DOORS OPEN: The Commons @ 401 Curation: SERIOUS BIZ
Lead curators Kelly Lui and Kaitlynn Tomaselli
May 24, 2025
10 am – 5 pm
The Commons @ 401, 401 Richmond Street West
Free Admission
All Ages
Full program duration: 30 mins
One weekend a year, dozens of sites open their doors for Doors Open Toronto, a city-wide celebration recognized as one of Toronto’s most culturally significant events. The City of Toronto is excited to work with the community to showcase their sites to residents and visitors.
FADO, imagineNATIVE, Reel Asian, SAVAC, and Vtape, collectively known as The Commons @ 401, are pleased to present the film curation to be SERIOUS BIZ for this year’s city-wide Doors Open event. We invite drop-in visitors into the Bachir Yerex Presentation Space to view a rotation of films hand-picked by this year’s leading curators, Kelly Lui and Kaitlynn Tomaselli.
“The city is your playground” prompts this edition of Doors Open. Full of movement, room for stillness, and plenty of contradictions, SERIOUS BIZ brings together six short films which display the interconnectedness and synergy of what it might mean to play together.
Textured, emotive, and delightful, each short presents its own expression of their relationships to themselves (including the AI partner-in-crime), the land, and one another.
SERIOUS BIZ PROGRAMME
DaynaAI
Director: Dayna McLeod
Canada | 2023 | 0:50 min
Video
An introduction to DaynAI, an AI doppelgänger for queer media artist, Dayna McLeod.
DaynaAI: This is not Dayna McLeod’s gibber
Director: Dayna McLeod
Canada | 2023 | 1:15 min
Video
Media artist Dayna McLeod uses her AI actor, DaynAI to discuss the challenges of working with an AI actor and AI voice-cloning subscription fees.
Dayna McLeod is a queer performance-based media artist. Her work often uses humour and capitalizes on exploiting the body’s social and material conditions. Her video and performance work have been presented at the Impakt Festival in Utrecht Netherlands, the Mardi Gras Festival in Darlinghurst Australia, MIX Brasil Festival Of Sexual Diversity in São Paulo Brazil, the Modern Art Museum in Warsaw Poland, Le Centre d’art contemporain in Paris, the PHI Centre, OFFTA, and Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois in Montreal, the Summerworks Theatre Festival in Toronto, Sporobole in Sherbrooke, and Performatorium, Queer City Cinema’s performance festival in Regina.
a tangled web drowning in honey
Director: Hannah Hull & Tara Hakim
Canada, United Kingdom | 2023 | 10 min
Video
Hannah Hull (they/them) (UK) is an artist and musician, also known as Burning Salt. The ancient practice of ‘burning salt’ is an act of expulsion, purification or protection. Hull uses song, poetry, drawing, animation and film to these ends. They studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths College. After a decade of specialism in socially-engaged art, Hull is currently focused on exploring somatic practices and trauma. They are also a boat dweller, TEDx speaker, intersectional feminist, queer person and recovering addict.
Tara Hakim is a multi-disciplinary, process-based artist based in Tkaronto, Canada. Of Palestinian heritage, born and raised in Jordan with an Austrian grandmother, Tara creates public displays of vulnerability that invite viewers to meditate on notions of self, diasporic existence, and the liminal spaces in-between—both physical and mental. Working across video, installation, performance, and, more recently, textiles and ceramics, she intertwines the complexities of cultural history and personal psychology with an experimental, playful, and tender approach. Tara holds a BA (Hons.) in Media & Cultural Studies and an MFA in Documentary Media.
POP
Director: Noor Gatih
Canada | 2024 | 04:31 min
Video
POP explores sisterhood, friendships and bonds that feel karmic. The film documents two sisters, Marium and Laila Vahed, as they spend a seemingly ordinary day trying to pass the time. Marium, the older sister, retreats into a book, while Laila, the younger and more restless sibling, struggles to connect with her sister. Delicate bubbles appear and start floating between them. Enchanted by the bubbles, the sisters find themselves drawn into a playful dance as they attempt to keep the bubbles from popping. Their differing approaches to the bubbles explore how they feel for each other.
