, charting constellations of commoning from the familial home to ecological sanctuaries. An intimate film depicts Tagny in her politician grandfather’s home, a structure shaped by the aftermath of Cameroon’s independence from France. In this space, colonial histories converge with present-day economies of extraction. Meanwhile, mosquito girlfriend’s eco-vampiric film Resurrect Me as a Parasite (2025) foregrounds queer ecologies in an age of extinction. Together, their works illuminate a vast expanse of shared histories that shape intersectional solidarities. 

 

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the generosity of the Amarte Fund, K.M. Hunter Charitable Foundation, and donors who wish to remain anonymous.

Biographies

Eve Tagny is a Tiohtià:ke/Montreal-based artist. Her practice considers gardens and disrupted landscapes as mutable sites of personal and collective memory—inscribed in dynamics of power, colonial histories and their legacies. Weaving lens-based mediums, installation, text and performance, she explores spiritual and embodied expressions of grief and resiliency, in correlation with nature’s rhythms, cycles and materiality. 

Tagny has a BFA in Film Production from Concordia University and a Certificate in Journalism from University of Montreal. Recent exhibitions and screenings include Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Ames Yavuz and PHOTO Australia, Australia; Murate and Gucci Gardens, Italy; MNBAQ, MAJ, Momenta Biennale, MAC Montréal and Centre Clark, Montreal; VAC, Cooper Cole, Gallery 44, and Franz Kaka, Toronto. She has done live performances at the Swiss Institute, NYC; C.CAP, Winnipeg; Nuit Blanche 2023, Cooper Cole and Gallery 44, Toronto. She has been longlisted for the Sobey Award 2024, is the recipient of a GOG Award (2023), the Plein Sud Bursary (2020), the Mfon grant (2018), has been shortlisted for the Prix en arts actuels MNBAQ (2023), Gala Dynastie (2023, 2025), CAP Prize (2018), the Burtynsky Photobook Grant (2018), the GOG Award (2020) and longlisted for the New Generation Photography Award (2022).

Gabi Dao (they/them) is an artist based in Maastricht, The Netherlands and is from the unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh Nations (Vancouver, Canada).

Dao’s practice culminates in collage, sculpture, sound and moving image installations with an insistence on multiple truths, blurry temporalities, sensory affirmations and ways of knowing otherwise. They work through long-gestating, fluid processes of gathering, breaking and repairing from their own world-making vernacular of audio/visual fragments, tactile collections of whatnots and scraps of linguistic detritus. Thinking with these materials, their work often begins within the slippages of ‘history’, archives and storytelling—towards channeling the ineffable tensions between grief and joy, alienation and belonging, dissidence and complicity, disassociation and sentimentality. From this juncture, Dao attempts to reclaim and re-enchant meaning-making from the ruins of capitalism and colonialism, especially in the ways they have extracted from racialized, gendered and more-than-human communities. Last year they started the collaborative project mosquito girlfriend with artist and filmmaker Lou Lou Sainsbury.

They have screened and exhibited their work at E-flux Screening Room (Brooklyn, USA), Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin (Lethbridge, CA), A Tale-of-a-Tub (Rotterdam, NL), The National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa, CA) and Vincom Centre for Contemporary Art (Hà Nội, VN). They were recently in residence at Triangle Astérides (Marseille, FR) and the EKWC (Oisterwijk, NL). They are currently in residence at Jan van Eyck Academy.

Lou Lou Sainsbury is an artist based in Rotterdam & London, working across moving image, live-performance, poetry, drawing, sculpture and textiles. Sainsbury’s work seeks to tell stories exploring histories of resistance, transformation and entanglement. With collaboration at the core of her practice, rituals and invocations, collective study, domestic intervention, adaptation, songwriting and make-shift mutations make up some of her idiosyncratic research methods. Making connections between spirituality, medicalisation, colonialism and technology, her tricksterish work attempts to excavate a historical and imagined past of transfeminized and queer life within the brokenness of human and more-than-human worlds. In 2024, she started the collaborative project mosquito girlfriend with artist and filmmaker Gabi Dao.

Her recent solo exhibitions include Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles (2024); Gasworks, London & Humber Street Gallery, Hull (2022); and Well Projects, Margate (2020). She has presented in group exhibitions and festivals internationally including Chapter (Cardiff), Rencontres Internationales (Paris & Berlin), Alchemy Film Festival (Hawick), International Film Festival Rotterdam, Tate Modern (London), Nottingham Contemporary, La Casa Encendida and Yaby (Madrid). Sainsbury has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including Mondriaan Fonds (2023) and Freelands Gasworks Partnership Programme (2021- 2023). In 2024, she was an artist in residence at EKWC (Oisterwijk).