Nuit Blanche 2025 returns to Toronto this Saturday night into Sunday morning, with talented artists taking over three different areas of the city in an all-nighter dedicated to all things art.
This year, the iconic overnight art celebration explores the theme of “Translating the City,” in which all performances and installations showcase how art reflects the city and how humans play a role in this process.
Nuit Blanche 2025 boasts 88 installations, featuring local artists as well as talent from around the world, spread across downtown Toronto, North York, and Etobicoke.
While each installation has something interesting to offer, there are a handful of potential standouts from this year’s lineup; here are the ones you won’t want to miss.
Signals of the City: Crossing Paths
Afaf Naseem’s neon installation presents everyday traffic lights like a language that connects people from various cultures. This artwork highlights movement and translates the rhythm of crossing streets into a symbol of unity and belonging.
Location: The Bentway Conservancy Courtyard
Afaf Naseem, Signals of the City, 2025, via City of Toronto.
Global Centre for Climate Action at OCAD University and the European Union Delegation to Canada – Dissolving Borders
The Canada Malting Silos at the foot of Bathurst turn into a structure of a flowing body of water. This projection and sound installation invites audiences to reflect on our connection to water, climate, and culture, merging motion and memory with the elemental world.
Location: Canada Malting Silos
Tower of Babel
LED screens play karaoke-style videos of the song Yesterday Once More, turning this installation into a shared performance that blends voices, languages, and cultures into a collective experience.
Location: Huron Square
Sacred Tags
Sacred Tags is an interactive projection that combines graffiti, Anishinaabe language, and urban imagery on city walls, turning them into a canvas of memories. Through augmented reality, viewers trace symbols on their phones to unlock hidden animations, where ancient stories and languages are brought back to life in a new digital form.
Location: 233 Simcoe St.
WISHING WELL: ALPHABET SOUP
Here’s a dance party that fills Buddies in Bad Times with letters, music, performances, and even real alphabet soup. By blending play and rituals together, it invites everyone — regardless of their language — to join in, make a wish, and be part of the celebration.
Location: Buddies in Bad Times Theatre
Aga Khan Museum – Circle of Sound: An Immersive Musical Journey
An immersive exhibit that transforms the Qasida Al Burda into a live, multi-sensory experience, fusing Fareed Ayaz and Abu Muhammad’s Qawwali with musicians from Toronto.
Location: Aga Khan Museum
Lucid Flow
This installation is a light display that shifts with wind and temperature, painting the night in changing colours. Visitors can trigger special animations with a beam of light, symbolizing how we navigate between the uncertainty of nature and our own actions..
Location: Humber Polytechnic – North Exterior Pathway
Undersight
Cassils’ work projects censored words into the night sky using Morse code, exposing how terms tied to equity, climate, and public health are being erased from U.S. records. Visible for miles and decodable through a free app, the flashing lights transform censorship into a call for action.
Location: 2 Colonel Samuel Smith Park
Home, Sweet Home
Anupa Khemadasa’s installation turns Toronto’s housing crisis into a sensory experience. A glowing house shifts and dims as viewers approach, reflecting the gap between the promise of a home and the reality of housing insecurity.
Location: Stackt Market
Anupa Khemadasa, Home Sweet Home, 2025, via City of Toronto.
The Bentway – Seeing Celsius
Seeing Celsius at The Bentway uses thermal-imaging viewfinders to display the hidden heat patterns of our bodies and their surrounding environments, offering a fresh perspective on how materials shape our experience of public space.
Location: The Bentway Skate Trail
Diatmoic States
This projection displays tiny lake organisms that move and change in response to human interaction. It serves as a reminder that all our actions have an impact on the environment around us.
Location: Design Exchange
Dylan Alsop, Elle Morris, James Jordan, Diatomic States, 2025, via City of Toronto.
The Eye of Wisdom
The Eye of Wisdom is a light-based artwork that transforms Heart Sūtra’s text into moving visuals, reimagined for Toronto’s modern City Hall and its historic Chinatown. This installation is open to the public until October 13.
Location: Armoury St. & Chestnut St.
YesterHere
Toronto’s Liam Sawyers’ installation layers archival footage, sound, and holographic illusions of Toronto landmarks to explore the city’s shifting identity. Viewers can use vintage TVs and a controller that allows them to remix visuals and audio, transforming collective memory into a personalized experience of place.
Location: Humber Polytechnic – L Building Learning Commons
Pontianak.exe
This artwork blends Southeast Asian folklore with digital art to explore what is lost and what survives in modern urban life.
Location: Cecil Community Centre
S’imbriquer
This performance, where bricks and bodies move together in cycles of building and breaking, turns the city into living architecture. It invites reflection on the world we create together.
Location: 5100 Yonge Street
DOUBLE TAKE
DOUBLE TAKE is an interactive art display that turns sounds and visuals from late-night city walks into a playful, immersive experience. As you move through it, your perspective shifts, inviting you to see and hear familiar spaces in interesting ways.
Location: 5100 Yonge Street
Lamination 1.0
This artwork turns discarded plastics into a colourful, quilt-like installation, made with the North York community using heat-laminated tiles.
Location: North York Centre
In Motion
In Motion combines light, fabric, animation, and sound to mirror Toronto’s changing neighbourhoods. The installation changes as people approach, inviting reflection on how each of us contributes to shaping the community.
Location: All Ours Studios
You can visit the City of Toronto website for the complete list of exhibits and installations on display.
Nuit Blanche is taking place on Oct. 4 and 5, from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., at various locations throughout the city.
