A video installation and live DJ dance party will pay tribute to Toronto's lost queer nightlife

This Nuit Blanche, artist and scholar invites attendees into an encounter with Toronto’s vibrant, vanishing past through a multi-screen video installation and dance party commemorating the city’s once-thriving lesbian and gay nightlife scene. On Saturday, October 4, Disappearing Acts will take over all five screens in Sankofa Square at Yonge-Dundas from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., commemorating the spaces that once shaped the city’s queer history.

From iconic venues like St. Charles Tavern, Chez Moi, Boots and The Rose to lesser-known backroom bars and word-of-mouth dance floors, Disappearing Acts honours more than 100 queer spaces that helped build and sustain 2SLGBTQIA+ communities in Toronto since the 1950s. Before homosexuality was decriminalized in 1969, these establishments offered sanctuary in a society that criminalized queer existence.

“Coming out in the mid-’80s, I couldn't go out in public with a girlfriend and hold hands. We couldn't even do that in a restaurant. We couldn't walk down the street holding hands without being harassed. It was extremely risky and dangerous,” says Jeffares-Levitt, a professor of visual art at 91��ɫ’s School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design (AMPD). “These clubs were super important in helping us create community. We would meet, hang out in a public space where it was possible to have a ‘normal’ social life outside of  our homes.”

Honouring lost spaces through sound and screen

From 7 to 11 p.m., the square will pulse with music from legendary queer DJs Denise Benson, John Caffery, Ace Dillinger and Sumation, turning the public space into a temporary dance floor. Throughout the night, from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., Jeffares-Levitt’s video will play on all of Sankofa’s screens, taking viewers on a journey through animated text and archival images.

Created in collaboration with animator Jesi Jordan, video editor Alison Taylor, and graphic designer Lisa Kiss, the video cycles through venue names alphabetically, beginning with women’s bars before moving on to mixed and gay spaces. Archival photos, historical footage, and tender moments of same-sex dancing are woven together with animated dissolves.

Posters listing the club names will be wrapped around columns in Sankofa Square, anchoring the installation in physical space and inviting passersby to reflect on this lost geography of queer Toronto.

Queer Toronto, then and now

Jeffares-Levitt, a photo-based artist, brings personal history and community care to the forefront in this project. A former member of Toronto’s Gay and Lesbian Patrol, she knows firsthand the role of these spaces in protecting, affirming, and shaping queer lives.

“Historically, people would have parties in their homes. But we also wanted social, public spaces. The bars and clubs provided safe places to congregate, places to meet friends, places to cruise, places to drink, places to dance,” says Jeffares-Levitt. But outside the walls of the clubs, in the streets and back alleys, members of the 2SLGBTQIA+ communities were facing harassment and physical attacks.

Jeffares-Levitt witnessed gay-bashing as well as homophobic crowds throwing eggs and bottles at drag queens, most infamously during St. Charles Tavern’s annual Halloween drag promenade. During that time, these spaces were more than bars and nightclubs; they were lifelines.

“Once we were behind closed doors, we felt safer. Our bars gave us a sense of resilience in the face of a society that feared and hated us,” says Jeffares-Levitt. While the need for exclusively queer spaces has shifted with legal protections, the advent of social media — online safe spaces and dating apps — as well as broader acceptance, she argues that something vital has been lost. The idea for this project came from conversations where Jeffares-Levitt and friends reminisced about bygone bars and clubs. She wanted to share those memories and histories with those who may have never visited or even heard of these places.

Jeffares-Levitt will be on-site and available for interviews until midnight on Oct. 4, as well as in the days leading up to the event. Photos of the installation will become available following the intervention. 

Disappearing Acts is an independent project of Nuit Blanche Toronto 2025 supported by The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archive, City of Toronto, Sankofa Square, Toronto Arts Council, ICON Digital Productions, 91��ɫ Faculty Association, and AMPD at 91��ɫ.

(AMPD) at 91��ɫ is a dynamic hub for creative experimentation and expression. With a commitment to cultivating artistic excellence, new ideas and entrepreneurial skills, AMPD students learn by doing with industry-leading professionals in career-focused activities. The Department of Cinema & Media Arts at AMPD offers exceptional hands-on and theoretical training across the evolving spectrum of cinema and media with access to top-tier facilities, including the 91��ɫ Motion Media Studio at Cinespace Studios Toronto. From idea to screenplay, camera to screen, screen to critical inquiry, AMPD students learn to think and create in the language of the moving image across all media, guided by faculty who are experts in their field.

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Andrea Carlson’s A Painting is a Coin and Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s When Water Embraces Empty Space are on view from May 23 to Aug. 2

The Joan and Martin Goldfarb Gallery of 91��ɫ is proud to present two powerful solo exhibitions by international artists: and . Both shows centre ancestral knowledge, legacy, and cultural continuity, offering politically resonant works that challenge colonial narratives.

