Hello from DesignTO,
When design moves beyond form and function, it becomes a way to ask deeper questions: Who are we? What do we carry with us? And how do we care for ourselves and one another?
At the 2026 DesignTO Festival, happening January 23-February 1, designers and artists across Toronto are exploring identity as something lived, layered, and constantly evolving. Through exhibitions and installations grounded in personal experience, cultural memory, and collective healing, these projects invite us to reflect on belonging, resilience, and the physical and emotional spaces we inhabit.
As a charitable arts organization, DesignTO believes design can help shape a more sustainable, just, and joyful world. Each year, the Festival brings together diverse voices working across disciplines to expand how design is understood, not only as a tool for making, but as a means of storytelling, care, and connection.
This week, we’re highlighting nine Festival projects that engage directly with identity, including BIPOC and queer perspectives, explorations of migration and cultural inheritance, and works that centre mental health, self-care, and healing. Together, they offer space to pause, listen, and see design as a reflection of lived experience.
Nine Must-See Identity-Focused Exhibitions and Installations
Beyond Function: An OCAD U x Baycrest Exhibition
Jan 23 – Feb 1, 2026
OCAD University, 100 McCaul Street, Toronto
Reception: Jan 25 | 5 PM
This exhibition showcases tangible product prototypes co-created with older adults living with dementia at Baycrest Terraces. Featuring work from OCAD U’s second-year Industrial Design students in a Human-Centred Design course shaped through close collaboration and community engagement.
Hope and Healing Canada: A Journey Towards Decolonization and Reconciliation
Jan 23 – Feb 1, 2026
40 St. Clair Street West, Toronto
Since July 2021, artist Tracey-Mae Chambers created over 150 site-specific red fibre art installations across Canada and the United States. These works, displayed at residential school sites, museums, galleries, and public spaces, address decolonization and reconciliation by challenging colonial narratives and prompting viewers to question who tells history’s stories and holds that power.
Jan 23 – Feb 1, 2026
STACKT Market
28 Bathurst Street, Toronto
‘Invisible Weight’ is a mixed-material installation visualizing the unseen weight of internal struggle. A suspended cloth, shaped by uneven sand pockets and shifting light, invites viewers to experience fragility, tension, and resilience—transforming emotional burden into a shared, tangible space of reflection.
Jan 23 – Feb 1, 2026
Telegramme Prints & Custom Framing
194 Ossington Avenue Toronto
Brain health struggles and memory loss bring grief, a painful unravelling of self and time. Memories become patchy, fleeting, and sometimes entirely obscured. Using an X-ray lightbox and curated slides, the work captures the tension between disappearance and persistence.
Dec 20, 2025 – Mar 18, 2026
Stantec Window Gallery
401 Wellington Street West, #100, Toronto
‘Remnants for the Future’ is a site-responsive installation exploring diasporic memory, inherited traditions, and cultural hybridity. Hand-knotted natural fibers and copper fragments evoke ancestral remnants, bridging craft and contemporary life while reflecting on resilience, belonging, and transformation within urban space.
Seasons of Care: A Co-Design Workshop
Jan 29, 2026
STACKT Market
28 Bathurst Street, Toronto
Attendees come together for an evening of reflection, dialogue, and collective creativity; how can co-design illuminate gaps in the current care landscape while surfacing the community practices, relationships, and forms of knowledge that help people feel supported in their health journeys.
Jan 23 – Mar 29, 2026
Gallery 235, Harbourfront Centre, 235 Queens Quay West, Toronto
Reception: Jan 30 | 6 PM
‘Traces’ is a group exhibition featuring the work of ten local and international artists, designers and collectives, exploring the weight of migration, forced relocation, and preserving culture and identity: what we carry, what we leave, and how we belong again.
TO ·BE·LONGING Portraits of Queer Living
Jan 23 – Feb 1, 2026
Ace Hotel
51 Camden Street, Toronto
What makes your home queer? ‘TO ·BE·LONGING’ challenges heteronormative domesticity. The exhibition engages 40 queer community-submitted artifacts to showcase the nuances of home, inviting visitors to re-shape and reflect on intimacy, identity, and possibilities of queer living beyond the norm.
Jan 14 – Feb 14, 2026
Urbanspace Gallery, 401 Richmond Street West, Toronto
Reception: Jan 24 | 5 PM
Talk: Feb 12 | 5 PM
‘Tracing Symmetries’ is a photographic exhibition by artist and architect Safoura Zahedi—inviting you into the living world of Islamic geometry—its history, migration, and imagined futures in contemporary art and architecture.
View the full Festival schedule and start planning your 10-days of DesignTO today!
