Mayworks Kjipuktuk-Halifax

The Embodied Creation Project
2024-05-12 15:00 - 15:30 (America/Halifax) | The Bus Stop Theatre Coop, 2203 Gottingen St, Halifax, NS, Canada
Performance art by Colleen Arcturus MacIsaac about creation, embodiment and Queer parenthood
Followed by a screening of Lockdown Baby by Nicole Jordan

ASL interpretation will be available during the performance and the later Q&A.
>>Register Here for FREE Childcare
In February 2023, a person named Colleen began an embodied creation project. Nine months later, a human named Wren entered the world. This is a new performance exploration of how we can use our bodies to create, what queer parenthood can feel like, what we might want to embody in this world. Join us for a joyful, terrified, chaotic and introspective celebration.
CreditS
Created and performed by Colleen Arcturus MacIsaac.
Directed and co-created by Coral Maloney.
Special guest appearances by Linda MacIsaac, Dorian Arcturus Lang, and Wren Arctutus.
Socials
@littlefoible
@coral_mmmm
@villainstheatre

Artist Q&A
The Embodied Creation Project will be followed by a screening of Lockdown Baby by Nicole Jordan and a brief Q&A with filmmaker Nicole Jordan and artist Colleen Arcturus MacIsaac.

Left: Nicole Jordan
Right: Colleen Arcturus MacIsaac (Photo credit: Shila Leblanc)

The Only Wealth Is Labour
2025-05-01 - 2025-05-16 | The Bus Stop Theatre Coop, 2203 Gottingen St, Halifax, NS, Canada
Sarah Mosher & Hannah Genosko
What gives real value to anything in this world? The work we put into it.
Exploring a key concept in Marx’s labour theory of value, textile artists Sarah Mosher and Hannah Genosko draw from the trade unionist tradition of parading crafted banners through city streets.
‘The Only Wealth Is Labour’ by Sarah Mosher and Hannah Genosko is a patchwork quilt banner made out of their remaining uniforms from the ‘Portrait of the Artist as an Essential Worker’ quilts, which were shown during Mayworks 2024. ‘The Only Wealth Is Labour’ quotes a historic union banner created by George Tutill in 1926 for the UK National Winding and General Engineers Society. Mosher and Genosko were struck by this quote and appreciated the simplicity and directness of the statement. With this new banner they moved away from speaking about their specific experiences as essential workers during the pandemic and into a more general call for solidarity and justice with all working people against the forces of inflation, late capitalism and neoliberalism.
Mosher and Genosko’s banner will be carried alongside two of our Working Class Heritage Tours on May 3rd and 11th, and otherwise on display at The Bus Stop Theatre throughout the festival.
Artists
Sarah Mosher and Hannah Genosko are an artist duo collaborating in Kjipuktuk/Halifax. Hannah has a background in printmaking and bookmaking, Sarah has a background in textiles and community arts. Both are graduates of NSCAD University. Their common ground is exploring labour, anti-capitalism and the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic through quilting. ‘Portrait of the Artist as an Essential Worker’ was their first project reflecting on their roles as essential workers at their jobs with Canada Post and NSLC respectively during the COVID-19 pandemic.

my inner child healing my immigrant identity
2025-10-11 - 2025-10-31 | The Khyber Centre for the Arts, 1880 Hollis St, Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3J 1W6, Canada
Presented in partnership with the Khyber Centre for the Arts and Nocturne
my inner child healing my immigrant identity by Martha Mutale explores the immigrant experience – the self split between two homes. A series of rag dolls where each figure represents a point in time in the immigrant life, softly positioned in space, while the whole assemblage provides a grounded picture of who she is. Presented by Mayworks Kjipuktuk/Halifax and hosted at the Khyber Centre for the Arts, the exhibition runs October 11-31, 2025. Events include Nocturne: Art at Night Festival from 6PM-12AM on Saturday, October 18, and a closing reception Tuesday, October 28th 6PM-8PM.

