How can art capture the layered complexity of urban life and our place within it?

Toronto’s all-night contemporary art festival, Nuit Blanche, returns on October 4 with the theme Translating the City. This year’s edition invites attendees to reimagine the urban experience and explore new ways of engaging with the spaces we inhabit.

Among the featured works is "People’s Dancefloor," a participatory installation co-created by Sandra Brewster (MSV 2017) and Maria Hupfield, assistant professor of Indigenous Digital Arts and Performance and member of the Native Art Department. Hupfield holds a Canada Research Chair in Transdisciplinary Indigenous Arts at U of T Mississauga and is cross-appointed to the Daniels Faculty.

Located at 317 Dundas Street West, the installation transforms public space into a retro video dance party. Each hour, a curated setlist by Toronto-based artists working across disciplines invites participants to reclaim the city through music, movement and collective joy.

Artist rendering of A Lake Story

Also featured is a documentary screening of A Lake Story, scored by Assistant Professor of Visual Studies Mitchell Akiyama, a Toronto-based scholar, composer and artist.  

Created by artist Melissa McGill in collaboration with Jason Logan and Dr. Duke Redbird, an Elder from the Saugeen Ojibway Nation, A Lake Story unfolded as a slow-moving procession of hundreds of local paddlers across Toronto’s eastern Waterfront on September 27 and 28. Each participant carried colour field paintings made with pigments sourced from the lake and shoreline, animated by the wind.

The documentary detailing the project will be screened at the Harbourfront Centre Concert Stage, located at 235 Queens Quay West.