Nuit Blanche Toronto 2025

Rimini Protokoll, 100% [City], Tokyo, 2011. Photo courtesy of Yohta Kataoka.

Nuit Blanche Toronto
Translate the City Through Art

October 4 – 5, 2025 | 7pm – 7am
Free, Public spaces throughout Toronto

Nuit Blanche, Toronto’s free all-night celebration of contemporary art returns 7pm on October 4 to 7am on October 5, transforming the city’s public spaces and familiar places into extraordinary landscapes.

The 2025 curatorial theme, Translating the City, explores the many languages—visual, sonic, cultural, and emotional—through which urban life is understood, expressed, and reimagined.

This year’s program features over 85 projects from local, national and international artists, including three curated exhibitions presented by the City of Toronto:

• Collective Composition curated by Laura Nanni
• Poetic Justice curated by Charlene K. Lau
• From here, there, everywhere curated by Renata Azevedo Moreira

Alongside these exhibitions, Nuit Blanche 2025 will showcase programming from Toronto’s major institutions, special projects, and an array of independent artist-led projects across the city. Expect monumental installations, live performances, participatory works, and unexpected encounters—all free.

2025 Theme: Translating the City

Cities are living texts, continually shaped by histories, landscapes, architecture, infrastructure, nature and people. Their languages take many forms — spoken, written, visual, gestural and sonic — creating layered and ever-evolving individual and collective narratives. Cities also communicate through their built and natural environments, public spaces, rhythms and even in their silences.

For Nuit Blanche 2025, Translating the City interprets, transforms and decodes the urban experience through art. Inspired by the multilingual nature of cities, including Toronto, where over 200 languages are spoken, this theme considers the intersections of culture, language, identity and place. Translation is not simply the conversion of one language to another, but the connection and understanding it creates.

About the Artistic Director

Laura Nanni (she/her) is a renowned curator, producer and artist with over 15 years of experience in large-scale events, performance and public art. She is widely recognized for her successful leadership and curation of initiatives focused on artistic experimentation, civic engagement and interdisciplinary collaboration. Nanni is serving as Artistic Director for Nuit Blanche 2024 & 2025. Prior to this, Nanni has held various roles including Artistic & Managing Director of SummerWorks (2016 to 2023); Interim Programming Supervisor for Nuit Blanche Toronto (2013 to 2015); Producer for Luminato Festival (2014 to 2015); Rhubarb Festival Director for Buddies in Bad Times Theatre (2010 to 2014); and Curator & Program Coordinator for HATCH mentorship and residency program at Harbourfront Centre (2008 to 2010). Her artworks and collaborations have been presented globally.

Shellie Zhang, Tower of Babel (mock up), 2025.

Collective Composition

Curated by Laura Nanni

Collective Composition explores how cities translate and are experienced as dynamic compositions. In North York, immersive and participatory works invite reflection on our shared role in shaping urban life—revealing the city as a living fabric woven through shared care, creativity, and responsibility, where everyone plays a part.

Poetic Justice

Curated by Charlene K. Lau

As a continual site for reconciliation and memory, the city is always in translation and its publics mixing. Downtown, Poetic Justice brings together the multilayered histories of Toronto as Indigenous homelands and as a city of global arrival and departure to consider concepts of land, treaties, justice and reform.

About the Curator

Charlene K. Lau is an art historian, critic and curator of public art at Evergreen Brick Works. Her research interests include art of the global Asian diaspora, the Gesamtkunstwerk in art and fashion, time-based media, and transgression. She has held fellowships at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity; Parsons School of Design, The New School; and Performa Biennial. Charlene has also held teaching positions at Parsons School of Design, OCAD University, Toronto Metropolitan University, University of Toronto Scarborough, Western University and York University. Her scholarly voice and curatorial work have been featured in The Guardian, PAPER, The Goods by Vox, The New Yorker and Studies in Costume & Performance; and her scholarly work has been published in Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty, Fashion Theory, Journal of Curatorial Studies, The Routledge Companion to Fashion Studies (2021) and Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to the Contemporary: Local Contexts and Global Practices (Routledge, 2018). She has written art criticism for Art in America, Artforum, TheAtlantic.com, The Brooklyn Rail, C Magazine, Canadian Art and frieze, among others.

From Here, there, everywhere

Curated by Renata Azevedo Moreira

From here, there, everywhere tells a version of any big city’s story: being a permanent or temporary home to millions of people. The exhibition translates many meanings of home—as layered as the many cultures shaping the city, transforming familiar South Etobicoke spaces into places of hope, connection, and resistance.

About the Curator

Renata Azevedo Moreira (she/her) is a Brazilian author, researcher, and curator based in Tkaronto. Queer, feminist and postcolonial gestures inspire her curatorial practice, which focuses on collaboration and inclusivity by striving to create space for connections between QBIPOC artists in different stages of their careers.

Renata obtained a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the Université de Montreal in 2021 with research focused on the entanglements between curatorial work and the creation of media artworks. She has worked as an Assistant Curator of Canadian Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, as well as the Head of Cultural Affairs of Ireland in Canada. She has recently started research about artistic practices engaging in queer and decolonial joy as a form of resistance, with an upcoming digital residency at Esse magazine in Montreal.

Renata’s writing (English, French and Portuguese) has been published in art magazines such as Border Crossings and Esse; in cultural websites like the Montreal-based Baron Mag, where she had the monthly exhibition review column L’art au rendez-vous; and in the book Imagining Futures of Experimental Media (2021).

Laurence Philomène, Installation view of non-binary portraits (part of It is what it is with Starchild Stela at Xpace Cultural Centre, Toronto, ON, January 2018), 2018. Photo courtesy: Xpace Cultural Centre.

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

Facebook @nuitblancheTO
Instagram @nuitblancheto
X @nuitblancheTO

Image Descriptions:
1. A group of people in darkness, wave small lights that create glowing trails. Above them is a large blue circular screen with specks of light, resembling a moon.
2. Words in multiple languages in rainbow colour are stacked on top of one another in a karaoke style. The words read “When I was young I’d listen to the radio.”
3. A room with one pink focal wall and two white walls are covered with photographs and drawings. There is a children’s bed in the middle of the room with a lamp on a bedside table. A Garfield cat stuffed animal sits on the bed.

Akimbo is a media partner of Nuit Blanche 2025.