Carlson explores land, language, and ancestral knowledge through layered paintings, drawings, prints, video and sculpture. Nguyễn examines the legacy of colonial collecting through the story of a 19th-century canoe from Papua New Guinea, his work following the spiritual return of the boat to the descendants of its makers. In response to Nguyễn’s project, the University has also begun reassessing its collection of cultural belongings from Papua New Guinea, .

The exhibitions will share a public reception on Thursday, May 22, from 6 to 9 p.m., with both artists in attendance, along with Nguyễn’s collaborators from Papua New Guinea. When Water Embraces Empty Space and A Painting is a Coin will remain on display from May 23 to Aug. 2, 2025. For more information, visit .

Andrea Carlson: A Painting is a Coin

This exhibition, curated by Clara Halpern, is Andrea Carlson’s first solo exhibition in a gallery in Ontario. brings together a complex arrangement of recent works — paintings, drawings, prints, video and sculpture — exploring topics that have fueled the artist’s practice for two decades: land, language, ancestral knowledge, future visions, deep time, cinema, stories, memorials and refusals.

Known for her expansive, multi-panelled works on paper, Carlson brings a layered approach to visual storytelling. Landscape plays a central role in this exhibition, particularly in paintings that stretch across multiple sheets of thick, hand-worked watercolour paper. Rendered in gouache, watercolour, inks, and oil, these fragmented, prismatic scenes challenge the “empty” vistas depicted in traditional landscape painting and their role in bolstering colonial justifications.

A Painting is a Coin also features a newly commissioned sculptural installation of wooden columns, continuing Carlson’s ongoing series inspired by effigy mounds — ancient Indigenous earthworks that can take the shape of lizards, turtles and cranes. Water too runs through the work and is the subject of a multi-screen video collaboration with Rozalinda Borcilă that explores Chicago’s wetland market and the monetization of these vital ecosystems.

Together, the art in this exhibition builds intricate matrices of meaning that are personal, politically charged and cosmologically expansive, reframing relationships and time, and highlighting traditions that have withstood colonialism.

Carlson is based in Gichi Bitobig (Grand Marais), Minnesota, and Chicago, where she is co-founder of the Center for Native Futures. Her research focuses on Indigenous Futurism(s) and the entanglement of cultural narratives and institutions. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at the MCA Chicago, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, and participation in Prospect.6 New Orleans, the Front Triennial and the Toronto Biennial. Her work is in the collections of the British Museum, the Walker Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the National Gallery of Canada.

Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn: When Water Embraces Empty Space

Curated by Goldfarb Gallery director Jenifer Papararo, is the first presentation of Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s work in Canada. Known for multi-faceted video and sculptural installations that explore personal narratives of diaspora and post-colonial identity, Nguyễn turns his attention to a singular, historically charged object for this exhibition: a 15-metre-long, late 19th-century canoe from the Island of Luf in Papua New Guinea.

Held in the permanent collection of Berlin’s Humboldt Forum, the canoe’s provenance became the subject of a 2021 book, The Magnificent Boat (translated into English in 2023) by journalist and historian Götz Aly, who questioned the legitimacy of the canoe’s acquisition by a German trader. Nguyễn’s work positions this contested cultural belonging both as a relic and a vessel for intergenerational memory, survival and reclamation.

At the heart of the exhibition is The Encounter, a 72-minute video capturing a powerful moment: the reunion of three descendants of one of the canoe’s makers — Stanley Inum, his son Fordy, and nephew Enoch Lun — with the boat in Berlin. The film documents their emotional first encounter with the elaborately carved canoe, including a whispered critique of how the sails were incorrectly displayed, comments that lay bare colonial misunderstandings and misrepresentations.

The exhibition includes a multi-channel video installation, photographs, and hand-carved sculptures tied to the descendants’ ongoing project to build a replica canoe using measurements taken during their Berlin visit. A video offers insight into this reconstruction process. In these works, When Water Embraces Empty Space moves past documentation as it re-imagines pathways of return.

Nguyễn is a recipient of the Joan Miró Prize (2023). He has participated in major exhibitions including the Asia Pacific Triennial, the Whitney Biennial, the Sharjah Biennial and the Berlin Biennale. Recent one-person shows include The New Museum, Fundació Joan Miró and Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa.

From the Visible Vault 2: Papua New Guinea cultural belongings

In parallel to Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s exhibition, Goldfarb director Jenifer Papararo is investigating 91��ɫ’s own holdings from Papua New Guinea — 49 cultural objects donated in the late 1970s by architectural historian Thomas Howarth. A selection of these cultural belongings will be on view in the gallery’s as part of a broader inquiry into their provenance.

