For its 15th year, DesignTO brings its diverse programming to Toronto’s to Union Station, Harbourfront Centre, and Sankofa Square for an immersive community experience of design, and the link between the aesthetics of textiles, objects and surfaces of everyday use, and our identities, interactions and connections to the world.
DesignTO looks to expand ideas of what design is, and its role in our daily lives. Design can not only frame but determine our interactions with our environments, and each other, where it belongs and who benefits from well-designed items, spaces and experiences. Their programming mandate is to highlight the ways in which design enhances our day to day life, and communicate the power of design to evoke joy.
DesignTO’s launch party is January 24th, ticket price goes toward the operation of the not-for-profit festival.
Below are some highlights from our favourite exhibitions from 2025:
At the conjuring of roots, I wished to meet Me…
January 1-31, 2025
Sankofa Square, 1 Dundas Street East, Toronto
From DesignTO: ‘At the conjuring of roots, I wished to meet Me…’ is an exhibition of photos by Toronto-based, Ghanaian-Nigerian photographer and visual artist Delali Cofie on five digital screens at Sankofa Square (formerly Yonge-Dundas Square).
Toronto-based photographer Delali Cofie’s work is grounded in his experience of the diaspora and the sense of belonging to two places, and what it is to embody a union of their cultures. At the conjuring of roots, I wished to meet Me explores identity and how one comes to communicate one’s interior in costuming the exterior. An act of masquerade that, rather than concealing, reveals more of himself.
Cofie draws from Ghanian-Nigerian traditions of making to share an autobiography in adornment. His selection of fabrics each hold so much of his history, familial ties, and experience, using familiar items like bedsheets and his family’s clothing to create new designs, voluminous, theatrical and when arranged in photography, narrative in their styling, context and expression.
The OCADU graduate’s exhibition of analog photographs of himself and his subjects are displayed in vivid colour on the large screens surrounding Sankofa Square. This is an exhibition not to be missed; and, if you’re in the Yonge & Dundas area, thankfully hard to miss!
Dwell
January 24 – February 2, 2025
Union Station (West Wing), 65 Front Street West, Toronto
From DesignTO: ‘Dwell’ is a design exhibition that offers opportunities to slow down and connect in the hustle and bustle of Union Station–Canada’s busiest transportation hub. Five artists and designers explore what taking pause amidst the rush of urban travel looks like. Through a showcase of furniture, florals, rugs, and animation, the exhibition explores thoughtful moments and offers of respite and reflection.
In a previous life I worked for a company known for their beautifully designed spaces, each one unique. All things public-facing were meticulously planned and executed for transient visual aesthetic satisfaction. These aesthetics carried through to the private spaces, and those choices remained consistent ignoring the change in use and function, for those occupying the spaces working: ignoring comfort.
Floating around my beautiful fishbowl, every surface hard and freezing, I asked why the two couldn’t be given equal weight?
DesignTO curators ask the same, and in Dwell, they want to put both beauty and comfort in public spaces, sometimes standing in contrast to the hardened, transient spaces in which they are embedded.
Yasmin Mora’s soft wool textiles exude warmth and comfort in their amorphous forms and tufted plushness. Like Cofie cultural touchpoints of craft and overlooked domestic design, Mora is influenced by her Chicana roots, and evokes a history of creating labour-intensive items for everyday use. Their artistry often overlooked, here Mora’s small textile works lay over hard, cold surfaces as rugs, encouraging interaction and appreciation for all things underfoot.
A wooden chair, fluidly curves to embrace two in a conversation, not sitting beside, or in front of, but rather held in a lemniscate, an infinite loop that only the presence of two individuals can close. The positioning of bodies in this space invites speaking at a level just audible to the other person seated, or, as the name Kissing Chair suggests, non-verbal interactions. Moving through city spaces with our bent necks and downward gazes, Alison Postma’s work elicits a radical sense of intimacy and connection.
More than just a conversation contained in that loop, it opens a larger one about how design can change our relationships to space and shape our interactions with one another.
How does the shape of a bench inform our ideas of our place in the world, and whether we are meant to have one at all?
Fundamentally DesignTO communicates the importance of this conversation, and the need for designers and planners to consider more than just the aesthetic merits, but deeper; the environment, its use, and through holistic design, how human need for not only function, but comfort and connection can be met.
I often look at hostile architecture in cities like mine, and Toronto, where tourism is encouraged, all while the comfortable use of public space is discouraged. Human spaces in denial of human hurt and disconnection.
Design can, and should, bring a sense of belonging, support and joy–it’s that joy that DesignTO wants to emphasize in exhibiting pieces like Postma’s and Mora’s, each an invitation; to sit, to touch, to be comfortable and comforted.
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