my inner child healing my immigrant identity is a continuation of Martha Mutale’s exploration of the immigrant experience through the making and presentation of rag dolls fabricated from Zambian fabrics overlaid with printed words. Each of the 40 inches tall dolls represents a different part of her life as an immigrant living in the Diaspora and what it means to hold two different identities grounded in two different homes – Canada and Zambia. What does it mean to call two places home at once? What does it mean to always have a foot in both worlds, to feel unmoored by this dual self? What are the different ways in which each of these places is home and for which reasons?
Mutale was confronted with these questions when she returned to her birth home during her adult life. Everyday, taxi drivers (themselves migrants from neighbouring African countries) would ask her about herself and where she came from. Growing up in Nova Scotia, one of Mutale’s most vivid and concrete connections to Zambian culture was the process through which she and her sisters would continually measure each others’ bodies in order for their mother to sew clothing for them made of African fabric. These experiences and memories, along with her love of poetry, have been the crucible for her ongoing series of projects using rag dolls to convey her sense of identity.
The process of crafting is a journey in itself and the tactile medium of textiles provide for Mutale a method of self-exploration that is both meditative and very concrete at once. For my inner child healing my immigrant identity, the dolls (smaller than in previous explorations) will be installed as a diorama in the window gallery of the Khyber Centre for the Arts through which passersby can windowgaze into Mutale’s life. As Mutale represents different facets and waypoints in her life through each rag doll, she presents a fragmented picture of herself. The soft sculptures each convey a lack of weight and definite attachment to the ground. And yet, the depiction of Mutale’s life as a whole through their assemblage in space, all together, offers her (and the observer) a sense of groundedness provided by the material expression of her identities and the added value of a sum crystallised by the joining of its parts.
ARTIST BIO

Martha Mutale is a poet and veteran of the spoken word scene in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, Nova Scotia. She grew up in Billtown, Nova Scotia, a small rural community in the Annapolis valley after emigrating from Zambia with her family when she was just under two years old. Her family is based in Nova Scotia. As an adult, she relocated to North End Halifax where she began expressing herself as a poet while also working in the non-profit sector. She has worked as a housing support worker where she witnessed first hand the vulnerability and social disposability of those who have lost their homes – especially immigrants who, without citizenship, are not allowed access to shelters. In December 2022, Martha relocated to Zambia to start over, reconnect with herself and apply to regain her Zambian citizenship. Having been raised in the Diaspora and having called Nova Scotia home since a young child, she longs for her birth home, Zambia, and yearns to learn more about her roots. While in Lusaka, waiting for her paperwork to be approved, she volunteered her time in an art gallery and completed two residencies which constituted her first forays into visual arts. During her second residency, she made six dolls, five feet long, all sewn and painted by hand using upcycled textile fabrics and African materials she found while living in Lusaka, Zambia. Martha is healing her inner child and making room for new and exciting adventures that await her in the future.
HOURS & EVENTS:
Exhibition on view: October 11-31, 2025
Gallery hours: On display in the window gallery 24/7 | Open hours: 12-5PM Tuesday-Saturday + events
Appointments/contact: info@khyber.ca
Accessibility notes: www.khyber.ca/access
Nocturne hours: 6PM-12AM, Saturday, October 18, 2025
Closing reception: Tuesday, October 28th 6PM-8PM – Click here for details
Presented concurrently with No Domain / No Dominion