“Nguyễn’s project and research as a whole has fostered a deeper conversation about responsibilities of cultural stewardship and the role we can play in ensuring these objects came to us ethically and, if not, being a process of repatriation,” says Papararo.

The objects were brought into the University’s collection as a significant gift, considered to be a valuable teaching asset with the stated intention of being displayed publicly. Since their exhibition in 1979, they have been presented only once in 2014,  until now.

The Goldfarb will host Nguyễn’s collaborators from Luf, Stanley and Fordy Inum, Enoch Lun, and Kireni Imwe Jean Sparks-Ngenge, for the reception of When Water Embraces Empty Space and hope to gain their knowledge of the belongings in 91��ɫ’s care. Creating new intersections of cultural dialogue, their visit includes studio exchanges with Indigenous artists in Toronto and Vancouver, and a meeting with curators at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. When Water Embraces Empty Space has opened a vital space for conversations around cultural stewardship, memory, and the ethics of museum collections, while centring the voices of those most directly connected to the stories these objects carry.

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Maryam Taghavi’s Unfolding Worlds and Charles Campbell’s An Ocean to Livity are on view from Feb. 1 to April 26

TORONTO, Jan. 23, 2025 – The Joan and Martin Goldfarb Gallery of 91��ɫ will celebrate the opening of two new exhibitions curated by Felicia Mings on Friday, Jan. 31 from 6 to 9 p.m. The artist Maryam Taghavi’s first institutional solo exhibition in Canada, , includes recent paintings, sculptures and an architectural installation. This will be an expanded iteration of , which includes sculpture and sound, after exhibitions in Surrey and Nanaimo, B.C.

Maryam Taghavi: Unfolding Worlds

In her practice, Taghavi is motivated by the unseen. She explores this concept through letter forms, particularly Islamic calligraphy, which expresses a reverence for the spiritual and a connection to the divine. “Calligraphy by its beauty becomes a portal to experience God,” explains Taghavi in an interview with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. “The perfection of the form is a part of the message.”

But Taghavi is not practicing perfection, she says. Nor is she really practicing calligraphy. “I am far away from the context this comes from,” she explains. Part of the Iranian diaspora, she feels distant from the art form both physically and in its traditions. Much of the work in Unfolding Worlds derives from an interest in the noghte, which serves as a unit of measurement in calligraphy. Represented by a diamond-shaped point, the noghte is the most essential diacritical mark in Arabic and Persian script. In her paintings noghtes delineate horizon lines. In Taghavi’s sculptures and installations, the noghtes are peepholes to mesmerizing reflections of light. When placed on the gallery's windows, translucent noghtes reflect ultraviolet light that can be seen by birds but is invisible to the human eye, opening up the exhibition to the natural world.

The diamond shape is also suggestive of her longstanding engagement with abstraction and deft knowledge of Islamic and Euro-American art history. In the exhibition, Taghavi manipulates light, language, and architectural space to emphasize the simplicity and beauty inherent in colour and geometric forms.

Taghavi is a Tehran-born, Iranian-Canadian artist and educator based in Chicago. She earned her Master of Fine Arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Taghavi has received numerous awards and grants, including support from the Canada Council for the Arts and the 2022 Artadia Award. Her work has been displayed at the Brick (formerly LAXART) in Los Angeles, Queens Museum in New 91��ɫ, Ex Teresa Arte Actual (EXTAA) in Mexico City, Sazmanab Gallery in Tehran and Chicago’s Driehaus Museum, Chicago Cultural Center and Chicago Artists Coalition. She has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Blanc Gallery, Chicago.

Parallel programs inspired by this exhibition include the artist in conversation, exhibition tours, and a response to Unfolding Worlds choreographed and performed by dancer . Working at the intersection of performance and dance, Zins-Browne extends his choreographic practice into encounters with dancers, non-dancers, singers, students, objects and texts. The performance by Zins-Browne will take place on Saturday, March 15 at 3 p.m.

Charles Campbell: An Ocean to Livity

In An Ocean to Livity, the immersive works on view consider what breath carries of our experiences, and how breath connects us to the past and present, to each other and our natural environment. At the height of the Black Lives Matter movement protesting anti-Black racism and state-sanctioned police brutality and the killing of Black people, Campbell developed a work that focused on bringing Black life into galleries through breath. In a performance at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Campbell had 20 Black artists and curators roam the rooms disseminating the sound of their recorded breath through speakers. The recordings became the beginnings of Campbell’s Black Breath Archive.

