Art Metropole

26 Mar. 2026

Book Launch - Retail Vérité: Vancouverama

Time

6:00-8:00 PM

Art Metropole is pleased to announce the Toronto launch of Retail Vérité: Vancouverama, A Maior’s second novella, published in partnership with Western Front and Bierke Verlag. Please join us on Thursday, March 26 for a conversation between artist Bruno Zhu and writer Derek McCormack.

Retail Vérité: Vancouverama is the outcome of writing workshops led by A Maior at Western Front in February 2025. Through a blend of improvisation, LARPing, and speed dating, the participants sketched the characters, narrative, and setting for a supernatural mystery in real time. Operating in the spirit of exquisite corpse, the workshops followed improvisational exchanges guided by prompts. As a result, the collective writing process generated its own distinctive internal logic to draw a playful, critical portrait of contemporary retail phenomena.

The cohort featured James Albers, Kathy Feng, Manon Fraser, Fiona Glen, Tiziana La Melia, Ben Lickerman, Trey Le, August Mesic, Nina Ortiz, Paige Smid, Kiel Torres, and Yasmine Whaley-Kalaora.

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A Maior is a clothing and home goods store located in the outskirts of Viseu, Portugal. Since 2016, an eponymous exhibition program has been hosted within the shopping environment. A Maior is managed by the staff, the artist Bruno Zhu, and his family. A Maior has been featured in exhibitions at Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam; Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem; Kunsthalle Freeport, Porto; X Museum, Beijing; Life Sport and BQ, both Berlin. In 2022, A Maior was the writer-in-residence at San Serriffe in Amsterdam, who commissioned Retail Vérité, A Maior’s first novella.

Bruno Zhu (b.1991, Porto) lives and works between Portugal and the Netherlands. Recent projects include exhibitions at CAM–Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian in Lisbon, M HKA in Antwerp, Chisenhale Gallery in London, Hessel Museum of Art in Annandale-on-Hudson, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Veronica in Seattle and What Pipeline in Detroit. Zhu is a member of A Maior, a curatorial project set inside the eponymous home furnishings and clothing store in Viseu, Portugal.

Derek McCormack is the author of Grab Bag (Akashic), The Show that Smells (Akashic), and The Haunted Hillbilly (Soft Skull), which was named a “Best Book of the Year” by both the Village Voice and the Globe and Mail, and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. He writes fashion and arts articles for the National Post, and lives in Toronto.

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