No Dominion/No Domain
2025-10-11 - 2025-10-31 | The Khyber Centre for the Arts, 1880 Hollis St, Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3J 1W6, Canada
Presented in partnership with the Khyber Centre for the Arts and Nocturne
Mayworks Kjipuktuk/Halifax presents No Dominion/No Domain, where Eva Grant and Curtis Botham trace land, life, labour, and pathways across speculative digital ancestral architectures and charcoal industrial landscapes.
“Homeless Shelters Before Police Raid” by Curtis Botham
No Dominion/No Domain brings together two artists, Eva Grant and Curtis Botham, whose works reflect on land, labour, infrastructure, and ecological movement. Presented by Mayworks Kjipuktuk/Halifax and hosted at the Khyber Centre for the Arts, the exhibition runs October 11-31, 2025. Events include Nocturne: Art at Night Festival from 6PM-12AM on Saturday, October 18, and a closing reception Tuesday, October 28th 6PM-8PM.
Eva Grant’s WILD INTERFACE is a work of St’át’imc speculative futurism that reimagines longhouses and Salish structures as though assembled from salmon bones. These digital works depict architecture not as idealized pasts or utopian elsewheres, but as living interfaces: porous inter-species networks where technologies and ancestral knowledge converge. Through computational geography and postnatural territories, Grant reconsiders space and place as co-constructed with ecologies, where memory and labours of love entwine.
Curtis Botham’s Effluents and Urban projects confront the landscapes of extraction that underpin industrial modernity. His large-scale charcoal drawings—made in a volatile medium that mirrors the precarity of his subject matter—document the sites of resource economies on Mi’kma’ki/Nova Scotia and their cascading impacts: inequities of wealth, the precarity of workers, and the hidden infrastructures behind everyday consumer life. Botham traces these environments with stark fidelity, inviting viewers to recognize their own embeddedness in these cycles of labour and consumption.
Together, Grant’s and Curtis’ works stage a dialogue on dominion—over land, life, and labour—and on domains, whether in digital terrains of speculative ancestral architectures or in the charcoal-rendered landscapes and machinery of industrial capitalism.
No Dominion/No Domain invokes the dual refusal of control and possession within colonial constructs and systems. The title, created by Grant, arose in response to the effectiveness of messaging between the blend of analog and virtual material. Through charcoal and digital works, the exhibition resists the illusion of permanence that dominion or domain implies. Charcoal, itself the residue of combustion, unsettles the idea of industry as stable progress, while Grant’s architectures utilize the digital realm to glitch and dissolve systemically oppressive boundaries. Both practices gesture towards knowledge, labour, and survival beyond grids of ownership.
Digital piece from the WILD INTERFACE series by Eva Grant
ARTIST BIOS:

Eva Grant is a Queer, St̓át̓imc-Eurasian filmmaker, curator, and new media artist. She studied philosophy and literature at Stanford University and is the founder of Tooth & Nail Pictures. Her world-building practice hybridizes moving image, animation, game engines, interactive digital media, data visualization, and speculative design to prototype decolonial and capacious futures. She is a former Sundance Native Lab fellow, a BIPOC TV & Film Episodic Writers Lab participant, an Artengine NEW SUNS Worldbuilding Lab artist-in-residence, a Vancouver Queer Film Festival Programming Disruptor, a Netflix-BANFF Diversity of Voices fellow, an Art Gallery of Ontario AGO x RBC emerging artist-in-residence, and an alumna of the imagineNATIVE Originals Commission program and the Screenwriting Shorts Fellowship. Her work has been supported by Mayworks Kjipuktuk, Nocturne: Art at Night, CFC Satellites, Debaser/Pique Festival, the Indigenous Curatorial Collective, Lay*Away, Black Star Film Festival’s William and Louise Greaves Filmmaking Seminar, and the Ottawa Animation Festival, and her films have screened at festivals around the world.