“For each iteration of this exhibition, Campbell works with community organizations to host intergenerational gatherings and facilitate breath recording sessions that guide participants through meditative prompts encouraging them to connect with their ancestors,” says Mings. The process of creating these recordings shapes the final form of the sculptural and audio elements that Campbell exhibits in An Ocean to Livity.

To expand his Black Breath Archive in the Greater Toronto Area, Campbell collaborated with the Afrosonic Innovation Lab, 91��ɫ’s Making and Media Creation Lab, local poets David Delisca and Joshua “Scribe” Watkis, and emerging sound artist Chibuzor Igwilo to facilitate a new iteration of breath recordings. The Joan and Martin Goldfarb Gallery presentation of An Ocean to Livity was also made possible with support from Canada Council for the Arts Explore and Create project grant.

Campbell is a Jamaican-born multidisciplinary artist, writer and curator. He holds a Master of Fine Arts from Goldsmith College and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University. His body of work includes sculptures, sonic installations and performances. Campbell is the recipient of the 2022 VIVA Award and the 2020 City of Victoria Creative Builder Award. His work has recently been on display at the Remai Modern in Saskatoon, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and Pérez Art Museum Miami. Campbell lives and works on lək̓ʷəŋən territory, Victoria B.C.

Parallel programs inspired by this exhibition include the artist in conversation, exhibition tours, and a night of poetry and music featuring David Deliscia, Joshua “Scribe” Watkis and DJ Grumps. will take place in the gallery's pavillion on Thursday, Feb. 27 from 7 to 8:30 p.m.

Unfolding Worlds and An Ocean to Livity are on view from Feb. 1 to April 26. The Goldfarb Gallery is located at 83a 91��ɫ Blvd., Toronto. It is free and open to the public Tuesday to Saturday from 12 to 5 p.m. The new gallery is a one-storey accessible building metres away from 91��ɫ Station on Line 1 where there is a Wheel-Trans on the north entrance. For those who drive, there is paid street parking on Fine Arts Rd. or at the Student Services Parking Garage (84 James Gillies St.). For more information, visit .

Parallel Programming

Wednesday, Feb. 12 from 12:30 to 1 p.m.: An Ocean to Livity with Allyson Adley, education and community engagement coordinator, The Joan and Martin Goldfarb Gallery

Allyson Adley develops educational programs that bolster the work of youth-led and youth-serving organizations engaged in hip hop, music, and performance. The programs she designs provide enriching arts employment, mentorship and professional development experiences that help artists build and sustain their practice. For the Toronto iteration of Charles Campbell: An Ocean to Livity, Adley has been integral in developing the poetic component, inviting poets to co-facilitate the expansion of the Black Breath Archive and to create poetry in response to their experiences.

Wed. Feb. 26 from 12:30 to 1 p.m.: Unfolding Worlds with Mehraneh Ebrahimi, associate professor, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies

Mehraneh Ebrahimi is an associate professor of English whose area of specialization encompasses Middle Eastern diasporic writing with an emphasis on aesthetics, ethics and politics. Ebrahimi is the author of Women, Art and Literature in the Iranian Diaspora. Her forthcoming book project is titled Refugee Literature: Dignity, Agency, & Voice in Iranian Exilic Life Writing.

Wednesday, March 12 from 12:30 to 1 p.m.: An Ocean to Livity with Ola Mohammed, assistant professor, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies

Ola Mohammed specializes in interdisciplinary research exploring Black cultural production, Black social life, and Black being as sites of possibility. Her manuscript, “The Black Nowhere: The Social and Cultural Politics of Listening to Black Canada(s),” examines the sonic dimension of anti-Blackness in Canada. Her research interests include Black Popular Music, Black Studies, Sound Studies, Diaspora Studies, Performance Theory, and Digital Culture.

Wednesday, March 26 from 12:30 to 1 p.m.: Unfolding Worlds with Felicia Mings, curator, The Joan and Martin Goldfarb Gallery

Felicia Mings is a curator at The Goldfarb Gallery. She focuses on interpreting and presenting modern and contemporary art with an emphasis on arts of Africa and the Caribbean, along with their diasporas. Mings’ recent curatorial projects include the Toronto iteration of Charles Campbell’s An Ocean to Livity, Maryam Taghavi’s Unfolding Worlds, Dele Adeyemo's From Longhouse to Highrise: The Course of Empire (2023), and Meleko Mokgosi’s Imaging Imaginations (2023).

The Joan and Martin Goldfarb Gallery of 91��ɫ is a socially minded, not-for-profit contemporary art gallery. A supported unit of 91��ɫ within the President’s Division, it is a space for the creation and appreciation of art and culture. The Goldfarb Gallery is externally funded as a public art gallery through the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council, local and international foundations, embassies, and members who support its programs.

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