Gabi Dao

[RSVP](https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/gabi-dao-selects-a-useful-ghost-2025-tickets-1984347506810 "button")

This spring, the Contemporary Art Gallery is pleased to present *Previously Viewed*, a series of artist-curated film screenings. Inviting artists from CAG’s recent and upcoming programming to present films that have been formative to their thinking and practice in some way, each screening is a one-night-only event centered on a single feature-length work.

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gabi dao has selected *A Useful Ghost* (2025).

> I selected *A Useful Ghost* in light of Wim Wenders’ self-congratulatory statement at this year’s Berlinale that the film world should “stay out of politics.” Director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke exemplifies how cinema can be fresh, humorous and a very necessary, contemporary political critique in our time of escalating fascism and oppression.

> Steeped in a lineage of Southeast Asian ghost stories, the film's use of haunting as a form of active remembering that resists erasure resonated with me. Aspirationally rigorous in form and content, Ratchapoom skillfully crafts a story of forbidden ghost-human, cross-class romance, collusion and Thailand’s 2010 Red Shirt massacre. In this film, the real horror isn't the motley cast of possessed household electronics, but a world that forgets violent abuses of government power.

> -gabi dao  

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Run time: 130 minutes.

### RSVP
Registration for this event is encouraged; tickets are free. Secure your seat [here](https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/gabi-dao-selects-a-useful-ghost-2025-tickets-1984347506810). 

Rush tickets will also be made available the day of the event, starting at 6:45pm. 

### Accessibility
This event will be held in CAG’s B.C. Binning Gallery, which is wheelchair accessible. Additional accessibility information can be found [here](https://cagvancouver.org/visit/accessibility). This film will be presented with closed captioning. 

###  Biography
gabi dao’s practice is invested in how entanglements with natural and supernatural worlds shape notions of belief and belonging, frequently culminating as sculpture, installation, experimental films, collage, and scent. Through methodologies of gathering, breaking, repairing, listening, and collaboration, their practice insists on blurry temporalities, sensory affirmations and ways of knowing otherwise. Their work often begins within the slippages of “history,” archives and storytelling – towards channeling ineffable tensions between grief and joy, dissidence and complicity, disassociation and sentimentality.

dao’s work has been presented at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Vancouver Art Gallery; Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver; Radius CCA, Delft, NL; Vincom Centre for Contemporary Art, Hà Nội, VN; and the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, where they were awarded the Research Residency Award; and has been screened at e-flux Screening Room, New York; Sàn Art, Sài Gòn, VN; and numerous festivals including the BFI London Film Festival and International Film Festival Rotterdam. dao holds an MFA from Piet Zwart Institute and has been in residence at Triangle Astérides, Marseille, FR; EKWC, Oisterwijk, NL; and Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, NL. They are represented by Unit 17.  

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gabi dao presents A Useful Ghost (2025)

Previously Viewed

We are pleased to announce our latest installment of CAG Reads, a book club where artists invite us to read alongside them. Each month an artist proposes a text for our collective reading pleasure, culminating in a virtual hangout where the artist leads a wide-ranging discussion grounded in their chosen reading material. 

This October, CAG Reads will be hosted by Gabi Dao and Christian Vistan. 

Gabi Dao is an artist and co-organizer at Duplex, a DIY project space and studio collective based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Her interdisciplinary practice insists on counter-memory, intimacy, hyphenation, multiple truths, and blurred temporalities through the pursuit of sculpture, installation, moving image, and sound. She has shown her work throughout Canada and internationally, with recent exhibitions at Audain Gallery SFU, Images Festival and the International Film Festival in Rotterdam, Netherlands. 

Christian Vistan is an artist originally from the peninsula known as Bataan, Philippines. His work and projects have been presented locally and internationally at Artspeak, Centre A, and Nanaimo Art Gallery in Canada; mild climate and Atlanta Contemporary in the United States; and Kamias Triennial in the Philippines. He lives and works the unceded ancestral territories of the Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) and sc̓əwaθən məsteyəxʷ (Tsawwassen) Nations.

Dao and Vistan have chosen two readings, both available online. [*The Year I Stopped Making Art. Why the art world should assist artists beyond representation: in solidarity*](https://documentations.art/The-year-I-stopped-making-art) (2020) is an open letter written by the artist Paul Maheke at the onset of the pandemic, one that questions the precarity many artists must face by participating within the art system. 

Their second selection, also inspired by the pandemic, is [*The Team*](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/07/magazine/tommy-orange-short-story.html) (2020), a short story written by Pulitzer-finalist and MacDowell Fellow Tommy Orange. 

Please follow these links to read [*The Year I Stopped Making Art. Why the art world should assist artists beyond representation: in solidarity*](https://documentations.art/The-year-I-stopped-making-art) and [*The Team*](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/07/magazine/tommy-orange-short-story.html) for free online.

Trigger Warning: There are references to incidents of sexual and physical violence and abuse towards racialized bodies in Paul Maheke’s text.


A photograph of a large mirror placed outside. A drawing of a person's face is attached to the top of the mirror. The reflection on the mirror shows people getting haircuts. 

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Gabi Dao and Christian Vistan present Paul Maheke and Tommy Orange

CAG Reads

Join CAG and artists at Lord Strathcona Elementary for the launch of the limited-edition volume *A New Path to the Waterfall*, celebrating the year-long collaborative art project between local artists and students from MaryAnn Persoon’s 2017-18 grade 6/7 class. A special screening of an experimental film created by this year’s class with artist Gabi Dao will accompany the launch.

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A New Path to the Waterfall

Publication Launch

This spring, the Contemporary Art Gallery is pleased to present a series of artist-curated film screenings at the gallery. Inviting five artists from CAG’s recent and upcoming programming to present films that have been formative to their thinking and practice in some way, each screening is a one-night-only event centered on a single feature-length work.

Thursday, March 19
[Abbas Akhavan presents *Before Night Falls* (2000)](https://cagvancouver.org/event/screening-abbas-akhavan-presents-before-night-falls-(2000))

Saturday, March 21
[Christine Sun Kim presents *Who Framed Roger Rabbit* (1988)](https://cagvancouver.org/event/screening-christine-sun-kim-presents-who-framed-roger-rabbit-(1988))

Tuesday, March 24
[Ser Serpas presents *Lake Mungo* (2008)](https://cagvancouver.org/event/screening-ser-serpas-presents-lake-mungo-(2008))

Thursday, March 26 
[Faye HeavyShield presents *Of Mice and Men* (1939)](https://cagvancouver.org/event/screening-faye-heavyshield-presents-of-mice-and-men-(1939))

Saturday, March 28
[gabi dao presents *A Useful Ghost* (2025)](https://cagvancouver.org/event/screening-gabi-dao-presents-a-useful-ghost-(2025))

### RSVP
Tickets to all screenings are free. Registration is encouraged; RSVP links for each screening are available through the links above. 

### Accessibility
Screenings will be held in CAG’s B.C. Binning Gallery, which is wheelchair accessible. All films — with the exception of *Of Mice and Men* (1939) — will be presented with closed captioning. Additional accessibility information can be found [here](https://cagvancouver.org/visit/accessibility). 

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Artists' Screening Series

Gabi Dao

Exhibitions

Talks & Events