Curtis Botham is an award-winning artist based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He graduated from NSCAD University in 2017 with a bachelor of fine arts. His accolades include the Canada Games Young Artist of Excellence Award, and numerous grants from Arts Nova Scotia and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation. Since 2017, he has depicted the impact and labour of industries in the Maritimes, examining the social and environmental effects of material culture on our lives. He has participated in residencies around Nova Scotia in order to create a broad portrait of the province and its relationship to its land, people and resources.
curtisbotham.weebly.com
HOURS & EVENTS:
Exhibition on view: October 11-31, 2025
Gallery hours: 12-5PM Tuesday-Saturday + events
Appointments/contact: info@khyber.ca
Accessibility notes: www.khyber.ca/access
Nocturne hours: 6PM-12AM, Saturday, October 18, 2025
Closing reception: Tuesday, October 28th 6PM-8PM – Click here for details
Presented concurrently with my inner child healing my immigrant identity

Closing Reception with Curtis Botham, Eva Grant and Martha Mutale
2025-10-28 18:00 - 20:00 | The Khyber Centre for the Arts, 1880 Hollis St, Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3J 1W6, Canada
Join us for a casual conversations with the artists behind No Dominion/No Domain and my inner child healing my immigrant identity.
Curtis Botham and Martha Mutale will be joining us in person, and Eva Grant will be joining us via video call. All will be available to answer questions about their works on display only until October 31st.
A brief facilitated Q&A will take place at 7PM.
Refreshments will be served!
ARTIST BIOS:

Eva Grant is a Queer, St̓át̓imc-Eurasian filmmaker, curator, and new media artist. She studied philosophy and literature at Stanford University and is the founder of Tooth & Nail Pictures. Her world-building practice hybridizes moving image, animation, game engines, interactive digital media, data visualization, and speculative design to prototype decolonial and capacious futures. She is a former Sundance Native Lab fellow, a BIPOC TV & Film Episodic Writers Lab participant, an Artengine NEW SUNS Worldbuilding Lab artist-in-residence, a Vancouver Queer Film Festival Programming Disruptor, a Netflix-BANFF Diversity of Voices fellow, an Art Gallery of Ontario AGO x RBC emerging artist-in-residence, and an alumna of the imagineNATIVE Originals Commission program and the Screenwriting Shorts Fellowship. Her work has been supported by Mayworks Kjipuktuk, Nocturne: Art at Night, CFC Satellites, Debaser/Pique Festival, the Indigenous Curatorial Collective, Lay*Away, Black Star Film Festival’s William and Louise Greaves Filmmaking Seminar, and the Ottawa Animation Festival, and her films have screened at festivals around the world.

Curtis Botham is an award-winning artist based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He graduated from NSCAD University in 2017 with a bachelor of fine arts. His accolades include the Canada Games Young Artist of Excellence Award, and numerous grants from Arts Nova Scotia and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation. Since 2017, he has depicted the impact and labour of industries in the Maritimes, examining the social and environmental effects of material culture on our lives. He has participated in residencies around Nova Scotia in order to create a broad portrait of the province and its relationship to its land, people and resources.
curtisbotham.weebly.com

Martha Mutale is a poet and veteran of the spoken word scene in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, Nova Scotia. She grew up in Billtown, Nova Scotia, a small rural community in the Annapolis valley after emigrating from Zambia with her family when she was just under two years old. Her family is based in Nova Scotia. As an adult, she relocated to North End Halifax where she began expressing herself as a poet while also working in the non-profit sector. She has worked as a housing support worker where she witnessed first hand the vulnerability and social disposability of those who have lost their homes – especially immigrants who, without citizenship, are not allowed access to shelters. In December 2022, Martha relocated to Zambia to start over, reconnect with herself and apply to regain her Zambian citizenship. Having been raised in the Diaspora and having called Nova Scotia home since a young child, she longs for her birth home, Zambia, and yearns to learn more about her roots. While in Lusaka, waiting for her paperwork to be approved, she volunteered her time in an art gallery and completed two residencies which constituted her first forays into visual arts. During her second residency, she made six dolls, five feet long, all sewn and painted by hand using upcycled textile fabrics and African materials she found while living in Lusaka, Zambia. Martha is healing her inner child and making room for new and exciting adventures that await her in the future.