Noor (she/her) is a filmmaker and arts facilitator. Her work explores gender and generational patterns, memory, her queerness, language and history through the lens of photography, family archives and film. Recent projects have included, revisiting archival photographs, experimenting with super 8mm and other analogue processes, as well as working on short documentaries. Her work often invites the viewer to reflect on these different modes of storytelling and the ways they reveal the complex relationships we hold with each other and ourselves.
Gatih’s work has been shown across Canada and internationally. She completed a mentorship program at Made In Her Image (hosted by Panavision). Her short film, Visions of Basra premiered at the Independent Iraqi Film Festival in 2021 and has gone on to screen in Vancouver, Toronto, LA and Florence. She was selected for the BIPOC 2021 Fall Photography Mentorship Program and was able to film a video essay entitled, Salam’s Archives. Her photography can be found in the Shine On exhibition, Gallery 44 Broadview magazine, Wave Art Collective, University of Toronto and MIMP Mag. Her latest short film, Khobs & Chai (2022) screened at TIFF Lightbox. She was part of the Arab Women’s Showcase organized by the Toronto Arab Film Festival in 2022.
MOOZ MIIKAN
Director: Evelyn Pakinewatik
Nipissing First Nation | 2019 | 8:00 min
Video
In search of moose in the vibrant near north, a life-long hunter tests his rifle. Mooz Miikan offers a quietly intimate and candid portrayal of an aging hunter with his youngest child on their traditional territory.
Evelyn Pakinewatik (Nbisiing Anishnaabe/Irish, Nipissing First Nation) is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist. Evelyn’s work explores the intersection of dreams and memory and the societal distortion of interiority, relationality, and animacy. An artist raised by artists, Evelyn began working alongside their parents from a very young age to preserve and disseminate traditional textile and nature arts in Indigenous communities across Ontario and Québec. Interconnectivity and reciprocity continue to motivate Evelyn’s creative process as they seek to practice anti-colonial survivance through an inclusive lens.
Inclinations
Directors: Alice Sheppard & Danielle Peers
Canada | 2019 | 5:40 min
Video
Inclinations began as a moment of ‘crip’ play. Alice Sheppard and Danielle Peers finding themselves on a 90-foot ramp on “social street”: the main entrance of the Kinesiology building at the University of Alberta. After a lifetime of climbing awkward, ugly ramps hidden away behind buildings with barely enough room for one chair user, this wide-open slope-scape sent us both literally somersaulting over the rails in our wheelchairs for nearly an hour. Drawing on Sheppard’s work more broadly, the disabled body, enabled by the ramp, becomes a source of creative movement. Dancers can move in ways that they cannot move on flat surfaces and the ramp itself becomes an artistic object, transformed albeit temporarily into an environment that reveals connection, trust, beauty, and desire.
As an emerging and Bessie award-winning choreographer, Alice Sheppard creates movement that challenges conventional understandings of disabled and dancing bodies. Engaging disability arts, culture, and history, she is intrigued by the intersections of disability, gender, and race. In addition to performance and choreography, Sheppard is a sought-after speaker and has lectured on topics related to disability arts, race and dance. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times and in academic journals.
Danielle Peers is a community organizer, an artist, and an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation at the University of Alberta. They were a Vanier and Trudeau scholar throughout their PhD at the University of Alberta, and a Banting Postdoctoral scholar at Concordia University in Montreal. Danielle uses critical disability theories to study disability movement cultures: from the Paralympics, to inclusive recreation, to disability arts. In their former career as a wheelchair basketball athlete, Danielle won a Bronze Paralympic Medal, a World Championship, and five National Championships. They also won numerous championships and all-star awards while playing in men’s leagues in USA and in France. In 2006, Danielle was named the Worlds Most Valuable Player, and was a finalist for the 2007 International Sports Woman of the Year.
Image credit: Alice Sheppard & Danielle Peers, Inclinations, Production still, 2019
