Nuit Blanche Toronto 2026: Exhibition Highlights & Nuit Talks

20th Anniversary Edition

October 3 – 4, 2026 | 7pm – 7am
Free | Across Toronto
toronto.ca/NuitBlanche

SJ Okemow, Dancing Molecular Landscapes, 2026. Photo: Lindsay Duncan

Next weekend, Toronto will be transformed by Nuit Blanche, the free, all-night celebration of contemporary art, returning for its nineteenth edition. From 7pm Saturday, October 3 to 7am Sunday, October 4.

Join in an annual celebration of contemporary art that transforms Toronto’s public spaces into unexpected landscapes and animates cultural sites throughout the city.

This year’s theme, Tomorrow’s Memories, invites you to look back to the artists, curators, communities and places that defined Nuit Blanche and its twenty-year history. But this is not just about the past, it’s a way to look at the present and a provocation for the future. Past Nuit Blanche artworks will be revisited, re-visioned and recontextualized, while artists can also create new works that consider personal and collective memory and histories as a tool for storytelling, reflection and dreaming of possible futures. Projects also explore ideas around memory itself, nostalgia and ephemerality.

Across Toronto and downtown

The event is anchored by an exhibition located Downtown in and around Nathan Philips Square, City Hall and Old City Hall with re-imagined Nuit Blanche projects by artists from years’ past; Couzyn van Heuvelen, Shelley Niro, Kelly Mark, Brendan Fernandes, Hiba Abdallah, Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky, R.I.S.E. Edutainment, Tangled Art + Disability, Roda Medhat.

New this year: Maggy Hamel-Metsos, Brandon Vickerd, SJ Okemow (pictured), Alexandra Gelis, Francesca Nocera aka SUN SUN (curated by Ayo Leilani aka Witch Prophet), Marco Baldonado, ĀNANDAM/Brandy Leary, Blessyl Buan, Joseph David Providence Farrugia, Lisa Kiss & Collaborators and more.

With its main exhibition in downtown Toronto and Major Institutions and Independent Projects city-wide, this milestone edition offers both a reckoning and a reimagining.

Exhibitions & Event Centres

Highlights include:

Ephemera: The Art We Didn’t Make (2026) by Blessyl Buan in collaboration with Toronto Dance Theatre transforms public space into a living archive of unfinished dreams and unmade art. Offering an audience participant element, this project explores abandoned ideas and unrealized expression.

Simile Aria (2026) by Maggy Hamel-Metsos is a sound installation installed across 6 locations in Old City Hall, that transforms reconstructed organ pipes into a visceral, bone-shaking exploration of testimony and being born.

Rosa’s Garden (2026) by Marco Baldonado is inspired by the artist’s 99-year old grandmother Rosa, and the gardening rituals that sustain her vitality. Rosa’s Garden invites the audience to walk through a surreal passageway of clotheslines, harvest baskets and a video portrait of Rosa herself.

I Miss You: T.Dot Memories (2026) by Francesca Nocera aka SUN SUN curated by Ayo Leilani.aka Witch Prophet will present a large-scale illuminated inflatable as a soft monument to Toronto’s changing cultural landscape. Each side features a different illustrated landmark, including Honest Ed’s, Ontario Place, Sam the Record Man and MuchMusic. Glowing from within, the inflatable will transform familiar buildings and signs into large-scale public artwork about memory, loss, nostalgia and urban change.

Rosa’s Garden (2026) by Marco Baldonado. photo courtesy of the artist.

Nuit Talks take place throughout the night, offering a deeper understanding of the ideas and creative processes behind the Nuit Blanche artworks of UFO by Brandon Vickerd, Simile Aria with Maggy Hamel-Metsos, Ever Sick with SJ Okemow, Museum of Lost Things with Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky. Check out times at Nuit Talks.

Stay tuned for a featured Nuit Talk hosted by CBC’s “The Debaters” Steve Patterson the week after Nuit Blanche on October 8.

Check out artworks that will extend until October 10, 2026 by Shelley Niro, Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky, Maggy Hamel-Metsos, Couzyn van Heuvelen, Brandon Vickerd, Francesca Nocera aka SUN SUN, Blessyl Buan, Joseph David Providence Farrugia, Par Nair, Negar Pooya, Bitbrainz and Jordan Shaw.

Roda Medhat, Farsh, Nuit Blanche 2022 (Humber Polytechnic)

Planning Your Visit & Accessibility

Whether you’re onsite or online, the Accessibility page is an essential resource for planning your experience.

The Accessibility page: Offers downloadable Access Guides with visual stories for each exhibition as well as details on accessibility features across various projects and venues.

The Getting Around page: Helps you navigate All Projects, Event Centres, Downtown and across the city.

Printed maps and onsite signage highlight features like wheelchair access, tactile elements, audio description and ASL interpretation. An interactive online map enables you to filter projects by accessibility features, neighbourhood, or theme, ensuring that you can navigate the festival in ways that work for you.

For those who can’t make it to Toronto—or who want to experience Nuit Blanche from home—the Nuit Blanche Remote Access Hub, created in partnership with Tangled Art + Disability, offers a first-of-its-kind hybrid experience. Part livestream, part art tour and part gathering, the project reimagines accessibility within the city’s celebration of contemporary art and is led by members of the disability arts community.

Choose Your Path

Whether you wander Toronto’s streets until dawn, focus on a single neighbourhood, or tune in online from anywhere in the world, Nuit Blanche 2026 offers countless ways to experience the night. Admission is free; projects are open to all—to experience Toronto through contemporary art, community and connection.

Nuit Blanche Toronto
Learn more about Nuit Blanche 2026 at toronto.ca/NuitBlanche.

Follow on social media and share your experience with #nbto26

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Image Descriptions
1. Four people sitting under the project Dancing Molecular Landscapes, a digital projection of white, light purple, blue and cosmic molecular circular design.
2. A 99 year old white woman in blue dress in the garden staking red and pink flowers with small tomato plants in the background.
3. A tall pyramid-shaped carpeted sculpture with red, yellow, white, blue colours reflecting traditional forms and textiles from the east, as a means of communication and cultural preservation, situated in the centre of a wide sidewalk in a campus environment.

Akimbo is a media partner of Nuit Blanche 2026.