Les Fleurs Du MalOakville Galleries
Feb 28 to May 24, 2026 Curated by Karen Kraven, featuring work by
Abbas Akhavan, Lili Huston-Herterich, Sukaina Kubba, Jeremy Laing, Jenine Marsh, Diyar Mayil, Marisa Portolese, Swapnaa Tamhane, and Aimée Zito Lema.
Les Fleurs du Mal brings together artworks that explore flowers, gardens, mourning, and remembrance. Grappling with the complexities of the thresholds between life and death, these works consider commemoration, materiality, and embodiment to imagine futures and elsewheres, while also reflecting on the disenchantment within those fantasies and the fleeting beauty of everyday life. 1
Prior to floral arrangement, the cut flower is poised in anticipation of being assigned meaning. Bouquets are often substituted for words or sentiments; their poetics insist on both the affirmation and fragility of life. The flower becomes a stand-in—like welcome company offered by those who could not be there, or sent in lieu of genuine support.
The garden is poetic and contradictory: a place of impermanence and decay, a rebel outpost and a communal paradise. On the one hand, it offers sanctuary; on the other, it performs “the act of possessing.” 2 This tension “makes visible one of the most interesting aspects of gardens: that they exist on the threshold between artifice and nature, conscious decision and wild happenstance.” 3 The garden is an experiential space that spills beyond its boundaries, as it is as much about the gardener and the surrounding world as it is about the plants and ecosystems within. Mapping otherwise, the metaphors of the flower garden become a stage for narratives of transformation.
The exhibition borrows its title from Baudelaire’s infamous book, which explores themes of death, a fascination with evil, and the search for a utopian ideal. Often translated into English as The Flowers of Evil, the French title can also be read as Wrong Flowers, Flowers of Illness, or Flowers of Pain. Mal is an ambiguous word in French. It asks: what can be made from human pain, cruelty, longing, and greed?
—Karen Kraven
1. Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, translated by Nathan Brown, Verso, 2024, p.20
2. Jamaica Kincaid, The Disturbances of the Garden, The New Yorker, August 31, 2020
3. Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time, WW Norton, 2024, p. 14
Infinite Sample Set (the 2026 Grow-Op Edit), 2022-ongoing
x-frame stands, found materials, grommets, and fibre drums, with lighting grid, dollies, and hand truck courtesy of Oakville Galleries
variable dimensions
This project was initially supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC), and the University of Toronto’s Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, and Visual Studies Department.
Documentation by Jimmy Limit, courtesy of Oakville Galleries.