Mayworks Kjipuktuk-Halifax

Call For Submissions - Mayworks 2026
2025-10-03 | NS
DEADLINE: OCTOBER 3RD 2025
Submit via this FORM
Mayworks Kjipuktuk/Halifax celebrates workers, justice and solidarity through art.
Our festival presents works of art of any discipline which explore the connection between the labour movement and art, art-making as labour, and struggles against racial injustice, environmental injustice, and other forms of injustice.
We encourage applications from underrepresented or marginalized artists, including Indigenous, Black, Disabled, Two-Spirit and trans artists, as well as artists from communities of colour and language minority communities.
Submissions need not be directly focused on work, labour or unions. In making our curatorial decisions, we look for works that are at the forefront of creative exploration, while also highlighting the political nature of artistic work. We look to include stories from Queer, Disabled, Black and Indigenous communities, in addition to content that speaks to working class and feminist struggles.
🌟 Mayworks programming is chosen by a jury of our staff members.
🌟 Mayworks Kjipuktuk/Halifax uses the Bus Stop Theatre as its main venue w/additional venues as needed.
🌟 Mayworks Kjipuktuk/Halifax provides presentation fees only, not fees for development and creation (but feel free to ask for a letter of support).
Applicants will be notified of their result by the end of November.
Learn more using the FORM link.
Photo by Keandre Johnson

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 (America/Halifax) | 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.

MAYDAY: Confession Publique
2025-11-14 19:30 - 20:45, 2025-11-15 19:30 - 20:45 | Alderney Landing Theatre, 2 Ochterloney St, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, B2Y 4W1, Canada
Confession Publique

“ A sensually complex work, Confession Publique leaves us enthralled before Angélique Willkie’s breadth of talent and her fruitful encounter with Demers’ world.” – Alexie Legendre, Revue JEU

MAYDAY
Tiohtià:ke/Montreal – Kanien’kehá:Ka Territory

November 14th & 15th, 2025. 7:30PM
Alderney Landing Theatre
General Seating – $65.00 Dance Advocate; $45.00 Adults; $35.00 Seniors; $20.00 Students / Arts Worker; Group Discounts Available
Run Time – 75 Minutes
Content Warning: Nudity, 18+ suggested. An Active Listener will be available on site if needed.
This show tackles experiences of racism, sexual violation, and living in an aging body, as well as the power of transformation. It contains nudity and mature content.
Traffic Note: The Parade of Lights is taking place on Nov 15th at 5pm. Please allow time for potential traffic on your way to the show.

Its title serving as a promise, Confession Publique explores ambiguity and paradox, probes the noble and the vulgar, oscillates between grace and brutality. Choreographer Mélanie Demers turns her trusted collaborator Angélique Willkie into her muse. Together, these two kindred spirits explore the act of telling others about yourself without reserve. The result is a hard-hitting solo show, where anecdotes become painful secrets and the body reveals as much as words, if not more.
In this work, the protagonist concentrates on the margins as she takes a deep dive into herself and ourselves. The connection is intimate, intimidating. The performance becomes the setting for questions asked a thousand times over: our relationship to the world, how the environment holds our destinies in its hands, and the power others have to dictate and dominate our life-choices.

MAYDAY
Since its foundation in 2007, an array of charismatic and eclectic artists working with Mélanie Demers has been drawn to MAYDAY as a hub for creative exchange and reflection. Each MAYDAY work is thus the fruit of a collective effort. And not only between the artists: the public enters into the creative process as well, since the physicality, imagery, and sense of rhythm characteristic of MAYDAY’s unique approach only come together as a coherent whole before an audience. Drawing on creative energies from around the world, MAYDAY’s unique works testify to both a spirit of artistic freedom and a deep-seated concern for contemporary issues. Demers’ fascination and the relationship between words and gestures crystallizes in WOULD, a work which won the Prix du CALQ for Best Choreography at the Prix de la danse de Montréal in 2015. WOULD will be followed by the choreographic relay Danse Mutante in 2019, then in 2021 by La Goddam Voie Lactée, MAMA and Confession Publique, and finally in 2022 by Cabaret Noir. Mélanie Demers won the GRAND PRIX de la danse de Montréal, which recognizes her unique mark on her era. MAYDAY tours frequently and has collaborated with many international partners. It is proud to be one of the few Canadian companies to have performed in both North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa.
MAYDAY tours frequently and has collaborated with many international partners. It is proud to be one of the few Canadian companies to have performed in both North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Credits