On the Line
2026-05-01 - 2026-06-01 | The Bus Stop Theatre Coop, 2203 Gottingen St, Halifax, NS, Canada
By Audrey Eastwood
On display May 1 to June 1
Reception on May 10, 4:00pm-6:15pm
Artist Q&A on May 10, 6:15pm-7:00pm

Childcare is available for free and on site during the May 10th reception and Q&A. Please register in advance.
ASL interpretation will be available during the May 10 Reception and Q&A

On the Line is a time-lapse video and photo compilation of six months’ worth of one of domestic labor’s most repetitive and relentless tasks: laundry. By documenting every load washed, every dryer load, and every line of drying clothes, the project seeks to show the cumulative weight of an everyday chore, particularly within the context of parenting and motherhood.

AUDREY EASTWOOD is a multi-disciplinary artist, General Manager of the Bus Stop Theatre Co-op, and Co-Founder and Artistic Producer of Terra Novella Theatre. She has worked as an actor, designer, musician, technician, and fight choreographer for a number of Kjipuktuk based companies including Villain’s Theatre, Kick at the Dark Theatre Co-op, Halifax Summer Opera, Halifax Fringe, Votive Dance and Whale Song Theatre. She is the mother of two young children, and lives on a small farm with them and her partner Nick. Her artistic practice has shifted in the last few years to try and find space in the small gaps of time between work and childcare: cutting floral designs into sourdough bread, filling indoor and outdoor spaces with plants, teaching her kids the names of different birds and trees and how to successfully cut paper without cutting your small fingers, and by making this art piece out of her never ending laundry pile.

Queers in Carhartts
2026-05-06 19:30 - 20:30 | Glitter Bean Cafe Co-op, 5896 Spring Garden Rd, Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3H 3B8, Canada
By Devin West and Shift Change Halifax

Film Screening and Exhibition//Artist & Researcher Q&A
Queers in Carhartts is an art exhibition, film screening, and research launch, documenting the unique challenges and practices of resilience by queer and trans people working in skilled trades labour. QiC is a hybrid of qualitative research investigating the lived experiences of 2SLGBTQ+ people in skilled trades in Nova Scotia, and a collaborative, community-building, creative documentation of the first-person authority of some of those experiences and survival strategies. Community collaborations feature local artist Andrew Deveaux for filmography, Winnipeg musician and sound artist, Kitz Willman on sound, and sculptor-researcher (carpenter), Devin West on research and artistic direction. Join us in launching our exhibition, film screening and research report at Queers in Carhartts.

Research and art facilitated by YWCA Halifax Shift Change Project @shiftchangehalifax, funded by Women and Gender Equity Canada. Thank you to our supporters: WAGE Canada, Wisdom2Action, WiSTAN and Titiklie Workplace Safety.

Devin West is a sculptor and art-researcher, based in Kjipuktuk/Halifax. Working with found objects, artifacts and other sensory ghosts of identity, West builds and stitches sculptures into structures of feeling in suspension with queer grief and grievance.

Andrew Deveaux (he/they) is a white settler media artist, poet and filmmaker based in Kjipuktuk, Mi’kma’ki (Halifax, NS). His work exists in conversation with queer subjectivity; examining the limits of memory, identity and space as they relate to—and are regulated by—systems of power. Andrew holds a Bachelor of Arts from Queen’s University and a post-baccalaureate certificate in expanded media from NSCAD. His work has screened across Canada and internationally.

Kitz Willman is a producer, songwriter, rapper, and multi-instrumentalist based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Treaty 1 whose work needles experimental sonics into a sample-based hip-hop approach to production. From prairie rap and sound collage to Ukrainian-Canadian folksongs full of saxophone squeals, there’s dissonance, unpredictability, and jazz embedded in each composition.

On the Line - Artist Reception
2026-05-10 16:00 - 19:00 | The Bus Stop Theatre Coop, 2203 Gottingen St, Halifax, NS, Canada
