Nuit Blanche Toronto 2025: Translate the City Through Art

Image of Jean Lumb from 1960 for the sound of lions in Chinatown by Annie Wong & Hannia Cheng. Image courtesy of Arlene Chan.

Nuit Blanche Toronto 2025

October 4 – 5, 2025 | 7pm – 7am
Free | Across Toronto
toronto.ca/NuitBlanche

On the evening of October 4 at 7pm, Toronto transforms as Nuit Blanche returns for an all-night celebration of contemporary art, carrying through to October 5 at 7am Envisioned by Artistic Director Laura Nanni, Translating the City reimagines the city, not as static architecture or infrastructure but as a dynamic text—written in multiple languages, expressed through visuals, gestures, sounds, silences, spaces, and continually reshaped by the people who inhabit it. Translation here is not mere conversion; it is connection, understanding, and rethinking how the city is lived, shared, and imagined.

Toronto is a city where over 200 languages are spoken and signed, layered with Indigenous presence, migration, displacement, and ongoing struggles for justice and belonging. Nuit Blanche 2025 frames the city as a site of translation—where language, memory, participation, and care intersect, and where translation becomes connection, understanding and co-creation.

Across these works—whether in curated exhibitions or city-wide projects by Independent Projects or Major Institutions artists—several throughlines emerge, connecting the diverse expressions of Nuit Blanche 2025, such as:

Language & Voice: Languages take many forms—spoken, written, visual, gestural, and sonic—shaping layered and ever-evolving individual and collective narratives. In the city, these expressions are echoed by architecture, public space, and natural rhythms, as well as by moments of silence. Together, they reveal how voice can be reclaimed, remembered, and reimagined across cultures and communities.

Participation & Co-creation: From weaving personal dreams into tapestries to contributing poetic prompts or shaping interactive installations, audiences are co-authors of the city’s story.

Access as Translation: Translation extends beyond words to sensory and bodily experience. Tangled Art + Disability’s Remote Access Hub allows audiences to engage through ASL, audio description, tactile experiences and online participation, making accessibility part of the art itself.

Memory, Home & Belonging: Diasporic narratives, Indigenous histories, queer and trans experiences and evolving ideas of home trace how identity is shaped by displacement, longing, and roots.

Political & Ecological Urgency: Resistance and care emerge through language—protected voices, banned words, civic rules rewritten—and material practice, including reclaimed plastics, sustainability and ecological mindfulness.

Consider these themes not only as curatorial threads, but as entry points into your own experience of the city.

A Place I Call Home by Faisal Anwar

Across Toronto and beyond its core

Nuit Blanche expands city-wide again with its main three main exhibition across Toronto and an invitation for encounters with diverse perspectives and media within the Major Institutions & Independent Projects programs. At the Aga Khan Museum, Poems in Passage: Voices of the City blends poetry, movement and sound to explore how we listen, connect and translate stories. Faisal Anwar’s A Place I Call Home, sponsored by CityPlace and Fort York BIA, uses responsive technology to examine shifting ideas of belonging. Marc Nair’s The Poetry Dispensary invites audiences to create typewritten haiku, while Rhonda Weppler & Trevor Mahovsky’s Take the Weather With You transforms orchestral performance into participatory storm and rhythm. DJ Kookum’s O’notsta’kéha (Shake the Bush) merges Haudenosaunee social dance with contemporary beats, transforming a Danforth venue into a ritualized rave.

The event is anchored by three exhibitions engaging with different parts of the city:

Poetic Justice, curated by Charlene K. Lau, is located Downtown with artists: Alexis Nanibush-Pamajewong, Annie Wong & Hannia Cheng, Dave Dyment, Demian DinéYazhi, Ellen Pau, Quinn Hopkins, Shellie Zhang and more.

Collective Composition, curated by Laura Nanni, is in North York with artists: Action Hero and Mia + Eric, Blessyl Buan, Nancy Tam and Daniel O’Shea (A Wake of Vultures), Philippe Dépelteau, Rimini Protokoll, Shilpa Gupta, Studio Rat, Tangled Art + Disability & friends.

From here, there, everywhere, curated by Renata Azevedo Moreira, sponsored by Humber Polytechnic, is based in Etobicoke with artists: Alize Zorlutuna, asinnajaq, Cassils, Laurence Philomène, Noor Khan, sy gomes and Tommy Truong.

We Change Each Other by Shilpa Gupta

When dawn breaks on October 5 at 7am, Nuit Blanche Toronto 2025 leaves behind more than installations and projections. It leaves a city read and rewritten through art, a city whose stories, voices, and dreams have been translated, amplified, and shared. This is more than a festival: it is a living, breathing dialogue with Toronto itself.

Nuit Blanche Toronto
Learn more about Nuit Blanche 2025 at toronto.ca/NuitBlanche, and follow on social media:

Facebook @nuitblancheTO
Instagram @nuitblancheto
X @nuitblancheTO

Accessibility:
Learn more about Nuit Blanche 2025 accessibility at toronto.ca/NuitBlanche

Image Descriptions:
1. Black-and-white photo of a parade in Chinatown, with people riding in a convertible car; a woman, Jean Lum, speaks into a microphone beside a child, while onlookers gather along storefronts.
2. Collage of photographs projected on a wall, showing landscapes, buildings, portraits, and everyday scenes, including a seaside view, a family portrait, a child standing in a decorated bus, and a silhouetted figure in a forest.
3. People view an outdoor light installation at sunset, with glowing words in English, Hindi and Urdu script mounted on a metal frame by the shore.

Akimbo is a media partner of Nuit Blanche 2025.