Ideation, Direction and Choreography
Mélanie Demers

Performers
Angélique Willkie with the participation of Anne-Marie Jourdenais

Direction of Rehearsals
Anne-Marie Jourdenais

Dramaturgy
Angélique Willkie

Set Design
Odile Gamache

Sound Composition
Frannie Holder

Additional Music
Excerpt from The Fairy Queen, composed by Henry Purcell and sung by Angelique Willkie

Lighting Design
Claire Seyller

Technical Director
Emmanuel Bossé-Messier

Costume Design
Elen Ewing

Production Management
Alec Arsenault

Special Notes of Thanks
Éléonore Loiselle

Teaser Production
Stefan Verna

Co Presented By

Canadian Labour International Film Festival
2025-11-27 19:00 - 20:30 | The Bus Stop Theatre Coop, 2203 Gottingen St, Halifax, NS, Canada
Mayworks Momentum presents selections from the Canadian Labour International Film Festival.
The Canadian Labour International Film Festival (CLIFF) is in its 17th edition and Mayworks will again present a local satellite screening of short films chosen from this year’s CLIFF selections.
CLIFF selects films from across the globe that give voice to workers and their struggles for better lives.
Total program runtime: 91 minutes

Film Program:

Nola
by Natalie Remplakowski & Aisha Evelyna (Canada: English) – 10 min

A Black woman working as a sous-chef navigates toxic restaurant culture and her wavering mental health, until a chance encounter changes her.

Your Own Boss
by Álvaro Guzmán Bastida (Spain: Spanish) – 18 min

A food delivery worker struggles to juggle his responsibilities as a young father with the impossible demands of an algorithm that pushes him to the limit.

Working For Freedom
by Conor Devries (Canada: English) – 11 min

Working for Freedom is a short documentary that follows an Ottawa-based woman through her experiences of prison labour at the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre. Author of Solidarity behind bars, Jordan House, provides us with an overview of the frameworks that allow these exploitative practices to continue today.

Shadow Work
by Gillian McKercher (Canada: English) – 3 min

This short documentary looks at “shadow work”: tasks that are not part of an employee’s official job description, but are necessary for the organization to function, and may be unpaid and unseen.
Unpaid labour, shadow work, glue work, organizational citizenship. Whatever you name it, organizations benefit from it.

Limerent Pittsburgh
by Anne Ciecko (USA: English) – 3 min

A videopoem revisiting the rust belt city is a site of rekindling of memories and mythologies of labour and family.

Motown South
by Samuel George (USA: English) – 20 min

The electric vehicle industry is booming in the American South, so much so that the region has earned the nickname the “Battery Belt”.
But why are producers setting up shop in states such as Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee? In part, the trend stems from a historic lack of union representation there. But workers – and labor organizers – have noticed. And they are starting to push back. How this emerging dynamic plays out could transform the future of American industry.

Ghost Workers
by Lisette Olsthoorn (Netherlands: English) – 26 min

In a film set in which their home offices have been recreated, six European microworkers share experiences with the filmmaker and with each other, offering an affecting critique on changing labour conditions.
Ghost Workers is a cinematic research project into the people conducting the often hidden labor necessary to make artificial intelligence work. Working from home, not being recognized as a worker by the platforms that they work for and being misunderstood by family and friends all together creates strong feelings of isolation. Therefore, the filmmaker invited six workers from across Europe to share their work experiences with her and with each other. Focusing on the theme of isolation and recognition as a ‘real worker,’ the film engages in a collective conversation about this type of work.
